This is not a book
on patronage. Horace tells us that he is one in a circle of poets whose
patron/s are the governing elite in the developing principate. He addresses the
lead poem of his Satires and Odes I-III to Maecenas and follows the
first ode with a praise-poem to Augustus (c.2). He then honors his friend
Vergil, one of the senior poets who introduced him into the poetic circle, with
a propempticon (c.3) and follows it with a sympotic invitation to Sestius, the consul
suffectus of 23 B.C. (c.4). After one love song (c.5) he addresses a recusatio to the other senior poet who
supported his entrance into the circle, Varius (c.6). By the sixth ode of the
first book his coterie of friends from the trip to Brundisium (minus Plotius, S.
I.5) are all present again. Horatian poetry embodies patronage. Horace laces
his poetry with the language of gift-exchange, which clearly labels his poetry
as a gift to his patrons (Ahl, 1984; White, 1993; Bowditch, 2001). Defining the
qualities of Horace's patronage, especially its socio-economic contexts and
language, has important implications for Horace's poetic service (munus); nevertheless, as important as
this is, it has left unexplored much of the specific contents of the gift. And,
in spite of Putnam's (1986) eloquent arguments for the literary merits of
Horace's later lyrics, the one book (Odes IV), which Suetonius tells us
was commissioned by Augustus and is devoted to panegyric song, remains the
least studied of the Horatian poetry-books. This book is about the contents of
that gift, Horace's panegyric praxis in Odes
IV.
When approximately
five to six years after the publication of Odes
I-III (23 B.C.) Horace accepted the commission of the Carmen Saeculare (17 B.C.)
and subsequently continued to compose lyric carmina
and cast these lyrics into another book of odes (13 B.C.), he undertook the
vatic role of the Romanae fidicen lyrae
(C. IV.3.23). At least, this is how
the poet represents his audience's perception of his later work. The people
passing him on the street pointed him out as
An emphasis on
persuasion reflects a bias for Ciceronian rhetoric, and Horace's praise has
most often been read and evaluated through the filter of
Far from avoiding
and suppressing disputed propositions, Horace's praise exploits them. Consider
a few of Horace's panegyric plots. Horace celebrates Paulus Fabius Maximus'
impending marriage to Augustus' cousin Marcia by praising the gentleman, over
thirty years old and an old bachelor by Roman standards, for being a great
lover (C. IV.1). Augustus' praise for his victory over the Sygambri, a
triumph which was never technically held, should be led by the likes of the
rather poor Pindaric imitator Iullus Antonius, while your poet Horace stands
back and shouts traditional acclamations along with the crowd (C. IV.2).
The epinikion for Augustus' adopted sons Drusus and Tiberius revisits an old
scandal: Augustus acquired Nero's wife and his children. Augustus raised them
well, and now Rome is in debt to Nero's sons, who savagely crushed the
Rhaetians and Vindelicians as a lion on his first kill attacks a helpless roe.
Then Horace has Hannibal the liar praise Rome (C. IV.4). Horace praises
Lollius, who lost Rome's standards to the Sygambri, for being a great general (C.
IV.9), and praises himself as a noble (C. IV.3). Augustus' patron deity
Apollo is invoked as a violent god of epic vengeance and then Apollo stops
Horace from composing the martial praise he is ready to sing (C. IV.6;
15). These panegyric tensions or nuances (dubia) lie blatantly on the
surface in the odes' plots, not just hidden in their details. Horace has
neither followed the traditional guidelines transferred to Rome by Cicero and
others, nor helped to set any precedent for Menander Rhetor's basic precepts
for panegyric. He has taken a different tack, another path, more Callimachean.
The twists and turns of Horace's encomiastic plots, the variety of their poetic
structures, and the complex allusive qualities of their narratives preserve a
Callimachean spirit. In Callimachus the Nile sings Sosibios' victories in the
games (fr. 384 Pf.) and locks of hair (fr. 110 Pf.), vowed by Queen Berenice
for the safe return of her husband, lament war and praise their lady's pledged
steadfast love in their own voice (Thomas, 1983). Catullus could not resist his
own translation (poem 66). Callimachus did sing of kings, battles, and heroes'
deeds and did so with an imagination not easily explained by the rhetorical
handbooks. Thus Alan Cameron (1995) assesses Propertius' praise-elegy on
Augustus' victory at Actium (4.6): "It is the fanciful, allusive,
asymmetrical style of Callimachean epinician that lies behind the curious
Propertian experiment. All that is lacking is Callimachus's saving irony and
wit" (479; n.b. 476-483). Horace has sustained the witty complexities in
his encomia. When Propertius' praises are placed alongside their Horatian
counterparts, they are not so curious or experimental as supposed. It is
certain that Plato at least would have banished both Propertius and Horace and
their mimetic praise-poetry from his city (R. 396b-d; 401b; Lg.
