5
RICHARD TARRANT
Horace and Roman Literary History
Just as Horace appears the most forthcoming of Latin poets on the level of autobiography, so too his statements of literary preference and affiliation are numerous and, on the surface, unambiguous. Those statements construct a picture that highlights his originality and shows scant regard for his Roman predecessors. He cites the description of Ennius as a ‘second Homer’ only to mock it, while the comic Plautus is blamed for negligent writing and lack of concern for anything except commercial success; even the satirist Lucilius, the only Roman poet whom Horace acknowledges as a model, receives harsh criticism for his excessive speed of production and consequent lack of polish. Of the leading figures of the generation prior to Horace, Lucretius is never mentioned and the name of Catullus appears only in a jibe at his feeble imitators. Horace’s favorable judgments seem limited to a small circle of contemporaries on one hand —Varius, Pollio, and above all Virgil— and on the other to the Greek masters whom he took pride in emulating, especially Archilochus, Alcaeus, and Sappho.
The foregoing sketch is not a complete travesty, but it offers no hint of the extent to which Horace’s poetry is indebted to earlier Roman authors. In seeking to understand that set of relationships Horace’s explicit statements will not take us very far: like other Latin poets, Horace signaled his literary allegiances more often through allusion than through overt reference. When critics noted that the main theme of the last movement of Brahms’s First Symphony bore a strong resemblance to the ‘Ode to Joy’ theme in Beethoven’s Ninth, Brahms snapped in reply ‘any jackass can see that!’[1] In the same way, Horace expected alert readers to recognize echoes of earlier Latin poets without explicit signposting.
But Horace’s literary pronouncements can also be more actively misleading. Horace approaches Roman literary history not as a disinterested observer but as a participant with his own interests in mind. The result is what Charles Brink calls ‘literary history with an ulterior purpose’.[2] In particular, Horace’s stated views of his predecessors form part of a contemporary debate in which Horace speaks as a defender of modern poetry. In such contexts Horace is more a polemicist than a historian, and polemic is inseparable from distortion.
The Letter to Augustus may serve as an example: there Horace expresses resentment at the unthinking exaltation of older poetry by his contemporaries. Among his targets are the teachers of literature (grammatici), who persist in drumming into their students the hoariest remnants of Latin poetry; as evidence he cites his exposure to the works of Rome’s oldest attested poet, Livius Andronicus, at the ungentle hands of his teacher Orbilius. Now there is nothing implausible in the picture of schoolteachers assigning texts no longer current—as a high school student around 1960, I found myself mystified by Walter Scott’s Heart of Midlothian—and Horace’s complaint of the public’s fondness for archaic poetry gets some later support from Seneca, who regretted that Virgil had been forced to cater to a public keen on Ennius;[3] nonetheless, Horace’s account is far from being the whole story. For one thing, Orbilius and his ilk had no monopoly on setting the school poetry curriculum. Indeed we know of other grammatici of the time with an interest in contemporary poetry, e.g., Valerius Cato, author of the neoteric-sounding poems Lydia and Dictynna, hailed as ‘the only one who chooses and makes poets’.[4] The meaning of that phrase has been much discussed, but it probably refers to poets of the present day rather than already established authors.[5] An even clearer example of a grammaticus with modernist tastes is Q. Caecilius Epirota, who at the time when Horace wrote was already teaching Virgil and other modern poets to select young men.[6]
Horace could even conceive of his own poetry entering the school curriculum, although he professed to loath the idea. In Satires 1.10.74-5 he claims to be content with just a few readers and says that only a madman would opt for the apparent alternative, to be lectured on in low-class schoolrooms, while roughly fifteen years later, in Epistles 1.20.17-18, he ruefully predicts that his new collection of poetry in its doddering old age will be reduced to teaching children in small-town classrooms. However much Horace stresses the sordid details of his work’s destiny, the passage still implies confidence that his poetry will survive and make its way into the educational canon—as it soon did: Juvenal 7.225-7 names Horace together with Virgil as authors read in the schools of the grammatici.
