Horace and the Slip to Solitude

Abstract

This chapter argues that Horace made the solitary sphere into a way of life. Against models of Horace’s persona and work that emphasize the contrast between public bard and coterie poet, it shows how the slip to solitude represented a pervasive gesture across his corpus. Proceeding chronologically, close reading of satires, Odes, and the relationship between the tale of the ostensibly mad man at Argos in the Epistle to Florus and the conclusion of the Ars poetica shows how the poet construed the solitary sphere in different ways in various genres, and how its representations formed an interconnected, self-encircling corpus. Throughout, review of the history of scholarship, including Richard Heinze’s theory of Horatian lyric, shows how Horatian poems have been re-socialized, how self-address works in a variety of Horatian genres, and how recovering Horace’s solitary sphere suggests a poet who had more in common with a Romantic than with a neoclassical spirit.