Where Poetry and History Meet

et tenuit nostras numerosus Horatius
aures dum ferit Ausonia carmina culta lyra.
--Ovid

IN SCOPE AND VIGOUR Horace's Odes I, II and III, published in 23 BC as Carminum Liber primus, secundus et tertius are unparallelled by any collection of lyric poetry produced before or after in Latin literature. "Horace is the best!", however, is unlikely to have been a street cry in the Rome of Augustus. Virgil had proclaimed a new golden age in his fourth Eclogues (published to an enthusiastic reception in 37 BC) and was hailed as the foremost poet; the seemingly effortless flow of his poetry fulfilled Rome's penchant for a pastoral and epic poetry that might revive the nobler facets of Roman society battered by a century of civil wars and unrest.

Although little space is given to the relationship between Virgil and Horace by David West in his recent translations of Horace's Odes, or in the volume of critical essays, Traditions and Contexts in the Poetry of Horace, edited by Tony Woodman and Denis Feeney, it is noteworthy that in 29/30 BC the two poets should be embarking on the centrepieees of their careers. For Horace the three books of Odes, comprising a total of eighty-eight poems (over half his total literary output) would represent the centrepiece of his oeuvre both literally and metaphorically. For Virgil, on the other hand, the Aeneid was to be his last and most extensive work even though it was left unfinished upon his premature death in 19 BC.

In contrasting the two literary giants of the time it is out of the question to have them contend in the arena for our imperial thumbs-up or down. More than any other poet, Virgil and Horace made the Greek tradition their own and gave shape to that form of Hellenism that was to be the trait and legacy of Rome to the West. Their immediate predecessors Catullus (c. 84-C. 54 BC), Cicero (106-43) and Lucretius (c. 99-55) had forged that admixture of tradition and innovation that came to constitute the twin nature of Latin literature of the period. In the broadest of brash-strokes they can be said to represent the voices of the concentric spheres of individual, state and universe that characterised Roman society, but all three voices were reacting to or against, and embedded in, the century of civil unrests that they lived through. With Virgil and Horace no such simple brushstrokes are possible. Theirs are complex voices in which the concentric spheres of Roman life and ideals are treated in counterpoint.

All that we might say to distinguish the two poets is that Virgil represents more the classical tradition, each of his successive works harking back to greater and more ancient Greek models, culminating in the Aeneid with the Odyssey and the Iliad as models (in precise reverse order). Horace, on the other hand, can be said to represent the more innovative vein of Latin poetry, a vein that looked towards the Alexandrian poets as models and predecessors.

WITH CLASSICAL literature, much of the value of an ever-increasing body of commentaries is that each subsequent pundit can stand on the shoulders of their predecessors. With Horace the body of criticism is a veritable totem pole whose foundation goes back to ancient times.

In the Life of Horace Suetonius points out that obscurity was not one of Horace's faults. The images and language are often startling but nevertheless forthright, and Horace, more than any other Augustan poet, employed the spoken or prose language rather than poetic register. The difficulty, and hence the need for expository essays and such commentaries as David West's, stems from the cultural and historical references that are lost to the modern reader, and the genius with which Horace employed his language, which is lost in translation. As West points out, "In English 'Dog bites man' does not mean the same as 'Man bites dog'. In Latin the logic is carried not by the order of the words, but by their endings ... What is different is the nuance, the emphasis."

A further element that goes by unnoticed in a straight translation without extensive commentaries is the choice of words derived from Greek or Latin. The Rome of Horace was a bilingual world. In the last poem of Satire I, which James Zetzel treats in detail in his essay "Dreaming About Quirinus", in the Woodman and Feeney volume, Horace tells of how he began by writing poetry in Greek but, as Zetzel writes, "late one night he had a dream in which Quirinus, the deified Romulus ... told him to stick to Latin: there were far too many Greek poets already". Although Horace scorns the mixing of Greek and Latin, he does employ Graecisms; the contradiction can either be seen as typically Horatian or can be attenuated by understanding the statement to refer to words written in the Greek alphabet (J.N. Adams' recent Bilingualism and the Latin Language, Cambridge 2003, offers a detailed study of the subject). As in English, where a poet can draw on synonyms derived from Saxon or Latin, Latin writers could readily Latinise a Greek equivalent for most words, knowing that the audience would not only understand the word but also the implications of the choice.

