by Horace
The philosophy would suit his need for detachment and enjoyment of the simple pleasures of the day, though he shows no deeper interest in Epicurean teaching; and he combines his scepticism with an apparent acceptance of the Olympian gods as great poetic figures, and with an affection for unsophisticated ritual in a country setting, comparable with an unbeliever’s pleasure in the Christmas story or evensong in a village church.7 So at the Faunalia in III.18:
The whole flock plays on the grassy plain
when the Nones of December come round;
in the fields the parish and its idle cattle
make their holiday;
the wolf now roams among fearless lambs;
for you the wild-wood sheds its leaves;
and the ditch-digger loves to tread his opponent
earth in three-four time.
As always, his irony makes it difficult to know when he is serious. I.34 (‘A parsimonious and infrequent worshipper’) can hardly be taken’ as a conversion, and quickly passes on to the capriciousness of Fortune. But in areas where he is totally committed there is no understatement, no teasing vanishing trick, no persona lightly assumed and tossed aside. He is very conscious of his vocation as a poet, and has a real sense of being under divine protection. The Bacchic and Dionysian odes on the poet’s inspiration show genuine ecstasy (II.19, 11.20 and, as follows, III.25):
O master of the Naiads
and Bacchanalians strong to uproot the princely ash,
I shall utter nothing
insignificant, lowly or not immortal. Sweet the risk,
Lenaean, to follow the God,
crowning one’s brows with sprouting vine leaves.
Poems which celebrate the liberating influence of god-given wine are also written with sure simplicity; in III.21:
you bring back hope to despairing minds;
add spirit and strength to the poor,
who after you tremble neither at the crowns
of angry kings nor at the soldiery’s weapons.
Often his need to disengage himself from what he sees as corruptive influences on mankind, and his enjoyment of immediate pleasures are set against his acute awareness of life’s uncertainties and of the inexorable advance of death which is the end of all; thus II.18:
What more can you need? Earth
opens impartially for paupers
and the sons of kings, and Charon could not
be bribed to ferry back
even resourceful Prometheus. He holds
Tantalus and Tantalus’
progeny, and whether or not invoked
is alert to disburden
the serf when his labour is done.
Horace was not by temperament melancholic, in the way Virgil was; but his sense of lacrimae rerum is no less poignant and profound because it is so simply, even baldly expressed by one who chose on the whole to smile – if wryly – at himself and the vanities of life. Any suggestion that because Horace was never openly anguished or resentful he was no more than a tubby little man fond of girls and good wine fails to see that no less than Marvell he felt at his own back Time’s winged chariot hurrying near; and that he well understood how the poet’s heightened awareness gives him the power – even the duty – to speak for the civilized values as he understands them.
Of course Horace was a Roman of his time, and as such accepted uncritically certain things which we find hard to take today: animal sacrifice, for instance, and the institution of slavery to provide him with girls for his entertainment, and labourers and managers for his farm. Still less could he escape the troubled period in which he lived; the Sabine farm was no ivory tower. Horace’s most impressionable years had been lived during the tension and violence which followed the murder of Caesar, and that wise father of the Satires must also have remembered the earlier civil wars ending in the death of Pompey. The Epodes were markedly affected by the continuing insecurity after Actium, and several of the Odes – I.2, I.12 (prompted by the dynastic marriage of the young Marcellus and Augustus’ daughter Julia) and I.14, with its sense of foreboding – arise out of the fear that after his victory Octavian (Augustus) would last no longer than his predecessors. In spite of Augustus’ successes in Spain and Illyria, there is uncertainty on the frontiers – Tiridates in Parthia in 1.26 – and anxiety for Augustus in 1.35:
Preserve our Caesar, soon to go out
against ultimate Britain; preserve our young
recruits, soon to plant fear in Eastern
realms and along the Arabian seaboard.
The horrors of civil war, the theme of II. 1, addressed to the historian Asinius Pollio, recur; and the repeated allusions to the evils of the getting and spending which wasted Rome’s powers, along with the nostalgia for a happier society, all stem from Horace’s longing for security.
In 28 B.C. Augustus embarked on a series of social reforms, mainly concerned with marriage and education, and in 27 he ‘restored the Republic’, claiming for his own authority no more than a tribune’s powers as representative of the people. This is what is called the Augustan revival, for which Livy, Virgil and Horace were spokesmen; though Horace, as a native of a Hellenized south Italy, was perhaps never so wholehearted a ‘Roman’ as the others. It is easy now to be critical of one-man rule in the interests of efficiency and the domestic virtues; many of us have seen what price could be paid for making the trains run on time and supporting a doctrine of Kinder, Kürche und Kirche. Tacitus, writing over a century later, bitterly condemned the Augustan revolution for its destruction of liberty:
He seduced the army with bonuses, and his cheap food policy was a successful bait for civilians. Indeed, he attracted everybody’s goodwill by the enjoyable gift of peace. Then he gradually pushed ahead and absorbed the functions of the senate, the officials, and even the law. Opposition did not exist. War or judicial murder had disposed of all men of spirit. Upper-class survivors found that slavish obedience was the way to succeed, both politically and financially. They had profited from the revolution, and so now they liked the security of the existing arrangement better than the dangerous uncertainties of the old regime.8
Horace was probably not very politically enthusiastic. For the Epicurean the dignity of office, which Augustus was always trying to persuade his senators to assume (and which Maecenas consistently refused) was less important than the banishment of care; but a quiet simple life could be comfortably led only against a stable background. There are few specific references to Augustan reforms. 111.6 appears to refer to Augustus’ programme to rebuild the temples in the hopes of checking the moral degeneracy of which Horace was always conscious, but the beauty of the poem lies in its backward glance:
… manly comrades, yeoman soldiers
taught to turn the soil with Sabine hoes
and carry cut firewood at a strict
mother’s bidding when the Sun
advanced the shadows of the hills
and lifted the yokes from weary steers,
his departing chariot leading in
the hours of comfort.
