Abstract

This chapter looks at the complex construction of the relationship between author and speaker in the second book of Horace’s Satires. The first book of Satires had been narrated in the poet’s first-person voice and provided an apparently self-revelatory poet of Horace and his career. The second book of Satires, on the other hand, introduces a succession of other speakers who take over from the satirist, either presenting poems as monologues or acting as dominating interlocutors in dialogues; a number of these speakers can be argued to represent aspects of Horace’s character, and this chapter explores the idea that characters other than the poet-narrator may in fact reveal just as much about him as his own first-person voice.