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RECONSIDERATIONS I
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David Armstrong 117
clearly than usual that the purpose of such Usts is to start the
reader off one-down. Finally, although the book is constructed on
so confusing a plan as to make it difficult as the Pentateuch to
read straight through, the index is wholly useless, and there is no
general bibliography; if you want to know Fraenkel's view of
Horace, you have to start at the beginning and push through to
the end, and unless you have a pretty fair command of the
subtler reading skills, you will miss it then, as many of the re
viewers did.
It seems necessary, then, to begin our scrutiny of the book
with a few words about where all this apparatus leads?so per
tinent, one would have thought, in something Uke Walbank's new
commentary on Polybius, so unnecessary and even impertinent
to a lucid and elegant poet Uke Horace; especially since Fraenkel
tells us in his Preface: ". . . what induced me to write this book
was my desire to remove from the poems of Horace some of the
crusts with which the industry of many centuries has overlaid
them and to enable a sympathetic reader to Usten as often as pos
sible to the voice of the poet and as seldom as possible to the
voices of his learned patrons."
In the first place, Fraenkel's scrupulosity about referring to the
work of his predecessors is to some sUght extent qualified where
really eloquent dissents from his own view are concerned. Thus,
when he argues that Satires I, 2 and 3 are "early" and inco
herent in structure, he leaves out of account the impressive argu
ments in Lejay's commentary (1915) for a strict "conversational
logic" in their thought progression. Or, for a more general ex
ample, Fraenkel is anxious to give an attractive picture of Hor
ace's relations with Augustus, since the States Odes are here
viewed as the crown of Horace's work. Therefore, a large part
of the review of various scholarly questions about Horace's life
with which the book opens is devoted to smoothing down what
most of us will still feel to be the rather strange tone of the quota
tions from Augustus' letters in Suetonius' Ufe of Horace. The
opinions of scholars who saw this ambiguity reflected at certain
points in Horace's poetry are dismissed as cynical. "This book
does not aim at converting those who know beforehand all about
the way in which Horace, the author of several entertaining satires
and epistles and of such lovely poems as Donee gratus eram tibi,
was lured, invita Minerva, into composing patriotic lyrics. Our
sole purpose is to recover, as best we can, the meaning of the
poems before us, although most readers may prefer to have these
poems treated as part of a clever organization of opinion." (p.
240) "The critical historian," Fraenkel acidly footnotes, "need
not necessarily take a cynical view of great poetry." But all this
hardly represents what can be said on the other side; it is not
necessary to take a cynical view of great poetry to see quaUfica
tions in Horace's love for the Empire, and, as we shall see later,
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Il8 RECONSIDERATIONS I
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David Armstro ng 119
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120 RECONSIDERATIONS I
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David Armstrong 121
them, either. For someone who started out to remove the schol
arly crust and find Horace underneath, this is an oddly conven
tional viewpoint; conventional, that is, in the sense that it shows
the usual philological arrogance in discovering faults that no mere
lover of Uterature would ever have seen, and using even the poems
that inspire the commentator with enthusiasm as a stick to beat
the unfortunate remnant. What has given this outlook its author
ity is the tremendous amount of labor that went into the com
pilation of learned references to support it. That these references
lead us nowhere, that they do not prove what they were intended
to prove, is what I have tried to show at the start. Let us now
inquire into the merits of the text.
The reviewers have generally assumed that by the length of the
section on the Epodes (pp. 23-75) a compliment was intended to
their poetic worth. This is not exact?y true; much about them
comes in for praise, but Fraenkel does not feel much sympathy
for the more 'improper' side of Horace, and such poems as X
and the Canidia epodes?VIII and XII are dismissed with a word
or two about Hipponax?are here mainly used to underline a
thesis which appears again and again: Greek poets had a func
tion in their community which Horace had not, so that in his
imitations of them, however feUcitous, there is always a faint feel
ing of strain and of mere artistic experimentation. Horace's prob
lem was to find a reaUy Roman voice, and the first efforts, accord
ing to Fraenkel, are seen in the Blessed Isles epode and in 'Quo,
quo scelesti ruitisT Much is made of the use of formulas that were
in fact used in the Comitia; a learned note establishes the horror
with which Romans would have received a proposal to emigrate
to the Blessed Isles rather than stick it out amid the Civil Wars;
and the immaturity of this early voice is thereby clearly demon
strated. Instead, the two Actium epodes come in for praise; an
affirmative attitude toward Maecenas and Caesar, not "the fiction
of participating in an imaginary assembly of the people," pro
vided Horace with a locus standi for the expression of "all that
he wanted to say as a Roman patriot."