And the link with Regulus as a symbol of Rome’s heroic past, much as Livy saw it, is what gives III.5 its visionary breadth. It is customary to group as ‘political odes’, all written in the somewhat solemn Alcaic metre, the first six odes of Book III. These noble poems form Horace’s main tribute to the new regime, inspired by the cautious hope that in the emperor’s hands Rome would take a new turn. It is noticeable that he is not carried away – he never allows himself to call Augustus a god, only to associate him with the gods – but his sincerity in these grander, Pindaric measures is not to be doubted, even if he has won more affection through his personal lyrics.
When the Odes appeared in 23 B.C. they were poorly received. The depth of Horace’s disappointment may be measured by the fact that he gave up writing lyrics for some six years and reverted to the smooth-flowing hexameters of the Satires in his conversational verse letters. A first book of these Epistles was brought out in 20�
��19 B.C. Horace addresses Maecenas in the first of the twenty poems (Epistles I. 1. 10–15):
So now I’m laying aside my verses and other amusements.
My sole concern is the question ‘What is right and proper?’
I’m carefully storing things for use in the days ahead.
In case you wonder whom I follow and where I’m residing,
I don’t feel bound to swear obedience to any master.
Where the storm drives me I put ashore and look for shelter.
So his intention was to withdraw from the urban rat-race and seek contentment in his ideal country life.
Three more long epistles (which include the Art of Poetry) provided a second book and appeared, it is generally thought, soon after 17 B.C. In the first, addressed to Augustus at his request, Horace defends the role of the poet and modern poetry against the prejudices of the Roman public in favour of archaic Latin verse, however unintelligible.
If poems like wine improve with age, would somebody tell me
how old a page has to be before it acquires value?
Take a writer who sank to his grave a century back –
where should he be assigned? To the unapproachable classics
or the worthless moderns?
Suppose the Greeks had resented newness as much as we do,
what would now be old? And what would the people have
to read and thumb with enjoyment, each man to his taste?
(Epistles II. 1.34–8, 90–93)
The second is a wry apology for his abandoning lyric poetry:
And yet it’s best to be sensible – to throw away one’s toys
and leave to children the sort of games that suit their age,
and instead of hunting for words to set to the lyre’s music
to practise setting one’s life to the tunes and rhythms of truth.
(Epistles 11.2.141–4)
In the Ars Poetica (303–5) he justifies his shift to literary criticism:
No one could put together better poems; but really
it isn’t worth it. And so I’ll play the part of a grindstone
which sharpens steel but has no part itself in the cutting.
But the tone of Epistles I.19, addressed to Maecenas, who did appreciate the extent of Horace’s achievement, is unusually bitter (35–41):
Perhaps you would like to know why readers enjoy and praise my pieces at home, and ungratefully run them down in public? I’m not the kind to hunt for the votes of the fickle rabble by standing dinners and giving presents of worn-out clothes. I listen to distinguished writers and pay them back; but I don’t approach academic critics on their platforms to beg their support. Hence the grief.
Yet it is understandable that the Odes were caviare to the general. Not only were they difficult metrically, but the purists could and did criticize them for the Latin innovations Horace introduced into the Greek lyric metres. The language is highly compressed, the allusions often cryptic, the mythology sometimes obscure. Odes 111.3 (‘The just man tenacious of his purpose’) is a noble poem of reconciliation expressed mainly through Juno’s speech, which is hard at first to grasp unless it is remembered that she had supported the Trojans in the Trojan War, and that Romulus was her descendant and founder of the new city of which Augustus was the second founder. To understand why Teucer is introduced into Odes I.7 we have to know that after Teucer returned from the Trojan War without his brother Ajax, he was sent straight into exile by his father Telamon, and that Horace’s friend the consul Plancus had permitted or procured the proscription of his brother in 42 B.C., many years before this poem was written; cf. Velleius Paterculus II.67.3–4, quoted by West, p.115, and the notes to this poem, p.205. So if Teucer could find comfort in wine, Plancus can too.
