The Complete Odes and Epodes

by Horace

  Yet we may wonder how far Horace’s deeper feelings were involved in several of these poems. We cannot expect the youthful intensity of Catullus; at thirty-four Horace was no angry young man – he was securely settled under a wealthy and sympathetic patron, and the author of a successful book published some four years previously. Very few of the Epodes can be dated, and the majority offer wit and elegance rather than personal sentiment: the diatribe against garlic (3); the attack on the swaggering upstart (4); the ‘cowardly cur’ (6); the harsh ill-wishes (10) to the Maevius who may be the poetaster of Virgil’s Eclogues 3.90, and for which the Greek model referred to above marks the contrast between its own fierce personal note and Horace’s professional expertise. Two brutally obscene taunts (8 and 12) are directed against ageing women still looking for lovers – a standard theme in antiquity. The late epode 14 is no more than a graceful apology to Maecenas for the book’s being behind schedule because of a love-affair with ‘the promiscuous ex-slave Phryne’, but, in 11, the feeling ‘sounds genuine, a vivid picture of the misery, helplessness and loss of self-respect that may torment the lover’.4 The Neaera of 15 is presumably a pseudonym, following the convention Horace will adopt throughout the Odes, but there is more raw emotion here than Horace will often allow himself to show – no urbanity or ironic detachment, only a bitter jealousy which might be voiced by Catullus or Propertius:

  – And you, whoever you are, who amble

  happy and proud in my misfortune,

  though perhaps you are rich in flocks

  and land and Pactolus flows for you alone

  and Pythagoras’ reincarnations pose

  no problems for you and your beauty

  surpasses that of Nireus, alas,

  you shall bewail her favours transferred

  to another, and I shall laugh last.

  One name stands out as a personality: the witch Canidia is a fearsome figure. She is named in epode 3 and vividly portrayed and cursed by her child victim in 5, while in 17 she is treated to an ironic recantation by the poet, to which she replies with unrelenting fury. Canidia (with her ally Sagana) appears in the graveyard orgies of Satires I.8, and is named as a poisoner in Satires II. I.48 and in the final line of II.8 (‘Canidia, whose breath is more deadly than an African snake’s’). She is identified by the scholiast Porphyrio as Gratidia, a Neapolitan sorceress and poisoner. This cannot be confirmed, but the way in which she haunts Horace’s earlier poems suggests that she has some basis in reality.

  The eight sermones of Book II of the Satires were published at about the same time, in 30 B.C., and after that Horace moved away from the genre of social commentary into what was to establish him as a lyric poet. Three books of carmina, eighty-eight lyric poems of widely varying style and length, appeared only seven years later; some of them must have been written while he was completing the Epodes. Indeed, there are two poems in the early collection which point so clearly forward that they cannot be classed as experimental. Epode 2 dwells on the simple life of the farmer in nostalgic detail – for farming was not really like that in Horace’s own day – a theme which will often recur with the same delicate sentiment. It should not seem false here because of the mocking irony of the last five lines which bring us down to earth before we can float away into rosy sentimentality:

  – Thus Alfius, a moneylender,

  on the point of turning farmer:

  he called in all his capital

  on the Ides, and on the Kalends

  he’s busily loaning it out again.

  This was a device copied from Archilochus. The change of mood is very Horatian, as is the withholding of the true identity of the speaker until the end. Finally, epode 13 is close in spirit to Odes I.9, where ‘A violent tempest narrows the heaven’ or ‘the trees cannot bear/their loads and bitter frosts/have paralysed the streams’. The poet tells us to shut out our cares with the comfort of good wine by a blazing fire. Then we are lifted into the wider context of the heroic age by the centaur Chiron singing of ‘wine and song,/sweet ministration to ugly hurts’, to Achilles, mortal son of an immortal mother, who cannot escape his destiny and will not live to return home. In such a context Lord Lytton wrote:

  When a proper name is thus used – a proper name suggesting of itself almost insensibly to the mind the poetic associations which belong to the name – the idea is enlarged from a simple to a complex idea, adorned with delicate enrichments, and opening into many dim recesses of imagination.5

  The first three books of the Odes are so richly varied in style and subject that they are difficult to classify. They are not arranged either by theme or chronology, the persona of the poet or the interests of the patron, though they start with an address to Maecenas (‘descended from olden kings,/my rampart and sweet admiration’) and end with a similar address in III.29 (III.30 being the coda to the whole collection).

