There, says Horace, he will be raised to the ranks of thevates, the Greek
singers, inspired (calcar) like Hesiod by the Muses of Helicon.
How should we understand this assimilation of a Latin poet to one of
the mythical figures of great Greek poetry? Is this a tasteless hyperbole, a
conventional comparison? If one focuses on the function of books and the
library, Horace will occupy in thelitterae latinaethe place of a canonical
author of thelitterae graecae. It is as if the poems of Horace, a great and
inspired Latin singer of ages past, had been collected and fixed in books
piously deposited in the library of Apollo. In fact, no Roman poet com-
poses while possessed by the Muses, but it has that status. This is the
origin of new poetry, Greek poetry in Latin, such as that of Vergil, Varius,
Propertius, or Tibullus. The book thus has a possible double destiny,
based both on its materiality and on its symbolic status, which it owes
to its fictive utterance.
This double destiny is presented very clearly by one of Horace’sLetters
(1.20). TheLettersare poems that use a fictive epistolary utterance and
thus have human recipients, who are addressed in the first or the second
line. This is the only poem of Book 1 that is not addressed to a human, but
rather to the book itself; it exposes the epistolary fiction by reminding us
that the letters are in fact a collection of poems. This poem retains
nothing of the epistolary form except the address to its recipient. The
book has the choice of one of two destinies. In its first destiny, the book is
reduced to the mere materiality of support. It is metamorphosed into a
young debauched boy, following the same metaphor as in Catullus. The
book whose edges had been smoothed by pumice is compared to a young
boy with a smooth body. He is eager to be read/loved by the greatest
number. Its other destiny is to remain hidden for the author’s sake
(Ep. 1.20.1–5):
Vortumnum Ianumque, liber, spectare uideris,
scilicet ut prostes Sosiorum pumice mundus.
Odisti clauis et grata sigilla pudico,
paucis ostendi gemis et communia laudas,
non ita nutritus.(You seem, my book, to be looking at the temples of Vertumnus and Janus,
no doubt so you can offer yourself for sale, polished with the pumice of
Sosius & Sosius, Booksellers.
You hate the keys and seals that please the modest.
You chafe at being shown to just a few and praise a public life.
That’s not how I raised you!)It wants to live as apuer delicatus, to attend the banquets, instead of
remaining modestly in the bosom of the family. It refuses to be locked up
in a box for bookrolls and deposited in a library, as a young ‘‘well-bred’’
book should; it wants to be seen/read and appreciated by a greater
number of people. So it leaves and soon will regret it, because the papyrus
The Corrupted Boy and the Crowned Poet 153