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ROLANDO FERRI
The Epistles
Our MSS of Horace and his ancient commentators know two different books of epistulae in the corpus of his poems.[1] What is thus called the ‘first book of Epistles’ (epistularum liber primus) in the MSS is a collection of twenty hexametrer poems of varying length, from thirteen to 112 lines, which were published by Horace in the year 20 or 19 BCE, and probably composed during the three or four preceding years.[2] A second ‘book of epistles’ comprises two much longer poems addressing Iulius Florus and Augustus, and devoted mainly to literary topics (though the letter to Florus, the older of the two, is still very close to the first book). These later poems, to which the longer Ars poetica, or Ad Pisones is sometimes attached as ‘Ep. 2.3’, are less clearly identifiable as letters, and they altogether belong in a tradition different from that of the first book. The two ‘books’ therefore call for separate discussions, and we shall concentrate first on book 1.[3]
The practice of presenting a poem as a letter in verse rather than a song performed before an audience at a symposium or a religious celebration, is early, and cross-generic, spanning from lyric to elegy: it has been recognized in Sappho and Solon (to Mimnermus), and even some among the epinicia of Pindar and Bacchylides are commonly treated as poetic epistles.[4]
In the Hellenistic age an important change has occurred, because poems are often referred to as written documents, physical objects which can be addressed and delivered to someone. In this context, it must have been relatively natural, even for texts not exhibiting formal markers of epistolarity, such as initial and final salutations, to become in some sense epistolary. However, among extant poems of this age, texts explicitly presented as sent messages are few, mainly some epigrams accompanying gifts, invitation billets (AP 11.44), and love letters (AP 5.9).[5] At Rome, before Horace, poetic epistles are found in Catullus and Propertius, and in the Corpus Tibullianum;[6] even some of Horace’s odes, for example Carmina 1.20 and 4.12, two invitation poems, fall into the category.
Perhaps more importantly for Horace, one of the satires of book 5 of Lucilius’ Satires began as a letter to an inattentive friend, scolded by the poet for failing to inquire about his health. It is not certain, however, how the epistolary beginning evolved in the rest of the poem. The fragment we possess leads quickly to a discussion of homoeoteleuta, and the suspicion arises that the epistolary beginning was only a pretext, an original device excogitated to satisfy the variety requirements of the genre of satire.[7]
Yet, notwithstanding the importance of recent formal precedents, especially neoteric, an entire book of poems purporting to be a collection of private letters was a novelty among ancient poetic genres, and one which Horace must have initiated withsome determination.
Horace has chosen to present the Epistles as a collection of real letters, and the framework of an epistolary exchange is maintained consistently and repeatedly asserted. Apart from the deployment, ably varied, of standard formulae of salutation at beginning and end of the letters (Ep. 8.1; 6.67; 10.1), Horace alludes to prior exchange with his correspondents, answers requests or complaints (Ep. 12), imparts admonitions, expects answers or visits (Ep. 3.30; 5.30; 10.49, 15.25), gives and seeks information, adapts the tone and content of the letter to the personalities and interests of his interlocutors.[8] The pretence of a real letter is kept up by even jumbling up together unrelated, or tenuously related, topics, in imitation of the miscellaneous character of real correspondence (cf. Ep.12.20-9).[9]
In contemporary or near-contemporary Latin poetic books, for example in Catullus or Propertius, the inclusion of the occasional letter was a device deployed to to create a different pathetic background for the main themes of friendship, love, separation, and infidelity (as most characteristically in Propertius 1.11 and 4.3, or in Catullus 35). More generally, the choice of the epistle tied in with the Callimachean and generally Hellenistic fondness for minor poetic genres, in which more intimate, life-like pictures of personal relationships could be drawn, and where even the little things and mundane details of life could be given a space (cf. Catullus 13, the invitation poem).
Yet an entire book of sole letters, as Horace chose to publish now - not letters as diversives in a book of satires and epigrams, or poetic epistles among sublime lyrics – aimed at telling a different story about the poet’s newly chosen path in life. Horace wanted to show himself enfenced in his world of philosophy, letters, and friends, engrossed in occupations more pressing and important than poetry. Indeed, he now proclaims to ‘give up poetry, and all other bagatelles’ in order to devote himself to philosophy (et uersus et cetera ludicra pono), and the form of the private document he has elected is consistent with this programmatic statement.[10] As the envoi (20) will elaborate more explicitly, the Epistles (Horace affects to believe) were not even meant for publication: they have ‘run away’ from the poet’s boxes, like a delinquent slave longing for a better life – a fictional scenario which is also an important poetic manifesto.[11]
In this way, the very choice of communicative medium relates to the poet’s newly chosen stance, and of his persona. Horace expresses himself in a distant and indirect form, looking away from the readers of the book, facing only his private addressees, as if he wished to situate himself at some remove from Roman society. Future readers are– the last poem will drive the point home–eavesdroppers, unforeseen listeners overhearing a muffled sound of confessions, complaints, exhortations.
