In his first book of Satires, written in the late, violent days of the
Roman republic, Horace exposes satiric speech as a tool of power and
domination. Using critical theories from classics, speech act theory,
and others, Catherine Schlegel argues that Horace's acute poetic
observation of hostile speech provides insights into the operations of
verbal control that are relevant to his time and to ours. She
demonstrates that though Horace is forced by his political circumstances
to develop a new, unthreatening style of satire, his poems contain a
challenge to our most profound habits of violence, hierarchy, and
domination. Focusing on the relationships between speaker and audience
and between old and new style, Schlegel examines the internal conflicts
of a notoriously difficult text. This exciting contribution to the field
of Horatian studies will be of interest to classicists as well as other
scholars interested in the genre of satire.