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An Asianist Sensation: Horace on Lucilius as Hortensius
Abstract
The Asianist orator Hortensius Hortalus is a partial model for Horace's critique of Lucilius in his début collection Satires 1. Much mileage is derived from the metaphor of Lucilius as a "muddy river." The appearances of Hortensius, a wealthy lover of luxury and innovator in dining habits, in Varro's De Re Rustica 3, Cicero's Brutus (where, recently deceased, he is especially memorialized) and Orator, and Catullus 65 are grist to Horace's mill. Lucilius is tendentiously linked to Asianism as well as Asia itself, and the identification is pursued through recall of Lucilius' own statements, as Horace toys with Republican texts.
This analysis explores aspects of the extant fragmentary record of early Roman poetry from its earliest accessible moments through roughly the first hundred and twenty years of its traceable existence. Key questions include how ancient readers made sense of the record as then available to them and how the limitations of their accounts, assumptions, and working methods continue to define the contours of our understanding today. Both using and challenging the standard conceptual frameworks operative in the ancient world, the discussion details what we think we know of the best documented forms, practitioners, contexts, and reception of Roman drama (excluding comedy), epic, and satire in their early instantiations, with occasional glances at the further generic experimentation that accompanied the genesis of literary practice in Rome.
This piece explores possible reasons for Lucilius’ suggestive reference to worms, emblemate uermiculato , in the famous comment (about speech arranged akin to mosaics) which has survived from Book 2 of the satirist. The fragment can be set metatextually amid other extracts of Lucilius to show the poet's agency and skill, considered as having influenced aspects of its own afterlife (especially in Hor. Sat . 2.4) and appreciated in its historical context as a hit at Publius Mucius Scaevola, who died from phthiriasis.
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