THE DIATRIBE SATIRES (SERMONES 1.1 – 1.3): “YOU'RE NO LUCILIUS”

The opening scene of Horace's first satire (Sermones 1.1) hustles us to the front row of a street-preacher's harangue. The man who rails at us there (a genius? a fool?) has us labeled as miserable, unbalanced, driven by desires for wealth and prestige that are utterly out of sync with nature's own sense of “limit” (finis), “due measure” (modus), and “just enough” (satis). From the very start, and without warning, he has decided that we are part of the problem, that our greed, discontent, lust, and so on, are grist for his satiric mill. Along the way we, his fidgety accused, must face up to that central, narratological task of determining who “we” imagine ourselves to be in relation to the man who speaks from the page, and just how much we want to credit his sometimes strained and addled reasoning against us. When he says de te │ fabula narratur (“you are the fool in the story,” S. 1.1.69–70) do we run for cover by reminding ourselves that the speaker is a zealot and a know-it-all, or, even easier, that he has someone else in mind? Maybe he means his addressee, Maecenas, or the fictive audience inside the poem. Or how about the poem's first-century-bce “intended” readers? Could he possibly really mean me?