Then there is the story itself. A great power sets its sights on a smaller, strange, and faraway land—an easy target, or so it would seem. Led first by a father and then, a decade later, by his son, this great power invades the lesser country twice. The father, so people say, is a bland and bureaucratic man, far more temperate than the son; and, indeed, it is the second invasion that will seize the imagination of history for many years to come. For although it is far larger and more aggressive than the first, it leads to unexpected disaster. Many commentators ascribe this disaster to the flawed decisions of the son: a man whose bluster competes with, or perhaps covers for, a certain hollowness at the center; a leader who is at once hobbled by personal demons (among which, it seems, is an Oedipal conflict) and given to grandiose gestures, who at best seems incapable of comprehending, and at worst is simply incurious about, how different or foreign his enemy really is. Although he himself is unscathed by the disaster he has wreaked, the fortunes and the reputation of the country he rules are seriously damaged. A great power has stumbled badly, against all expectations.
Except, of course, the expectations of those who have read the Histories. If a hundred generations of men, from the Athenians to ourselves, have learned nothing from this work, whose apparent wide-eyed naiveté conceals, in the end, an irresistible vision of the way things always seem to work out, that is their fault and not the author’s. As he himself knew so well, time always tells. However silly he may once have looked to some people, Herodotus, it seems, has had the last laugh.
—The New Yorker, April 28, 2008
THE STRANGE MUSIC OF HORACE
DAYLIGHT WAS FADING on June 3, 17 BC, when there suddenly ascended into the soft air above the Palatine Hill in Rome the pure and reedy sound of fifty-four young voices singing a most unusual hymn. Anyone in the audience that evening who knew his Greek literature—and you can suppose that many did—would have recognized the syncopated, slightly nervous meter of the song being sung as the one invented and made famous six centuries earlier by the Lesbian poet Sappho, who used it to convey some of her most famous lyrics of erotic yearning. (“That man seems to me to be like a god / who, sitting just across from you, / when you’ve spoken sweetly / hears you.”)
On this particular summer night, however, burning desire was not on the poetic menu. That much became clear as soon as the two choirs of twenty-seven singers—one of boys, one of girls, each corresponding to one of the deities invoked in the hymn—called upon Apollo and Diana, “world’s brightness and darkness, worshipped forever,” to
… make our young men tractable
and virtuous; to our old, grant peaceful health,
give to the whole race of Romulus glory,
descendants and wealth.
The singing of this hymn was, in fact, the high point of a magnificent and solemn civic occasion: the ludi saeculares, Centennial Games, which the First Citizen, Augustus Caesar (né Octavian), had ordered to be held that year—a celebration of Rome as the capital of the world, meant to commemorate the beginning of a new era, a new saeculum, in the affairs of humankind. And why not? Fourteen years earlier, Augustus had defeated Cleopatra and Antony at Actium, thereby establishing, for once and for all, Rome as the single great Mediterranean power and putting a hundred years of civil conflict to an end. Since then, he had been consolidating his power abroad and at home, traveling in the East, legislating ethical and moral reforms. Only now, in the year 17 BC, could Rome and the world—and his own position as de facto emperor—be considered secure enough to announce the beginning of what was clearly a New World Order.
We happen to know an unusual amount about the commissioning and performance of the hymn that was meant to celebrate Augustus’ achievement because of the survival of two objects from antiquity: a book and a stone. The book, by Suetonius, the historian and biographer of the emperors, was written about a century and a quarter after the evening in question, and in it the author describes how Augustus “approved so highly” of the works of a certain poet and was so “convinced that they would remain immortal that he bade him to compose … the Carmen saeculare.” The stone, discovered in 1890 and visible today in the Musée des Thermes, is a chunk of the official catalog of the ludi saeculares, and with respect to the hymn it notes that on the third day, after a sacrifice offered on the Palatine Hill,
twenty-seven young boys and twenty-seven young girls, still having their mothers and fathers, sang a hymn. And in the same way at the Capitol. The song was composed by Q. Horatius Flaccus.
