TWO ACROSTICS IN HORACE'SSATIRES(1.9.24–8, 2.1.7–10)

Abstract

Hunters of acrostics have had little luck with Horace. Despite his manifest love of complex wordplay, virtuoso metrical tricks and even alphabet games, acrostics seem largely absent from Horace's poetry. The few that have been sniffed out in recent years are, with one notable exception, either fractured and incomplete—the postulated PINN- in Carm. 4.2.1–4 (pinnis? Pindarus?)—or disappointingly low-stakes; suggestions of acrostics are largely confined to the Odes alone. Besides diverging from the long-standing Roman obsession with literary acrostics, Horace's apparent lack of interest is especially surprising given that Virgil, his contemporary, friend and ‘poetic pace-maker’, was at the time conducting what seems to be a systematic adaptation of Hellenistic acrostic-poetics into Latin poetry.