A snooty word for “snooty”

Horace is best known for his lyric poetry, the four books of Odes. In these poems especially he is a word artist who can make even Virgil seem ordinary, and that is hard for me to say.

An example follows.

In the first poem of the third book of his Odes, not for the first or last time, he chides people who believe that material comfort is the answer to their problems. An illustration is a rich man building a fancy villa by the sea (3.1.32-40):

Contracta pisces aequora sentiunt
iactis in altum molibus: huc frequens
     caementa demittit redemptor
     cum famulis dominusque terrae

fastidiosus: sed Timor et Minae
scandunt eodem quo dominus, neque
     decedit aerata triremi et
     post equitem sedet atra Cura.

Fish feel the shrinking of the water as massive piers
are dropped into the deep. Here come crowding
the owner who has wearied of dry land
and the contractor with his slaves throwing in

the building rubble. But Fear and Foreboding
climb as high as the master. Black Care
stays aboard the bronze-plated trireme,
and sits behind the Knight.

No matter how visibly successful you are, says Horace, whether commanding a ship, parading through Rome as a Knight, or building a villa that extends out into the sea, you can never escape the troubles that attend all humanity, high, low and in between.

Horace in the Odes is working on a very small canvass, the miniature metrical schemes he’s borrowed from archaic Greek poets such as Sappho and (here) Alcaeus. His response was to develop a style of poetic expression that a character in Petronius’ Satyricon calls curiosa felicitas (118), “meticulous appositeness”, a precision in word selection, word placement, and word combination. For Quintilian he is uerbis felicissime audax (Inst. 10.1.96). In both cases these critics are using an appropriately concise, Horatian turn of phrase to capture the character of his poetry, but this might be translated “daring in his diction to great effect”. At its most brilliant, Horace’s lyric poetry identifies the mot juste, situates that mot juste perfectly, and combines it with another mot juste to intensify poetic felicity to the maximum degree.

An excellent instance of just this is the three-word expression that in the Latin bridges these two stanzas, dominusque terrae// fastidiosus (“and the owner who has wearied of dry land”).

These tiny lyric stanzas work rather like individual lines in more expansive metres, in the sense that the stanza is felt to be a sense unit, and that carries with it an expectation that the end of the stanza will coincide with a sense break (even though it often doesn’t). Here there’s a very marked disruption of the integrity of the stanza, a single expression strung out between two, and the very least that does is defer and enhance our appreciation of the complete meaning of the expression, giving special impact to the first word in the second stanza, fastidiosus.

Which we shall contemplate for a spell, for it is the mot juste, perfectly placed, and perfectly combined. Roughly, this word means “bored”: it governs terrae, “of dry land”, and it describes the dominus, the owner of the property, its proprietor: thus “the master bored of dry land”.

But that isn’t to begin to do fastidiosus justice. Fastidium is an aversion to something, and fastidiosus is an adjective formed from the noun plus an -osus suffix which carries the sense of “full of, prone to”–thus uinosus is “addicted to wine”, curiosus is “full of care”, “meticulous”, and Catullus’ description of Spain, cuniculosus (37.18), is “crawling with rabbits”. To be fastidiosus is thus to be full of this aversion, to be something like squeamish, though I refer you to Robert Kaster in Transactions of the American Philological Association 2001 for a proper discussion of fastidium, a Roman emotion that is extremely interesting when analysed. But for now, and all these examples come from Kaster, you might feel fastidium if, like Pliny the Elder, you were contemplating having to eat a lizard (Historia Naturalis 30.90) or at the very mention of bedbugs (29.61); or you might prove yourself a very inadequate Roman indeed if you betrayed the fundamental principles of amicitia, “friendship”, by being in aequos et pares fastidiosus, (something like) “contemptuous of your equals” (Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.52).

Fastidiosus is a rich word of disapproval in its own right, then. But that’s just one step in the choice, combination and placement of a word. Here the owner of this extravagant villa is terrae fastidiosus, “contemptuous of the land”. The rich man building his house out into the sea is wrong-headed in the same way as a Roman being a snob about his fellow Romans, but to an extreme degree. This man is so disconnected from reality and good sense that he can’t stomach something as basic to everyday human existence as dry land. Terrae fastidiosus is a paradox capturing a profoundly unhealthy state of mind.

That’s the mot juste and combination of mots justes covered, then. But what about placement?

This is where the stanza break comes in. By separating the word for “dry land” and the word for “bored/contemptuous of/disgusted by” between the two stanzas Horace is also visually illustrating on the poetry page this man’s unhealthy thinking, and enacting his disdain in our reading about it. What’s perfect about the placement of fastidiosus is that it makes the word itself look contemptuous of terrae, like it wants nothing to do with it. Fastidium is all about keeping your distance from something unappealing: Cicero talks of us being caused by fastidium to back away (abalienemur, de Orat. 3.98).

What do we do between stanzas of a poem we’re reading? We pause momentarily, take a breath: the result is that fastidiosus is separated, unnaturally, from the rest of its expression, and Horace has placed some supercilious space, analogous also to the seaward extension of the rich man’s villa, between fastidiosus and “the dry land” of the previous stanza.

Curiosa felicitas.