We know him simply as Horace.
The poem that was sung on that long-ago evening—a Greek lyric expression of Roman civic virtues and imperial ambitions; a patriotic anthem set to the lilting poetic rhythms of erotic yearning; a grand celebration of official and communal values given definitive shape by a private individual, a solitary bard—suggests the strange tensions and seeming contradictions that characterize not only Horace’s life and work but also our awkward attitude toward him. He is, on the one hand, the august Augustan: during his lifetime, the emperor’s friend as well as Virgil’s, moving in the highest social, political, and literary circles, acknowledged as the “performer on Rome’s lyre,” as he himself boasts; after his death, a figure absolutely central to the Western poetic tradition, having had a particular influence in the Renaissance, after languishing in comparative neglect during the Middle Ages. (He has always been more popular when reason is in vogue.) The sixteenth century in France—Ronsard (who in more than one poem rhymes “grâce” with “Horace”), Du Bellay, Montaigne, “the French Horace”—and the seventeenth and particularly the early eighteenth in England (Addison, Steele, Prior, Pope) would be unthinkable without him.
On the other hand, he is—well, the august Augustan: all that avuncular philosophizing about the fleeting nature of pleasure and the inevitable passage of time, from someone comfortably ensconced in the nests of privilege, comes off, today, as complacent and not terribly original, as even his admirers admit. “Heaven knows,” the American critic Brooks Otis wrote a generation ago, in an essay called, significantly enough, “The Relevance of Horace,”
there is nothing new about “seizing the day” or relaxing from business or moderating one’s desires or being philosophic about the future, but we all do fall into the moods that these clichés suggest and, when we do, find Horace just the man for our purposes. He was in short felicitous in his phrasing and charming in his life-style.
Indeed, Horace’s lyric output has been reduced in the mind of the general public to a pair of clichés. One, which everyone knows even without knowing its author, concerns the poetry’s content: carpe diem. The other concerns its form—the rigorous structures of which their creator was so proud, those formidably dense verse patterns with the funny names that sound like constellations (“Greater Asclepiad”), which have notoriously been the bane of schoolboys both real and imaginary from Shakespeare’s Chiron in Titus Andronicus (“O, ’tis a verse in Horace, I know it well, / I read it in a grammar long ago”) to the pathetic student in Kipling’s short story “Regulus,” victimized by a sadistic teacher when called upon to translate Horace’s paean to the Punic War hero Regulus in one of the six great “Roman Odes” with which Book III of the Odes begins.
Neither the charm nor the felicity, the armchair Epicureanism nor the impregnable formality, suits the current taste. When we think of lyricists, it is Sappho who comes to mind, not Horace, who merely used her seamless meters while leaving the messy erotic stuff alone; we like our exaltation in the content, not the form, of our poetry. And yet Horace’s steadfast refusal to provide such exaltation, his stubborn artisanal focus on refinements in technique rather than rawness of emotion, is the key to both the beauties and the difficulties in his greatest work, the Odes—to the subtle and fragile emotional textures that are so famously hard to convey, and to the elusive tonal artistry that makes it so famously difficult to translate.
Horace was born to a freedman, a former slave, on December
8, 65 BC, in Venusia, a small military colony at the heel of Italy. (In the witty and caustic Satires with which, at thirty, he first announced his talent to the world—the Latin title, Sermones, means something more like “conversations,” or perhaps better “causeries”—the poet amusingly recounts his schooldays with the “burly sons of burly centurions.”) When he died, on November 27, 8 BC, in Rome, he was buried in a tomb on the Esquiline Hill next to his beloved patron, the fabulously wealthy litterateur and bon vivant Maecenas, the emperor’s longtime friend; the emperor himself was his heir.
