Lalage, a life
In 1913, Aurel Stein, archaeologist and explorer, was preparing for his third expedition into Chinese Turkestan, modern Xinjiang. He made sure to pack, as he always did, a copy of Horace’s Odes, on this occasion the recently published Odes and Epodes translated by C.E. Bennett in the new series of Loeb Classical Texts from Harvard University. On the inside cover of the book Stein wrote In ripis Hydaspis MDCCCCXIII, “On the banks of the Hydaspes 1913”. Later in his expedition he added Gravi vulnere aegrotantis solatium fuit iste libellus in montibus Sericis Nan-shan, “This book was a comfort when suffering from a serious injury in the Chinese Nan-shan mountains.” Stein had been thrown by an excitable horse and spent some time recuperating in camp, his Horace to hand. These inscriptions in Stein’s Loeb were recorded by L. Rásonyi, Stein Aurél és hagyatéka [Aurel Stein and his Legacy] (1960), on page 30, most fortuitously so as since that time the cover of the book, bequeathed along with much else by Stein to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, has been mislaid. I’m deeply grateful to Ágnes Kelecsényi of the Academy for all this information.
“On the banks of the Hydaspes” is a little Horatian joke on Stein’s part. He was in Srinagar, Kashmir, which lies on the river Jhelum or Vyeth, in Greek antiquity named Hydaspes, and so named in particular in one of Horace’s most popular odes, 1.22, Integer vitae:
I think I’ve now sent off a final text of Horace: A Very Short Introduction, which will see the light of day sooner or later, but I thought I might thread together some scattered references I make to this particular poem of Horace and its fairly remarkable life story. You can’t embed YouTube videos in a book, either, and it would be a shame not to share a couple of them.
Horace’s poem is a particularly satisfying exercise in playful misdirection. An apparently sombre and high-minded opening, claiming that the virtuous man should have no fear of any harm, a Stoic doctrine, is somewhat punctured by the appearance of an addressee for the poem, Aristius Fuscus, a literary type and friend of Horace who has been advertised as a man with a sense of humour in Satires 1.9 and would by implication be characterised as a Stoic with a sense of humour in Epistles 1.10. Greater damage still to the respectability of Odes 1.22 is done by the poet’s lover Lalage, whose name means “Chatterer”, “Babbler”. Horace is singing about her when the wolf runs away from him, but that seemingly incidental detail returns unexpectedly at the end of the poem to derail what we’re probably expecting to be a restatement of the opening: “No matter what inhospitable place I find myself in, my virtue will keep me safe” is instead “No matter what inhospitable place I find myself in, the answer is to sing about Lalage as I was doing when that wolf appeared.”
Philosophy gives way to a flippant love affair, then, and it’s possible also that the effect is reinforced by a move from poetry reminiscent of Alcaeus to a more Sapphic conclusion. The metrical form of the poem, the sapphic stanza, was shared between Alcaeus and Sappho, but there is a clear allusion to Sappho fr. 31 (and Catullus’ imitation of it) in the final image of Lalage, while specifically Alcaic elements in the poem have been argued for by Gabriele Burzacchini, QUCC 22 (1976), 39-58, and one might say (and once I did) that poetry focusing on an attractive young woman is itself intrinsically reminiscent of Sappho. I also suggested back then that the Mytilenean duo Sappho and Alcaeus offered Horace in his Odes a mini polarity between relatively serious and relatively unserious lyric poetry — always according to ancient stereotype.
That’s all as may be, but for our purposes what matters is that it follows from this account of Integer vitae that if you lop off the last four stanzas you have an apparently serious poem, and the remarkable truth is that historically 1.22 has probably been encountered far more often in this form, just the first or the first two stanzas, than as a whole. The reason for this is a melancholy musical setting by F.F. Flemming that became a standard at funerals in northern-European funerals. Here it is sung by a German collective, although somewhat inauthentically (I think) they sing the first three verses.
The other Latin author I’m currently working on, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, shares in his Latin-language newspaper a discussion of the poem between himself and a Finnish Classics professor in Helsinki, “F. G-n”, identified by my co-editor Michael Lombardi-Nash as Fridolf Vladimir Gustafsson, Professor of Latin at Helsinki University from 1882 to 1920 and according to Iiro Kajanto, “The Classics in Finland”, Arethusa 3 (1970), 205-226, a formative influence in the history of Classics in Finland. (This is a rich Classical culture under severe pressure at the moment, I’m sad to say: there are petitions worth signing relating to Classics at Oulu here and Turku here.) One thing that makes editing Alaudae such a fascinating activity are Ulrichs’ interlocutors across Europe and the US.
Gustafsson had attended a funeral of a friend at which Flemming’s Integer Vitae had been sung by the congregation, and the friend’s widow had asked him to translate the whole poem for her — an awkward dilemma, as Lalage is not especially funereal. What’s interesting is that Ulrichs, who is undoubtedly one of Horace’s very biggest fans, seems to agree with Gustafsson that the poem is unsatisfactory, a dignified opening spoiled by the entry and especially the reappearance of Lalage. “Someone once exclaimed, “How did Pontius Pilate creep into the Christians’ creed?” I exclaim, “How did Lalage into Integer Vitae?”” But both Gustafsson and Ulrichs will no doubt have attended numerous funerals where this strange hymn was sung, and the sombre associations were perhaps impossible to escape. They were not alone in wanting to lose Lalage, at any rate. The metrically identical socios, “fellows”, was another way of bowdlerizing away the love interest Lalagen in school texts.
The poem seems to have been favoured for musical setting also in the heyday of the frottola, the most widespread form of secular song in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Italy. Here you can find a setting by Bartolomeo Tromboncino, and here at 2:10 by Michele Pesenti.
