The Night of Reason. The Esquiline and Witches in Horace

The city is the framework of Horace’s moral quest: the satirist, at least in the first book of Sermones, depict Rome as a place where this project can be carried out. This substantially favourable image of the urban environment is also linked with the majestic project that, right after the civil wars, intended to create a bright and reassuring environment for the secular and the religious life, for businesses and otium. Maecenas did participate to this process of urban transformation in an original way, mainly through the building of his own villa and of the horti Maecenatiani. Starting from sat. I 8 and from epod. 5, the aim of this paper is indeed to analyse the Esquilian theme (?) and the role) of the witches and to stress their symbolic value, depicting them as an operation of urban regeneration that is concerned with preserving the memory of the past, both recent and distant, connecting the Esquilian to gloomy impressions of disorder and violence and making out of the renewal of one of the most squalid setting of Horace's work a powerful emblem of getaway from that night of reason represented by the witches, threatening the bright augustan present.