Suzanne Sharland has written an engaging and original book on Horace's Satires. She uses Bakhtin's theories of narration, carnivalesque inversions, heteroglossia and addressivity to analyse the dialogicality (‘the chatter and counter-chatter’) of Horace's Satires, so they ‘may be better understood in their full artistic complexity’ (7). Bakhtin's theories of dialogicality are her scaffolding, but her own careful ingenuity enlivens and mobilizes the poems.

The book begins with a long chapter introducing Bakhtin, the nature and definition of diatribe, and Horace's Satires as sermo — as conversation as well as satire; the rest of the work gives close readings of the first three satires of Book 1, the ‘diatribe satires’ and then of Satires 2, 3 and 7 in Book 2. Sermo is understood as always dialogue, ‘a response to prior discourse and an anticipation of future discourse’ (3), and the inherent dialogism in diatribe's second-person address makes Satires 1.1–3 an ideal place for S. to begin her discussion. Horace's opening poems of Book 1 have hardly been the favourites that appear in Latin readers (unlike Satires 1.9, for instance, the poem excluding the talkative wannabe that readers so enjoy — though S. would have something to say on that) and the introjected speakers of Horace's first three satires seem wooden, prone to hackneyed philosophical parody. Yet S.’s dialogical reading makes the interactive chattiness of these poems evident, as well as their humour, their liveliness and their instability, and she particularly reveals the performance of the Satires immanent in the text. S.’s book shows that Horace exploits the layered voices of his multiple speakers and addressees in his first book of satires to destabilize the moralizing speaker of the diatribe, known as ‘Horace’.

S. sees the second book of the Satires as a carnivalesque inversion of Book 1 and its primary speaker. Horace becomes the primary listener in Book 2, and in dialogues that verge on monologue Horace, the moralizing/satirizing chief speaker of Book 1, becomes the object of the satire. The seemingly separate projects of Horace's two books of Satires thus mirror one another and are interdependent, or, as S. says, are in dialogue with each other. The inversion in Book 2 accomplishes the undoing of Horace as an authoritative speaker. In a similar way, according to S., individual satires speak to each other. So, for example, the suspicions we develop in the course of Satires 1.2, that the speaker's confidence in his moralizing speech against adultery derives from his own taste for the practice and his acquaintance with its concomitant perils, are confirmed by his slave (with the notably Plautine name of Davus) in Satire 2.7. In this monologic dialogue Davus makes apt, and Bakhtinian, use of the Saturnalian reversal of hierarchy to speak libertate Decembri and inform his master that he (‘Horace’) possesses none of the virtues he advocated in the diatribe satires of Book 1, and among other specifics that he is obsessed with another man's wife. Likewise, though Horace eats a simple meal off of earthenware in Satires 1.6, in Satires 2.2 and 2.7 he is ‘busted’ for a fondness of gourmet food.

The Bakhtinian idea of addressivity marks the fact that a speaker always talks to someone, and no communication is outside a relationship. S. sees the poetic address to Maecenas in the Satires as real, not merely a conventional dedication; Maecenas is one of many addressees of the poems, but S. sees the troubling, unequal relationship with Horace as ever-present in the Satires. S. might have bolstered this element of her argument with further investigations into the extensive current scholarship on the poetic version of patronage, Peter White for example, but her book does us all a favour in forcing Maecenas into the picture as a live player in the Satires. One surely has to imagine that Horace performed these poems for an audience that included Maecenas, and that it would have been irresistible to play his audience for satiric humour. So the tasteless nudge to Maecenas ‘for a raise’ that Lyne and others have seen in Satires 1.1 when Horace moralizes against stinginess, strikes S. not as tasteless but rather a good joke, at which Horace's friends in his audience laugh, along with the ever generous Maecenas. S. acknowledges that the Bakhtinian reversals of Carnival support the power-relations of the status quo, and she makes a reasonable case for a disappointingly unsubversive Horace: there is so much he might lose.

S.’s analysis seems to me to have crucial implications for how we read the figure of Horace in these poems which have elicited such passionate autobiographical readings from their beginnings. S.’s book would have us imagine Horace as an historical figure who writes satires in which he sometimes stars, or hosts if you will, and he sometimes brings other historical figures in too, such as Maecenas. He works out real issues in life in a fictional context, and where the fiction begins or ends is anyone's guess, but it works better as art than as fact.

S. is refreshingly gentle to the critics she disagrees with, as befits a writer who believes what Bakhtin's comrade Voloshinov says, that word is a two-sided act and speaking makes a relationship with one's audience. S.’s practice as a critic is to investigate what the satires are doing rather than to evaluate their success in some undefined world (our own) and she can thus always show how the satires succeed.