A final outing for the poem now, accompanied by a request for any others you know of. (I have myself found and am pondering a parody of the poem in Proceedings of the Cotteswold Naturalists’ Club circa 1853, beginning Innocens vitis, cellar-isque purus, “Innocent of the vine, of the cellar pure”, and by (I believe) William Henry Hyett.) Below is the whole of the stunning film of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, directed by Julie Taymor and starring Anthony Hopkins, an appropriately gothic take on a Goth-driven Revenge Drama. Titus is a very classically-aware play, with an overarching debt to Seneca, Ovid’s Metamorphoses a key prop in the plot, and a general determination to collect and stage the most ghastly myths from antiquity. Do watch it, but count to ten before you do. At 4.2.18 (around 1hr 37mins in the film, where Shakespeare’s text is slightly adapted), Titus Andronicus, having discovered the plot of Aaron the Moor to destroy his family, sends his best weapons to the two Goth sons of the empress Tamora, who under Aaron’s guidance have committed their ghastly crimes, and along with them a note containing a meaningful quotation of the first two lines of 1.22:
DEMETRIUS
What’s here? A scroll, and written round about?
Let’s see:
[reads] Integer vitae, scelerisque purus,
Non eget Mauri iaculis, nec arcu.
CHIRON
O, ’tis a verse in Horace, I know it well.
I read it in the grammar long ago.
AARON
Ay, just — a verse in Horace, right, you have it.
[aside] Now, what a thing it is to be an ass!
Here’s no sound jest. The old man hath found their guilt
And sends them weapons wrapped about with lines
That wound, beyond their feeling, to the quick.
Anachronistically, these depraved young Roman-era Goths were educated using the so called Brevissima Institutio, a Latin textbook composed during the reign of Henry VIII by John Colet, Erasmus, but mainly William Lily, and in continuous use in schools for centuries thereafter. The first stanza of 1.22 is used in Lily as the model for its metrical form, the sapphic stanza. The textual variant Mauri, present in Lily and in Titus Andronicus, allows a pun, targeting Aaron: “The man pure in life and innocent of crime/ needs not the javelins nor bow of the Moor.” Aaron, at least, gets the point of it.
A moral of this very short history of Odes 1.22 is that, however much you try to suppress Lalage, she has a habit of resurfacing, sweetly laughing, sweetly speaking — a dynamic that began with Horace himself. A final thought is whether there’s a hint of the same here in Titus. Titus Andronicus’ beloved only daughter Lavinia has been raped and maimed by the Goth princes, at Aaron’s instigation, who have cut off her hands and removed “that delightful engine of her thoughts,/ that blabbed them with such pleasing eloquence” (3.1.83-4), her tongue. Yet she has managed to communicate the truth of their ghastly crimes nevertheless, mainly by means of a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses opened to the story of Philomela, and Titus’ revenge on Aaron and the princes follows.
Titus is surely conveying by the citation of Integer vitae not just that he knows of the plot, but that Lavinia has communicated it, the beloved babbler still babbling.
The Song of the Allobroges
A Horace blog to mark, a little belatedly, the draft of Horace: A Very Short Introduction that I submitted to OUP at the start of the month. But the Horatian poem I’ll be talking about here came to my attention through an entirely different project, the text and translation (with light commentary) of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ late-nineteeth-century Latin-language newspaper Alaudae that will be my major preoccupation this year (cf. recent blogs, passim).
The poem I’m concerned with here is not by Horace but an imitation of Horace by J. P. Steele written in 1894 and published, perhaps surprisingly, in The Lancet on March 31st of that year. It is a twenty-stanza Latin ode in alcaics on the occasion of the Eleventh International Medical Congress in Rome in April 1894, and it honours Guido Baccelli (1830-1916), the President of the Congress, an eminent physician and Ministro della Pubblica Istruzione (Minister of Public Education) in the Italian government. It also celebrates the Policlinico Umberto I, a modern teaching hospital in Rome, the first of its kind, of which Baccelli was the prime mover and in which the Congress was held, though this huge undertaking was not finally completed for another decade.
The poem is presented below along with a rough-and-ready translation done on trains through France, corrections to which would be welcome. But in summary, the author proposes, with a healthy dose of Horatian irony, that Rome had owed its ancient greatness as much to its devotion to the god of medicine Aesculapius as to its martial abilities, and that the recent revival of Rome as capital of the new nation of Italy is reflected in the renewed concern for the study of medicine in the city that Baccelli and the Policlinico exemplify.
We are informed by The Lancet that the poem was written for The Lancet and presented to Baccelli in advance of the Congress. Some explanation of this lies in Baccelli’s own enthusiasm for Latin. In his obituary in the British Medical Journal, 15 January 1916, p. 115, we learn that he “could discourse in Latin of a Ciceronian quality”, and at the preceding meeting of the triennial International Medical Congress in Berlin in 1890 Baccelli had flouted the requirement that communication be restricted to German, French and English by addressing the conference in Latin. The poem picks up on the breadth of Baccelli’s interests, bonarum cultor et artium et/ scientiarum.
The author of the poem, James Peddie Steele (1836-1917), we’d know less about but for a long and affectionate obituary in Papers of the British School at Rome 9 (1920), 1-15, by John Sandys, Cambridge Classicist and Public Orator. From this it emerges that he was another doctor-Classicist, a Scot who was a long-time resident of Italy, and latterly Florence, and who had a passion for Horace, and “was himself particularly fond of writing Alcaic odes after the model of Horace” (Sandys in an earlier eulogy in the TLS August 2, 1917 p.369). Sandys records Steele’s gift of books and bookcases to the nascent British School at Rome, his generous and authentically Horatian style of hospitality, and the summers he spent with friends at a villa in Tivoli, Sant’ Antonio, which a sequence of British owners had identified as the site of one of Horace’s properties. In letters to Sandys he described the view from the villa in a couplet adapted from Epistles 1.10, one of Horace’s most appealing poetic letters: Prospiciens Anienis aquas, et Tiburis umbram,/ Excepto quod non simul esses, cetera laetus, “Looking out over the waters of the Anio and the shade of Tivoli,/ in all respects happy except that you are not with me” (cf. Epist. 1.10.50). This intense identification with Horace is a feature of his afterlife, really unlike any other ancient poet.
