Library › Latin: Satire & Fable › Versus Satirae Horatianae Praemissi
Eight anonymous hexameters found in some manuscripts of Horace before his tenth satire of the first book, and printed by D. R. Shackleton Bailey in his edition. Addressing Lucilius, the speaker promises to prove how faulty his verses are on the evidence of Cato, Lucilius’ own defender, who is preparing to correct them — a gentler man and far more refined than the schoolmaster who drove pupils with whips and wet ropes.
The lines take up the literary quarrel of Horace’s satire, which criticises Lucilius’ carelessness and his admirers. Their authorship and purpose are disputed — they may be the work of an ancient scholar or imitator — but they show how Horace’s judgement of his predecessor was debated in antiquity, and they mention the grammarian Valerius Cato’s work on Lucilius.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Musisque Deoque, the digital archive of Latin poetry (edition: D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 1985), licensed CC BY-SA. Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.