Horace's Roman Odes: A Critical Examination

93 Pages·1983·1.781 MB·English

by  Charles Witke

HORACE’S ROMAN ODES
A Critical Examination
MNEMOSYNE
BIBLIOTHECA CLASSICA BATAVA
COLLEGERUNT
A. D. LEEMAN ■ H. W. PLEKET · C. J. RUIJGH
BIBLIOTHECAE FASCICULOS EDENDOS CURAVIT
C. J. RUIJGH, KLASSIER SEMINARIUM, OUDE TURFMARKT 129, AMSTERDAM
SUPPLEMENTUM SEPTUAGESIMUM SEPTIMUM
CHARLES WITKE
HORACE’S ROMAN ODES
A Critical Examination
A ® *
2 JÈm >
jF
V*
LUGDUNI BATAVORUM E. J. BRILL M CM LXXXIII
HORACE’S ROMAN ODES
A Critical Examination
BY
CHARLES WITKE
LEIDEN E.J· BRILL 1983
ISBN 90 04 07006 0
Copyright 1983 by E. J. Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
translated in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche
or any other means without written permission from the publisher
PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS BY E. J. BRILL
CONTENTS
Preface..................................................................................................................... vii
I. Horace and the Roman Odes........................................................... 1
II. The Ordo Legendi.................................................................................... 6
III. The First Roman Ode........................................................................... 19
IV. The Second Roman O de.................................................................... 28
V. The Third Roman O de...................................................................... 37
VI. The Fourth Roman O de..................................................................... 47
VII. The Fifth Roman Ode ........................................................................ 58
VIII. The Sixth Roman O de........................................................................ 66
Epilogue and Odes III.7................................................................................... 78
Index........................................................................................................................ 83

PREFACE
I should like to thank the Horace H. Rackham school of Graduate
Studies of the University of Michigan for making it possible for me to
conduct research in Italy for this work, and for much help in the prepara­
tion and publication of it . My thanks are also extended to the staff of the
Apostolic Library of the Vatican. I also express my gratitude to Professor
John H. D ’Arms for his warm hospitality in 1979 as Director of the
American Academy in Rome, where much of the present work was
carried out, and likewise for his imaginative support as chairman of my
Department. Finally, my thanks to Baoyu, Canyon, Yogi and Aileen
Gatten for making my tasks easier.
Ann Arbor, Michigan
7.II.83

