think, torn between their status as a great naval power and their inability to escape from
dominant Greek aristocratic ideologies of landed wealth: Griffith 1999, 185.
As Chris Kraus points out to me, such a mentality leads to the attempt to locate
the city of Rome in an ideal situation, neither too close to nor too far from the sea (Cic.
Rep.2.5 – 10, with Zetzel 1995, 162 – 63).
He is thus widening his focus from the previous poem (Carm.1.2), which had
used the end ofGeorgics1 as a way of concentrating on the more circumscribed topic
of Roman national guilt for the civil wars: Nisbet and Hubbard 1970, 16 – 17.
Mynors 1990, 28.
Horace ’s primary lyric model, Alcaeus, is regularly cast by him as the sailor
(Carm.1.32.7 – 8; 2.13.27).
Rosen 1990, 104, on Hesiod ’s metaphorical activation of farming and sailing; I
thank Stephen Hinds for this reference, and for alerting me to the issue. On this pro-
grammatic dimension to Horace ’s poem, see Basto 1982 and Sharrock 1994, 112 – 14.
I quote the translation of D. West (1995).
As Sharrock (1994, 113) puts it, in the course of an enlightening discussion. She
well brings out how the poem combines an understanding at once of “progress, the
attempt to push back the boundaries of human civilization,” and “transgression, which
attempts to burst the boundaries of human nature and the condition of man” (115).
On Valerius Flaccus’s exploitation of the similarity offlying and sailing in his
treatment of the Argo’s ending of the Golden Age, see Feeney 1991, 330 – 32.
Nisbet and Hubbard 1970, 57: “The long final vowel is an archaism.”
W. S. Anderson per litteraskindly points out to me another striking departure
in this portion of the poem, “the daring enjambement between 32 and 33, which acts
out the Latin corripuit gradum.It is the only case where the fourth line [of the stanza]
does not come to a full stop in the poem.”
It is interesting to see what the great commentary of Nisbet and Hubbard said
about this poem in 1970: “Horace turns to an attack on human inventiveness in gen-
eral. The ancients by no means lacked appreciation of such enterprise”; they give
examples: “Yet poets and moralists regularly stressed the other point of view, not nec-
essarily with any overwhelming conviction. Prometheus was too often the symbol not
for man’s conquest of nature, but for impious defiance of the gods” (Nisbet and Hub-
bard 1970, 44). “Man’s conquest of nature” was a phrase that could still be used in
straightforward approbation in 1970. Their further comment (45) sounds genuinely
ironic early in the next, steadily warming, millennium: “The diatribe against enterprise
has none of the universal validity which we expect from Horatian commonplaces, and
though no more foolish than the conventional praises of poverty, it sounds particularly
unconvincing to modern ears.” Syndikus 1972, 62 – 63, offers a more sympathetic view.
Note, however, that Catullus “refrained from mentioning the Argo by name”:
notes to pages 121 – 123