Horace and the Dialectic of Freedom: Readings in Epistles 1 (Cornell Studies in Classical Philology) - Hardcover

Johnson, Walter Ralph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801428688 ISBN 13: 9780801428685

Publisher: NCROL, 1993

Synopsis

Informal in tone and seemingly effortless in movement, Horace's Epistles have haunted and delighted readers for two millennia. W. R. Johnson offers an extraordinarily suggestive new interpretation of Book 1 of the Epistles, an interpretation not only of the poems but of the poet they reveal

Johnson regards the Epistles as the fruit of the poet's search for freedom, clarity of perception, and inner harmony in a complex society. He portrays Horace as a paradoxical combination of sophist and gardener, working both nature and culture within a terrain bounded on the one side by chaos and on the other by technocracy. Resisting any linear, progressive reading, he traces the key themes in the poems, such as Horace's relationships with his father and with Rome, his adoptive city, and the conflicts between urban vitality and rustic serenity and between inner freedom and outer freedom.

While in the end Johnson maintains that the Epistles uphold the possibility that the individual can achieve a dynamic balance of heart and soul, he demonstrates that what nourishes the poems are the suffering and fear, resentment and anger that underlie their carefully controlled surface. Horace and the Dialectic of Freedom will engage and challenge classicists, students of Latin literature, and others interested in satire and in the history of poetry.

About this title

About the Author

W. R. Johnson is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of Classics at the University of Chicago. His books include Lucretius and the Modern World; Luxuriance and Economy: Cicero and the Alien Style; Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil's "Aeneid"; and two books in the series Cornell Studies in Classical Philology―Horace and the Dialectic of Freedom: Readings in “Epistles” 1 and Momentary Monsters: Lucan and His Heroes.

Review

"This is a remarkable book, a challenging and disturbing book, and one that I had difficulty putting down until I had finished it. It is not a book that asks for, or should simply receive, the good scholarship seal of approval. Its style proclaims unorthodoxy. In keeping with Horace's own studied informality of time and movement in the Epistles, Johnson has allowed himself more departures from respectability than I have seen in a long time in a book on Latin poetry."―Kenneth Reckford, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Edition details

• Publisher: NCROL
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801428688
• ISBN 13: 9780801428685
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 172