CHAPTER ONE
HORACE AND THE ROMAN ODES
To embark upon a study of Horace’s Roman Odes, the first six odes of
his third book of lyrics, and so-called from their patriotic themes and ad­
dress to Roman citizens, is to enter a well-worked terrain. For centuries
students of Latin lyric have addressed themselves to the myriad facets of
these six texts, and have also, sometimes brilliantly, attempted a study of
their entirety.1 To offer yet another work concerned with these poems
implies that something new can be said about them, some novel meaning
or interpretation be imputed to them or ostensibly dieted from them. Yet
it might also be useful to assemble a study of the Roman Odes which,
while offering no startling re-assessment of their import as a whole, might
nevertheless raise certain questions about the Roman Odes in light of
new perspectives opened up by modern literary criticism on the one
hand, and new awareness of the dimensions and strategems of Roman
political art on the other. Such a study might enable one to experience
these poems more fully as a twentieth century reader, as well as suggest
ways whereby the text organizes itself in accord with principles more 1
1 For the coining of the term “Roman Odes” to mean Horace, Odes III.1-6, reference
is usually made to Theodore Mommsen’s “Festrede” in Sitzungsberichte der königlich
Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, (Berlin, 1889), pp. 25ff. But the term occurs earlier
in F. Curschmann, “Die Römeroden,” Horatianis, (Berlin, 1887), pp. 43-56. Among
numerous studies one may note F. Klingner, Die Römeroden: Studien zur griechischen und
römischen Literatur (Zürich, 1964), pp. 333-352; R. Heinze, “Der Zyklus der
Römeroden, ” in Vom Geist des Römertums (Stuttgart, 1960), pp. 190ff., a reprint from Neue
Jahrbücher für Paedagogik 5 (1929), pp. 675ff. ; Eduard Fraenkel, Horace (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1957), pp. 260ff.; G. Pasquali, Orazio lirico2 (Florence, 1964), 649ff.;
Carl Koch, “Der Zyklus der Römeroden,” Neue Jahrbücher für Antike und Deutscher Bildung
2-3 (1941), pp. 62ff.; Hans Opperman, “Zum Aufbau der Römeroden,” Gymnasium 66
(1959), pp. 204ff.; Victor Pöschl, “Pqetry and Philosophy in Horace,” The Poetic Tradition
ed. D. C. Allen and H. T. Rowell, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1968), pp. 47ff., especially pp. 58ff.; L. A. Moritz, “Some ‘Central’ Thoughts on
Horace’s Odes,” Classical Quarterly, n.s. 18, (1968), pp. 116ff., especially pp. 125ff.
Studies of the individual poems have also been undertaken by Fraenkel and by Steele
Commager, The Odes of Horace ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962). References to
these two scholars will be noted in connection with the several Roman Odes. D. O. Ross,
Backgrounds to Augustan Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp.
139-152, also addresses some comments to the Roman Odes. These have been termed
“the Finest use to which these methods [of Ross: viz., to move from small philological
points to wider literary implications, with sensitivity to nuances of tone and style] have
ever been put”; J. E. G. Zetzel, “Gallus, Elegy and Ross,” Classical Philology 72 (1977),
p. 250. R. Heinze, Vom Geist des Römertums, p. 213, thought the Roman Odes the most
discussed work of Roman literature.
HORACE AND THE ROMAN ODES
familiar to an Augustan audience than to our own times. Without
arrogating to itself the claim of definitiveness or even total novelty save in
the application of methods not hitherto invoked for the examination of
Horace’s poetry, such a study as the present one might also validate
certain modern critical approaches to an ancient text.
The idea of civic poetry in lyric form is foreign if not repugnant to a
modern Western audience. For us, the lyric is essentially private, even an
overheard statement made by the poet in relation or reaction to some
vision or experience of his world to which his words give us access. For
the ancient world, such a conception of lyric poetry would have been em­
barrassing or even incomprehensible, as were certain aspects of Catullus’
highly personal and unironic verse for Horace. Classical Greek usage had
restricted melé to poems sung to musical accompaniment, in distinction to
iambic and elegiac verse, and in contrast to non-narrative and non-
dramatic poetry. Horace’s poems, which open up Latin lyric to the
wealth of Greek meter and subject, were indeed lyrics but not designed
for singing,2 rather they are lyrical by virtue of their meters, subjects and
forms. The term lyric as modernly used is non-generic and descriptive,
denoting poetry presenting the artist’s image in relationship to himself,
fusing concept and image in sound. For the Greeks as for the Romans,
the lyric poet, in varying ways and with increasingly complex
developments, spoke not only for and to himself, but for all who could
hear him and heed him. There was a clear place for the lyricist in Greek
literature; one need only think of the political statements of the Aeolian
poets reflecting tension between the received oligarchic traditions and
newer ideas. The Roman audience for Horace’s three books of Odes,
published as a unit in 23 B.C., would have been prepared through
awareness of Greek antecedents to understand that lyric poetry addressed
to public concerns existed as a recognizable form. Further, their own
literature had provided, through Ennius’ Annales and Lucilius’ books of
satires, to name but two of many, the examples of poets who addressed
civic concerns, if not in lyric, at any rate in verse. An Augustan audience
would experience increasing manipulation of its attention also by means
of political statements made on coins, and in civic art. Finally, an atten-
2 Pace A. Bonavia Hunt, Horace the Minstrel (Kineton, Warwick England, 1969), an
idiosyncratic work devoted to this thesis. It is the contention of E. Poehlmann, “Marius
Victorinus zum Odengesang bei Horaz,” Philologus 109, (1965), pp. 133ff., that the Odes
were to be recited, not sung. On Horace’s Alcaic meter see J. P. M. Blackett, “A Note on
the Alcaic Stanza,” Greece and Rome, second series 3, (1956), pp. 83L;J. Hellegouarc’h,
“Observations stylistiques et métriques sur les vers lyriques d’Horace,” L’Information lit-
teraire 18, (1966), pp. 66ff., especially p. 74. For rhyme in Horace, see O. Skutsch’s
remarks in the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London 11
(1964), pp. 73-78.