Horace

Horace plays an important role in Ariosto’s work, both as concerns the Satires and the Furioso. For the Furioso we should note a certain similitude, such as the one in I, 34, when Angelica flees: ‘Qual pargoletta o dama o capriuola, / che tra le fronde del natìo boschetto / alla madre veduta abbia la gola / stringer dal pardo, o aprirle ‘l finaco o ‘l petto, / di selva in selva dal crudel s’invola, / e di paura triema e di sospetto: / ad ogni sterpo che passando tocca, / esser si crede all’empia fera in bocca’, modelled, with suitable modifications and some embellishments, on Horace’s Carmina, I, 23, 1-8: ‘Vitas inuleo me similis, Chloe, / quaerenti pavidam montibus veris inhoruit / adventus foliis, seu virides rubum  / dimovere lacertae, / et corde et genibus tremuit’. As to the Satires, Ariosto took as his model Horace’s Sermones and Epistulae rather than his Satyrae, with which there is nevertheless an association through the title. Ludovico, who also borrowed from Horace the idea of epistolary dialogue, distances himself from Horace’s ideological model, too oriented towards a wisdom and a sobriety distant from Ariosto’s intellectual horizon, inclined at times towards the autobiographical and in any case never moralistic or programmatic. Ariosto does not identify himself with Horace’s utile dulci. By way of proof as to how Ludovico was familiar with the works of the Latin poet there is the quotation that appeared as an inscription on the house in the contrada Mirasole in Ferrara: ‘Parva sed apta mihi’. There was in any case a special tie between Ariosto and Horace, given the reference we find in Satires IX, 61 (‘Fuscus Aristius occurrit’) to the Roman family of the Aristii, from which were to have descended the Ariosto, this in all probability the fruit of genealogical fantasy.

Portrait of Horace, private collection