Metonymy is another element that contemporary readers would have savoured and which can go by unseen in translation. Surprisingly, West does not pick out this aspect of Horace's poetry for direct commentary in any of the three books. The use of Jove for sky, of Hadria for sea, or Taenarus for Hades, lends the diction an epic overtone that Horace often uses to elevate the poem or parody the genre, and at times he is doing both. The frequency with which metonymy is used by Latin poets in general is illustrated in the opening quote from Ovid: by qualifying Horace's verse as Ausonian odes, Ovid is not merely employing a poetic name for Italy, although the term in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is defined as a native or inhabitant of ancient central and southern Italy, it is only when we become aware of the etymology of Ausonia, which derives from the Greek Auson, son of Odysseus, who was said to have settled there, that the full implication of Ovid's choice can be savoured. (Horace was born in southern Italy, formerly a Greek colony, and his poetry was inspired from Greek models, but one could also take the analogy to the extreme and wonder if Ovid is not also calling Horace "son of an Odysseus".)

The figure of metonymy in common language is widespread today as it was in Roman times. A good example is Horace's use of stomachum at Carm. I 6, 6. West glosses the term as "being a colloquial word for anger". The figurative use of the organ for the emotion is common to English usage as it is in many languages (including in Chinese where yi du zi huo "the belly on fire" denotes to be full of anger), and is a classic example that could elucidate the frequency with which Horace employs metonymy. The point is not mere nit-picking, since it does have deeper implications. Welleck and Warren (in Theory of Literature) write, "Recently some bolder conceptions of metonymy ... have been suggested, even the notion that metonymy and metaphor may be the characterising structures of two poetic types--poetry of association by contiguity, and poetry of association by comparison." Metaphor has come to dominate our thinking about poetry to such an extent that often metonymy is subsumed to it. Horace certainly employs metaphors, but metonymy is by far the more common Wait in his poetry and brings his use of language closer to a vernacular diction.

Reading the poems without commentary, in David West's other translation of Horace, The Complete Odes and Epodes (1997), where the notes are kept to a bare minimum, is quite a different experience from the detailed study provided in the three volumes under consideration by West where each poem is elucidated by a short essay. Apart from the fact that various translations of the same poem differ, including, for example, West's own 1997 version of Carm. III 30 from the 2002 one, no single translation can bring out the various ambiguities present in the original. In exploring the allusions, shifts of registers, and bringing out the vibrancy of Horace's often startling word order in the Latin original, David West takes a refreshing approach insofar as academic questions are sobered by looking at how the poems work as poems. The purpose of his three volumes, as stated in the foreword to Odes III, "to explain the Latin and suggest how the poetry works", is fully realised. Reading the commentaries and translations, and, even for those of us who do not understand Latin, exploring the original text (a worthwhile exercise to gain a better feel for the rhythm and tone), brings us a step closer to the poems and affords us a glimpse of how Horace's contemporaries might have read them.

In West's commentaries, however, there is a sharp disparity between the first two books and the third book of Odes. Part of that disparity, as West alludes to in the foreword to Odes III, is that the first two books were "building on the brilliant commentaries by Nisbet and Hubbard (1970 and 1978)" whose commentaries to the third book are still in preparation. Nisbet's "A Wine-jar for Messalla", included in the Woodman and Feeney volume, is an exceptionally intricate detective labour to unearth the social world of the recipient of Carmina III 21. One can well understand West's nervousness at working on the third book without the benefit of such learned historical scholarship as Nisbet's essay exhibits. What failings there are in West's approach to the third book of Odes, however, are counterbalanced to some degree by the short summations of "other views" that he has included at the end of each poem in that volume and by his determination, throughout the three volumes, to do Horace justice. Quoting a translation by John Michie of Carm. II 12, West sums up his methodology when he writes, "The poetry of Michie is a joy to read, and close to the Latin, but not close enough for a reader who wants to know what Horace has said."

THE MOST RADICAL essay in Traditions and Contexts in the Poetry of Horace is Alan Griffiths', "The Odes: Just Where Do You Draw the Line?" Arguing that in the Roman practice of the time, book construction took the form of multiples of five, Griffiths proposes to amend Odes I, which traditionally holds thirty-eight poems, to thirty-five poems by amalgamating three sets of adjacent alcaics into three poems rather than the present six. The evidence he offers is well argued; but number games are easy to play and it would not be difficult to point out proof for the opposite thesis. Griffiths' essay, however, is significant for not taking the received canon for granted and for reminding us to what extent contemporary readers had to determine where a particular text finished and a new one began.