What happened between Venusia and Rome, between centurions’ sons and Augustus himself, explains a great deal. The poet’s childhood and early manhood witnessed some of the most traumatic years Europe has ever seen: the death throes of the Roman Republic, with its political and social instabilities, and the proscriptions, executions, and confiscations that attended them. (His shrewd, self-made father was an auctioneer’s agent, responsible among other things for the disposition of confiscated properties: it’s entirely possible that Horace saw firsthand the emotional trauma inflicted by the era’s political violence.) As a university student in Athens, where he wrote quantities of verse in Greek—the education that made his later achievement possible—Horace became involved in the upheavals of his era, joining the cause of the “liberators” Brutus and Cassius after their assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. From the disaster at Philippi, he tells us, he barely escaped with his life. He slunk back to Italy to find his father’s property confiscated for veterans of the winning side: an ironic twist of fate for the auctioneer’s son. Still, he must have had some wherewithal, for he soon after bought himself a clerical post at the treasury—becoming, into the bargain, the model for many distinguished poets (Housman, his great admirer and translator, and also Cavafy) whose stultifying day jobs seem not to have extinguished the lyric impulse.
Insulated from the decade’s volatile politics, he began to move in literary circles. By his late twenties he’d joined the circle of Virgil, which suggests he was already circulating poems by that point; and soon after met Maecenas, who remained an intimate for life. Two books of satires, along with a volume of epodes, scathing iambic verses modeled on the invective poetry of Archaic Greek, were published between 35 and 29 BC. It was around this time that Maecenas presented him with the gift of the Sabine farm about which he would write so lovingly—in fact a quite substantial property that allowed the poet to live henceforth as a kind of country gentleman.
It was in the comfort and security afforded by this munificent gift that Horace undertook an enormous project of a character radically different from that of the spicy, scintillating, gossipy Sermones and the often outrageous Epodes: the three books of odes, comprising eighty-eight poems, in Greek meters on a wide range of subjects. Their publication in 23 BC made his name. (It was the Odes, certainly, and not the Satires, that earned him the Carmen saeculare commission.) There followed some verse epistles; an additional, fourth book of odes, which Augustus himself “compelled” Horace to write, according to Suetonius; and another epistle on the writing of poetry, which has been enshrined separately as the Ars poetica, the “Art of Poetry.” His last decade was darkened by the losses of friends and other poets: Virgil, Tibullus, Propertius. In the year 8 BC, Maecenas died, admonishing Augustus on his deathbed to treat Horace as “a second me.” He needn’t have bothered: a few months later, Horace himself was dead.
Even this brief biography should help to account for much about Horace that irritates today: his ostensible embrace of the Augustan regime, his status as a poet of the establishment, his studied avoidance of ecstasy in favor of a measured appreciation of modest beauties and pleasures. For he had seen, firsthand, the worst that his century had to offer; whatever his reservations about Augustus may have been—and given his youthful politics, he must have had some—the new imperial stability was clearly to be preferred to the kind of violent upheavals he had witnessed. Who could blame him for wanting to spend the rest of the life that he had nearly lost celebrating the virtues of solid pleasures sensibly enjoyed—pleasures that are, in the Odes more than anywhere else in his work, both shadowed and heightened by an awareness of the violent energies always threatening to destroy them?
Yet it was not the temperate content but rather the artful form of the Odes that was their great distinction—or so at least Horace declared. In the final entry to his third book of odes (the last lyric he ever planned to write, before Augustus asked him to whip up some more), he asserts that his claim to poetic fame would rest on the fact that he was the “first to adapt Aeolian [that is, Greek, the verse forms used by Sappho and Alcaeus] verse to the Italian measure”—the very grafting of Roman onto Greek that would be replicated in the great public hymn that Augustus commissioned to celebrate the new Rome.
