Horace's Ars Poetica: Family, Friendship, and the Art of Living

by Jennifer Ferriss-Hill

Overview

A major reinterpretation of Horace's famous literary manual

For two millennia, the Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry), the 476-line literary treatise in verse with which Horace closed his career, has served as a paradigmatic manual for writers. Rarely has it been considered as a poem in its own right, or else it has been disparaged as a great poet's baffling outlier. Here, Jennifer Ferriss-Hill for the first time fully reintegrates the Ars Poetica into Horace's oeuvre, reading the poem as a coherent, complete, and exceptional literary artifact intimately linked with the larger themes pervading his work.

Arguing that the poem can be interpreted as a manual on how to live masquerading as a handbook on poetry, Ferriss-Hill traces its key themes to show that they extend beyond poetry to encompass friendship, laughter, intergenerational relationships, and human endeavor. If the poem is read for how it expresses itself, moreover, it emerges as an exemplum of art in which judicious repetitions of words and ideas join disparate parts into a seamless whole that nevertheless lends itself to being remade upon every reading.

Establishing the Ars Poetica as a logical evolution of Horace's work, this book promises to inspire a long overdue reconsideration of a hugely influential yet misunderstood poem.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691197432
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	11/12/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jennifer Ferriss-Hill is associate professor of classics and senior associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Miami and the author of Roman Satire and the Old Comic Tradition.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Preface: Horace, Ars Poetica: Text and Translation xi

Introduction: Becoming the Ars Poetica 1

The Name of the Poem 5

The Genre of the Poem 13

The Date of the Poem 17

The Standing of the Poem-A Story 22

The Unity of the Poem 30

Reading the Ars Poetica 37

1 Humano 39

Human Nature 46

Living Language 62

Appropriateness and the Satires 69

Horatius senex 80

Callidaiunctura 90

2 Pisones 100

The Identity of the Pisones 100

The Pisones in the Ass Poetica 106

Ages and Aging, Young and Old 129

Horatius pater 138

Conclusions 149

3 Amid, risum 154

Risum 154

Amici 157

Laughter and Friendship 159

Roman Friendship and Horace as Amicus Pisonum 173

Horatius iudex 183

From Laughter to Madness 189

Toward the End of the Poem 197

4 The End of the Poem 200

The Art of Doing Everything 211

Ars Poetica, Ars Poiëtike (ποιητικη) 221

A Conclusion: Ars Poetica, Ars Vivendi 237

Epilogue: Receiving the Ars Poetica 244

Bibliography 273

Index 295

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This is a fine work of scholarship, impressively argued and written with great lucidity and energy. A new view emerges of how the Ars Poetica should most productively be read."—Denis Feeney, Princeton University

"A welcome and overdue contribution to the literature, since the conventional reading of the Ars Poetica is woefully inadequate."—Gregson Davis, Duke University

Editorial Reviews

"What the book does do well is to document an intelligent reader’s journey through this most elusive of poems. In the process it offers us a new way of thinking about it, one in which its apparent center moves to the margins and its apparent defects become strengths. It offers a richer and more interesting Ars than most of us are used to, but one recognizably by the Horace we know from other works."—-Gregory Hays, New York Review of Books

From the Publisher