American Journal of Philology 138 (2017) 641–672 © 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press 1 Johnson 2011, 192–229, recognizes the programmatic role of 1.13–16 (he includes 1.17 in the sequence) in formulating Horace’s lyric approach to blame, though his interpretation differs from mine. For Johnson, these poems continue Horace’s iambic praxis as he sees it working in the Epodes, that is, they propose reciprocal song—and the fusion of viewpoints that such song encourages—as an alternative to retributive vengeance. PUTTING THE WOLF TO FLIGHT: HORACE’S DISAVOWAL AND DEPLOYMENT OF INVECTIVE IN C. 1.13–16 AND 1.22 KENNETH DRAPER u Abstract. This article analyzes the dynamics of Horace’s relationship with invective in a programmatic sequence of odes, C. 1.13–16, and his subsequent commentary on this relationship in C. 1.22. While Horace tentatively engages in political blame through the allegories of 1.14 and 1.15, the poems to either side, 1.13 and 1.16, announce that he is not a blame poet. In C. 1.22, Horace uses his unarmed encounter with a wolf to reflect on this earlier sequence: in putting the wolf to flight, Horace symbolically accomplishes the goal of blame poetry although his self-portrait appears to deny his capacity for invective. IN C. 1.16, HORACE REPUDIATES INVECTIVE, announcing that iambic composition (criminosis . . . iambis) lies far in his past (in dulci iuventa). How are we to take this disavowal? What is the role of blame in the Odes? How does this poem relate to neighboring odes in the collection? In the first part of this article, I analyze the dynamics of Horace’s relationship with invective in a programmatic sequence of odes, C. 1.13–16. 1 While Horace tentatively engages in political blame through the allegories of 1.14 and 1.15, the poems to either side, 1.13 and 1.16, showily announce that he is not a blame poet. This message is clearest in 1.16, but it emerges from a close reading of 1.13 as well, where the disavowal depends on a gendered rhetoric of genre: Horace pairs elegiac language with Sapphic allusion to imply that lyric/elegiac poets are too effeminate for the hyper- masculine aggression of invective. This argument builds on metageneric commentary in two epodes, I. 11 and 14, which C. 1.13 invokes through dictional and thematic links.