HORACE, THE LIAR PERSONA AND THE POETRY OF DISSIMULATIO: THE CASE OF EPISTLES 1

In this paper I examine Horace’s Epistles 1 and argue that Horace constructed the main speaker of this collection as a duplicitous ‘liar persona’. Horace’s persona of Epistles 1 admits that his past relationship with his patron Maecenas was paramount to slavery and appears determined to restore himself to freedom. Nevertheless, Horace employs various strategies to make us question the sincerity of his persona’s resolve and to suspect we may be being addressed by a slave dissimulating as a free man. Furthermore, Horace seems to have implicated the Epistles as a whole in this pretence; they are poems written to a patron’s demand but ‘pose’ as his personal letters. I argue that Horace created this poetic dynamic, the liar persona in his false letters, in order to ‘unmask’ himself and disclose his real view of the nature of his relationship with Maecenas