It would be equally wrong to assume that pp. 76-153 are
devoted to the Satires out of any indiscriminate enthusiasm for
them; the point is rather to prove that their feUcities, when not
merely artistic, Ue largely in the region of autobiography?hom
age to Horace's father, his first meeting with Maecenas, Ufe on
the Sabine farm. An odd exception is I, 7, an anecdote from the
days of Horace's campaign with Brutus told in mock-epic style,
which seems so clever to Fraenkel that he places it late in his
treatment of Book I and impUes that its merit precludes its having
been written very early. Yet Horace was twenty-three in 42 B.C.,
the earnest date for I, 7, and most great poets have written better
stuff than Proscripti Regis Rupili pus atque venenum at twenty
three. No notice is taken of the one really ingenious comment that
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122 RECONSIDERATIONS I
has been made on this Uttie piece; Alfred Noyes remarked that
the important word in the last line is not the pun on Rex's name
but the word jugulas. To say to Brutus "tu qui reges jugulas"
estabUshes once for aU the distance between Horace and Brutus'
idealistic repubUcanism.1
We may note here that though Fraenkel beUeves Horace pub
lished his poems in the order they were intended to be read?that
each book of Satires, Odes, and Epistles has a structure?he also
beUeves he has evolved a clue to what is, generally speaking,
early and late in Horace's work. Poems of inferior quaUty are
assumed to be early; so are those that use undignified language.
Moreover, poems that can be attributed to "mere" artistic experi
mentation, such as Vitas hinnuleo, are outranked by the more
serious of the odes to Augustus and Maecenas. The poems are
taken out of order, on this basis, and treated in an artificial order
corresponding to merit. Thus, Satires I is discussed in the order
2, 3,1, 6, 5, 9, 7, 4,10. Satires II is an embarrassment. It becomes
more, rather than less, biting and improper than the first, and it
contains two very funny self-criticisms, 3 and 7, whose biographi
cal information does not quite square with the picture of Horace
Fraenkel would like to draw. 3, therefore, is dismissed as a tour
de force; nothing is said about 7; nothing is said about 5, the
source of Jonson's Volpone, except that it is a good thing Horace
wrote no more in that vein or 'he might have been in danger of
changing from the pugnacious yet good-natured Venusinus into
a venomous Aquinas (i. e. Juvenal). Being Horace, he checked
himself . . ." (p. 145). FinaUy, II, 1 is given a glowing appreci
ation designed to disguise the cynicism of its interlocutor, the
aristocratic jurist Trebatius, with his advice to Horace to discon
tinue his satires: Aude Caesaris invicti res dicerel Fraenkel also
argues that, since there are ten satires in the first book and only
eight in the second, Horace must have gotten tired of writing
satire. ". . . ten, or a multiple of it, seems to have been considered
by Horace, and by some contemporary poets as well, the ideal
number for the poems of a book." However, Satires II is fifty
lines longer than Satires I.
The next chapter takes up the first three books of odes, with
the love poetry almost entirely omitted. The treatment accorded
to two or three samples does not encourage one to wish for more.
On Miser arum est, III, 12: "Horace's Neobule begins with a
gnome, Miserarum est, etc. This gnome is also applicable to Neo
bule's own situation, but as a general sentence it has the effect
of rendering the opening of the poem more ornate and probably,
to the Augustan period, more momentous . . . The topics as well
as the sentiments of this ode are partly Roman, partly Hellenistic.
'Il carme d?lia vergine sospirosa non ? imitazione di Alceo se non
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David Armstrong 123
Fraenkel argues that cumque goes with rite rather than vocanti,
that no contrast is intended between the Latinum carmen and the
songs sung in the shade, and that much of the language is priestly.
