The Oxford History Of The Classical World

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1
intemptata nites! ...

What slim boy, Pyrrha, drenched in liquid scents presses you in an abundance of roses under some pleasing grotto? For
whom are you binding back your blonde hair in simple elegance? Alas, how often will he bewail fidelity and the gods
changed, and wonder amazed at the sea made harsh by dark winds, he who now trustfully enjoys golden you, he who expects
you always available, always lovable-ignorant of the deceiving breeze. Wretched are they for whom you shine untried ...!


That carries a typical Horatian message which Horace, unlike the gullible youth in the poem, knows only too well. Love, the
occupation of leisure, is a fleeting, evanescent, untrustworthy thing, though it can be none the less painful for that.


Odes 3.28 gives a taste of Horace as poet of wine as well as love. It too carries a typical Horatian message: Horace announces
that it is a holiday, the Neptunalia, and therefore leisure time. What is he to do? Answer: drink good wine, make music-and
love. So, in Horace's view, leisure pursuits, love and wine, should not usurp the position of serious business; but it is equally
his view, embodied in this Ode, that leisure is not leisure without them.


It will be noted that the girls in Horace's poetry of love and wine have Greek names. If we investigate these names, if we
investigate other details in the poems, we find that this leisure poetry reflects-with discretion, stylization, romance-a real
society: the Roman demi-monde, the symposion scene, where girls of probably slave or freedwoman class entertained with
music and sex. This fact is important in two respects. It shows that Horace's erotic and sympotic poetry is not mere fancy and
convention. And it also shows that Horace as a rule enjoyed, or liked to be seen to be enjoying, his erotic pleasures with
women, or boys, of the lower classes employed for that purpose. That was considered correct at Rome. To attempt an erotic
liaison with an upper-class uirgo was or should be an impossibility, and to have affairs with married ladies was in the
Augustan age to become literally criminal. That point was not always well taken.


Many of Horace's Odes in Books 1-3 are concerned neither with affairs of state nor merely with leisure and pleasure, but with
ethics on a private scale: how a man in his private capacity should conduct his life. After the production of Odes 1-3 Horace
returns to the hexameter metre of his Satires and, in the late twenties B.C., writes Epistles (Book 1) which are devoted to such
ethical exploration and instruction. In his introductory Epistle to Maecenas he explains that, for this new production, he is
giving up verse 'and other such frivolities'. The statement lacks neither ambiguity nor disingenuousness: for a start, Horace is
at that very moment technically writing verse. It is nevertheless true that he does temporarily relinquish his role as public poet
and the more overtly poetical mode of lyric. Why? Some reasons are stated, some may be inferred. Horace's dislike of the
business of being a professional poet (recitations and so on) is affirmed in Epistle 1.19 and reaffirmed in the Epistle to Florus
(2.2) of 19 B.C. He also attests lack of public acclaim for Odes 1-3, due to his unwillingness to participate in such business;
that too may have been discouraging. Then again, the question of private ethics had always been a preoccupation of his, in
Satires as well as in Odes.


There is perhaps one more factor: something to do with the role of public poet, the poet as immortalizer, the poet as educator.
Horace may have experienced lack of confidence in the role, or perhaps disenchantment with it, as the Maecenas era drew to
its close; whatever it was, the cap was no longer fitting. In Book 3 Horace had been the 'priest of the Muses', addressing
future generations in public and edifying tones. In the Epistle to Florus, this same man turns to discuss the various reasons for
writing poetry-the reasons that might induce him to turn professional again-and does not mention poetry's grand functions, its
functions to immortalize and in particular to edify. The silence seems to me significant: for some reason, Horace was
unhappy about the poet in this sort of role.

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