For me, the trickiest detail of Steele’s poem to interpret were the references to the Allobroges. I had assumed a very loose reference to “barbarians”–Alaric conquering Rome in 410. But that seemed weak and didn’t make much sense in context. Illumination struck at Beaulieu-sur-Mer train station as I fell down a very deep rabbit hole in pursuit of the Italian/French character of this part of the Côte d’Azur. Key to the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian reunification, had been Victor Emmanuel of the House of Savoy, king of Sardinia and then from 1861 king of Italy. It was his forces that in 1870 “completed” the reunification by capturing Rome, entering the city by the Porta Pia in the Aurelian Walls, not far from the later site of the Policlinico, itself named after Victor Emmanuel’s son Umberto. The Allobroges, an Alpine people, are best known as Cicero’s informants during the Catilinarian Conspiracy, but their territory coincided with Savoy, or at any rate sufficiently so for Savoyards to claim the Allobroges as ancestors. Le Chant des Allobroges is one product of this.
Steele knows his Horace and does a good pastiche. A speech by Hannibal is inspired by Odes 4.4, and there’s one direct quotation from elsewhere in the Odes and no doubt others I’ve missed. He has managed a Horatian combination of adventurous word order and clarity, and exploits the inherent dynamics of the alcaic stanza, for instance using the emphasis given anything placed in the middle of the third line to highlight Baccelli’s name. I’ve mentioned already the characteristically Horatian elusiveness of tone. This poem is light and serious simultaneously.
Finally, it’s probably worth observing that with hindsight some of the assimilation of ancient and modern Rome that Steele pursues in 1894 foreshadows fascist ideology a generation later. An editorial in the same issue of The Lancet also addresses the Congress, Baccelli and the Policlinico (Steele was close to the editor, and may have effectively written it), and quotes a stanza from Horace’s Carmen Saeculare, alme Sol! … possis nihil urbe Roma/uisere maius (11-12), which was later inscribed on the fascist Arch of the Philaeni in Italian Libya; it was a fascist motto, in effect. Studying the 1890s, as I have certainly said before, is an eerie exercise in dramatic irony, seeing all the ingredients of the ruinous Twentieth Century as its protagonists plough on regardless.
I’ve added some even rougher and readier explanatory notes below. For Daphne I should have directed the reader to Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.452-567, where she is transformed into a laurel tree. In any case, enjoy what seems to me a remarkable transposition of Horace to the scientific aspirations of the late nineteenth century.
- The Gauls expelled from the Capitol by Manlius (and the geese) in 390BC.
- Pyrrhus of Epirus, of “pyrrhic victory” fame, defeated by the Romans in 275BC.
- Hannibal. The Gallic capture of Rome and Pyrrhus’ and Hannibal’s campaigns in Italy could be considered the three most significant conflicts in Rome’s rise to prominence.
- Epidaurus in the Peloponnese was a cult centre of Asclepius/Aesculapius, the god of medicine. In response to a plague in 293BC, the Romans sent an embassy to Epidaurus to secure the god for Rome, encouraged either by the Sibylline Books or the oracle at Delphi (in either case a Sibyl), and the god expressed his willingness by boarding the Roman ship in the form of the snake wrapped around his staff. In the last book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses the poem finally reaches Rome on the ship bearing Asclepius.
- Asclepius, still in the form of a snake, chose the Tiber island as his new residence, and that was the location of his shrine in Rome, perhaps constructed to recall the ship that first brought him there.
- The wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus.
- A Muse, speciality history, her name suggesting fame.
- The kings of the Allobroges are the nineteenth-century House of Savoy: see above.
- In a gorgeous couple of lines (I seem to share Steele’s taste in Horatian verses) Horace had asked his long-exiled friend Pompeius, quis te redonavit Quiritem/ dis patriis Italoque caelo, “who has restored you as a Roman citizen to your ancestral gods and the Italian sky?” (Odes 2.7.3-4), the unspoken answer being Augustus.
- Staged hunts of wild animals and gladiatorial munera, fights between men with variations of weaponry and armour, were two forms of Roman public entertainment in the Colosseum.
- Machaon and Podalirius, sons of Asclepius, were both doctors, described as such in Homer’s Iliad.
- The International Medical Congress was designed to be a triennial event, thus Washington D.C. in September 1887, Berlin in August 1890, Rome in March 1894, Moscow in August 1897. Trieteris strictly, by ancient inclusive counting, denoted a festival that occurred at intervals of two years, not three.
- Steele echoes Odes 3.29.35-6.
Ingenuo patre natus?
A snippet here, scribbled rapidly on a Saturday afternoon before the FA Cup final (in the event, I shouldn’t have scribbled so rapidly), from the research I’m doing toward Horace: A Very Short Introduction. The issue here is a detail, and quite a significant one given Roman snobbery, of the poet’s biography.
Horace’s stellar career, according to Horace himself, owed a lot to his father. But was his father born a slave?
If so, Horace’s career even prior to his success as a poet is stunningly unconventional. For instance, he enjoyed the Roman elite’s equivalent of higher education in Athens, hobnobbing with the most privileged stratum of Rome’s highly stratified society, and thereafter as tribunus militum, a rank again reserved for the Roman elite, he seems to have commanded a legion at Philippi. Rome was an intensely status-conscious place, and while the extremities of civil war brought inevitable compromises, that remains an unexpected CV for the son of an ex-slave.
Now, there is no question that Horace was in some sense “the son of a freedman”, his father a slave who had secured his freedom. Satire 1.6, which will feature a lot here, is clear that Horace was so considered by detractors at least (libertino patre natum, 1.6.6, 45-6). But an influential (and clever) article by Gordon Williams, “Libertino patre natus: true or false?”, in S.J. Harrison, Homage to Horace (1995), has argued that Horace was exaggerating the humbleness of his origins for effect (an important theme of the poem is the consideration due to people of lower social status), and that Horace’s father was only an ex-slave in a technical sense.
What Williams proposed was that Horace senior had been captured, in his youth, when the Romans took the rebel city of Venusia, Horace’s home town, at the end of the Social War in 88 BC. Once in captivity, he would likely have been considered a slave, Williams suggests with reference to known parallels, but his status might have been reversed fairly easily, in which case he could have quickly returned to his previous existence as a free inhabitant, potentially quite prominent and prosperous, of Venusia. In literal terms a freedman, then, but in social status far from a typical example.