801e-802a; 829c-e; 957d-e). To be sure, Ovid who would exploit to the full the
same imaginative multiplex panegyric strategy would have to go.
When Lowell
Edmunds (2001) presents himself as putting some final nails in the coffin of
authorial intention (viii), he does not excuse me from a question on whether
the presence of disputed propositions (dubia) in Horatian panegyric is
different from the aporia that naturally comes to the fore in
negotiating sense with any literature (author[s]) or art. Don Fowler (1997: 24,
27; 2000: 3-4) and Stephen Hinds (1998: 48), I think rightly, position meaning
in the moment of reception. What makes tensions in Horatian panegyric different
from those involved in 'hearing' or 'reading' in general is not necessarily any
clear evidence identifiable in the 'text' of his poems that Horace intended to
include disputes, but rather that other rhetoricians and panegyrists themselves
advise that such disputes, especially conflicts that might incidentally impugn
the character of the laudandus in some way, should be avoided in praise.
Perhaps what makes panegyric a dangerous game is that disputes can never really
be avoided (Bartsch, 1994), and if this is the case, then I believe it is safe
to conclude from the brief outline of the above plots that Horace takes on the
panegyric hazards like a daredevil. A panegyrist under a temperamental emperor
would not want to take Horace for his model or to have as his
'listeners-readers' an audience Horatian praise had made sensitive to the
possible presence of disputes. Whether or not we call Horace's praise 'good' or
'bad' panegyric depends on our own understanding of intention. We have assumed,
probably too naďvely, that 'good' panegyric means undisputed praise for the
honoree. Horace models a different and more nuanced panegyric expression, more
readily recognized as characteristic of the 'exilic Ovid' (G.D. Williams, 1994:
154-168). Edmund's supposedly safe concession, "Roman poets had intentions
for their poems. A most obvious one is to please a patron (19)," may have
limited value in appreciating the complexities of Horace's panegyric
storytelling.
While dismissing
the rule of intention, I would argue that a 'reading' that discerns in Horatian
panegyric an invitation to an interpreting community, that is the formation of
praise through a complex of reciprocal voices, derives from internal impulses
within the text and is not simply forced onto Horatian panegyric by the aporia
of the external and remote audience(s). Such aporia surely compounds the
complexities of Horatian panegyric and may certainly be confused, arguably so,
with the disputes within the text; however, these disputes are also encouraged
by the very qualities and collective spirit of the panegyric. Horace's
interactions with Pindar and his remodeling of Pindaric structures, which run
the course of book IV, invoke the environment of the agon in which multiple
participants (athlete, judges, audience, praise-singers) comprise the event.
Horatian panegyric in this short collection involves a wide range of communal
experiences: weddings (c.1), triumphs (c.2), celebratory hymns (c.3; 6; 15),
father and mother to son relationships (c.4; 5; 14), and laments (c.1; 10; 11;
12). The Dionysiac ritual symbolism, most prominent in c.5, but always implicit
in the poet's sympotic persona, places wine (poetry) inside the gathered
revelers so that they are empowered by their songs to overcome painful
separations and celebrate life's pleasures together. Thus the book's concluding
invitation (c.15) is to communal song: nos ... canemus, 'I' (the
poet-singer) and 'we' (the poet's multiple audiences). These communal moments
of Horatian panegyric, the experiences in our living and dying that necessitate
we come together and on some level incorporate individual expressions, position
the internal and external audiences not as passive spectators but as active
participants who create and re-create the events.
I have borrowed
the dialect of modern public philosophy (sharing stories as a vital process of
creating and maintaining civic identities) not only in an effort to shorten the
distance between Horace's situation and our own but also to provoke a
conversation on Horace's later poems that moves beyond the question of
intention, motivation, and the problem of authentic (sincere) or inauthentic
(insincere) imperial panegyric. This move has long been suggested (Galinsky,
1975: 210-217; Brink, 1982: 532-533; Santirocco, 1995: 225-229), but has been
strikingly slow to materialize. Although panegyric poetry has received some
renewed interest (MacCormack, 1981; Pernot, 1993; Bartsch, 1994; 1998; Whitby,
1998; Fantham, 1999) due in part to recent work on the later epicists, the
application of panegyric modes of thought to Horace's Odes IV has maintained the relatively rudimentary assumption that
praise and blame are mutually exclusive categories: the poet in total control
of the creative and interpretive processes performs one act or the other. This
has meant that the nature of Horatian panegyric has been oversimplified. In
spite of Horace's consistent imaging of himself in Odes IV as the new and greater Pindar, exactly how he shapes and
defines his panegyric persona is given short shrift compared to whether or not
he reflects imperial interests. In general, many still view panegyric as a
negative label, which offends us more than the poet, and approach Odes IV, via Suetonius, wondering why
Horace wrote the book in the first place. Doubts about the accuracy of
Suetonius' vita Horati, in particular his contention that
Horace put together Odes IV only because Augustus requested certain
praise-pieces for his sons, began seriously with Fraenkel (1957) and spread throughout
Horatian criticism. There continues, however, to be an over-reliance on
Suetonius' judgment and a disregard for the poet's own ambitions and creative
passions even after the success of his lyric Carmen Saeculare. Accepting imperial pressure as the prime
motivation for Horace's later lyric immediately places Odes IV in a reactive posture and perpetuates the pro/anti-Augustan
debate. Further, every time the word 'propaganda' is used it betrays the 'why'
approach. Some hear Horace's voice as authentic imperial praise, fervent or
less so, with little consideration of what this implies about the poet's role
in Roman society. Others read Horace as subversive in some way without
recognizing what might be at risk for a poet who is so well known and has such
powerful patrons. As a consequence, there is still no clear unifying
relationship between the so-called 'public' (c.1-9; 14-15) and 'private' poems (c.10-13).
