Horace and Archaic Greek Poetry

3 GREGORY HUTCHINSON

Horace and archaic Greek poetry

Introduction

Horace proclaims explicitly his use of Archilochus (7th cent. B.C.) and Hipponax (6th cent. B.C.) in the Epodes and of Alcaeus (6th cent.) in the Odes (Epodes 6.13-14, Odes 1.32, Epistles 1.19.23-33). But the relationship of these works to archaic Greek poetry is not easily grasped. They are less closely and pervasively engaged with that poetry than the recently published Eclogues with Greek bucolic; they discuss their relation to their ‘models’ less explicitly than the Satires. Is broad difference from the Greek poets significant divergence, or a sign of their relative unimportance? Such questions are trickier because these poets mostly survive in fragments.

The primary aim here is not to compare archaic Greek poetry with Horace, as we perceive both, but to see what function the Greek poetry and ideas of it possess within the Horatian works.[1] Points should be made on both source and target texts. The relevant Greek material is not just naked fragments in neat modern editions. Papyri show abundant metatexts to archaic poetry in circulation: commentaries, lives, treatises.[2] Such works would hardly be ignored, as Horace’s evidence confirms, by someone planning to conquer a Greek genre. Scholia—with a marked interest in biography—frequently appear in the margins of lyric texts.[3] Papyri and other material show us things no less essential than fragments: poets’ lives, images, critical reputations, the placing of their poems in* Hellenistic editions.

Horace’s own works are best approached as books of poems with a shape and a strategy, not just as individual poems collected together. Recent scholarship demonstrates the value of so viewing the Epodes.[4] But each book of the Odes too, even if 1-3 were first published simultaneously, needs to be considered as a distinct entity.[5] It will be shown how each of Horace’s books uses archaic poets differently, how each deploys them to fashion an identity and create its own significant structure.

Epodes

Archilochus and Hipponax were the main archaic iambic authors; Archilochus supposedly invented the iambus (cf. Ars Poetica 79). Horace annexes the whole archaic literature of the genre*, by pointing to both as models (Epodes 6.13-14), and marking a special connection with the founder (he avoids Hipponax’s metrical hall-mark, choliambic lines, lines with ‘dragged’ end).[6] He goes beyond the Hellenistic poets, who had concentrated on reworking Hipponax. They, however, dramatize the idea of revival: Hipponax appears in a dream or as a ghost (Herodas 8, Callimachus fr. 191 Pfeiffer). Characteristically, the Epodes do not present their annexation so directly.

Horace later claims to have followed Archilochus’ numeros animosque, ‘metre and spirit’ (Epistles1.19.24-5). The emphasis on metre is notable; and animos discourages us from finding in the Epodes’ narrator a straight anti-Archilochus like Callimachus’ peaceable new Hipponax. It will emerge, though, that these two aspects, numeros and animos, lead in divergent directions.

Archilochus and Hipponax were both famed for anger. Archilochus also seems to invite the listener’s admiration or interest for his toughness, bravado* and Achillean independence. Hipponax invites amusement at himself. But anger is their crucial feature for Horace.

Their works were divided by metre. Archilochus (in more than one book?): elegiacs, trimeters, tetrameters, epodes (couplets as written *in papyri); Hipponax: at least two books of iambi, perhaps at least one further book, maybe including epodes.[7]* All but the last of Horace’s poems are epodes. Even so there is division by metre: the same all-iambic combination for 1-10; an explosion of new metres, with dactylic elements, in 11-16; stichic iambi (not couplets) in 17. Callimachus’ Iambi inspire the plain close, and the movement to new metres after the earlier poems.[8]

P. Oxy. 2310 (Archilochus) seems to collocate unconnected iambi. Related epodes appear together in P. Köln 58, but this need not be by design: the epodes dwelt so much on Lycambes and his daughters (one was promised to Archilochus in marriage). It remains notable that the Epodes usually avoid placing the same subjects—including politics—consecutively. This is part of their indirectness, in particular as regards narrative.