Horace also foresaw the possibility of his work enjoying a more glorious afterlife. Odes 1-3 openly aspire to canonical status on a par with the Greek lyric poets, and indeed the final poem in the collection claims to have obtained it. Horace was not so daunted by the conservatism of the public as to despair of his own poetry’s reception at the highest level. The concept of canonicity had recently been given a more tangible form by Augustus’ establishment of the Palatine Library with its twin collections of Greek and Roman literature: when Horace speaks of Maecenas ‘placing him among the lyric bards’ (Odes 1.1.35 si me lyricis uatibus inseres), the implied image is of a set of rolls being placed alongside those of the canonical lyricists.
Finally, even at a relatively early stage of his career Horace did not lack critical approval. The ‘few readers’ Horace hopes for in Satires 1.10.74 are exemplified by a catalogue of fifteen named individuals, a ‘gallery of heavyweights’ in Jasper Griffin’s phrase,[7] that includes poets, critics, patrons of literature, and political leaders: unless Horace was indulging in wishful thinking—hardly likely in such a prominent passage—he could already count some of the most eminent figures in Rome’s cultural life among his admirers. By the time of the letter to Augustus, Horace could expect a favorable hearing from the princeps himself—especially if, as Suetonius alleges, the letter was prompted by a complaint from Augustus that Horace had not spoken of him in his previous sermones.[8]
When due allowance has been made for strategic omissions and exaggerations, we are left with a core of consistently expressed views that in all likelihood reflect Horace’s genuine literary outlook. The salient components are a high regard for originality and adherence to the highest standards of verbal craft, or, in their negative counterparts, scorn for the ‘slavish herd’ of imitators (seruum pecus, Epistles 1.19.19) and disdain for careless or uncouth writing.[9] The latter attitude accounts for Horace’s harsh remarks about Plautine comedy: in Epistles 2.1.168-76 Plautus is criticized for failing to suit his writing to his characters, for overall looseness of style, and for valuing financial gain over artistic success;[10] in Ars Poetica 270-2 Plautus’ audiences are derided for admiring his jokes and metrical displays. Both passages allude to Plautus’ popular appeal, which can in itself constitute a black mark in Horace’s book. By contrast, when Horace speaks approvingly in Satires 1.10.40-2 of the comedies of his contemporary Fundanius, he refers to them as written texts, libelli; either Fundanius wrote comedies to be read rather than performed, or Horace highlights their written quality to elevate them above drama with mass appeal.
Horace’s dismissive attitude toward older Roman Comedy did not prevent him from adopting its verbal wit and brio—although credit should also be given to a shared Italian fondness for quick-witted repartee. Some of the most enjoyable passages in all of Horace are the quasi-dramatic dialogues scattered through the Satires and Epistles: for example, here is part of the conversation between Horace and his persistent companion in Satires 1.9.26-28: interpellandi locus hic erat ‘est tibi mater, / cognati, quis te salvo est opus?’ ‘haud mihi quisquam. / omnis composui.’ ‘felices. nunc ego resto.’ (‘This was my chance to interject “do you have a mother, or relatives, who need you to stay healthy?”’ “Not a one: I’ve buried them all.” “Lucky for them; that leaves me”’.)[11] The last satire of Book 2, the account of a dinner-party at the home of Nasidienus, is narrated by the comic poet Fundanius and is itself a virtual comedy.[12]
Comedy even colors Horace’s satiric autobiography. In Satires 1.4.105-29 he claims that he owes his forthrightness in criticizing other people’s faults to his father’s instruction, but that ‘father’ proves to be modeled on the stern father Demea in Terence’s Adelphoe. To complicate matters further, Demea is neither a very sympathetic character nor an effective moral teacher; thus what seemed most sincere in Horace’s self-portrait takes on an element of fiction and ironic distance.[13]
When it suits his rhetorical purposes, Horace can imply a more positive view of early Latin poetry. In Ars Poetica 53-8, he complains that Virgil and Varius are criticized for their verbal innovations whereas Plautus and Caecilius were not, and that he is begrudged his own few additions to the language while Ennius and Cato ‘enriched our native language’. In Satires 1.10 he claims the right to criticize Lucilius without denying his virtues, and compares Lucilius’ own criticism of Accius and Ennius, adding that Lucilius did not consider himself Ennius’ superior.