Well, Williams’ argument rests on detailed readings of Satire 1.6, and I think it’s fair to say that Horace’s chatty style in the Satires (they are designed to read like the conversations of Romans at dinner) makes it hard to pin down precisely what he’s saying about himself—hard for Williams to ground his theory securely, but hard also for me to dispute it. But a word that features a lot in connection with Horace’s father seems to me important, and this is ingenuus. It can be used loosely to mean something like “respectable” or “gentlemanly”, but its core meaning is “freeborn”, and in a poem where social categories are at issue, in general and with reference to Horace’s father, that implication must be readily felt.
By Williams’ theory, Horace’s father was “freeborn”, ingenuus, his enslavement a temporary inconvenience of his early years. But on three occasions in Satire 1.6 Horace’s father is, to put it no stronger than this, associated with a lack of ingenuitas, freeborn status. The question is whether we can walk away from this poem seriously doubting that he was born unfree.
In the first case Horace credits Maecenas, his powerful friend and patron, with attaching no importance to quali sit quisque parente/ natus, dum ingenuus, “of what kind of parent anyone is born, so long as he be ingenuus” (7-8). Here I think the natural sense of ingenuus is “freeborn”, and while Williams suggests that Horace might in this clause be describing the father rather than “anyone”, that seems to me a stretch. In context it is Horace’s status that is the primary issue here, and Maecenas’ unconcern for the status of an individual’s father. There may be an implication that Horace’s father was not freeborn, unlike his son, but no more than that.
In the second passage, the most important for us, Horace is stating, and also accepting (somewhat unexpectedly), that people of low birth will not get far in political life: namque esto populus Laeuino mallet honorem/ quam Decio mandare nouo, censorque moueret/ Appius, ingenuo si non essem patre natus/ —uel merito, quoniam in propria non pelle quiessem, “For let’s grant that the people would rather entrust office to a Laevinus than to a Decius with no family background, and that Appius the censor would exclude me from the Senate if I weren’t born of a freeborn father—rightly perhaps, since I’d not have rested quietly in my own skin” (19-22).
To repeat, getting the nuance of satirical Latin is not straightforward, and this does not say outright that Horace’s father was not freeborn—that is stated as a remote condition, strictly speaking—but it is hard to explain why he raises this of all possible objections to himself (and in terms that so clearly recall the earlier statement of Maecenas’ point of view), not to mention the following acknowledgement in principle of the validity of the imagined sanction by the censor (an official responsible among other things for policing the qualifications of senators), unless Horace wants this understanding of himself and his paternity to be seriously entertained.
Finally, 89-92, which won’t clinch anything either: nil me paeniteat sanum patris huius, eoque/ non, ut magna dolo factum negat esse suo pars,/ quod non ingenuos habeat clarosque parentis,/ sic me defendam, “While of sound mind I would never regret having such a father, and the way the majority say it’s not their fault that they don’t have freeborn or distinguished parents isn’t how I would defend myself.” Here ingenuos might, I suppose, just entail “respectable”, if at any rate a reader could fail even toward the end of the poem to be thinking of more precise kinds of social differentiation. For a sense of the contemporary significance of being not just free but freeborn, the story of Augustus’ refusal to dine in the company of Menas/Menodorus, the turncoat freedman of Pompey, until he had been assertus in ingenuitatem, deemed legally (if not actually) freeborn, is suggestive (Suetonius, Life of Augustus 74, cf. Appian, BC 5.338, ἐλεύθερον εὐθὺς ἀπέφηνεν ἐξ ἀπελευθέρου).
Williams’ argument needs to be read to be properly assessed, and I can’t do it justice here: it’s also included in Kirk Freudenburg’s collection Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Horace, Satires and Epistles (2009). All I can do is say that my own impression at the end of Satire 1.6 is that Horace has strongly implied that his father was born a slave. If this is correct, it is not, I think, something that a poet in Rome would state of his background unless it were substantially true.
“And so what?” you might say at this point.
I think to me it matters because it restores to Horace’s life story some of its dramatic quality. It reinstates major obstacles that Horace and his father had to overcome for the Horace we know and can write books about to emerge.
The turning point in Horace’s early life, described in this satire and in more oblique terms in his famous ode on the Bandusian Spring, was his father’s decision to secure for him an education at Rome, 200 miles from Venusia. If we conclude that Horace senior was a conventional Venusian who had simply experienced some misfortune (widely shared among his fellow townsmen) as a youngster, that still counts as a courageous decision, but it is vastly more so if a man born a slave refused to let his talented son be limited by his own accident of birth, in a culture that continued to set great store by such things.
Some of the most impressive figures from Greco-Roman antiquity are those whose exceptional ability had secured their escape from slavery: here is such a person, for instance. Horace’s remarkable rise to the very heights of Roman society—including his composition and performance of the hymn at the Secular Games in 17BC, perhaps the ideological acme of the Augustus’ principate—had as its catalyst the fatherly ambition that took him to Rome, and I’m loath to lose the sheer, splendid audacity of that decision by a man born enslaved without better reason than Williams seems to give us.
Horace, top dog
As I ponder putting pen to paper for the first time in my Horace: A Very Short Introduction, it’s proving as daunting a challenge as I anticipated. Horace is both technically meticulous and hugely versatile, and trying to capture his essence in 100 pages is not straightforward. But I think Horace at least, the great miniaturist, would approve of the attempt.
In his Odes, poems composed within the tiny structures represented by his lyric stanzas, brevity is the key. Horace has various strategies to achieve it, but one of them is an astonishing precision in word selection. An ancient assessment by the critic Quintilian (10.1.96) identifies Horace’s inventiveness in figures of speech and felicitous boldness in word choice (a paraphrase of uarius figuris et uerbis felicissime audax) as a characteristic quality of his lyric poetry, and what follows is a brief illustration: a moment in the Odes where a word chosen with pin-point precision generates a remarkable richness of imagery from a minimum of text. This is a turn of phrase that I’ve loved for a long time, but I’d missed the full subtlety of it until a recent rereading of the Odes—and my hunch, I should add, found corroboration in Nisbet & Rudd.
