In the Public Eye
Fame can be intoxicating and often dangerous. It offers shining rewards to those who attain it, but it can also carry a heavy price in lost indepen-dence and the continual pressure of public attention. Public figures in every historical period have had to deal with the darker, more restrictive side of their celebrity and the strange disjunction between private and public selves that inevitably attends any rise to widespread fame. An ac-claimed author or artist, for instance, may revel in his notoriety and take pleasure in the knowledge that his activities and movements are avidly followed by thousands. But, like a popular hero or prominent politician, he is also forced to bear the intense scrutiny of his audience—to resist their constant intrusions into his personal life, endure their mingled adu-lation and hostility and fickle changes of taste, and live up to the high expectations that gather around him as he builds his public image. In-deed, as his stature grows, his time and attention become increasingly devoted to the maintenance of that outer façade of behavior and per-sonality which his audience has come to expect from him, even as his projects come to be dictated by the requirements of self-presentation. It is never a comfortable situation in which to be placed, as Cicero despair-ingly observed from the similarly floodlit stage of Roman politics: ‘‘O di immortales! quam magnum est personam in re publica tueri principis!
quae non animis solum debet sed etiam oculis servire civium.’’1
Horace reflects a great deal in his works on the special demands placed upon a poet by his public—the judgments, expectations, and even direct attacks that require a response or at least some accommodation on his part. But where many an author might have limited himself to the pri-vate acceptance of his public constraints, Horace directly confronts his audience as he struggles to reconcile their domineering influence with his individual aims and interests. Indeed, he incorporates this struggle as an integral component of his constructed, public self-image. Horace
In the Public Eye
regularly portrays himself as being at the center of a large, disparate, and volatile public, of which each segment exerts a different sort of pressure and elicits from him a different response. This wider audience becomes a rich and complex character in its own right, simultaneously the source of and Horace’s mechanism for dealing with all the public demands that he claims have been placed on him. For Horace, the process is reflexive:
the popular reception of his work fuels and shapes that work, becoming itself a central theme of his poetry.
. The Rings of Audience
The essentials of Horace’s relationship with Maecenas are reflected in his techniques of self-presentation, as we have already noted. In much the same fashion, Horace’s portrayal of his dealings with his general reader-ship constitutes his most direct and effective response to the pressures he faced from these readers.2As a result, the poet’s treatment of his public travails tells us a great deal about his actual relationship with his origi-nal audience. But what was the composition of this audience? Who was reading Horace? No segment of Roman society can at the outset be safely disregarded with complete security. It is conceivable (though unlikely) that some of Horace’s readers may even have sprung from the lowest levels of the Roman populus, the urban mob whose tastes ran more to mimes, gladiators, and similar entertainments than to Horace’s brand of cultivated and allusive verse—although there would have been nothing particularly new or innovative in his treating any difficulties with them as a theme in his work. The city masses had long represented a source of frustration for aspiring writers, as demonstrated by the playwright Terence, who in approximately .. had expressed his anger and dis-may over the repeated failure of his Hecyra by condemning the vulgar tastes of his erstwhile audience.3In any case, Horace’s works had many potential readers throughout Roman society, ranging from the knights and senators in the uppermost circles of Rome to those in the higher cen-sus categories who, while lacking conspicuous wealth or social promi-nence, nevertheless could be expected to possess some education and a certain level of interest in the literary world.4
Some might dispute this picture of Horace’s readership, arguing with William Harris that literacy in the late Republic and early Empire was not so widespread as is generally assumed and that, as a result, the audience
The Rings of Audience
for literary works consisted of a very small and circumscribed elite.5But as a number of scholars have noted, Harris’s conclusions are overly dras-tic, and Horace’s audience would have been far larger and broader than he suggests. The poet became extremely famous very quickly through his association with Maecenas; consequently, many would have eagerly read his works, which were readily available at the libraries and booksellers’
stalls.6We must also take into account the large population of Greeks then living in Rome: men of inherently lower status as far as Rome was concerned, who nevertheless were often deeply engaged in literary pur-suits. Moreover, any recoverable evidence regarding rates of literacy is of questionable relevance to the more central issue of Horace’s poten-tial audience. Statistics on literacy in the ancient world tell us very little about the extent to which the general population had access to the lit-erature of the day, as Rosalind Thomas has pointed out: ‘‘How much did such low levels of literacy matter? The prevalence of oral communica-tion, for instance, is important in its own right for gauging the role of writing; it meant that illiterates were not always cut off from the prod-ucts of writing. Public readings at Rome were the fastest means of literary publication. It was not always thought necessary to read something your-self, and in any case oral and written communication were deeply inter-twined.’’7We can safely conclude with T. P. Wiseman that ‘‘the Roman populace listened, or had the opportunity to listen, to a lot more poetry than we think. The evidence is unobtrusive and therefore usually disre-garded, but it exists and to ignore it is to misunderstand the profession of letters in Rome.’’8
Nevertheless, the way in which various members of Horace’s audi-ence encountered his poetry remains an extremely important issue, for it raises a crucial point about the composition of this audience. Social class was not necessarily the determining factor in whether someone be-came a reader or hearer of Horace’s poetry. Rather, the primary question was one of access, not only to the poetry but to the poet who produced it. This in turn reminds us that each member of the audience enjoyed a different degree and kind of access. Certainly, there would have existed a significant gulf, in depth of experience and connection with the poetry, between (say) a casual Roman reader who simply bought Horace’s poem at a bookstall, and a personal friend who first heard the poem at a private reading by the author, and who is perhaps even mentioned in the poem.