Except for five instances, in Odes I to III Horace gives his readers clear indications of where a poem begins and ends by varying the metre. The first nine odes of the first book have been designated as the "parade odes" with each ode introducing a different metrical scheme. With them Horace not only introduced the various Sapphic, Alcaic and Asclepiadic lines to Latin but he set the carmine/ode and lyric agenda for the ages to come. In the epistle I. 19 published some three years after the Odes of 23 BC, Horace complains to Maecenas of the reception to his poetry. He rebukes those that think he has slavishly imitated the tradition he drew upon, and gives a succinct outline of his own agenda (I. 21 ff.):

Libera per vacuum posui vestigia princeps
non aliena meo ressi pede. Qui sibi fidet,
dux reget examen....

Unbound through vacant fields I have traced a
course as a pioneer,
I have not placed in another's track my feet. He who
has confidence
leads and guides the throngs

Not without irony, Horace continues his invective against his would-be critics, and proceeds to make a clear distinction between employing metrical schemes developed in the Greek tradition and copying the tone and style of that same tradition. In our own tradition the ode is associated with a distinctive lyrical expression that, based on the Pindaric ode, encompasses the somewhat solemn public address, and, with the Horatian ode in mind, the more reflective or philosophical meditation. The common denominator for the twin nature of our modern understanding of the ode is the distinctive presence of an addressee, an aspect that is rarely sufficiently emphasised.

Stephen Harrison[i] has argued that although in archaic Greece the form was linked to religious and social contexts where it was sung, by the Roman period it came to be associated with a purely literary form. Harrison goes on to identify the wide range of genres and themes that Horace treated in the Odes, but thereby takes up the modern conception that equates a given form with a generic theme-based mode. Ovid, in reminiscing on the literary gatherings that he took part in in Rome (Trist. 4, 10) recalls how "rich-of-rhythm Horace captivated our ears / as he strummed Ausonian songs upon refined lyre". Although I have adopted the usual gloss of "rich-of-rhythm" for the epithet that Ovid applied to Horace, numerosus literally encompasses all the various meanings of numerous, such as "plentiful, abundant, copious; comprising many separate things", "consisting of many individuals" as well as the archaic usage "rhythmic, harmonious". Undoubtedly Ovid was also punning on Horace's girth, said by Augustus to have been rather copious.

THE SHEER EXUBERANCE and virtuosity with which Horace employs the various metres, images, and themes is what makes the Odes of 23 BC work as a collection. The variety of themes and rhythms (both within and across the metres employed) are linked and intermeshed either by a poem elaborating on a minor theme from the previous poem, or through contrast and antithesis. Add to this the factor of the overall organisation of the three books, and the resulting melody is a veritable orchestral score for a complex set of voices in counterpoint. Try as you might to focus on a single voice, you soon lose the thread.

The temptation to identify Horace with a given persona always falls short because he is a master of disguise. West is very careful not to fall into the trap of identifying the poem with the poet. A verse written to a cupbearer-cum-lover does not imply that Horace ever had a love affair with a slave-boy. Nevertheless, the temptation to somehow pin Horace down to a single persona is great. Each generation and each nation has made of Horace their Horace: by turn he has been seen as a political agent of Augustus, a philosopher, a hedonist, a love preceptor (as identified by West in a number of poems), but by whatever emphasis we try to grasp him, we can find as many proofs as contradictions. Ultimately what makes the presence of the poet so strong is the intimacy and immediacy of his language; through the choice of language he reveals and conceals himself, giving as much of a self-portrait as he cares to formulate.

The centre of the whole collection of 23 BC is the eleven poems which open the second book. The poems alternate Alcaic and Sapphic metres and are all addressed to contemporary friends, with Carm. II.12 to Maecenas written in the second Asclepiad metre effectively breaking the sequence; on either side of this cycle there are thirty-eight poems.