  In the first poem Horace sets himself above ordinary men by his devotion to the Muses:

  and should you list me among the lyric bards

  I shall nudge the stars with my lifted head.

  In the coda he celebrates his achievement as the first to introduce Greek metres into Latin verse. He was not literally the first. Ennius had adapted the Greek hexameter to early accentual Latin; the dramatists Plautus and Terence had taken the iambics of Greek New Comedy for their model, and Terence claimed creative originality in doing so; two of Catullus’ extant poems (11 and 51) are closely imitative of Sappho. But just as Horace had re-created the iambics of Archilochus in the Epodes, he now extended his range to the elaborate metres of the lyric poets of Lesbos, Alcaeus and Sappho; to Anacreon, Simonides and Stesichorus, and to the Hellenistic poets who in their turn had been influenced by the early lyricists. For his lofty poetic themes he looked to Bacchylides and Pindar. But Horace is no slavish imitator. His complex measures are creative modifications of his equally complex Greek models in order to suit the Latin language, and his mastery of his technique is complete. His pride in this, shown too in Epistles I:19, is very proper in a great poet who knows his capabilities.

  What survives of Greek lyric poetry is sadly fragmentary, so that its influence on Horace cannot be as closely traced as one would like. Sometimes light is thrown on a puzzling poem by analogy with a known fragment: I.28, for instance, where it is a surprise to find half-way through that the dead mathematician Archytas is addressed by a drowned sailor, is paralleled by passages from Simonides of Ceos.6 In III.4 the Muse is hailed in terms used by Pindar in Pythians I.1. On the other hand, the scholiast Porphyrio says explicitly that 1.27 is taken from Anacreon’s third book, but the surviving fragments of this (43D) are in a different metre, and the connection is probably no more than that of the plea for less riotous behaviour in Horace’s first two stanzas. It would have been impossible anyway for Horace to have re-created the atmosphere of the Greek lyricists. Alcaeus and Sappho write very personally, Alcaeus in particular as an aristocratic opponent of the reigning tyrants of Lesbos. Their poems were sung to the lyre, while for Horace the lyre is a poetic convention. Their audiences were limited to a small social circle, and through their poetry they spoke in their own voices. So too did Catullus speak, and even more so Virgil and Lucretius, with single-minded purpose.

  But Horace offers an elusive variety by assuming a wide range of poetic personae. He can speak now as the Muses’ priest, the inspired follower of Bacchus, the immortal bard, and then be gently chiding some wayward girl in almost avuncular terms; he is the wryly humorous man of forty of whom lovers need not be jealous, and then he is himself a lover locked out. Sometimes he seriously attacks the social evils and insecurity of his times, the decay of family life, the overspending and overbuilding, and then he escapes to his country retreat to enjoy the good things of life – while they last, for his mood quickly shifts to the inevitability of approaching death. He is at once the loyal friend to the companions of his republican youth, the grateful admirer of Maecenas and Agrippa, the supporter of Augustus’ measures to restore
political stability to Rome, and the self-sufficient individualist who can still enjoy taking part in a simple rustic festival for the gods of rural Italy.

