The didactic role of recusatio and the Horatian persona

Emily A. Kratzer (University of California, Los Angeles)

Horace’s talents as a praise poet, he would have us believe, are in such high demand that he must constantly reject requests for encomiastic verse. This is the case particularly when those requests, for one reason or another, do not coincide with his poetic goals or professed strengths. In response to the demanding public, Horace often employs the topos of recusatio, “refusal,” as a means of politely denying those requests. According to a common definition, recusatio is a rhetorical device aligning the poet with Callimachean aesthetics and expressing rejection of epic themes as unsuitable or unattainable. However, while this definition may be appropriate for the Augustan elegists, it is far too narrow to apply to Horace’s use of the refusal motif.

The Horatian recusatio, although indebted to its Callimachean model, is not confined to a single genre or theme and cannot be tied to a consistent ideology: the poet rejects epic themes when writing lyric only to reject lyric while writing in the sermones style (cf. Odes 1.6 and Epistles 1.1). The topic rejected and the reason given seem to matter little within this structure; it is only the fact of rejection that is consistent. In this paper I argue that the Horatian recusatio is in fact linked to Horace’s technique of self-representation: he portrays himself as a learned poet, a man of good taste who knows what is appropriate in any given situation. As such, he is the poet of refusal, and this is crucial to our understanding of the Horatian poetic program.

In this paper I demonstrate that the three most common modes of scholarly reception of the recusatio—which I term the “political” (Freudenberg 1993 and 2001, Lyne 1995), “generic assimilation” (Davis 1991), and “Callimachean” (Wimmel 1960) modes—although indispensable, do not explain the role of the rejection motif throughout Horatian poetics. As a supplement to these approaches, I look to ancient literary strategies of self-representation, and specifically to those utilized by praise poets. We find that Horace’s poetic persona, repeatedly sought-after by would-be laudandi, owes much to Pindar, a praise poet who shares with Horace an inclination towards self-censorship as to his poetic subject matter. But whereas the Pindaric recusatio, if we may call it that, seeks to demonstrate the poet’s keen sense of style and propriety, and by extension to impute to the patron the same qualities, Horace’s recusatio serves to admonish the potential patron for his lack of discernment. Horace takes on the role of instructor of good taste and also of the good life, both for us as readers and for anyone who makes unsophisticated requests of poets.