Running Down Rome: Lyric, Iambic, and Satire

        For over a decade scholars have read Horace’s so-called “diatribe satires” within the context of the poet’s disparate personas (Martindale 1993; Oliensis 1998), which, in hindsight, ought to strike readers as the equivalent of a diagnosis of literary schizophrenia.  The only thing these poems seem to have in common is their helplessly lackadaisical, quasi-Cynic approach to moral vice (Oltramare 1926; Fiske 1971; Freudenburg 1993), which has been described in terms of incompetence (Rudd 1966; Fiske 1971), utter confusion (Fraenkel 1954; Rudd 1966) and even mo