Narrative had been very important in Hipponax and Archilochus, particularly Archilochus’ epodes.[9] Horace here differs strongly, on various levels (including intensity of characterization for the speaker). How pointed this difference is is shown by animal fables, especially associated with Archilochus’ epodes, and used in Callimachus’ Iambi, and Horace, Satires 2.6. Their absence from the Epodes is stressed by vestigial comparisons with animals (so Epode 6). No Epode is straightforwardly narrative; 9 tells of Actium, allusively, 5 of a human sacrifice (it is more like a mime).

Archilochus’ epodes included at least one erotic narrative on Lycambes’ daughters (fr. 196a). The Lycambes story, recurrent in his poetry, was expanded by biography into a further sensational narrative, with the suicide of the daughters (cf. Epistles 1.19.31).[10] The Epodes which deal with love and sex offer only fragments of multiple and frivolous stories. The broken oath of 15 is merely a lover’s oath; the older woman of 8 and 12 is frustrated, not suicidal. Archilochus’ corpus and tradition alike created a super-narrative of his life.[11] Horace’s earlier Satires book 1 had been full of biography, and dwelt on the narrator’s status and circumstances; the Epodes touch on these very little.[12] They are post-Archilochean and oblique.

Instead of narrative and biography the book as a whole offers a more self-reflexive and metaliterary sequence; here poetry, and relation to the model, and the character of the narrator are combined. Poem 1, like many prologues, both introduces and misleads. We see possible links with Archilochus, but also a considerably modified narrator: not much of a fighter, though willing to accompany his friend to war, and friendly rather than (as in the stereotype of Archilochus) angry and abusive. The first part* of the book seems to tease us on its relation to Archilochus; it works towards* a trademark outburst of rage. Poem 2 sounds content—but turns out to be spoken by someone else (itself an Archilochean trick). 3 shows mock-anger, with Maecenas, on garlic. Much of 4, a brief attack on an unnamed person, is spoken by others. 5 culminates in a verbal attack on the witch Canidia by a character. 6 briefly threatens an attack, and finally mentions (periphrastically) Archilochus and Hipponax: the announcement of the model is delayed, as in the Eclogues and Satires book 1, but also achieved.

7-10 offer Archilochean material (speech to citizens, insults to a woman, battle). In 7 the speaker is impressive; in 8 his impotence appears understandable, the affair sordid. 10 at last offers a full-scale attack, based on an epode probably by Hipponax (fr. 115). The moment is climactic; the enemy is even named. But the cursing discloses no misdeed or story; the reader of the Eclogues (3.90-1) takes Maevius’ crime to be writing bad poetry. We are in a metaliterary world.

We should be struck by the poet’s metrical achievement in 1-10. The couplets of iambic trimeters and dimeters in all ten poems create a special combination of craft and incisive vigour, new to Latin and remote from satiric hexameters. It is particularly potent when depicting anger. It produces a powerful, if elaborately polished, equivalent to Archilochean force; it gives an overwhelming sense of authorial control.

11-16 explore aspects of Archilochus less apparent before: the narrator’s sexual desire (11, 14-15); wisdom and drink (13). The ageing woman (12), the oath (15), the proposal to move city (16), have specific Archilochean associations (fr. 102, 188, etc.). In 11-15 and 17 the narrator now appears weaker and less acceptable. 11, in the metre of Archilochus’ narrative of suave seduction (fr. 196a), presents this narrator’s passive amorous susceptibility—with self-conscious humour. 12 suggests, through a character’s Archilochean direct speech, the narrator’s heartlessness: even ‘old hags’ have a point of view. In 11 and 14 love stops the feeble narrator writing poems; it was a relative’s death that made Archilochus claim he was not interested in poetry (fr. 215).[13] 16, with the narrator as prophet (uate 66), is deflated by 17. In 17, the narrator, afflicted by the witch Canidia, humiliatingly and vainly offers to retract his attacks.

Yet the mention of poetry points to contradictions in 11-17: the narrator has finished his book, the reader knows, nor can we swallow (in a poem) his lack of interest in poetry. This accentuates a drastic contrast: the good-for-nothing narrator is formally identified (note 15.12) with the poet so brilliantly handling in 11-16 a whole series of metres new in Latin. He mentions his distaste for poetry at the start (11.1-2), in a notably complex three-period metre. 12-16 all begin their ‘couplets’ with hexameters: Horace is displaying his metrical and poetic range, invading contemporary elegy and the recent Eclogues. Callimachus’ epodes have no dactylic elements. 17, like 5 using Canidia from the Satires, emphasizes range beyond this book: stichic iambics besides stichic hexameters. The author’s actual command of his creation is apparent in the whole fiction of 17 (including Canidia’s closing speech, which ends with the word ‘end’).