Odes 3.29 is often (and, as it happens, rightly) considered Horace’s lyric masterpiece, the penultimate poem of his first collection of lyric poems, an address to his patron Maecenas which restates in powerful and memorable terms some core themes of his lyric.
As he rounds off this glorious poem, Horace explains what to do if Fortune turns against you, offering himself as a model for Maecenas and the rest of us (3.29.53-6):
laudo manentem; si celeris quatit
pinnas, resigno quae dedit et mea
virtute me involvo probamque
pauperiem sine dote quaero.
David West’s translation: I praise [Fortune] while she stays. If she shakes out/ her swift wings, I return what she gave, wrap myself/ in my virtue and look for honest Poverty,/ asking no dowry.
Even this one tiny stanza is fraught with implication. Fortune is as flighty as a winged thing; resigno, which is what Horace does with all Fortune’s gifts, makes of everything he has received from her just a temporary loan that he has always had to pay back; while quaero presents his calm acceptance of poverty as courting a potential wife, but Poverty, while a virtuous lady, will not bring any financial advantage with her.
But it’s the image in the middle I’m concerned with here, et mea/ uirtute me inuoluo, “and I wrap myself in the virtue that is my personal possession” (mea carries a lot of weight here: the virtue is really his, what he got from Fortune merely borrowed). Virtue is transformed by this metaphor into a cloak that protects the poet against the inclement conditions once Fortune has departed—and even left there, it’s a wonderfully rich effect achieved with impressive economy. For me, too, the repetition mea … me and the way the vowel of me blends with the initial vowel of inuoluo give an impression of things tightly wrapped, but I am known to overread.
But let’s press inuoluo itself a bit harder. Who wraps themselves up in cloaks in Greco-Roman antiquity?
An identifying feature of a Cynic, an illustration of the extreme self-denial to which adherents of this philosophical tradition subjected themselves, was the simple kit, the sum of their possessions, that they carried around with them: a staff, a leather pouch, and a rough cloak known as a τρίβων/tribōn (Arrian, Epict. diss. 3.22.10). Antisthenes, often regarded in antiquity as the founder of the school, “was the first, according to Diocles, to wrap his cloak twice around himself (πρῶτος ἐδίπλωσε τὸν τρίβωνα) and be content with that one garment” (Diog. Laert. 6.13); according to others it was Diogenes, the most famous of the Cynics and a rival for the role of founder, who first doubled up his τρίβων (Diog. Laert. 6.22). Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, incidentally, is just the best text: Diogenes was called “the Dog”, Κύων; by the poet Cercidas, the οὐράνιος κύων, the heavenly dog Sirius (Diog. Laert. 6.77; Cercidas fr. 54 Livrea).* But Antisthenes was “the Absolute Dog”, ʽΑπλοκύων (Diog. Laert. 6.13).
Dogs aside, the key idea here is that the τρίβων, the rough-and-ready outer garment which was also all in the way of clothing that the Cynics allowed themselves, was a visible expression of their ascetic philosophical principles: Cynics regarded virtue as alone sufficient for a flourishing existence (eudaimonia), and exactly like Horace in this stanza scorned such superficial human comforts as fickle Fortune might bestow.
Our poet, wrapping himself tightly in the virtue that is all that remains to him, but also everything that he needs, assumes the character of a Cynic preacher, the last word in austere self-sufficiency. But what we have to remind ourselves of, and what poses me a problem in my very short introduction, is that if, as we read, we find ourselves thinking of bitingly cold weather, cloaks wrapped tight, and Cynic mendicants, it’s essentially with the single word inuoluo that Horace has conjured up all these associations.
And there are another 70,000 or so meticulously chosen Horatian words where that came from.
*J. L. López Cruces, “A heavenly son of Zeus (Diog. Laert. 6.76 = Cercidas, fr. 54 Livrea)”, CQ 68 (2018), 91-6.
50, roughly
Early in the summer a retired colleague said something to me I’ve struggled to forget since. She was describing all the heavy responsibilities she found herself bearing, out of the goodness of her heart, for aged friends and loved ones, and she concluded: “Don’t get old, Llewelyn.” It caught me at a slightly low ebb, suffering from something it’s taken the summer to work out is nothing significant, well, nothing more than one of those skeleto-muscular reminders that time is remorseless. Hence the disproportionate impact of a passing remark, no doubt, anyhow.
I am now in my fiftieth year, and to a Latinist one thing that means is that I’m roughly the same age as Horace when he wrote his fourth book of lyric poems, the Odes. If our comparable ages matter at all, it’s because age matters to Horace. His poetry is not in any straightforward way autobiographical, but he did construct a kind of parallel biography out of his poetry, matching the sequence of poetic genres he undertook to the stage of life at which he was writing, aggressive iambic and satirical poetry in his younger days, detached epistolary musings in his dotage. It was in middle age that Horace wrote the Odes (Horace was born in 65BC; Odes Books 1-3 were apparently published as a collection in 23BC), and again lyric was an age-appropriate choice. The male lyric voice is quite precisely defined in this respect: he’s not as young as he was, he’s seen a bit of the world and is wise to it (though perfectly capable of losing his head, just quicker to regain it than his younger self), but above all he’s sensitive to his years, regretful of the passing of time and acutely aware of his mortality.
The persona Horace adopts in Odes 1-3 is all of those things. Already in these books Horace spends a lot of time contemplating his inevitable death and pursuing activities to mitigate that gloomy prognosis, mainly involving alcohol and serial monogamy. His most famous motto, carpe diem, means “pick the day”, as if the day is an apple that you must pluck and eat while you still can–and who knows how long that will be? In its original context in Odes 1.11 Horace has one particular activity in mind for himself and the young woman, Leuconoe, to whom this advice is directed, and it isn’t a game of monopoly.