The third book opens with a sharp shift in register. The first six poems, all written in the Alcaic metre, have been dubbed the "Roman odes". The opening stanza to this sequence sets the agenda, and many commentators, West included, flounder:

I hate the profane mob and keep them at a distance.
Maintain a holy silence. As priest of the Muses
I sing for girls and boys
songs never heard before.

As Griffiths (op. cit.) points out, the 336 verses that make up the six Roman odes were already regarded by the third-century scholar Porphyrio as constituting a single poem. More than the interconnectedness of the Roman odes, however, it is the themes treated in this cycle that have caused difficulty of interpretation. Aware of the fallacy of using later records to support earlier material, West nevertheless employs Augustus' Res Gestae to illustrate the Augustan nature of the Roman Odes. The Res Gestae is an inventory appended to his testament in which Augustus listed his achievements and which was only made public upon his death in AD 14, twenty-two years after Horace's death (thirty-seven years after the publication of the Odes).

Polarising the Roman Odes as being political further exasperates the difficulty. The division of state and religion is a modern, post-enlightenment, concept that cannot be applied to classical Rome. On Carm. III.1, when West writes, "Horace is priest, sacerdos, of Augustan religion, his odes are its hymns, and the priest is singing for the young," the epithet Augustan rather than Roman shows just how little understood the nature of Roman religion is. In Emperor Worship and Roman Religion (Oxford 2002), Ittai Gradel clinches its essential features:

It is difficult for us to grasp a religious system with
almost exclusive emphasis on ritual action to the
almost complete detriment of theology or
speculation. But it is revealing that such pagan
theological speculation was confined to philosophy,
and the traditional cultic systems carried on for
centuries irrespective of these philosophical
discussions.

Hence whether Horace is speculating on morals and ethics (often employing ideas developed by Cicero and Lucretius) or making fun of superstitious practices that were as rife among Romans then as they are today, it does not imply that he was disparaging of the religious practices that were maintained and upheld by the state. As outlined above, the Roman world can be seen to operate on a tripartite division of individual-state-universe; above all the religious sphere was embodied in state ritual, and Roman law closely regulated religious practice. Horace can be seen to side with Augustus in emphasising that the neglect of sacred rituals had led to the civil wars, but that does not mean that he was Augustus' political propagandist.

The difficulty is largely related to our separation of church and state, a dichotomy that not only did not exist in Roman times but which is further exasperated by our inability to fully comprehend what constituted Roman religion. West falls into the trap of labelling the poems as political and proceeds to outline Augustus' agenda and fit the various elements of the poems to it.

A further slip occurs when West discusses the ending of the second ode and writes, "Horace told us at the beginning of these Roman Odes that he spoke as vates, priest, prophet, poet." In several places throughout his poetry Horace does refers to himself as vates--a soothsayer or prophet--and since prophecies were delivered in verse, by transfer the term was applied to a poet or poetess and was "the oldest name for a poet; but it fell into contempt, and was discarded for poets until restored to honour by Virgil" and, we might add, by Horace. But, as West knows, the Latin of the opening stanza of Carm. III.1, at line 3 does not employ vates but sacerdos. The difference is subtle, but then so is Horace. Were it not for the excellence of West's approach to the language and poetry of Horace, such slips and mishandling of historical elements would mar the whole enterprise.

Ironically there are several direct references relating to the religio-political situation and the rule of Augustus in the last poem to the whole collection, Carm. III.30, that are not picked up by West and which show how closely Horace's poetry reflects the reality of the time. This short poem West translates as:

I have completed a monument more lasting than bronze
and higher than the decaying Pyramids of kings,
which cannot be destroyed by gnawing rain
nor wild north wind, or by the unnumbered
procession of the years and flight of time.
I shall not wholly die. A great part of me
will avoid Libitina. In time to come
my fame will grow ever fresh, while priest
climbs the Capitol with silent Virgin.
Where fierce Aufidus roars and Daunus,
poor in water, ruled the country peoples,
it will be said of me that from humble beginnings
I had the power to be the first to bring Aeolian song
to Italian measures. Take the proud honour
well-deserved, Melpomene, and graciously
circle my hair with the laurel of Delphi.

The second line, regalique situ Pyramidum altius, has caused much comment and consternation, since situ can mean the building of a structure (such as a rampart) as well as decay. Although West in his 1997 translation rejected the latter meaning, he returns to it here. Both meanings, however, can be combined when the Rome of the time is brought to mind.