  As with the personae, so with the localities from which Horace addresses his audience. In some of the Odes we are firmly in Rome, addressing individual Romans, as in the Satires; we see the wealthy building their grand houses in the City or their villas at Baiae, the drinking parties and the young men riding in the Campus Martius or swimming in the Tiber, the girls peeping out of doorways, and the ‘lonely crone in an alley’. More often the scene moves to Tibur or the Sabine farm with all the pleasures of the simple life. But frequently the poems are not localized at all: Greek and Roman elements are interwoven as are Greek and Roman proper names, and this has the liberating effect of taking the poem out of a factual context into a commentary on the human condition. Indeed, perhaps too much editorial effort has been applied to pinpointing a time and place. Take the famous I.9 (‘See how Soracte stands deep/in dazzling snow…’); for Wilkinson (p. 130), Mount Soracte is local colour and the whole scene symbolic of old age. For Fraenkel (p. 176) the poem ‘is dear to many of us primarily because it reminds us of the days when, either from a terrazzo on the roof of one of the tall and weathered houses off the Corso or from the height of the Gianicolo, we gazed at the queer silhouette which the isolated sharp peak of Monte Soratte forms against the northern horizon’. For West (p.6) the scene is set at Thaliarchus’ home somewhere in the country from where Soracte can be seen in the near distance. Fraenkel finds that the combination of a wintry beginning (based on Alcaeus) and a summery ending means that the poem ‘falls short of the perfection reached by Horace in many of his odes’. Yet others can see the perfect link in ‘this is your green time, not your white/and morose’ – salad days for the enjoyment of summer nights; and Wilkinson is surely right when he sees how the third stanza unites the poem ‘if we feel the storm to be the storm of life, and the calm the calm of death’.

  Horace also makes use of mythology to establish an individual ode in a general context. The ‘grey wolf loping down from Lanuvium’ on the Appian Way gives a Roman setting to Galatea’s impending journey across the stormy Adriatic in III.27, but what remains with the reader is the transfer to a grand-style treatment of Europa’s destined journey with Jove. In III. 11 Mercury is asked to bring all his persuasive powers to bear on Lyde – powers which can comfort even the Danaids in hell, so that mention of their name carries us on to the noble refusal of Hypermnestra. (See Lord Lytton’s comment quoted on pp. 17–18.) History is freely used in the same way, the expanded episode being either from the distant past (Regulus and the quiet heroism of his self-sacrifice in III.5) or one taken from the recent political turmoil. Thus in 1.37 (‘Friends, now is the time to drink’) the celebration of the victory of Actium is less important than Cleopatra’s fortitude:

  resolved for death, she was brave indeed.

  She was no docile woman but truly scorned

  to be taken away in her enemy’s ships,

  deposed, to an overweening Triumph.

  Though it is so hard to fit the Odes into categories, there are about twenty in Books I to III which can be called symposium (drinking-party) poems, on the Greek model; here too their originality and often their depth rest on Horace’s expanded treatment of the type. The girls are always Greek, while the young men may be Greek or Roman; rustic festivals are likely to be Italian, and the gods have Greek attributes. Only rarely is an actual drinking-party taking place, and the wine may be Greek (‘of Lesbos’ in I.17) or Roman, ‘put up to bask in smoke’ from Horace’s own vintage (III.8), in Greek jars, ‘a modest Sabine wine’, no choice Caecuban or Falernian (1.20). Often the symposium features only in the initial request to a girl to make preparations or to a friend to accept an invitation, before the poem moves on to its true purpose. One ode (III.29) opens with a plea to Maecenas to leave the crowds and smoke of Rome in the unhealthy season and shed his cares of State for ‘a jar of smooth wine as yet untilted’, but the real message is that

  Wisely the God enwraps in fuliginous night

  the future’s outcome, and laughs

  if mortals are anxious beyond mortality’s

  bound…

  The future may be stormy, but the self-sufficient man may enjoy the present and say,

  ‘I have lived: tomorrow the Father

  may fill the vault with dark clouds

  or brilliant sunlight, but he will not render

  the past invalid, will not re-shape

  and make undone whatever

  the fleeting hour has brought.’

  He can easily dispense with Fortune’s gifts and ‘pay court to honest Poverty’; not for him to risk his life at sea for valuable cargo – he takes to his dinghy before the storm. Here, as in similar poems, Horace neatly sums up his whole philosophy of life.

