SOURCE: “Horatian Satire and the Conventions of Popular Drama” in The Walking Muse: Horace on the Theory of Satire, 1993, pp. 3-51.

In the following essay, Freudenburg discusses Horace's use of satiric persona, the influence of Bion on his satire, and his handling of the diatribe.

Introductory Remarks: Ancient Rhetoric and the Persona Theory

“The poet's work may be a mask, a dramatized conventionalization, but it is frequently a conventionalization of his own experiences, his own life. If used with a sense of these distinctions, there is use in biographical study.”¹ Since the days of the great “Personal Heresy” debate, which pitted C. S. Lewis of Oxford against E. M. Tillyard of Cambridge, critics of personal poetry have struggled to strike a balance between the opposing claims of art and autobiography.² The concept of the poet's mask, the persona, while generally accepted in theory, still suffers from much neglect...