Horace Epistle 1.13: Introduction
1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 This short letter is to Vinnius, a messenger that has been entrusted with delivering Horace’s Odes to Augustus. Horace peppers the letter with advice to Vinnius on the proper way to carry his poems, and the proper time to try to give them to the emperor. Clearly, Horace is intimidated by and modest before Augustus (or, at least, the letter wants us to believe this). The letter has a number of jokes running through it, especially the idea that Vinnius will resemble a donkey in his behavior and thus embody the cognomen that his father had acquired “Asina“. Additional humor can be found in the way that Horace makes Vinnius into a type of epic hero, who has been entrusted with a heavy duty, when in fact he is delivering three books of “light” odes (Horace often claims that the style of his odes is levis, e.g. C. 2.1.40). There is the possibility that this is exactly the sort of humor that Augustus like (note his jokes about Horace’s weight in Suetonius’s Life of Horace). Augustus was also had a penchant for certain word-choice (Life of Augustus 87) and one wonders if the odd words lamas (“bogs”, line 10) and inportes (“cause”, line 5 found only here in Augustan poetry) might aim to be the sort of diction that Augustus would favor. In some sense, this is a letter to Augustus, even if Horace shies away from making Augustus the addressee. The whole poem then becomes a sort of joke (risum) and a fabula (9) in its own right.