On these three points most of us will agree; but he misses the vital
point in arguing at length for the variant poscimus, which has
been printed by few editors since Bentley. Besides the emphatic
hiss introduced into the prosody, "I pray" instead of "I am asked
for a song" spoils the whole point. If any of Horace's odes was
written in wartime, this one was. It is a beautiful explanation of
the poet's abiUty to write of love and wine when the state is
threatened; this is why Alcaeus, who wrote his love poetry Uke
Horace in unsettled and unsettling times, is invoked. His spirit
will be brought into Latin poetry in?is it unreasonable to suppose,
from the reference to Jove's banquets, a banquet song? At any
rate, a poem that will be a dulce lenimen for the labores he and
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124 RECONSIDERATIONS I
his friends see around them. Can one take this ode seriously, and
still imagine that there was, to Horace, anything that deserved
the word "mere" about such poems as Miserarum est or Vitas
hinnuleo? I think not; and, moreover, Horace's maturity in his
attitude toward the state had not far to develop when he wrote
this beautiful apology for his personal poetry.
Even where the odes to Maecenas and Augustus are concerned,
it would have been weU to remember that a reading which makes
sense of a poem has always the pas over one which does not. Thus
the suture Fraenkel insists oh seeing in III, 12, Nolis longa ferae,
was long ago stitched together by Wilkinson, Horace and his
Lyric Poetry, 83. Much worse is the interpretation of the foUow
ing (11,20):
Non usitata nee tenui ferar
penna bfformis per Uquidum aethera
vates, ?eque in terris morabor
longius, invidiaque maior
urbis reUnquam. Non ego pauperum
sanguis parentum, non ego quern vocas,
cUlecte Maecenas, obibo,
nee Stygia cohibebor unda.
lam iam residunt cruribus asperae
peUes et album mutor in aUtem
superne nascunturque leves
per d?gitos umerosque plumae...
Absint inani funere neniae
luctusque turpes et querimoniae;
compesce clamorem sepulcri
mitte supervacuos honores.
On no ordinary, no slender wing shafl I be borne, a double-formed
poet, through the Uquid air, nor shaU I be bound much longer
to the earth; greater than envy, I shaU leave these cities. I shaU
not die?I, the child of poor ancestors, I whom you caU to your
self, beloved Maecenas?nor shall the Stygian waters hold me.
Already the rough skin gathers on my legs; above I become a
white bird, and the Ught feathers spring out on my hands and
shoulders . . . Let there be no dirges and shameful wailing and
clamors at a pointless funeral; hold back the cries, forget the use
less honors of a tomb.
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David Armstrong 125
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126 RECONSIDERATIONS I
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David Armstrong 127
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128 RECONSIDERATIONS I
about it, any more than MarveU, for aU his enthusiasm for Charles
and the old nobiUty, was insincere when he compared in another
poem Cromwell's efficient leadership to the slack government of
kings:
Thus ( Image-Uke) a useless time they teU
And with vain Scepter strike the hourly BeU;
Nor more contribute to the state of Things
Then wooden Heads unto the Viols string.
While indefatigable CromweU hies
And cuts his way still nearer to the Skyes,
Learning a Musique in the Region clear,
To tune this lower to that higher Sphere.5
It is easy to see how similar this is to the tone of Odes, III, 3,
1-12:
Iustum et tenacem propositi virum
non civium ardor prava iubentium,
non voltus instantis tyranni
mente quatit soUda, neque Auster...
Hac arte PoUux et vagus Hercules
enisus arcis attigit igneas,
quos inter Augustus recumbens
purpureo bibet ore nectar.
The man just and tenacious of his course wiU not be shaken from
his fixed purpose by the rage of the people, ordering wrong
doing, nor the tyrant's threatening face, nor the wild south-wind
. . . Thus PoUux and wandering Hercules attained the fiery
citadel; and among them Augustus shaU rechne and drink nectar
with god-like Ups.
The compliment, Uke MarveU's, is to Augustus, not the age that
needed him; and it is the best Horace could ever give, Horace,
who was proud to the end of his Ufe of having fought for the
RepubUc at PhiUppi.
But Fraenkel's remarks on the state odes are fine enough as
they stand, and it is no smaU merit to have made so strong a case
for their greatness in an age by no means sympathetic to state
oriented art. It is a pity that so much poetry of no less merit what
ever is either ignored or given far less than its due; but the
comparative failure of the rest of the book may be a useful sign.
If a scholar of Fraenkel's impressive learning cannot make criti
cism after the old school of Wilamowitz and Mommsen meaning
ful or useful to the interpretation of Uterature, few wiU be en
cauraged to try. And, after aU, no harm is done to Horace. Of all
poets, it is he who responds best to his own srniling description of
Augustus: cui male si palperis, recalcitrat undique tutus.
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