The private is still completely subsumed into the political so that certain
poems are at best largely ignored and at worst certainly confused.
The reinvented
vocabulary of literary theory has made some progress, but often leads back to
the same conclusions. Horace represses his voice, that is, the poet sacrifices
independent expression to fulfill a public role and does his best under these
circumstances (Oliensis, 1998).
Horace's odes "sap" the sense of his previous poems so that the poet
undercuts his praise and makes his panegyric questionable (Lyne, 1995). While recently there has
been a trend to protect the poet from the negative label of propagandist,
readings of Horatian panegyric still heavily depend on presuppositions about
authorial motivation. Others have tried to escape this quandary through
metapoetics. The Callimachean and Epicurean aesthetic of the small/thin voice
(Horatian moderatio) contradicts the
poetic persona required for praise-poetry and makes panegyric impossible. The
poet can never be believable in this role (Fowler, in Harrison, 1995; and to a lesser degree, Lowrie, 1997: 349-352).
To be sure, Horace's poetry is about poetry and as Lowrie's work has once again
proven, Horatian techne is often the point -- not the only point, but a
primary one. Putnam's seminal work (1986) has well demonstrated that in Odes IV Horace is concerned to establish
the role of the poet and the lyric poetic in Roman society. But is Horace's
lyric so limited by encomium that the power of the poet can for all practical
purposes be reduced to an ability to immortalize the deeds of another? Is this
the extent of the poet's role? If this is the case, then Horace's lyric
sympotic persona of Odes I-III is in
full retreat in Odes IV. Horace's Carmen
Saeculare, the song for the new age that presents the poet as the creator
of its ritual magic (Putnam, 2000), announces the opposite: Horace's lyric has
the power to give substance and form to civic identities. This is the impasse
of Odes IV: either there is no
credible Horatian imperial or Roman panegyric, or the poet is so completely an
imperial panegyrist that he is little else.
One root cause of
the dilemma (as Barchiesi, 1994, has already shown with Ovid; Habinek, 1998,
with Augustan literature in general) is that the political and the aesthetic
have been so artificially divided that the lyric sympotic Horace and the
panegyric Horace are too often separated into distinct and disassociated
entities. Horace writes one persona or the other. The failure to appreciate
fully the character of Horace's epic criticism (its irony) and the diversity of
the lyric tradition has led to the rigid over-application of this artificial
division (when the poet is in a panegyric mode he has forfeited his independent
lyric temperament). Studies on Horace have repeatedly, if inadvertently,
communicated clearly that the pleasures of Horatian drinking-songs and imperial
praise have always had an uncomfortable coexistence. It has been an
inconvenience that they together form the same lyric collection. But the poet
has been so obviously deceitful. Horace is above all a sympotic poet and his panegyric
praxis is best understood as an expression of his sympotic persona from Odes I-III (chapter 1). Book IV cannot
be understood when it is interpreted as if it were independent from Horace's
earlier lyric collection. The collections are remarkably codependent even
though they were published ten years apart. The poet's sympotic persona of Odes I-III constantly informs his
panegyric. From the very first ode of book IV, Horace weds panegyric with his
lyric sympotic persona. This is to say that Horatian panegyric depends on an
invitation to community rather than a confrontational relationship of a poet
facing an audience and attempting to persuade them to adopt a particular
position toward a laudandus. We
should also expect Horatian encomia, like Horatian symposia, to be seriocomic,
which in turn means that they are prone to incorporate conflicting points of
view and tone (chapter 2). Horace writes panegyric with tensions and conflicts
that provoke his audience to become active interpreters, and as a result even
the panegyrics for the imperial family do not offer easy resolutions between
praise and blame or political and poetic power. Horace's lyric praise requires
and nurtures a collective interpretive process that transforms panegyric into a
vibrant communal activity (chapters 3 and 5). The communal nature of Horatian
panegyric complements the expressions of lament and celebration prominent in Odes IV. The anguish expressed over the
transience of life is not so much an autobiographical sorrow over the poet's
old age, but an individual's genuine emotive response to the episodes of one's
life consciously encumbered and significantly entwined with the lives of others
so as to necessitate and envalue individual expression (chapter 4). That is to
say, Horace's panegyric is sympotic.
