HORACE Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture Series Editor A. J. Heisserer, University of Oklahoma Advisory Board David F. Bright, Iowa State University Nancy Demand, Indiana University Elaine Fantham, Princeton University R. M. Frazer, Tulane University Ronald J. Leprohon, University of Toronto Robert A. Moysey, University of Mississippi Helen F. North, Swarthmore College Robert J. Smutny, University of the Pacific Eva Stehle, University of Maryland at College Park A. Geoffrey Woodhead, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge/ Ohio State University John Wright, Northwestern University HORACE Epodes and Odes A New Annotated Latin Edition by Daniel H. Garrison University of Oklahoma Press : Norman and London By Daniel H. Garrison Mild Fren~: A Readingo f the HellenisticL ove Epigram( Wiesbaden, 1978) The Languageo f Virgil (New York, 1984) The Student's Catullus (Norman, 1989) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Horace. [Carmina] Odes and Epodes / Horace ; a new annotated Latin edition by Daniel H. Garrison. p. cm. - (Oklahoma series in classical culture ; v. 10) Latin text; commentary in English. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8061-2374-5 I. Garrison, Daniel H. II. Horace. Epodi. 1991. III. Title. IV. Series PA6393.C2 1991 874'.0l-dc20 91-3224 CIP Horace:E podesa nd Odes, A New Annotated Latin Editioni s Volume 10 of the Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources, Inc. Maps 1-4 courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art. Excerpt from Alexandria by Edward Morgan Forster, copyright 0 1961 by Edward Morgan Forster. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Copyright 0 1991 by Daniel H. Garrison. Published by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the U.S.A. First edition. CONTENTS Preface page vii Introduction ix The Epodes 3 The Odes, Book 1 27 The Odes, Book 2 70 The Odes, Book 3 94 The CaTT11Sea1e1c ulare 135 The Odes, Book 4 139 Abbreviations 170 Notes to the Epodes 171 Notes to the Odes, Book 1 200 Notes to the Odes, Book 2 258 Notes to the Odes, Book 3 291 Notes to the CaTT11Sea1e1c ulare 339 Notes to the Odes, Book 4 342 Appendix A: People 371 Appendix B: Meters 377 Appendix C: Glossary of Literary T enns 385 Appendix D: The Death of Cleopatra, by E. M. Forster 395 References 397 V MAPS 1. The Classical World 163 2. Italy 164 3. Greece 165 4. Asia Minor 166 5. Rome and Environs 167 6. Horace's Italy 168 vi PREFACE This edition began four years ago as a revision of the 1934 Bennett and Rolfe commentary, from which generations of scholars (my own included) first read our Horace. It soon became clear that something more than a revision was necessary if students of this fine poet were to have a clear view of his achievement. So many of the basic assumptions with which we read poetry have changed since the beginning of the twentieth century (when the school editions still in use at this writing first appeared), that it has been necessary to write a new book. What has emerged preserves the scope and some of the actual language of the 1934 Bennett and Rolfe, but makes different assumptions about the poet and the business of reading him-about which more later. Though in respect to the dis manibuso f Bennett and Rolfe I cannot present this edition as a revision of their work, it still owes much to their example, as it attempts to anticipate the problems of today's reader as comprehensively as they did. At the same time, the 1896 commentary of E. C. Wickham, the 1903 C. L. Smith, the 1910 Shorey and Laing, the 1930 Kiessling and Heinze, the 1970-78 Nisbet and Hubbard, and the 1980 Quinn have each made important contributions. Besides these commentaries, I have regularly consulted Fraenkel, Com mager, Williams (on Odes3 ), and Putnam (on Odes4 ), and as many articles on individual poems as time permitted. David Armstrong's Horace and the typescript of Gregson Davis' Polyhymnia also contributed to my work in its later stages. My own students over the past twenty-two years have made no small contribution, and my colleagues Francis Dunn and Diane Rayor suggested dozens of improvements as the commentary grew. In addition, William S. Anderson, Gregson Davis, and the anonymous readers of the University of Oklahoma Press each contributed several pages of suggestions. Barbara Siegemund-Broka edited the final draft for the Press with meticulous care and good humor. I owe particular thanks to David Armstrong, who with his students at the University of Texas spent a considerable amount of the fall of 1990 helping me improve what now goes to press. My own conception of each poem has necessarily colored the notes, but the chief task has been to select what should be included of everything I have learned. In that respect this book, though eclectic, is new and its faults are my own. The method of this