Also importantly, a number of letters claim to be despatched from Horace’s country estate or some other location away from Rome (2, 7, 10, 13), and several others are compatible with the same setting (16, 18). Horace elaborates a new scenario for his letters, different from the fairy, diaphanous, poetic landscape of the Odes (e.g. Carmina 1.17; 2.6).[12]Founding a new genre, the Epistles set up their own landscape, out of time, dilapidated, yet self-sufficient like the philosophy which now Horace wants to be his way of life. The poet sits and waits behind the crumbling pillars of Vacuna’s temple(10.49 post fanum putre Vacunae) a name conjuring up timelessness, emptiness, leisure; he lives in a shady valley, enclosed by a crown of mountains, which he calls latebrae dulces, a ‘sweet hideout’ (16.15); the nearby village is wrinkled with frost (18.105 rugosus frigore pagus); happiness now is for Horace a path of life which hides away (ibid. 103 fallentis semita uitae); of his friends, the melancholy Albius drags himself wearily along solitary woods(4.4), another seeks oblivion in godforsaken corners in Asia (11).[13]. The town vignettes of so many brilliant satires, most memorably in Sat. 1.6, 1.9, 2.6, have almost entirely disappeared.[14]
If the model of the new genre was the prose, non-literary letter, it would be crucial to know what books of prose letters were in circulation at the time and how they helped to shape Horace’s project. Leafing through Cugusi’scollection of all known letters from the III century to the end of the Republic (1970, 1979), it comes as somewhat of a surprise to encounter the names of some 150 personages on record for writing letters. In fact, the surprise is mitigated by a look at the correspondence of Cicero, which shows how widespread and routine writing and reading letters was for many upper-class Romans: the Epistles certainly presuppose the routine practice of letter writing on the intellectual horizon of Horace’s readers. But granted that writing letters was an ordinary activity, we cannot point/ put our fingers on published books of real spontaneous letters, sincere giveaways of their writers’ feelings, at Rome, before Horace’s Epistles or Cicero’s Ad Atticum.[15]
The Epistles are perhaps, among the works of Horace, that which has been most consciously planned and set up as a book: the letters gain enormously from being read one after the other, indeed they require a continuous reading, in which even backslidings, second thoughts, contradictions are parts of an overall effect planned on the reader (see infra).[16] At the same time the montage of the book, with its variety of correspondents and themes, is designed to communicate a sense of discontinuity and fragmentation. This is done with two aims in mind: on the one hand, to impart the work the casual spontaneity of the document; on the other, the gaps in the continuous narrative create a tension about what has been left outside the book, for us to imagine: the story behind, the real lives and moral predicaments of the poet and his followers-friends.[17] This very curiosity about the people of the Epistles, the author and his respondents,is a vehicle used to enhance the protreptic impact, the message of the work.
But who are the people of the Epistles?Horace showed even by his selection of correspondents, how much his book of letters should pose as a private and personal document. Horace seems to have been by now on a fairly firm footing with Augustus, even a ‘star’ of the Augustan literary establishment. The princeps wanted him on his staff, as a private secretary (cf. Suet. De poetis p. 44 Reifferscheid), and the clout and status of Horace were to be given public recognition by the prestigious commission to write the Carmen saeculare for the celebrations of 17. Yet the Epistles don’t open up a window into the world and thoughts of the great and good; the addressees of the work, apart from Maecenas, seem to have been mainly second-rank individuals. The bookdoes not include letters to politically influential personages, or protagonists of the Roman poetic and intellectual stage such as, say, Pollio, Agrippa, Vergil, Varius. Apart from Albius, perhaps the poet Tibullus, only minor figures turn up, some unidentifiable (16, 17), others with more definite personalities: a young man with a good family background (2, 18), friends from older days (9, 10, 11), aspiring writers, perhaps young (3, 8), a would-be natural philosopher, now managing Agrippa’s estates in Sicily (12), a Lucanian notable (15, Numonius Vala), and Horace’s own bailiff (14). This stands in some contrast with several of the Odes, and most notably with book IV, where crucial figures of the imperial house, and other representatives of the nobility are given great importance.[18]
Writing to relatively undistinguished friends, who had not attained public eminence, was then a deliberate choice: the book sets up its own ideal society of friends who become prime targets of the book’s moral research for wisdom. Although the poet reaches out to them to meet their requests and respond to their moral predicaments, none of them upstages the poet, hijacking/ stealing the content of the letter by a prepossessing personality.
