HORACE'S PRIAPUS: A LIFE ON THE ESQUILINE (SAT. 1.8)*

摘要

Horace’s Priapus has traits familiar from the poems of the Priapea.1 These traits arenself-consciousness concerning ligneous origin, red phallus, raised arm, and protectionnof gardens against thieves.2 Yet he has one trait unparalleled in the Priapea, a reednattached to his head. The reed scares birds away, and this scarecrow function is presumablynalso generic, whether or not there was always a reed.3 Horace’s uolucres … … uetat … nouis considere in hortis (6–7) seems to refer to this particular function,nbecause scarecrows protect newly sown gardens, where birds eat the unsproutednseeds.4 Does Priapus speak of himself, then, as a new installation, and is the reader tonassume that he has been fitted out as a scarecrow because these gardens are new? Sonone might at first assume, but already in line 8 Priapus begins to tell the history of thenplace. (It was once, he says, a potter’s field, marked by a cippus that defined its