Abstract

This satire has often been accounted apoorpoem,repetitive,irrelevant and self-indulgent. Rather than recover one more cultured display of refinement as disguise, this essay explores instead the fall-out that radiates from a classic text's play with the ‘loose talk’ ofplebeiangossip. The proposal here is that Horace and his intimates could, andcan, easily share a view of the view of ‘their’ populace, but at the price of surrendering control over the import of their intervention. This claim turns on the figure ‘Brutus’, which noises a republican politics of resistance to tyranny through what linguists term nonphonation: as we shall find, Horace both tells a dummy tale about ‘przemilczenie’ (῾not speaking about something, ‘failing to mention something’) and at the same time performs a dumbshow of his own.