Innovative Invective: Strength and Weakness in Horace’s Epodes and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria

Abstract

Building on scholarship on Horace’s attribution of weakness to himself in the Epodes , this article finds a parallel for that practice, and for modern scholars’ analyses of it, in Quintilian’s theory of invective, which allows that mollitia , infirmitas , and lack of nervi may be advantageous for the orator. This comparison allows us to recognize Horace as a rhetorical innovator who, in response to the political upheaval of the civil wars, transforms not only poetic but also oratorical traditions of invective. It also deepens our understanding of the function of poetic models in Quintilian’s treatise.