commentary is to provide aids to understanding Horace's Latin rather than to suggest a finished translation: in this I depart fundamentally from Bennett and others whose glosses imply that the end product of studying Horace should be a poetistic English version. Latin poetry, like other poetry, is by definition untranslatable in its essence. Though translation can clarify meaning at some basic level, it cannot go beyond that. Anyone reading a straight prose translation of Horace may well wonder why anyone bothers to read such stuff in any language, and why Horace bothered to write it in the first place. This commentary is written for students of Latin, not of translation. The genius of Horace is locked in his language: the order of his words, their flavor, their sound, and their rhythms, few of which are reproducible in English. It is generally beyond the scope of these notes to make critical judgments, this being the privilege of each reader. It has not been easy to conceal my distaste in some cases or to restrain my enthusiasm in others, but I have endeavored to keep my personal preferences and prejudices out of the commentary. Most lovers of Horace will agree that his poetry is uneven, and may viii Preface therefore sympathize with the plight of the neutral commentator. Critical neutrality does not, however, exclude rhetorical exegesis and the identification of poetic devices. Poetic, rhetorical, grammatical, and historical explanation are the main business of any commentary that proposes to serve the reader, whether first-time student or advanced scholar. But aesthetic doctrine, literary ideology, and critical opinion are another matter, best left to individual readers, classroom discussion, and written analysis. In this respect I have kept to the traditional form of Horatian commentaries. I depart from tradition by restoring the original order of publication: instead of treating the misleadingly named Epodesa s a regrettable appendage to the Odes (Bennett and Rolfe decline to comment on Epodes 8 and 12, Shorey and Laing refuse to print Epodes 8, 11, and 12 even in the decent obscurity of a learned tongue, while Quinn omits the Epodese ntirely) this edition puts them first, as they 1 were the first written and published. Likewise, the Cannen Saecularei s placed between Odes 1-3 and Odes 4, also reflecting the date of composition. For the Latin text, I have relied chiefly on the Wickham and Garrod Oxford Classical Text, with occasional departures where I felt there was a more readable alternative. As a general rule, for the sake of brevity I do not comment on textual controversies. Latin scholars have long needed a commentary that emulates the helpfulness of the Bennett, Smith, and Shorey and Laing editions while avoiding their Victorian sense of decorum, Romantic preconceptions, and blindness to Hellenistic poetry's all-pervasive influence. With this edition, I hope to give readers of Horace a more authentic view of the poet and his work, combined with help in understanding the mechanics of his art. DANIEL H. GARRISON Northwestern University January 1991 INTRODUCTION Horace's Life Quintus Horatius Aaccus was born December 8, 65 B.C., in Venusia, a small town on the Appian Way in the center of southern Italy. His father, a freed slave, had done well for himself as a minor financial official1-well enough, at least, to provide his son an expensive education at Rome and later at Athens, where the most wealthy young Romans received their higher education. Horace describes his father in his Satiresa s a devoted moral preceptor, but he makes no mention at all of his mother. Except for tributes to his father, Horace makes few credible references to his early childhood or to the dismally poor region of Italy where he spent it. Nor do his scant remarks about his first years in Rome give any hint of unusual formative experiences: he appears to have had hard teachers and a simple, conventional introduction to classical literature before going to Athens to complete his "liberal" education-the exposure to philoso phy, science, and letters considered appropriate for a young man of good family about to enter a public career. At Athens, he perhaps attended lectures at the Academy (Epist. 2.2.45), then headed by one Theomnestus. But the phrase inter silt1asA cademi quaereret 1erumm ay be only figurative, as Horace later proved more an Epicurean than a follower of Academic doctrines. This was in the mid-forties B.C., and when after the assassination of Julius Caesar the tyrannicidc Brutus attended the lectures of Theomnestus (Plutarch Bnctus 24), Horace was one of the Romans in Athens who took note of his presence and approved of his ideals. Along with Cicero's son Marcus, who was studying under the Peripatetic Cratippus, he joined the forces of Brutus and shared his defeat at Philippi in 42 B.C.