Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority

This book explores how Horace’s poems construct the literary and social authority of their author. Bridging the traditional distinction between ‘persona’ and ‘author’, Ellen Oliensis considers Horace’s poetry as one dimension of his ‘face’ - the projected self-image that is the basic currency of social interactions. She reads Horace’s poems not only as works of art but also as social acts of face-saving, face-making and self-effacement. These acts are responsive, she suggests, to the pressure of several audiences: Horace shapes his poetry to promote his authority and to pay deference to his patrons while taking account of the envy of contemporaries and the judgement of posterity. Drawing on the insights of sociolinguistics, deconstruction and new historicism Dr Oliensis charts the poet’s shifting strategies of authority and deference across his entire literary career.

This book explores how Horace's poems construct the literary and social authority of their author. Bridging the traditional distinction between 'persona' and 'author', Ellen Oliensis considers Horace's poetry as one dimension of his 'face' - the projected self-image that is the basic currency of social interactions. She reads Horace's poems not only as works of art but also as social acts of face-saving, face-making and self-effacement. These acts are responsive, she suggests, to the pressure of several audiences: Horace shapes his poetry to promote his authority and to pay deference to his patrons while taking account of the envy of contemporaries and the judgement of posterity. Drawing on the insights of sociolinguistics, deconstruction and new historicism Dr Oliensis charts the poet's shifting strategies of authority and deference across his entire literary career.

Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction; 1. Face-saving and self-defacement in the Satires; 2. Making faces at the mirror: the Epodes and the civil war; 3. Acts of enclosure: the ideology of form in the Odes; 4. Overreading the Epistles; 5. The art of self-fashioning in the Ars poetica; Postscript: Odes 4.3; Works cited; Poems discussed; General index.

This advanced introduction to Horace considers his poetry not only as works of literature, but also as social acts which simultaneously promoted his authority while also paying deference to his eminent patrons. The book charts this aspect of the poet's persona across his entire literary career.