As that comparison suggests, Horace’s attitude to Lucilius involved both criticism and respect.[14] In this case an already complex relationship is harder to assess because of the fragmentary state in which Lucilius’ works survive: we possess approximately 1400 lines of what originally comprised thirty books of poetry. The volume of Lucilius’ output in fact gives Horace his main basis for criticism: in typically Callimachean terms, Horace laments the ‘muddy flow’ of Lucilius’ writing (Satires 1.4.11 cum flueret lutulentus, also 1.10.50), the lack of care in revising, the helter-skelter mixing of Greek and Latin (1.10.20-30). The critique is summed up in the image of the older poet dictating two hundred lines per hour standing on one foot (Satires 1.4.9-10). Having accused Lucilius in Satires 1.4 of writing too much, too fast, Horace illustrates his criticism with the following satire. It is well known that Horace’s account of his journey to Brundisium has a Lucilian counterpart, a description of a voyage to Sicily. The content and dimensions of Lucilius’ narrative cannot be precisely determined, but since it filled the entire third book of his Satires, it probably ran to several hundred lines.[15] Horace’s poem, at just over a hundred lines, is an implicit rebuke of his predecessor’s loquacity, and to underline the point Horace concludes with an ironic apology for his ‘lengthy text’ (longae ... chartae 104).
While claiming to have surpassed Lucilius on stylistic grounds, Horace surprisingly acknowledges him as a superior in satire (Satires 1.10.48-9 inuentore minor, 2.1.29 nostrum melioris utroque). Perhaps Horace was eager to associate himself with Lucilius, for all his faults of style, because Lucilius was the sort of literary figure Horace aspired to be, moving easily among the great men of his time and respected by them. Poetic kinship with Lucilius might therefore dilute awareness of the social gap separating Horace from the exalted company he had succeeded in entering. Horace may also have had self-interested reasons for characterizing the content of Lucilius’ satires as he does. His two most explicit statements, though not actually inconsistent, present very different pictures of his predecessor’s work: in Satires 1.4.3-6 Horace plays up the acerbic side of Lucilius’ writing and connects his attacks on the powerful with the tradition of Aristophanic comedy, while Satires 2.1.30-34 highlight his autobiographical focus.[16] The shift in emphasis probably reveals more about Horace’s self-presentation as a satirist than about his views of Lucilius. Horace opens the second book of Satires with the implausible claim that his earlier collection had struck some readers as excessively harsh; it is tempting to see Horace’s stress in that book on Lucilius’ acerbitas as a means for him to suggest that his own satires had an edge that they in fact lacked.[17]
Horace’s judgments of early Latin poetry are closely linked to the issue of changing standards: in his view, Plautus delighted the audiences of his day because Romans then had no sense of genuinely witty and urbane comic writing. Horace allows that Lucilius would have written more fastidiously if he had lived in Horace’s time (Satires 1.10.64-71); his more sympathetic attitude may reflect the fact that Lucilius had attracted significant scholarly attention in the previous generation.[18] A likely echo of that critical study is the description of Valerius Cato as a defender of Lucilius in the spurious lines attached to the opening of Satires 1.10; the statement that Cato tried to correct Lucilius’ poorly-formed verses (2-3 qui male factos / emendare parat uersus) suggests an awareness that Lucilius’ writing no longer met contemporary standards of refinement.[19]
The influence of Lucretius on Horace is less evident than might be expected in light of their shared Epicurean outlook. Lucretius’ argumentative rigor and stylistic elevation were far removed from Horace’s chosen orbit; the unostentatious but sincere piety that Horace advocates in several of the Odes was also at odds with Lucretius’ thoroughgoing hostility to religious practice. Odes 1.34 even stages a recantation of Epicurean views about the gods, though no biographical inferences can be drawn from that not altogether serious poem.