Why would an achievement that was, at least superficially, a technical one matter so much—and make Horace’s influence on later literature so profound? Roman authors during the last two centuries of the Republic—years marked, among other things, by the annexation of much of the Hellenistic Greek world—were acutely aware of the dominance and authority of the Greek cultural inheritance, which proved at once to be a superb model and an irritating burden. Poetry in particular was a vexed subject. The Greeks had an ancient poetic tradition, rich in its own special diction and forms; by comparison, the Roman tradition was both young and relatively impoverished. Roman poets found it was proving difficult to make Latin sound “poetic” (which is to say, Greek). Latin as a language feels heavier than Greek: unlike Greek it has no articles, a phenomenon that lends Latin a certain chunkiness; unlike Greek, it does not have a number of monosyllabic “particles” that can be sprinkled through lines or sentences to give subtle extra flavor—or to help meet the requirements of meter.
As a result, it was difficult to adapt Latin (so ideal for grave prose utterances) to the fluttery and complex stanzaic meters of Greek lyric verse. Horace dealt with this by altering certain conventions of the Greek models used by Sappho and her peers in ways that made them more suitable vehicles for the gravity of Latin words and rhythms (substituting spondees, for instance, where the Greek called for trochees or iambs, and placing regular caesuras, or breaks, within lines to allow for the greater stateliness of Latin speech). By eliminating the hiccupping effect of Greek meters, he achieved verse forms that for the first time sounded natural in Latin—and indeed exploited the monumental quality of the Latin tongue. It was Nietzsche who most famously put his finger on the special quality of Horatian verse, which took the stone blocks that were Latin words, ungainly and difficult to maneuver, and for the first time made them genuinely beautiful and artful: reading Horace, he said, was like encountering a “mosaic of words, in which every word by sound, by position and by meaning, diffuses its influence to right and left and over the whole.”
This lapidary quality is the supreme Horatian achievement, the hallmark of his poetry. He ends his famous Mount Soracte ode (“See how deep stands the gleaming snow on / Soracte”) with a description of how a flirtatious girl’s lovely laughter betrays her hiding place in the corner of a Roman piazza:
nunc et latentis proditor intimo
gratus puellae risus ab angulo …
Literally, the words mean this:
Now / too / of a hiding / betraying / from an intimate
lovely / of a girl / laughter / from a corner
Any translation into syntactically correct English will shatter the cunning effect of the (syntactically correct) Latin, which is capable of a far more elastic word order. To the Roman eye and ear, the first line creates a terrific anticipation, consisting as it does of a series of adjectives describing nouns we don’t encounter until the second line. When we do get there, we realize that the correct relationship between each adjective and its noun is meticulously vertical: hiding / girl, betraying / laughter, intimate / corner. So the lines in fact produce the very phenomenon they describe: a sound, a mysterious sound that you cannot
at first identify because its source is deeply hidden (as is the word angulo, “corner”) in a corner. Every line of every ode by Horace is this dense, this complex.
The problem remained of how to give poems composed in those newly useful meters the kind of intellectual heft that suited Roman sensibilities, molded as they were by immersion in the study of rhetoric, focused as they were on the concrete, on the useful, and expressed in the rolling periods, the long, balanced, complex sentences, that so brilliantly distinguish Latin oratory. Horace’s second great technical achievement was to learn to thread complicated and extended ideas through one after the other of the four-line stanzas perfected by Sappho and her peers; in so doing he hit upon an unmistakably poetic way to think like a Roman—and he provided, into the bargain, a tautness, variety, and sinew to lyric utterances that had never been achieved before. The energizing tension between the static “mosaic” quality of his diction, which invites you to pause and admire every word, every stanza individually, and the forward-moving pull of his long arcs of thought is what gives Horatian verse its great distinction.
As it turned out, these stylistic and technical innovations perfectly served a characteristic thematic preoccupation: the relationship between pleasure and pain, between how we would like to live and what life does to us. When you carefully follow the strangely winding thread of Horace’s thought from stanza to stanza, you often find yourself arriving at a destination quite different from the one the opening line might have promised. Below I have translated I.22, Integer vitae, “Wholesome in life,” a classic example of this characteristic Horatian sleight of hand, in which the poet’s attention wavers between high Romanness and his charming girlfriend, Lalagê:
Waiting for the Barbarians Page 16