It is therefore best to think of Horace’s contemporary general readership as consisting of a series of concentric rings, based not so much on relative
In the Public Eye
social standing as on levels of intimacy and direct contact with the poet himself. As we shall see, Horace represents his audience in terms of these same categories, characterizing each ring by a different type of inter-action with himself as well as by the particular threat that each poses.9 Thus, each ring of audience becomes the focus of a separate facet of his overall public self-portrayal.
At the center we find Maecenas, sole occupant of the innermost ring;
we have already seen the extent to which Horace’s benefactor and patron stands as his most important and influential reader, the clarification of their relationship as one of the poet’s most basic themes. Surrounding this pair are those individuals whom Horace declares to be personal friends, men of quality whose taste and literary judgments he implicitly trusts.
The next ring comprises members of the apex of Roman society—sena-tors and equites whom Horace often would have known through Maece-nas and who, as members of an elevated and erudite social stratum, would certainly have been familiar with the poet and his work. A fourth ring consists of men outside the social and political elite of Rome, who never-theless hold some hope of gaining entry—social climbers eager to follow Horace’s path from obscurity into prominence and more than ready to scrape acquaintance with Horace himself in order to do so. Last, Horace creates a fifth ring of literate outsiders—impoverished grammatici, Greek poetasters without contacts among the Roman upper classes,10and other undifferentiated potential readers—who have no contact with the poet and no hopes of advancing in his society but who read and respond to his poetry all the same.
. The Core Readership
It is worth recalling that the tensions and pressures of Horace’s relation-ship with Maecenas arose largely from the fluidity and indeterminacy of the amicitia between patron and poet; that is to say, within an essen-tially private context. By transforming this amicitia into a central sub-ject of his poetry, however, thereby exposing it to universal scrutiny, Horace automatically gave it a tremendous public resonance. In much the same fashion, Horace obliquely acknowledges that even the inner ring of his audience represents for him a source of considerable pub-lic anxiety, stemming from his perceived need to identify and cater to his most desirable readership. These are Horace’s own close friends and
The Core Readership
associates, such as Virgil, Varus, Varius, and Fuscus, some of them fellow members of Maecenas’s clientela. As with his patron, Horace shows him-self determined to affirm publicly the strength of his bond with them by dedicating individual poems to them as well as by alluding frequently to their shared activities and pursuits.11In the closing lines of Satires ., for example, Horace cites as his main literary principle the ideal of the small, select audience (–): ‘‘Neque te ut miretur turba labores,/con-tentus paucis lectoribus’’ (Nor should you struggle to make the crowd marvel at you; be content with a few readers). It doesn’t bother him in the slightest, he claims, to be attacked or slandered by inconsequential scribblers, whom he dismisses with contempt (–).12Instead, the poet introduces his most desired readers by projecting the image of an elegant group of men with whom he is very proud to associate himself, and who represent for him a haven of good taste in a sea of loutish hostility and criticism (–):
Plotius et Varius, Maecenas Vergiliusque, Valgius et probet haec Octavius optimus atque Fuscus et haec utinam Viscorum laudet uterque!
ambitione relegata te dicere possum, Pollio, te, Messalla, tuo cum fratre, simulque vos, Bibule et Servi, simul his te, candide Furni, compluris alios, doctos ego quos et amicos
prudens praetereo; quibus haec, sint qualiacumque, adridere velim, doliturus, si placeant spe
deterius nostra . . .
May Plotius and Varius, Maecenas and Virgil, Valgius, good Octavius and Fuscus approve of my work, and may both of the Visci brothers praise it! Without any ulterior motive or intent to flatter I can name you, Pollio; you, Messalla, with your brother;
and also you, Bibulus and Servius; and with these you, brilliant Furnius; and many others, learned friends whom I discreetly pass over. I would like these men to laugh at my verses, such as they are; and I will be crushed if they should be less pleasing than I hope.
But the poet undercuts any atmosphere of total collegiality and un-conditional sympathy that might initially seem to obtain in these lines, through language that is highly suggestive of a basic underlying anxiety.
In the Public Eye
Horace’s use of the subjunctive in probet haec, haec utinam . . . laudet, and quibus haec . . . adridere velim, for example, emphasizes that it is his wish that his verses be well received by this circle, not a secure declaration of an established truth. Similarly, the care with which Horace specifies that he names Pollio, Messalla, and rest of his second group not in order to curry favor with them, but to pay a compliment to close friends (ambi-tione relegata te dicere possum), serves to remind us of the inherent difficulty of making such an address—the challenge it poses of striking just the right note of polite familiarity and the possibility that such praises will be misinterpreted as base sycophancy.13That Horace plausibly presents himself as having to make such clarifications makes clear the extent to which his relationship with this inner group of readers is to be read as remaining indistinct or even potentially vulnerable.
