References to law are relatively abundant in Horace's works, especially when measured against those of contemporary literary authors, and this is particularly true of the Satires. H. sets herself a twofold task (p. 5, see also pp. 2, 6): first, to collect as many such references as possible, a concrete goal, second, to ascertain to what extent these usages are ‘functional’ (‘funzionali’) in the relationship between the poet and his readers, which calls for a somewhat more subjective approach.
The book is organised into two main parts, followed by a brief conclusion. The first part contains three chapters, one devoted to the poet's ‘biography’ as it emerges from his work, including career, personality, friendships with jurists, the second to his relationship with the Roman legal tradition on a more general level, beginning with the Twelve Tables, and the third to a poem-by-poem summary of the legal content of the Satires. The second part has four chapters, three of which are thematic in nature, focusing on various types of ‘legal’ problems, namely, sacrilege, inventio thesauri and ‘hidden defects’ in the sale of slaves. The fourth is devoted to an examination of the interesting question of the nature of the poet's readership, specifically addressing the problem of how much these readers could be expected to know about law.
The book forms part of a trend in scholarship that is of relatively recent vintage, tracing back to the 1970s, known as the Law and Literature Movement, and featuring notable contributions by, for example, the prolific judge and legal scholar R. Posner. H. positions herself within this tradition from the outset (p. 2). Its avatars offer much that is stimulating and insightful, and yet at the same time, their work reflects a challenge that might be described as in a certain sense ‘bilateral’. In other words, the range of expertise(s) required of practitioners in the fields of Law and Literature can be so diverse from each other that rarely does an individual show the same aptitude for both. In the end, works by legal scholars tend to show strikingly different approaches than those written by students of literature, so that overall there has been little of the cross-pollination one would like to see result from this ‘interdisciplinary’ enterprise.
As a student of Roman law, H. falls squarely within the former camp. Her competence in various aspects of this subject – and in Horace these are quite varied – is manifest on almost every page. Examples are too numerous to list, but include discussions of various aspects of the Twelve Tables as well as of mancipatio and usucapio.
When it comes to an appreciation of the poems as literary creations, and particularly in assessing whether they respect (or not) the rules and expectations that were developed in antiquity for the impressive range of literary genres pursued by our poet, above all satire, H. finds herself on less certain ground. Certainly, different responses to this challenge are possible. For example, H. might have sought out a standard definition of the genres she elucidates, or even developed her own, in order to construct a firmer foundation for her analysis. In particular, what exactly is satire?
As is well known, about half a century ago there developed in the scholarship on satire an approach to the hermeneutics of the genre known as ‘persona-theory’, which has since been widely accepted. Simply put, this holds that, when the poet speaks to us in his work and/or feeds us biographical details about himself, such representations are not to be understood in a literal way as reflecting, in our case, the historical Horace, but as a literary construct – a persona – that in a certain sense stands in for him, sharing any number of characteristics without being the same thing. In the same way, the other characters he introduces, some blatantly fictional, some ostensibly ‘real’, are viewed as anti-personae designed to reflect the main persona in certain ways and contrast with it in others. An example would be the figures of ‘Horace’ and ‘Trebatius Testa’ in Serm. 2.1; another one, perhaps combining persona and anti-persona in the same ‘person’, is the famous Horatian pater.
It is in my view unwarranted to allow reliance on this useful theory to foster a hyper-scepticism about every last biographical detail offered by Horace in his poetry. It is only that these details, even where we might accept them as factual, i.e. as drawn from real life, have an exclusively literary function in the poetic context. Of course, no one can reasonably deny to any author the freedom of choosing the methodology and the strategies of reading that she finds most congenial. All the same, one might expect to find a justification of this choice, and some acknowledgement that other approaches are not only possible, but very much in vogue.
One tendency that characterises the works of authors on the ‘law’ side of the Law and Literature divide is that they generally find it difficult to resist the temptation to locate as much ‘law’ as they possibly can in their texts. This can lead to circular reasoning or at least over-argument. For example, there are personages mentioned in the Satires such as ‘Alfenus’ whom the scholiast identifies as contemporary jurists. These identifications are by no means guaranteed, however, and it is difficult, despite all efforts, to make much of them (see pp. 32–9, 43–6). A distinct challenge is posed by the sheer abundance of actual or apparent legal references in Horace's work, about which H. wisely chooses to be selective in her discussion (pp. 68, 95).
In the first part of her book, H. tends to treat Horace almost exclusively as a source for law. Of course he is precisely that, and there is much of value in this approach. She also recognises that it has its limitations, but it is not until page 87 that she comes to grips with ‘la funzione dell'impiego del diritto nell'opera di Orazio’. Regrettably, this promising opportunity goes largely unexploited. The poet tends to view illegal acts in a broader context of moral failings, and this requires a somewhat more subtle approach, one that takes into account the possibility that Horace is not just stating or referencing the law, but criticising it.
Matters improve markedly with the second part of the work, which, as noted, is organised thematically. The discussion is an interesting one, treating matters not just of law, but of religion and morality, that sometimes veers a bit off course however (e.g. the longish digression on sacrilege at pp. 110–18). All the same, there are instances where H.’s close and careful reading of the poetry yields distinct dividends (see p. 121). What the reader finds is more a commentary on individual passages rather than the development of an overall thesis. Thus the book lacks a general conclusion, instead winding down with an engaging essay on the nature of the poet's readership, which contains, among other things, a good-sized excursus on references to law in (roughly) contemporary Roman poets. H. – highly plausibly – recognises, on the part of ancient readers, different levels of appreciation of the references to law in these works.
The book contains a pair of abstracts in English and Italian, an index of sources as well as one of modern authors, but no index of subjects or bibliography. Sources are generally given in Latin without translation.
H.’s monograph will serve as a convenient point of reference for those interested in legal references in Horace and more generally in the subject of law and literature.