Between Odes 1-3 and Odes 4 there was a gap of as many as ten years. The date of Book 4 is disputed, but Horace himself gives his age as circa lustra decem at 4.1.6, “around fifty,” and in-between times he’d written a book of meditative Epistles as well as a long hymn for Augustus’ Secular Games in 17BC. We’re presumably around 14BC. The same lyric themes of the rapid passage of time, the unpredictable future and imminent mortality are found in the later book, but if time was an issue already in 1-3 (as it must be in any lyric poetry), it’s an urgent one in 4, a book deeply conscious that its author is too old to be writing it. The book opens with Horace insisting he’s past it (3-4, non sum qualis eram bonae/ sub regno Cinarae, “I’m not the man I was when good Cinara ruled my life”): Venus should leave him alone and pick on young men like Paullus Maximus. At the end of 4.11 he calls a definitive end to love affairs (29-36), which implies, as in 4.1, a farewell to lyric poetry: age iam, meorum/ finis amorum/ (non enim posthac alia calebo/ femina), condisce modos, amanda/ voce quos reddas; minuentur atrae/ carmine curae, “Come now, last of my loves (for after this I shall feel no passion for any other woman), learn some tunes to sing with your lovely voice. Black anxieties will be lessened by song.” When the lyric song is over, an implication is, there will be nothing to distract him from those anxieties.
There is another poem in Book 4 that’s all about age, Odes 4.13, but in this case the subject is not (or maybe, not directly) Horace. It’s also the most troubling poem of the book to read, a brutal, vengeful celebration that a woman he once loved, Lyce, is getting old. That, at any rate, is where it starts (David West’s translation after the Latin):
audiuere, Lyce, di mea uota, di
audiuere, Lyce: fis anus, et tamen
uis formosa videri
ludisque et bibis impudens
et cantu tremulo pota Cupidinem
lentum sollicitas. ille uirentis et
doctae psallere Chiae
pulchris excubat in genis.
importunus enim transuolat aridas
quercus et refugit te quia luridi
dentes, te quia rugae
turpant et capitis niues.
nec Coae referunt iam tibi purpurae
nec cari lapides tempora, quae semel
notis condita fastis
inclusit uolucris dies.
quo fugit Venus, heu, quoue color, decens
quo motus? quid habes illius, illius,
quae spirabat amores,
quae me surpuerat mihi,
felix post Cinaram notaque et artium
gratarum facies? sed Cinarae brevis
annos fata dederunt,
seruatura diu parem
cornicis uetulae temporibus Lycen,
possent ut iuuenes uisere feruidi
multo non sine risu
dilapsam in cineres facem.
The gods have listened, Lyce, the gods have listened
to my prayers; you’re becoming an old woman
and you still want to be thought beautiful,
you still play about and you drink too much,
and sing in your cups in that wobbling voice of yours
to rouse the sluggish god of love, but he is out
for the night, on duty on the lovely cheeks
of a young Chian lyre-player.
That demanding god soars over dry oaks.
He flies away from you, your black teeth,
your wrinkles, and the snow
in your hair. You are ugly.
Neither Coan purples nor precious stones
bring back the time
buried in old calendars
by the swiftly flying days.
Where has your charm gone? Where is your complexion?
Where is that lovely way of moving? What remains
of the girl who breathed the breath of love,
who stole me from myself,
the girl I so loved after Cinara, and where is
that artful beauty of yours I knew so well? But the Fates,
who did not give Cinara many years,
were to keep you alive
as long as any ancient crow, to raise
a laugh among hot-blooded young men
as they see your torch
crumbling into ashes.
This is Roman literature at its most indigestible. A man assesses a mature woman on her looks, and judges her worthless by virtue of his own failure to find her attractive. What interests me about this poem, though, is the possibility that in as limited a way as a Roman male could manage, Horace evinces some awareness of this imbalance. There’s a hint of that, nothing more, in the shift of tone in the fourth stanza from the vindictive opening to something (slightly) closer to empathy, a general principle that the past is irrevocably the past followed by Horace’s expression of his own dismay at Lyce’s aging, a very different response, at least, from the triumphant taunts he started with. But the conclusion is again merciless: the young men laugh at her; she is a torch that has burnt itself out; she would have done better to die before she lost her looks, like Cinara.
But if I can try to recall my reaction on first reading this poem, it was to be appalled by Horace’s nastiness, but also left with a sense that there was an unavoidable further implication. I can’t personally read this repulsive poem without the rest of Odes 4 in my head, a book preoccupied with aging, as we’ve seen, and first and foremost with the aging of the author. If Lyce is getting old, Horace must be older; if she is too long in the tooth for this game, Horace has already told us he is too. “I am not the man I was when good Cinara ruled my life,” he says in the first poem of the book; here he reminds us of Cinara, and cannot help but remind us in the process that if anyone’s obsolescent, it’s Horace himself. On the matter of names, “Lyce” carries its own associations: we’ve met her just once before, in Odes 3.10, a poem in which the poet ultimately claims to be too old to take love affairs too seriously, or even to be physically equal to them. This at any rate, for what it’s worth, is how I feel compelled to read Odes 4.13: the brutality of it is shocking, but it’s also self-directed, self-eviscerating. There’s every chance I’m indulging the old misogynist, but if I’m not, the loathing he directs at Lyce entails self-loathing: every nasty jibe Horace makes about Lyce drives home, in turn, how old he is, how decrepit, how close to death.
Horace didn’t get old, or not by our standards: he died just a few years later in 8BC, at 56.
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There’s a very nice article on this poem, and some similar ones in the Odes and Epodes, by Carol Esler in T. M. Falkner & J. de Luce, Old Age in Greek and Latin Literature (1989), 172-82. David West’s essays on the Odes in his translation/commentaries are always eye-opening (the one on 3.10, for example, I lean on here).
Talking to God
The emperor Domitian (r.) smites enemies & communes with the gods, from the temple of Khnum at Esna. Photo @ Olaf TauschA short blog, the fruit of my efforts to beat insomnia with night-time reading entirely unrelated to my work.