Such detail delights commentators, but does it make for immediate appreciation of a poem? Horace is careful to contrive an appearance of casualness in the shifts of tone in his long poems, as he does in his ordering of serious and lighter poems in each book, and each ode is entirely self-contained, with nothing like a title or any opening lines to set a scene. All this can create difficulty, and outside the sophisticated coterie surrounding Maecenas a Roman audience may well have found it a puzzling collection. Being so far removed in time, we are likely to find it even more puzzling, though possibly less daunting, accustomed as we are to grappling with obscurities and allusions and metrical inventions in the poetry of Hopkins, Yeats and Eliot, and to turning to factual notes (such as are provided for this translation) to resolve the initial problems. We no longer look for a ‘message’ of the kind we expect from Virgil or Wordsworth, and the sudden surprises of the Odes may be more in keeping with our own fragmented moods in an uncertain age.
If Horace’s contemporaries were irritated by his elusiveness and felt that they could never pin him down, it might also be because in the two books of Satires he had already established a more consistent self-portrait as an altogether more genial figure – l’homme moyen sensuel who took a humorous view of himself and of life’s oddities; and, in Epistles I.20.24–5, he was to describe himself as
Of small build, prematurely grey, and fond of the sun,
he was quick to lose his temper, but not hard to appease.
But the Horace of the Odes wears so many masks: amused and ironic in one poem, he castigates moral corruption in the next; the heart-aching beauty of the spring’s renewal becomes a memento mori under the inexorable advance of ‘Pallid Death’; the proud awareness of the poet’s calling slides into the disclaimer (I.6):
Flippant as ever, whether afire
or fancy free, I sing of banquets and ‘battles’
of eager girls with neatly trimmed nails
against the young men.
Life for Horace at this time was generally less kind. Twice he mentions his poor health (Epistles 1.7 and 15), and there had been reminders of mortality. The poet Quintilius Varus died in 24; Virgil and Tibullus in 19 B.C. The charmed circle round Maecenas suffered in late 23 when the leakage of the discovery of conspiracy against the emperor was traced to Maecenas, who had mentioned it to his wife, half-sister of a conspirator.9 After this Maecenas ceased to be of influence with Augustus, though Horace himself seems to have been on increasingly friendly terms – to the extent of being a butt for Augustus’ heavy, somewhat schoolboyish humour.10
It was in fact Augustus who brought Horace back to writing lyric poetry by commissioning the Centennial Hymn (carmen saeculare) to commemorate the revival of the Secular Games in 17 B.C. This was to be a typical Horatian ode, written in Sapphics, sung by a double choir of boys and girls, addressed to Apollo and Diana,
not meant to be part of the religious ceremonies but to be an ideal image of them, and therefore to be performed after the completion of all the sacrifices. By making this arrangement Augustus and his advisers showed that they respected the limits which Horace himself had set to his art. They encouraged him to persist in his own manner because they understood the meaning and aims of his poetry. This complete recognition stirred Horace profoundly. Disappointment and resignation gave way to fresh impulses, and the damned-up stream of his lyrics began to flow again.11
The Centennial Hymn is a triumphal ode which is unique in the way it breathes serenity. The prayers it offers are a list of the Augustan regime’s achievements in establishing peace, security and prosperity:
Now the Parthian fears the Alban axes,
the forces mighty by sea and land;
now Scythians and Indians, lately so proud,
await our answer.
Now Faith, and Peace, and Honour,
and pristine Modesty, and Manhood neglected,
dare to return, and blessed Plenty appears
with her laden horn.
Its reception put Horace somewhat in the position of poet laureate. Thus he had good reason to ask in Epistles II. 1.132–3:
Where would innocent boys and girls who are still unmarried
have learnt their prayers if th
e Muse had not vouchsafed them a poet?
Augustus then asked him to follow up this highly professional poem with odes to commemorate the victories of his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus over the Alpine tribes, and to add a fourth to his three books of Odes.
There are fifteen poems in the final collection, generally thought to have been brought out in 13 B.C. or rather later, about ten years after the earlier lyrics. The two victory odes requested are 4 and 14; 2 is also in the grand style – it is Horace’s tactful refusal to write a Pindaric ode to celebrate the triumphal return of Augustus from Gaul in 16 B.C., and is his final tribute to ‘the swan of Dirce’ by contrast with his own ‘small talent’ expressed in lines 27–32:
… but I, very much in the manner
of a Matine bee
laboriously harvesting thyme
from numerous groves and the banks of many-
streamed Tibur, inconspicuously accrete
my intricate verses.
Odes 5 and 15 directly address Augustus: 5 appears to have been composed during his absence in Gaul and Spain in 13 B. C., while 15 is an epilogue to sum up his country’s debt to the emperor. Both express Horace’s hopes for continued peace and security – to be celebrated, as ever, by festive wine-drinking in a rural scene. The earlier vision of the poet’s calling has now grown (in odes 8 and 9) into a splendid assurance of immortality for Horace’s own lyrics and for their subjects, since ‘The Muse forbids the praiseworthy man to die./The Muse bestows heaven…’ (IV.8.28 –9) and
Many heroes lived before Agamemnon,
but all are oppressed in unending night,
unwept, unknown, because they lack