Upon his return to Rome from Actium in 29 BC, Augustus began the construction of his Mausoleum on the northern edge of the Campus Martius. In scale, placement and timing, its construction was of unprecedented import. In Death and the Emperor: Roman Imperial Funerary Monuments from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius (Cambridge, 2000) Penelope Davies argues convincingly for an Egyptian echo to its design. Its massiveness, stepped design, the Egyptian obelisks that flanked the entrance, and the bronze statue of Augustus that topped the whole structure, fit well with the opening stanza of Carm. III.30. Bearing in mind that the Mausoleum was first used in 23 BC for the burial of Marcellus (Augustus' nephew) the whole of Rome would have been able to identify the bronze and pyramidal building/decay that Horace alludes to.

On the priest leading the procession of Vestal Virgins to the Capital, West assumes that Horace is understating the case by not mentioning the pontifex maximus. But here again Horace is alluding to a historical event of unprecedented importance. Although the Senate offered him the post of pontifex maximus, chief priest of Rome without whom many of the key sacrifices could not take place, Augustus did not agree to the slaying of Lepidus, who had become pontifex maximus upon the assassination of Caesar in 44 BC, even though Lepidus had fought against him and had been banished to Circeii. Only in 13 BC, upon the death of Lepidus, will Augustus take up the sacred role of pontifex maximus.

Such allusions, which portray Horace's awareness of politico-religious matters, can be said to be beyond the ken of a philological approach. One can, after all, read allusions where there might be none (does the laurel of the last line allude to the honour usually accorded to Roman generals, making of Horace, as West points out, the first poet laureate, or are we to see a further reference to Augustus and the laurel trees planted by decree of the Senate in 27 BC outside his house on the Capitoline hill?).

THE DANGER of over-interpretation is a real one. Given the sheer bulk of commentaries on Horace from ancient times to the present, the search for new approaches can obscure more than elucidate. A case in hand is Ellen Oliensis' essay "Feminine Endings, Lyric Seductions" in Traditions and Contexts in the Poetry of Horace which explores the "effects produced by hair as a closural motif in Horace's poetry". Although aware of the danger of "taking up this somewhat recherche topic" Oliensis nevertheless abstracts the motif beyond the load it can reasonably bear.

In the last stanza to the whole collection of the three books of Odes (Carm. III.30) Horace boasts of his achievement, but then, with typical about-turn, shifts the honour to his muse only to have her return the favour. The Latin of the last line, lauro cinge volens, Melpomene, comam, "with Delphic laurel graciously bind, Melpomene, my hair" (Oliensis' translation, which adheres closely to the Latin word-order) ends with "hair" as does, indirectly, the first poem to the whole collection, where "my soaring head will strike the stars" (Carm. 1.1.36) translates sublimi feriam sidera vertice, with vertex being the crown or top of the head. But taking such a motif towards a quasi-allegorical interpretation of weakness, binding and circularity misses the point.

Overall Oliensis does make an interesting argument for noting how Horace toyed with his readers by offering what could be interpreted as a strong closure and then writing on to a closure that employs a softer tone. Straining the point, however, loses the subtle and, particularly where Horace is concerned, the elusive quality of the poetry. The closure of a poem with a crowning point such as vertice or comam is a device, but the art lies in leading the reader to that closure, and, in the case of the first and last odes under consideration, to a lingering smile that suspends the reader, making the poem persist beyond its ending. Dante's closure to each of the three books of the Commedia employs a similar echo by ending each poem with "star", but what makes it more than a scheme is the fact that there is a progression leading to the climax.

Echoes are to be found for the opening and closing ode to each of the three books. The pattern is not adhered to slavishly, at the end of the first book (Carm. I.38) Horace tells the cupbearer not to seek fancy garlands with which to crown himself or Horace, simple myrtle will do. Such echoes, concatenations and reverberations operate throughout the three books. The keenness of observation that West brings to the poetry of Horace is considerable and significant. Having noted that the opening image of Carm. I.1 evokes Pindar's Olympians "with talk of chariot-races in the Olympic arena" West concludes his discussion of Horace's last poem to the collection of 23 BC by quoting the last stanza to Pindar's Olympians and noting that the last word there is chaitan, the Greek word for comam, hair.

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