  The Greek form of prayer or invocation was also adapted by Horace for his purposes. He variously addresses Apollo, Diana, Venus, Mercury, the Muses Clio, Calliope and Melpomene, Fortune, Bacchus and Faunus, often only to move into an unlocalized scene or sentiment which may be lightly felt or deeply serious. He calls on objects which range from the lyre of Alcaeus, dedicated to Apollo (I.32), and the ship (I.14) which is symbolic of the ship of State (an image taken from Alcaeus), and perhaps reflects the political uncertainty which was not wholly removed by the victory of Actium, down to a wine-jar to be broached (III.21) and the notorious tree of II.13 which fell and narrowly missed him. Persons named may be little more than pegs on which to hang great poems – who cares now for Postumus as the poem develops, though his name is reiterated in the first line of II.14?

  Earth, home and kindly wife

  must be left, nor will any of the trees

  you foster, except the unloved cypress,

  follow their brief master.

  So too with Sallustius Crispus (II.2), Iccius (I.29), Sestius when ‘Sharp winter thaws for the spring and West-Wind’, in I.4, and Dellius in II.3, since:

  All are thus compelled;

  early or late the urn is shaken;

  fate will out; a little boat

  shall take us to eternal exile.

  As for the girls who flit through the poems, rarely repeated and barely differentiated – Chloe, Galatea, Glycera, Lalage, Lyce, Lyde, Lydia, Myrtale, Pyrrha and Tyndaris, to name a selection – if these are Horace’s loves, his attitude towards them would usually seem to involve nothing more profound or disturbing than a gently teasing affection. These docile, often silly young things are treated tenderly but never over-sentimentally, much as the innocent sacrificial victims of whom Horace writes with a kind of sympathy – the young boar ‘practising sidelong thrusts’ in III.22, the white-marked calf in IV.2, and the touching young kid of III.13:

  a little goat

  whose forehead bumpy with budding

  horns prognosticates love and war –

  in vain: the kidling of wanton herds

  shall dye with his scarlet blood

  your icy streams.

  Yet Horace can so quickly sheer away into irony and self-parody that it is hard to be sure. Pyrrha, in that much-translated ode I.5, appears to some to have had a real hold on Horace’s affections, so that his relief at his escape is genuine; others find the charm of this fine-wrought little poem to lie in its detachment and irony. It is one of the paradoxes of Horace that this most elusive of poets gives rise to a conflict of opinions which are so definitely and personally held. But Lyce in III. 10 (who may or may not be the ‘agèd crow’ of IV. 13) is certainly no docile victim, and Horace speaks here in a voice helpless with male frustration. The ‘I’ who ‘will not always tolerate sky, and rain, and doorstep’ is not to be taken as Horace himself, but the feeling of powerless subjection throughout the poem is real enough.

  The only woman of whom Horace writes differently here (Cinara is not mentioned yet) is the ‘lady Licymnia’ of II.12. The name is a pseudonym (Horace never names a Roman lady and domina implies a wif
e); the scholiast Porphyrio says that she was Terentia, wife of Maecenas and half-sister to the consul Terentius Varro Murena. For her Horace writes one of his best poems, one of great delicacy and respect. And of course he has his real friends, men of whom or to whom he writes with warm affection: Maecenas, ‘the half of my heart’, to whom he swore in II.17:

  I have taken

  no false oath: we shall go, we shall go,

  whenever you lead the way, comrades prepared

  to take the last journey together.

  The poet Virgil too, in I.3, is ‘the half of my soul’; Pompeius is his ‘friend and oldest comrade’ at Philippi; the poet Quintilius Varus, contemporaries such as Aelius Lamia (I.36) and the unknown Valgius of II.9, are all treated as personal friends.

  Horace describes himself as an Epicurean in the much-quoted lines which end Epistles I.4:

  Come and see me when you want a laugh. I’m fat and sleek, in prime condition, a porker from Epicurus’ herd.

  His early scepticism, not unlike that of Lucretius, is shown in his amusement at a temple miracle on the famous journey to Brundisium in Satires 1.5.100–104:

  Apella the Jew may believe it – not me, for I have learned that the gods live a life of calm, and that if nature performs a miracle, it’s not sent down by the gods in anger from their high home in the sky.