For all the miscellaneous, plural features of the Epistles, the work is kept together by a major unifying feature, a concern for ethics, as applied to all situations in life, the uiuere recte or ‘right living’: it is this unifying thread that permeates and binds together what may appear sometimes difficult to reconcile with a monolithic reading of the work, such as, in Epp. 17 and 18, the advice on how to gain favour and ingratiate themselves with powerful patrons, apparently at odds with the great stress on freedom and self-sufficiency advocated in most other epistles.[19] Horace’s attitude as a teacher is that of a more advanced fellow student, eager but tolerant and often uncertain about the best answer to the problem at hand, even open to better suggestions, if any come to mind (cf. Ep. 6.67-8): there is not just one way of life he can recommend, although he has his own predilections.[20]
Around this ethical core, the Epistles build up a determined didactic thrust / project / programme, for which Horace must have drawn inspiration from the model of the Greek philosophical letter. Collections and anthologies of letters, mostly spurious, went under the name of several Greek philosophers, from Socrates onwards:[21] by far the most significant of them for Horace must have been the correspondence of Epicurus, not only for the great appeal Epicureanism had for Horace throughout his poetic career,[22] but also for the intrinsic charm of Epicurus’ letters, which were to be an important model also for Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius.
Epicurus used his correspondence as a means to keep contact with his closest friends and disciples scattered by the Hellenistic diaspora, in a way which calls to mind the role of epistolography for early Christian communities. Epicurus’ correspondents spanned a social spectrum as wide or wider than Horace’s, from old disciples who had become powerful ministers, and needed reminding that happiness was but a simple thing, to women and children. Epicurus succeeded to interweave in his letters the personal and affectionate with the theoretically challenging; and was capable even of speaking of himself in humourous, captivating tones.[23]
The epistolary medium could then, and with good precedent, both serve as a protreptic, and afford an opportunity for the expression of one’s true self and self-analysis. Indeed, autobiography and self-confession are part of an ‘effective protreptic tactic’,[24] making for a more gripping and convincingmessage exactly because that message does not resonate from the serene heights of superhuman wisdom, but is pronounced down below amidst the fray by one who is only a little farther along the way.
Like Seneca in his Epistulae ad Lucilium, Horace presents himself as a man still in search of illumination, not as a perfect, and much of the appeal and comedy of the Letters derives from Horace’s dwelling on his own neuroses, his dissatisfaction, his sudden changes of mind (cf. Ep. 8.3-12, 15.42-6). The persuasiveness his words carry for his addressees is nurtured/ sustained by the manner in which Horace sits next to them, and discloses his inner thoughts and anguishes. So, for example, Horace endeavours to cure the elusive Bullatius of his compulsive travel mania by showing that he sometimes feels the same drive to get away from it all: ‘You know Lebedus: it’s lonelier than Gabii/ or Fidenae: and yet, o to live just there,/ and forgetting and forgotten by my friends (oblitusque meorum, obliuiscendus et illis)/ from the distant shore look down at Neptune raving’, only to conclude ‘crossing the sea is a change of air, not heart./ A busy idleness drives us: in ships and cars/ we seek the good life. What you seek is here,/ or at Ulubrae, so long as your heart is calm’ (11. 7-10; 27-30; transl. MacLeod; Vlubrae was a village on the edges of the Pomptine marshes, the quintessence of desolation).
Older treatments of the Epistles tended to stress the similarity of the Epistles with the earlier collections of satires, in meter, style, presentation of argument, and choice of topics, sometimes minimizing the originality of the new book.[25] Indeed, the link with the Satires is very important, and close echoes of the earlier collection are numerous and significant. Several satiric themes are picked up in the Epistles although the crudest and most diatribic have been left behind: there is no talk of the right kind of sex (Sat. 1.2), or of legacy-hunting (2.5), almost no literary parody. But above all, the poetic mask donned by Horace is different. The poet no longer strolls about the city, seeking out occasions for laughter or censure at the expense of ridiculous maniacs, or even of himself, and the choice and treatment of a topic are conducted with a friend’s wish or need in mind, not as points on the diatribic agenda.
One significant example of the redeployment of familiar themes and atmospheres in different colours in the new genre is letter 15. A medical prescription sets the poet on a journey towards a spa, less fashionable than his usual summer haunts, and the poet asks a friend to write back with information about the climate, the roads, the people, the drinking water, very important for a convalescent – but, his friend is not to bother about the local wines: he is sure not to care greatly about those, and will bring some from his best reserve to keep in good spirits.
The garrulousness and longwindedness of Ep. 15 are a masterwork of studied pretence: the periods flow in a rambling sequence, in which the main request for information is interspersed with parenthetic digressions, adding chatty and unnecessary, though memorable details (in a flashforward, the surprise of the poet’s equipage at the unexpected turn when they reach the familiar Baiae-Cumae junction, the spite and anger of the neglected holiday towns personified): it all seems to go on forever.
The letter starts as a real document responding to a practical need: we may even wonder why was such a mundane, even frivolous letter included. A suspicion glimmers through as we fend our way through the embarrassed contortions of the letter, the starts and jolts of the syntax. Then the poet picks up himself, and rounds off the ramble with a story and a confession: does Vala know that notorious glutton, old Maenius, so ready to pillory the profligate when money is out, and so quick to throw all aloofness and turn into an Epulon when money is in again? He is no different from him now.