Thus, Horace underscores the urgency with which he must anticipate the reactions of his core readership. He has declared that he cares only for the favor of the few and the docti, and so his concern is here apparently only that his verses should be pleasing to these particular individuals. But he has also suggested that a positive reaction on their part is evidently by no means a fait accompli. They will be true critics, not simply his friends.
Horace calls the members of this core audience his amici, of course; but their reception of his work is not guaranteed to be one of unqualified enthusiasm—indeed, this is precisely why it is of such overriding im-portance. Doliturus, si placeant spe deterius nostra becomes something more than a closing pleasantry: if the poet has assumed in this passage an out-ward expression of friendly optimism, his inner anxiety is nonetheless also readily apparent here.
. The Social Elite
It is particularly significant that Maecenas as well as other socially and politically prominent Romans such as Asinius Pollio and the aristocratic Messalla Corvinus make their appearance in these, Horace’s innermost rings of audience. By declaring his intention to win the approval of these men above all—despite the attendant implication that they may be hard to please and his relationship with them not entirely secure—Horace self-consciously aligns himself with the very highest circles of Roman society.14But such a claim is double-edged, as is so often the case with Horace’s statements concerning himself and his views. For in the very act
The Social Elite
of defining the core group of his best critics and truest audience, Horace also implicitly acknowledges the existence of other readers, whose views he may claim to discount but whose insults and attacks remain for him a major source of irritation. Even as he shrugs off the importance of this second audience, Horace portrays himself as being forced to admit that their existence cannot wholly be disregarded and that they, too, have an impact on him and his work.
Thus, we are led to the third ring of Horace’s readership, made up of the general body of the Roman elite: senators and equites not neces-sarily on an intimate basis with the poet himself but socially powerful and therefore important as potential readers of his poetry. Members of these classes were, of course, heavily involved in the world of literature:
as patrons, as genuine or feigned enthusiasts of poetry (a major enter-tainment for the upper classes of Rome, being heard or recited nightly at dinner parties and at formal readings as well as in moments of pri-vate leisure), and often as writers themselves. What is more, they would have possessed a natural curiosity as to the character and family ori-gins of all newcomers into their circles, not only the novi homines or wealthy arrivistes who entered their political and social ambit but even (or perhaps especially) any new and promising ‘‘discoveries’’ on the literary scene. Taking this high-profile environment as his starting point, Horace presents both his works and his social acceptability as coming under in-tense scrutiny from these men, and himself as being abruptly thrust into the hothouse climate of elite Roman society through his amicitia with Maecenas no less than his promise and ability as a poet.15
Horace often creates a strong impression of widespread hostility and scorn directed at him by members of the social circles within which he now moves. It is crucial for us to understand that this impression is largely manufactured by the poet himself and is intended more to raise the issue of a successful author’s difficulties in dealing with his audience than to give straightforward expression to his troubles.16It is the poet’s implication, and only his, that Roman society tended to look upon him with suspicion as an unacceptable upstart of dubious social background.
Horace’s depiction of his social woes must surely have had some basis in actual experience, however, since otherwise the sheer implausibility of his presented scenarios would have drastically undercut the impact of his intended message on its original recipients. As a result, Horace accom-modates different levels of veracity in his accounts of his background and experiences. His personal statements are artificial and self-consciously
In the Public Eye
made, but they also reflect the tensions in his life that made such state-ments necessary.
In Satires . Horace establishes this theme of social scorn by means of a neat technique of double address, in which separate audiences are simultaneously given very different messages. The poet lauds Maecenas for his open-mindedness and virtue, as manifested by his refusal to sneer at Horace’s obscure origins despite the splendor of his own ancient and glorious family tree (–):
Non quia, Maecenas, Lydorum quidquid Etruscos incoluit finis, nemo generosior est te,
nec quod avus tibi maternus fuit atque paternus, olim qui magnis legionibus imperitarent, ut plerique solent, naso suspendis adunco ignotos, ut me libertino patre natum.
cum referre negas quali sit quisque parenti natus, dum ingenuus . . .
None of the Lydians who settled the Etruscan lands is more nobly born than you, Maecenas; at one time your grandfathers on both your mother’s and your father’s sides commanded mighty le-gions. But despite this, you do not turn up a curved nose (as so many are accustomed to do) at complete nobodies—nobodies like me, ‘‘the freedman’s son.’’ When you deny that it makes any
None of the Lydians who settled the Etruscan lands is more nobly born than you, Maecenas; at one time your grandfathers on both your mother’s and your father’s sides commanded mighty le-gions. But despite this, you do not turn up a curved nose (as so many are accustomed to do) at complete nobodies—nobodies like me, ‘‘the freedman’s son.’’ When you deny that it makes any