The mark of Lucretius is most clearly seen in the Satires, and indeed Satires 1.1 features echoes of Lucretius at three structurally significant points (25-6, 69-70, 119). The first and third of those echoes have long been noticed, but apparently not the middle one: Horace’s reference to Tantalus, followed by the address to the reader quid rides? mutato nomine de te / fabula narratur (‘Why do you laugh? Change the name and the tale is about you’) surely recalls Lucretius’ argument in 3.978-1023 that the torments of the fabled sufferers in the Underworld represent the emotional anxieties of the living. The first and most conspicuous Lucretian allusion follows a statement of Horace’s satiric method that implicitly contrasts him with Lucretius: ‘to speak the truth with a smile’ (ridentem dicere uerum 24). Lucretius is tireless in proclaiming what he takes to be the truth, but he seldom relaxes into a smile while doing so. In keeping with that self-characterization, Horace modifies Lucretius’ famous image of the honey around the rim of the cup containing bitter medicine (1.936-50) into a more benign one, of children given cookies as a reward for learning their ABCs. Horace thus implies that he will share many of Lucretius’ therapeutic goals but will adopt a more genial manner in pursuing them.[20]
Lucretius claimed that his project of expounding Epicurean doctrine to a Roman audience was made more difficult by ‘the poverty of my native language’ (patrii sermonis egestas 1.832, 3.260). Horace alludes to the phrase, but in an unexpected way, when he cites Ennius and Cato as having ‘enriched our native language’ (Ars Poetica 57 sermonem patrium ditauerit). The fact that Lucretius is not named even as his words are recalled might imply that the kind of abstract philosophical terminology Lucretius strove to create for Latin did not strike Horace as an enrichment of the language.
Catullus is the poet who most clearly foreshadows aspects of Horace’s literary persona and writing. Horace shares Catullus’ high regard for charm and polish, and his disgust at poetic crudeness. Both poets disparage their own work in terms not meant to be taken literally: Catullus called the collection of poems dedicated to Cornelius Nepos mere ‘trifles’ (nugae) and almost in the same breath prayed that they might survive for more than an age; one could compare Horace’s pretense that the Satires are closer to versified conversation than to true poetry, contradicted by his insistence on their painstaking composition. The diversity of meter and content that Catullus packed into his slender body of poetry also prefigures the many-sidedness of Horace’s work. In fact, Horace at times seems to have taken hints or isolated experiments in Catullus and made them the basis for entire collections of poems. Thus Catullus’ poetic letters to friends (35, 65, 68A) may have provided the germ of Horace’s first book of Epistles, and his four extant poems in lyric meters (11, 34, 51, and 61) were undoubtedly an important stimulus toward the Odes.
The influence of Catullus is most evident in the Epodes. As he does with Lucretius in Satires 1.1, Horace opens the collection with an unmistakable gesture toward Catullus: his promise to accompany Maecenas to the ends of the earth (1.11-14) evokes the similar willingness that Catullus ascribes to Furius and Aurelius in 11.2-13. The Epodes owe much to the invective component in Catullus, who anticipated Horace in blending archaic iambos with its Callimachean counterpart.[21] Particular points of contact include scathing images of physically repulsive people (e.g., Epode 12 ~ Catullus 69) and poems that lambaste others’ failings in manners (e.g., Epode 3, pretending to denounce Maecenas for lacing Horace’s food with garlic). The erotic epodes frequently echo Catullus’ love poetry, though often with a telling shift of tone: so Catullus’ Lesbia, ‘loved by us as no other woman will ever be loved’ (8. 5 amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla) is transformed into the witch Canidia, ‘greatly loved by sailors and merchants’ (Epode 17.20 amata multum nautis et institoribus). In the same poem tu pudica, tu proba (40 ‘how modest you are, how chaste’) recalls Catullus 42.24 pudica et proba; in both passages the poet pretends to atone for earlier invective with ludicrously inappropriate praise.