14
PETER WHITE
Friendship, Patronage, and Horatian Sociopoetics
Horace addressed poems or otherwise paid compliments to over sixty of his contemporaries, and he treated of social relationships in every sort of verse he wrote.[1] He thus created a more detailed representation of his milieu than we have from any other Roman poet except Martial. And although Horace put on show only about half as many people as Martial, on average he gave them more exposure. They tend to have firmer identities outside his text as well, since they belong to a comparatively well-documented period of Roman history.[2] They are the available data from which a historian can hope to draw some inferences about one poet's social position in late first-century Rome. From Horace's standpoint, too, they were a kind of raw material, but less as facts about his life than as symbolic elements in a constant poetic reprocessing of it. Both perspectives are relevant to the subject of this essay.
Profiling Horace's Relationships
To begin from a sociohistorical perspective, Horace's relationships can be characterized first of all in terms of the activities ascribed to the people involved in them. In Epistles 1.17 and 18, paired letters of advice that have been described as Horace's own version of a De amicitia,[3] he emphasizes the time that they spend in each other's company. They dine and party together, share pastimes and confidences, and accompany each other on trips and holiday retreats. The same or similar activities figure in narratives in which Horace depicts his own experience of Roman social life, and they underlie occasional poems in which he invites others to drink or dine with him, bids them goodbye or welcomes them home from their travels, and congratulates or commiserates with them.[4] This intense socializing is what the Romans meant when they spoke of enjoying convictus or "life in common," as Horace does in his boast of "having lived with the great" at Satires 2.1.76.
It is consistent with the kind of engagements they have that Horace can refer to himself and those he celebrates as amici or "friends." He applies the word to these relationships more than twice as often as all other terms combined, and without apparent regard for status differences. "Friend" is how he describes himself in relation to, among others, his junior protégé Septimius, the influential knight Maecenas, the senators Pollio and Messalla, and the prince Tiberius.[5] Especially in the lyrics, where Horace's language is most laden with implication, he sometimes highlights his choice of words. The book of Epodes opens with a salutation to "amice … Maecenas", Odes 2.9.5 again features the rare syntagm of vocative amice plus proper name (amice Valgi), and in Odes 2.6 and 7, amicus is reserved for the final position of the closing line.[6] But although Horace uses the word assertively, his language was not out of line with that of his contemporaries. Augustus himself testified to a friendship with Horace,[7] and throughout Roman literary history, friendship language was the standard idiom in which relationships between writers and the elite were described. The language implies that they were voluntary associations based ideally on sentiment,[8] however diverse their particular manifestations might be.
Modern readers of Horace have been more inclined to understand these relationships in terms of literary patronage than of friendship, however. In principle, nothing prevents a friend from occupying the position of a patron or a client at the same time, and patronus and cliens, being good Latin words, should reflect the truth of Roman social relations as faithfully as the word amicus. Yet it is now generally recognized that the Romans rarely invoked them in literary contexts. Not only that, but Latin sources reveal little about the working of patron-client ties generally during the Late Republic and Early Empire.[9] Lacking a clear Roman model of patronage, classicists have therefore borrowed from sociologists and defined patronage in the abstract, as an asymmetrical personal relationship of some duration which involves the reciprocal exchange of goods and services.[10] The definition is not perfectly tailored to the shape of Roman society, less because it does not cleanly demarcate the institution of patronage from marriage or slavery than because it does not explain relationships at the top of society in which the asymmetry ratio fluctuates. It would be difficult to apply to the dealings between Cicero and Atticus, for example.[11]
But it can be applied to some of Horace's literary relationships. A clear-cut case is his tie with Maecenas, which lasted from an initial meeting in the year 38 to the death of both men in 8. The inequality between them is emphasized in Horace's avowal that in conversation he used to call Maecenas his "father" and "king" (Epistles 1.7.37), and he describes himself to Maecenas in turn as a "friend who depends on and looks to you" (Epistles 1.1.105). Elements of an exchange are discernible on both sides. Apart from supplying the kind of boon companionship already noted, Horace honored Maecenas with mention in 26 of his 162 poems. Moreover, in the Epodes and in the first book of the Satires, the Odes, and the Epistles, Maecenas is addressed before anyone else, making him effectively the dedicatee of the respective books. He also elicits more fulsome invocations than anyone else, as for example, "O Maecenas, scion of ancestral kings, my bulwark and my sweet ornament" (Odes 1.1.1-2), "Maecenas, proud ornament and mainstay of my affairs" (Odes 2.17.3-4), "Maecenas, descendant of Etruscan kings" (Odes 3.29.1-3), "Maecenas, hailed in my earliest muse as you shall be in my last" (Epistles 1.1.1-3). No one else in Latin literary history was as lavishly and consistently advertised by any poet.
On the other side of the exchange, Horace points to one benefit that he received when he proclaims Maecenas the ornament of his affairs. Close association with Maecenas brought him to public attention, and that in turn probably contributed to the success of his poetry.[12] But he makes his frankest reference to benefits received when he tells Maecenas "you made me rich" (Epistles 1.7.15). Since the root sense of the word he uses for "rich" (locuples) is "rich in land," Horace may have in mind the gift of property and specifically of his Sabine farm.[13] But here and elsewhere, his references to Maecenas' generosity are forthright without being concrete.[14] They do not indicate the value of the gifts received, what form they took, or when Horace received them. But if a detail in the Suetonian life (p. 297.8-9 Roth) can be trusted, Horace did not have to rely on Maecenas for basic subsistence. About four years before they met, Horace had already wangled a pardon for fighting at Philippi and a salaried clerkship that installed him in "the status group which lies just below the rank of eques."[15] Subsequent largesse from Maecenas and others is best seen as an enhancement of his income rather than the foundation of it.