-though he was not necessarily in charge of a legion, as he brags to Maecenas in Sat. 1.6.48. He eventually returned to Italy "with wings clipped" (Epist. 2.2.50, decisish umilemp ennis) under the terms of a general amnesty, but his father was now dead, the fam1 confiscated, and the time had come for him to find a place for himself in the new order of things. Horace says very little about this period of his life. Like any writer who places himself at the center of his own writings, he had in a sense to invent himself for his readers, and he chose to present a finished product rather than dwell on the process of self-creation. Suetonius reports in his brief Vita Horati that he obtained a civil service post (scriptumq uaestoriumc omparat1it).T his would have been unavailable to someone without rank and a certain amount of independent wealth, and we must avoid the temptation to picture him slaving at some petty job and getting by on starvation wages, like Melville in his New York customs house or P. G. Wodehouse in his London bank, living on three pounds a week. Though Horace claims at one point that neediness forced him into his career as a poet (Epist. 2.2.5 lf., paupertasi mpulita udax ut t1ersusfa cerem), it is unlikely that he ever earned his living by writing, or hoped to do so. 1 In Sat. 1.6.86 Horace says his father was a coactor, a collector of goods for auction or collector of money at auctions; cf. Suetonius, exactionum coactor. Introduction X All that can be said with certainty of these years is that Horace made good connections with the powerful circle of young Octavian, who was two years his junior, and the Roman literary establishment. Virgil, whom he met in about 41 B.C., introduced him to the future emperor's wealthy friend Maecenas, 2 who was to become his patron. He also found time to write, as is testified by the publication in 35 B.C. (at the age of thirty) of his first book of Satires,o r Sermones.T hese lightly satiric, humorous "talks" in dactylic hexameters are miscellaneous sketches ultimately derived from the Cynic-Stoic diatribe or "pastime" making fun of human foibles, particularly those committed in the quest of goals not worth achieving. A more immediate model for Horace's first writing was the Saturao r "miscellany" developed by Q. Ennius (239-169 B.C.). These humorous pieces had no cutting edge of invective or attack, but they were so congenial to Horace that he called Ennius the au.ctoro f his own art in the Satires (Sat. 1.10.66). C. Lucilius (180-101 B.C.), who fixed the meter of this emergent Roman genre and added the element of ridicule, is in tum credited as the inventoro f Horace's Satires( Sat. 1.10.48). One feature of Roman satire that Horace found attractive was the centrality of the satirist himself as a dramatic character. The satirist personifies the point of view that he is promoting, taking on a character that is appropriate to his rhetorical style. In his Sermones,H orace adopted the persona of a detached, amused observer. It was a pose that served him well throughout his career. Horace followed up this success five years later with a second book of Satires.M aecenas had presented him with the Sabine farm that provided the peace, privacy, and natural surroundings that his temperament required. Now in his mid-thirties, Horace had another type of poetry ready to show the world. In the same year as Satires2 , he published a collection of poems that came to be known as the Epodes,t hough Horace himself calls them Iambib ecause of their characteris tic meters. 3 These too are something of a miscellany, and like the Satirest hey contain a thread of attack and ridicule. But they also introduce new themes, such as the political crisis that continued to threaten Rome and the love themes that would recur with the more serious political motifs in the Odes. An important difference from the Satiresi s that the Epodesa re not a Roman genre: like their meters, they are consciously Greek, loosely modeled on the early Greek poet Archilochus, and they mark a critical turning point in Horace's career. Now he was to be a Hellenistic Roman poet, adapting Greek models to Roman life and taste. Catullus had shown a generation earlier that a wide range of Greek lyric meters could be employed successfully in Latin poetry, and that love and mockery, both with a personal flavor, were promising themes. With the Epodes,H orace began his career as a lyric poet. The next seven years were the peak of his career as a lyricist, culminating with the publication in 23 B.C. of three books of Odes, or Carmina.T hey show Horace as the master of a poetic style chiefly inspired by Alcaeus of Mytilene (early sixth century B.C.) but influenced 2 For more about Maecenas and other persons appearing in the Epcx:ksa nd Odes, see appendix A. 3 Epod. 14.7, Odes 1.16.3 and 24, Epist.1 .19.23. For the meaning of "epode," see appendix C.