The Vices and Virtues of Friendship. Juridical Metaphors in Horace (Ep. 2.2 and Sat. 1.3)

Consuelo Carrasco García

Two poems by Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 BC) provide us with the occasion to study how Roman society of the first century BC perceived the law. They allow us to see the creative process of the poet from a literary point of view and at the same time to become aware of his moral and philosophical values. This is a work of Roman law, but also of literature and of the language in which both are expressed. The legal analysis of the poems helps us to understand the way in which the author avails himself of legal situations and morphosyntactic phenomena that are characteristic of the language of law in order to achieve poetic effects, which would be impossible if he did not thoroughly understand the mechanisms of the ius that he refers to. One could say the same with respect to the public with whose complicity he reckons: a public - at least the elite that Horace addresses himself to especially - that knows how to "read between the lines," since it is able to appreciate and understand, among the metaphors and other literary devices, the subtlety of the Roman jurists' thinking; all this because the legal world is nothing strange to it. Dating to around 19 and 36 BC respectively, both poems have as their underlying argument the taking shape of the concept of "vice," of the body and of the mind, and its antonym "virtue," the latter understood as careful consideration in judging the "defects or shortcomings" of others, especially one's friends.

Roman Legal Tradition, 13 (2017), 10–47

DOI 10.55740/2017.3

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