The structure of the book in content and in metre diverges. The result is both humorous (on the level of content) and self-assertive (on the level of art).

Odes I

Odes 1 advances beyond the Epodes. Horace takes on a more complex tradition. ‘Archaic lyric’ covers a multitude of dialects, metres* and subjects, and various modes of performance. Somewhat as in the Epodes, Horace wishes both to encompass the whole tradition, and to appropriate the genre through one paradigmatic author: Alcaeus. The Lesbian poets Alcaeus and Sappho (6th cent.) appear from papyrus the most-read lyric poets, apart from Pindar (5th cent.), commonly regarded as supreme. When Horace refers to ‘Lesbian’ poetry in book 1, he might seem to be modelling himself on both Alcaeus and Sappho. But in 1.32 he connects his tradition specifically with Alcaeus; Alcaeus there embodies amatory as well as symposiastic lyric. Seven poems are known to base themselves ostentatiously on Alcaeus (9, 10, 14, 18, 22, 32, 37), one on Sappho (13).[14] Yet* Horace pushes his distance from his exemplar further than in the Epodes.

Alcaeus probably presented himself as Archilochus’ successor in activities, ethos* and violent emotion (though without Archilochus’ dashing charisma). Synesius, Insomn. 20 links them in the close relation of poetry and life.[15] Alcaeus’ predominant subject-matter was political: he himself, with his brother, was a prime player in Mytilenean politics. In his papyri, some collocations of political poems could be chance; but sometimes at least editors have deliberately placed together poems on the same aspect or period of his life (so P. Oxy. 2165, or 2306 with 2734 fr. 6). Notes, commentaries, treatises show that reconstructing his life particularly interested scholars (e.g. scholion on fr. 114; P. Oxy. 2506 fr. 98).[16]

Odes 1.32 contrasts Alcaeus’ turbulent life with the narrator’s own inactive existence. This underlines both the slightness of implied narrative about the narrator, and the positive role *of that slightness in characterization. It suits the presentation of this relaxed, middle-aged* and supposedly unimportant person that he has nothing to do, and nothing happens to him. Horace is not continuing the anger of Archilochus, Alcaeus and the Epodes, as 1.16, in the middle of the book, explains: he is older and gentler and renounces anger and iambi.[17] Even in the past, the main events were love-affairs somewhat more intense than his present ones: so 1.5, significantly presented as an allegorical shipwreck—Alcaeus experienced real storms.[18] The present love-affairs push a Sapphic world of shifting attachments towards a humour and a depiction of the aging male that evoke the self-irony of Anacreon (6th-5th cent.). Bereavements, warfare, illness happen to others. Changes of place were crucial to the events, and scholarly reconstruction, of many lyric poets’ lives; this book is full of journeys, but they are other people’s. The narrator stays put, in retreat but not in exile.[19] There is a philosophical aspect to this quietude, but it is lightly borne.

Let us return to the concerns of the book with its own literary procedures and status. Horace is not really a one-man band, playing all the instruments of lyric: he has transcribed pieces for different instruments on to one. Metrically all is turned into four-line aeolic stanzas. Horace is advancing from the couplets of the Epodes, and their range of metrical forms. He had important predecessors: Theocritus adapted aeolic metres (but not in stanzas), the Neoterics used aeolic stanzas (but simpler ones, the sapphic stanza apart). Sappho’s Hellenistic books had been organized by metre—an indication of its perceived importance; mostly, this book juxtaposes different metres, as usually occurs (perhaps undesignedly) in papyri of Alcaeus.[20]

Horace’s book is structured by various displays and links to archaic poetry. The end of 1.1 hopes he may join the lyric canon, but suggests, more ambitiously, that he is embracing it all. 1.1-9 are all in different metres: this display of range culminates in 1.9, with the first alcaic stanza (Alcaeus’ favourite) and the first prominent imitation of Alcaeus.[21] We may compare the final arrival of the Epodes at Archilochus and Hipponax in poem 6, and the full imitation (if there are none earlier) in poem 10.