****
To answer three
possible criticisms -- (1) I have not arranged the book according to particular
instances of the sympotic within the encomia of Odes IV. Although this may risk weakening the overall argument, it
is more important to treat each ode as a whole and not hinder the natural
development of the book by rearranging its odes out of turn to fit a particular
thesis. I have not been entirely successful in preserving the linear order of
the poems. The odes most affected are the encomia
Augusti (4-5; 14-15), which begin in the middle of the encomia nobilium and
resume after the odes of lament (10-13). Therefore, I have divided
Horace's imperial praise into two chapters (3 and 5) in order to preserve the
natural chiastic structure of the book. This division allows my reading of the
encomia to begin where Horace began his book, with the praise of the young
nobles. In general, however, readers interested in specific textual and
interpretive questions on individual odes should be able find them readily
without the need to search through various chapters. (2) I have not maintained
rigid distinctions between such titles as 'Horace, the poet's persona, the
poet, the singer, and the speaker' because Horace constantly blurs these
distinctions so that it becomes impossible to tell when he is wearing a mask
and when he is not. This confusion is a good part of Horace's fun. I do not
want to ruin it. (3) It is difficult to sort through and explain the details of
Horace's compressed lyrics with any brevity, especially since his later songs
interact so closely with his earlier work. Such attention to complementary
repetitions in Horatian song is a necessary task and a large part of
appreciating the music in Horace's lyric art. Consequently, any book on Horace
is forced to be Callimachean, both 'fat and thin.' Horace, I believe, would
enjoy this compliment. He would still likely criticize my book for having too
many words, but not too many words on literary theory.
Latin poetry does
not survive the transfer into English prose, and this is true for Horace
perhaps more so than for any other author; the artistic subtle nuances of his
word-order, vocabulary, and sophisticated manipulation of language are not
easily reproduced in another form -- Ben Jonson aside. To translate Horace is
to attempt the Pindaric. I have attempted only to provide close renderings of
the basic sense of his poems to help my audience better follow and judge my
arguments.
Except where
noted, I cite Shackleton Bailey's 1985 Stuttgart Teubner edition of Horace.
This may not be a popular choice. His edition has been roundly criticized for
an eccentric, zealous predisposition for emendation and, more unfortunately,
for a general lack of good proofreading that risks introducing a fair number of
mistakes into the textual tradition. The edition is worth the risks. In 1981
C.O. Brink complained that as yet a critical edition of Horace did not exist
(in Killy, 1981: 15-16; cf. Tränkle, 1993: 1-40; Lowrie, CR [1999]
386-387); this void has been filled more by Shackleton Bailey's Teubner than by
its rival, Borzsák's 1984 Leipzig Teubner (Renehan, 1988: 311-328; Harrison,
1995: 1-2). Borzsák claims "daß ich kein konsequent konservativer
Textkritiker war" (1985: 179), but it is a rather moot protest, since his
conservative edition stops with recensio
and avoids emendatio, even when there are problems with
meter, grammar, or sense. His work moves little beyond his predecessor's,
Klingner's 1959 Teubner third edition. Shackleton Bailey, following more in the
Housman tradition, offers more than 200 emendations than Klingner and does not
obscure the fact that there are textual difficulties. Not all agree that the
text is as corrupt as Shackleton Bailey's edition implies (Nisbet, Gnomon 58 [1986] 611-615; CR 100 [1986] 227-334), but the text is
certainly far from secure (Maas, 1956: 603-604; Nisbet, 1989: 87) as was
asserted at the turn of the century by Paul Shorey (1898). A primary advantage
to Shackleton Bailey's work is that it alerts readers to the questions critics
have debated about the text, which otherwise they would likely miss (Delz, Gnomon
[1988] 495-501). As a bonus, Shackleton Bailey restores respect to Richard
Bentley's role in the textual criticism of Horace (Joliffe, 1939; Shackleton
Bailey, 1982: 104-120; Brink, 1985).
I have tried in
the notes to convey some sense of chronology for Horatian studies by in general
citing authors according to the date of their earliest editions. For the
reader's convenience I have referenced subsequent editions, which are commonly
consulted, under their respective authors in the list of works cited.