So I’ve been reading Graeme Wood on supporters of ISIS, and after that Penelope Wilson on hieroglyphs, rather different kinds of book but I recommend both. What caught my attention in each of them was a linguistic phenomenon I find intriguing, the impulse people can feel to take language, this practical tool we use to navigate around our world, and transmute it into something more exalted: a medium for addressing the divine.
I didn’t know until I read Wood’s book that Muslims of the Salafi movement cultivate an archaic style of spoken Arabic, a form of the language reflecting their desire to emulate the very earliest generations of Islam, al salaf al salih, the pious forefathers. Rejecting contemporary forms of Arabic brings them closer to the Prophet and the Quran, closer to God’s revelation. Wood describes having his colloquial Arabic corrected by an Egyptian Salafist (p.33):
Ahmad took me to lunch at a chicken restaurant where we ate well and he, over my objection, paid the bill out of his student stipend. He corrected my Arabic over and over, studiously transposing the street dialect that came most easily to me with the high register favored by Salafis. Chicken was not firakh, but dajaj. Any time I pronounced the letter jim with a hard g, in the Egyptian way, he corrected it to the more classical j as in “Juliet”: “Jamal,” not “Gamal,” was the name of the dead Egyptian strongman Nasser. The letter qaf, instead of vanishing without a trace as in normal Egyptian speech, had to be pronounced deep in the throat, where the soft palate meets the tongue: qalam [pen], not alam. My language was getting purer, word by word and bite by bite.
Qalam gets one closer to the origin of the word in Greek kalamos, as it happens.
Still in Egypt, albeit a few centuries earlier, another thing I didn’t appreciate was how significant the “hiero-” (“sacred”) bit of “hieroglyphs” was. From Wilson (p.18) I learned that the Ancient Egyptian word for this pictorial writing was medu-netjer, meaning “words of god,” and that the primary function of hieroglyphic script was to enable communication between Egyptians and their deities. This wasn’t a different form of language, of course, so much as an esoteric way of representing that language (though if I understand rightly, hieroglyphs were also associated with an archaic and ossified form of the Egyptian language).
By way of illustration, Wilson memorably describes the different audiences targeted by the three texts on the Rosetta Stone (p.31):
Greek (for the ruling administration of the day), hieroglyphs (for the gods), and Demotic (for everyone else).
She also rather beautifully encourages us to imagine that the hieroglyphs accompanying images of human activity and speech covering tombs might become audible: “the tombs would be full of noise, and the chatter of hundreds of people” (p.46). Again, if I understand correctly, the things depicted are summoned into existence by being named in hieroglyphic form. The hieroglyphs secure from the gods an Afterlife for the dead person as rich as the life they have departed. For the dead, I suppose, the tomb with its images and hieroglyphs in effect is that wonderful new life.
I hope I’ve got that right, because a) I find it frankly and gloriously mind-blowing, and b) it’s the main motivation for this blog. And while the whole idea was to be reading stuff at bedtime that was unrelated to work, I couldn’t help thinking about Greco-Roman things, too.
If the Greeks and Romans had anything like hieroglyphics or Quranic Arabic, linguistic ways of communing with God, it might be the dactylic hexameter. This is a verse form, and as Paul Fussell wrote in his classic book on the matter, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, one of the essential effects of couching language in verse, making prose poetry, is to raise its register (p.12):
meter, by distinguishing rhythmic from ordinary statement, objectifies that statement and impels it toward a significant formality and even ritualism.
But if all metre is a “ritual frame”, as Fussell calls it, for the language it encloses, there are more or less elevated kinds of metre, and in antiquity the highest form of communication was that done in dactylic hexameters. That included conveying the utterances of the gods. In fact it was believed that the hexameter was invented by the Pythian priestess at Delphi (Pausanias 10.5.7), to be the vehicle for the oracles that the god Apollo shared with humanity.
A more familiar function of the hexameter, though, is as the medium for another kind of divine narrative, epic poetry. This is poetry describing, typically, a heroic world of superior humans (the hexameter in antiquity was more commonly known as the “heroic” metre), but represents divine speech in at least two ways. First, part of the greatness of the heroes of epic was the ease with which they communed with gods, who aided them and appeared and spoke to them. The epic world is one governed by the gods, and in Homer and Virgil and other epic poets we often see the gods discussing among themselves how events on earth should unfold. Secondly, though, this made the task of the epic poet a daunting one, since they needed inspiration sufficient to be able to relate the deeds and words of the very highest beings. Conventionally epic poets would claim that their poem was itself divine speech. “Tell me of the man of many wiles, Muse,” is how Homer’s Odyssey begins, and “Sing of the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, goddess,” the Iliad.
“Speeches of the gods” could even be shorthand for epic poetry. In Odes 3.3 Horace closely imitated the epic poet Quintus Ennius, Virgil’s great predecessor at Rome, and a speech that Ennius gave to Juno in a Council of the Gods in the first book of his epic poem Annales. At the end of his poem Horace admits that in formal terms he’s seriously broken the rules, putting this epic material in one of his own lyric poems:
Non hoc iocosae conveniet lyrae;
quo, Musa, tendis? Desine pervicax
referre sermones deorum et
magna modis tenuare parvis.
This will not suit the light-hearted lyre!
Where are you heading, Muse? Cease in your wilfulness
to report the speeches of gods and
diminish great matters in small measures!
Why? Because the only proper habitat for gods and their awe-inspiring utterances is the heroic measure, the hexameter.
More to my godless taste, I have to admit, is Juvenal’s take on this whole issue. In his fourth satire Juvenal lays into the emperor Domitian, describing the measures taken by the tyrant to get a huge turbot cooked. The poem is a parody of an epic (which doesn’t survive) by Statius on Domitian’s military exploits in Germany; as with almost all Roman satire it is written, like epic, in hexameters, an outrageous act of misappropriation by satire which established it once and for all as epic’s disreputable twin.
At 34-6 Juvenal parodies the conventional epic evocation of the Muse, the plea for access to divine knowledge.
incipe, Calliope. licet et considere: non est
cantandum, res uera agitur. narrate, puellae
Pierides, prosit mihi uos dixisse puellas.