Aside from Maecenas, however, Horace's only documented benefactor is Augustus, who according to Suetonius "enriched him with a couple of grants" (p. 297.34 Roth). Curiously, Horace himself gives no hint of these grants, even when extolling Augustus' generosity to his fellow poets Vergil and Varius (Epistles 2.1.245-47). Maecenas is the only source of benefits he openly acknowledges. But while he downplays material rewards in the case of his own relationships, he takes them for granted in relationships involving others. Epistles 1.17 and 18, the two letters of advice mentioned earlier, assume that anyone who cultivates a rich friend will be angling for gifts in return. Horace all but confesses to the same motivation himself when he declares that "brazen poverty compelled me to write verse" (Epistles 2.2.51-52). Since literary activity per se could not generate an income, he can only have been thinking of the entrée it provided to the company of the well-to-do. Over half of the sixty-plus persons celebrated in his poems are identifiable as prosperous knights or senators. Although none but Maecenas and Augustus is known to have supplied economic benefits, Horace's silence about Augustus' gifts stands as a warning not to assume that no one else did.
Still, the fact that Horace rarely adverts to material aspects of the exchange between him and his friends suggests that these preoccupied him less than they do us. Possibly tact played a part in his reluctance to speak of benefits. Satires 2.6, in which he extols his Sabine farm without remarking that Maecenas gave it to him, has often and perhaps correctly been interpreted as an exquisite adaptation of a poem of thanksgiving. Maecenas would have known the identity of the donor, after all. But Horace also seems to distance himself from other conventions that we associate with the poetry of patronage. Although, as mentioned earlier, some of his poems could be classified as occasional verse, most often the occasion is but the thinnest pretext for a poem. The first book of Epistles provides many examples. Horace also does not promise to immortalize friends in his poetry, and he generally refrains from puffing their literary productions in the way that poets like Martial do. When he alludes to work by Maecenas and Tibullus, for example, it is to imagined rather than actual writings.[16] Even his most specific homage to poetry written by friends (Satires 1.10.40-45) functions within the context of an argument about his own work.
One aspect of social attachments which Horace does emphasize, especially in his early work, is that they engage him as much with groups as with individuals. Some of his most memorable vignettes are of groups, as when he describes the writers and magnates who frequent Maecenas' house (Satires 1.9.48-52) or the cronies desperate for amusement during a dull journey (Satires 1.5) or dinner-party (Satires 2.8). Not surprisingly, shared interests in poetry often provide the focus: about twenty of Horace's friends can be identified as writers of verse. He says that he was first taken to Maecenas by poet friends (Satires 1.6.54-56). He claims that he limits readings of his work to groups of friends (Satires 1.4.73), and it is just such an audience that he evokes at the end of Satires 1.10, where he ticks off the names of fifteen fans. The collective appetite for poetry among his friends also inspired the image of the literary smorgasbord he develops at Epistles 2.2.58-64.
Literary exchanges in this milieu flow in many directions, unlike the exchange of material goods, which flow from richer to poorer. The compliments that Maecenas received from Horace were reciprocated by compliments he made to him in prose and poetry of his own.[17] Recitations of verse were as likely to be staged by rich men before dependent friends as vice-versa, a situation on which Horace comments at Ars Poetica 419-25, and poets whom he praises include the senator Pollio as well as his peers Vergil and Varius. Horace represents himself as being both a recipient and a source of literary requests and literary criticism.[18]
Since these interactions and the communal framework in which they take place are not obviously explicable in terms of patronage, it would be helpful to have supplementary models of exchange to deal with them.[19] Alternatives are all the more desirable because we have so few data in which to ground the basic postulates of patronage. If largesse defines a patron, strictly speaking only two of the people connected with Horace qualify. With few can we be sure that he had long-lasting relationships, and to many whose social standing was plainly higher (the senator Valgius, for example) he does not exhibit the deference that would suggest an association on unequal terms. The conventional model presumes too much in Horace's milieu that we cannot observe, and explains too little that we can.
Sociopoetic Perspectives
The selection of friends presented in Horace's poems differs in some respects from the set he would be expected to have acquired in real life. As noted earlier, more than half of those he invokes are senators and knights, who made up only a small fraction of society overall. Other categories seem underrepresented. Horace cites no Roman women among his friends, apart from pseudonymous and possibly fictitious lovers. He identifies only one compatriot from his Apulian homeland and only two among the comrades whom he followed onto the losing side during the civil war.[20] Although grammatici, the teacher-critics who were the academics of his day, played a vigorous part in contemporary literary life, Horace professes to disdain them and numbers one at most among his set.[21] Dozens of Greek poets and intellectuals sojourned in Rome during his lifetime, but they too scarcely figure among the associates he names. The only Greeks in evidence are a diplomat in whose company he once journeyed, a doctor, and perhaps his booksellers and a landowner in Sicily.[22] While it cannot be proved that the friends he advertises do not correlate closely with the friends he had, that seems a plausible surmise, given the apparent biases in our sample. Horace's selectivity extends also to what he reports about the relationships that he does advertise. He rarely alludes to benefits or literary requests and he skirts other conventions of praise poetry. His poems are at best an imperfect mirror of his activities and attachments in society.
Not that most readers have supposed differently, of course. But over the past generation, as critics have stressed the constructedness of every facet of Latin poetry, they have argued that it is no less true of the prosopography than of anything else in Horace's poems. From the critical perspective that Zetzel (1982) sketched as "the poetics of patronage," a relationship treated in poetry carries a meaning intrinsic to the poem or book, which may or may not correspond to an external reality.