Begin, Calliope! And do please sit down: there’s no call
for singing, these are real events we’re dealing with. Tell the story, maidens
of Pieria, and may I profit from having referred to you as maidens.
Brutal stuff, but that’s satire. He summons the Muse Calliope (the Muse of epic, the grandest of them all), then makes a nasty joke about the Muses’ sexual morality. I’m more interested in the first line and a half, because in them Juvenal carries out an expert demolition of this divine medium. Incipe, Calliope is authentically epic, but as he tells Calliope to stop taking it so seriously the verse form collapses, too. Some brilliantly shabby versification follows: non est is a useless, unemphatic cadence to the line, and res uera agitur deliberately obscures by elision another important structural element of the heroic hexameter, its central caesura or pause.
A less technical way of putting it is that Juvenal starts line 34 in epic mode, as he should when a god is being addressed, but then collapses into all-too-human prose. I find the aspiration that we feel to speak the language of the gods fascinating, but I find Juvenal’s utter refusal to respect it most refreshing, too.
Horace on living
A rapid post, this, and topical in a way I wouldn’t have chosen.
I love the Latin language. I struggle to explain why. Something to do with its brevity, and the scope an inflected language gives to shift words around for maximum effect.
No Roman poet exploited these inherent characteristics of Latin more effectively than Horace, and a poem like Horace, Odes 3.29 has it all for me, and not just for me: formal beauty allied to profound ethical truths. I like this poem so much that when I fell over an inscription of a line of it at a charity auction once, I parted with rather a lot of money. Latin and stone go so well together.
There is so much that’s great about 3.29: the way Horace expresses the unpredictability of life through an image of a river in spate, his description flowing river-like from stanza to stanza; the image he uses to express a proper indifference to misfortune: “I wrap myself in my virtue,” he says, mea/ uirtute me inuoluo, as if virtue were a warm and waterproof coat.
But my very favourite thing in 3.29 is a single word, uixi, “I have lived,” at line 43. It is perfectly chosen and perfectly placed, and it represents the key principle of the poem’s philosophy.
Here are the two stanzas around it, with a translation much indebted to David West. Horace is explaining that what matters is the present moment, living life in the here and now. We cannot influence what the future will bring, but if we have lived life to the full when we can, what happens in time to come is of no significance.
… ille potens sui 41
laetusque deget, cui licet in diem
dixisse “uixi.” cras uel atra
nube polum pater occupato
uel sole puro. non tamen irritum 45
quodcumque retro est efficiet neque
diffinget infectumque reddet
quod fugiens semel hora uexit.
A man will be in control of his life
and happy, if he can say at each day’s end
“I have lived.” Tomorrow Jupiter can
fill the sky with black cloud
or with pure sunlight, but he will not cancel
whatever is behind,
nor reshape or unmake
what once the fleeting hour has brought.
Horace’s poem is written in a verse form called alcaics, a metre in four-line stanzas which Horace had inherited from the archaic Greek poet Alcaeus, but given a character all his own. Horatian alcaics have a very clear dynamic: in broad terms, there are two identical lines followed by a third that slows the flow of the poetry, and a much faster fourth. What creates the impression of drag in the third line is mainly its contrast with the previous two. The first two lines normally have a word break, a pause or caesura, after the fifth syllable, but while the third line starts off as if it is going to follow the same pattern, it then pushes on without a break. The second stanza here is typical: uel sole puro//, quodcumque retrost// in the first two lines, but diffinget infectumque in the third, no break until after the seventh syllable.
In slightly more technical terms, here is an alcaic stanza, with _ marking a long syllable, u marking a short, and // marking the normal/expected location of word breaks:
_ _ u _ _ // _ u u _ u _
_ _ u _ _ // _ u u _ u _
_ _ u _ _ _ u _ _
_ u u _ u u _ u _ _
The things to notice are the identical shape of the first two lines, and the way the third line also begins the same way, but has no break after the fifth syllable. Horace has a habit of placing in the middle of the third line a word needing emphasis, or suiting in other ways this expansive position. Here is an example from earlier in Odes 3.29 (ll. 9-12), where Horace urges Maecenas to abandon his obsession with the city of Rome, and join him for drinkies in the country:
fastidiosam// desere copiam et
molem propinquam// nubibus arduis,
omitte mirari beatae
fumum et opes strepitumque Romae.
Leave behind cloying abundance and
that pile that reaches to the high clouds,
stop admiring
the smoke and riches and racket of wealthy Rome.
In the first two lines there are word breaks after the fifth syllable. The word set in that expansive centre of the third line is mirari, “admire,” “wonder at,” and the placement is very effective: we dwell on Maecenas’ obsession with the city as he indulges his obsession. Meanwhile the frantic fourth line well suits the distracting sensory chaos of the big smoke. Given that practically all of Horace’s alcaic stanzas follow this dynamic of expansive third line and skittery fourth, of course, any exception becomes eye-catching.
At l. 43, dixisse uixi. cras uel atra, there is just such an exception to the rule, and it’s gorgeous. What we have in 43 is a third line that doesn’t expand, but stops short just like the first and second line. The word uixi not only introduces a pause after the fifth syllable, where we don’t expect it, but brings a very strong pause: Horace ends a sentence where we were anticipating continuation. The effect on the word uixi is to underline and isolate it.
I’ve suggested that “I have lived” is the essence of this poem. If you can say this to yourself today, Horace tells us, it simply doesn’t matter what happens tomorrow. I find that a beautiful sentiment in itself, but Horace has made it more beautiful, in the subtlest of ways, by detaching it from the rest of the poetic line by means of that unexpected pause. Vixi, “I have lived,” stands alone. Because there is nothing else that needs to be said.
Charlotte Easton died far too young. I only met her once, though we chatted from time to time on Twitter. She lived life to the full, with her love of cycling, her delight in teaching, her passion for Latin and Greek. If I love Latin, its chiselled clarity, the people I rate highest in the world are those who keep the study of this language I love alive, sharing my enthusiasm for it, but possessed of a precious capacity to communicate the joy of it that I can only wish I had.
Charlotte, uixisti.