Victorian Horace: Classics and Class 9781472583918, 9781472583901, 9781474204460, 9781472583932

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Victorian Horace

CLASSICAL INTER/FACES SERIES Edited by Susanna Braund and Paul Cartledge Celebrity in Antiquity: From Media Tarts to Tabloid Queens Robert Garland Delusions of Invulnerability: Wisdom and Morality in Ancient Greece, China and Today G. E. R. Lloyd Figuratively Speaking: Rhetoric and Culture from Quintilian to the Twin Towers Sarah Spence Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth Lillian Doherty Lucretius and the Modern World W. R. Johnson Nation, Empire, Decline: Studies in Rhetorical Continuity from the Romans to the Modern Era Nancy Shumate Performance and Cure: Drama and Healing in Ancient Greece and Contemporary America Karelisa Hartigan Pity Transformed David Konstan Plato’s Progeny Melissa Lane Radical Theatre Rush Rehm Rome and the Literature of Gardens Victoria Pagán The Tragic Idea Vassilis Lambropoulos Translating Words, Translating Cultures Lorna Hardwick

Victorian Horace Classics and Class Stephen Harrison

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2017 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Stephen Harrison, 2017 Stephen Harrison has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover images: Alfred, Lord Tennyson engraving from 1873, traveler1116/Getty. Frontispiece from Q. Horatius Flaccus, cum erudito Laevini Torrentii commentario (Antwerp, 1608). All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Harrison, S. J., author. Title: Victorian Horace : classics and class / StephenHarrison. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. |Series: Classical inter/faces |Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016057218| ISBN 9781472583918(hardback) | ISBN 9781472583932(epdf) Subjects: LCSH: English literature–19th century–Historyand criticism. | Horace–Influence. | Horace–Criticism and interpretation. | English literature–Classicalinfluences. | Classicism–Great Britain–History–19th century. | Great Britain–Intellectual life–19th century. |BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Ancient & Classical. | LITERARY CRITICISM /European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. | HISTORY / Modern / 19th Century. Classification: LCC PR468.C6 H37 2017 | DDC820.9/008–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057218 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-8391-8 PB: 978-1-4725-8390-1 ePDF: 978-1-4725-8393-2 ePub: 978-1-4725-8392-5 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Series Preface Preface to the Volume 1 Preliminaries: From English Augustan to Victorian Horace Introduction: Horace and cultural capital A case study: Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century translations Rochester, Dryden and Pope: Versions in context The Romantics: Byron, Wordsworth, Keats Horace and the Victorian gentleman 2 Horace in Victorian Commentaries, Literary Criticism, Translations Commentaries Literary criticism Translations (i) Martin (ii) Conington (iii) Lytton (vi) Gladstone (v) Other complete versions (vi) Partial versions 3 Horace and the Victorian Poets I: Tennyson, Arnold, Clough, Fitzgerald Tennyson Arnold Clough Fitzgerald 4 Horace and the Victorian Poets II: Other Imitations Horace updated

vii viii 1 1 3 9 14 19

25 25 33 37 38 41 44 47 49 51

57 57 71 77 84 89 89

vi Contents

Horace the Victorian young man Loftier allusions

102 105

5 Horace in Victorian Fiction Horace at Athens Horace and the major Victorian novelists (i) Charles Dickens (ii) William Makepeace Thackeray (iii) George Eliot (iv) Anthony Trollope (v) Thomas Hardy

117

6 Epilogue – Modernizing Horace

145

Envoi Notes Bibliography Index

155

118 123 123 125 131 134 139

169 183 197

Series Preface The book that follows is the last – in the terminal sense – in our series, which was inaugurated exactly twenty years ago, in 1997. Readers curious for an editorial overview of the series aims, objectives and accomplishments are respectfully directed to the Envoi to be found at the end of this concluding volume. SMB PC

Preface to the Volume This volume looks at the English reception of Horace in Victorian culture, a period (here defined as roughly 1830–1900) which saw the consolidation of the discipline of modern classical scholarship in England and of many associated and lasting social values. It shows that the scholarly study, translation and literary imitation of Horace in this period was a crucial element in reinforcing the social prestige of classics as a discipline and its function as an indicator of ‘gentlemanly’ male status through its domination of the elite educational system and its prominence in literary production. It begins with a chapter of pre-Victorian background, and ends with a brief sketch of how things have moved on since 1900. Some basic investigation of Horace’s impact on the English literature of the Victorian period is available in a century-old collection of parallels (Thayer 1916), in occasional (usually older) notes and articles, and two fine survey chapters by Norman Vance (1993 and 1997; see also his more recent briefer summary, Vance 2015), all of which I have used with profit, but there is no more detailed study. This volume seeks to fill that gap, as far as the brief compass of its series allows; the topic of each chapter could easily itself occupy a whole book. It develops a series of earlier articles and chapters (Harrison 2007b, 2009, 2012), and focuses on England as a key region and the one best known to the author; similar works could be written in France, Germany, Italy and the United States. My work in this area began in teaching an undergraduate paper on Victorian reception of the classics in Oxford (1997–2004), with Edith Hall and then Fiona Macintosh; I am most grateful to them both for their support, then and now, to Richard Jenkyns for initial guidance in the area, to Stuart Gillespie for help in matters of translations, and to Chris Stray, with whom I have now worked happily on a number of projects on the history of scholarship and whose Classics Transformed (Stray 1998) is a major impetus for this book. I am most grateful to Paul Quarrie for sharing his expertise on historical



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Horatian translations (also shown in his excellent recent anthology of trans­ lations, Quarrie 2015), and to Maureen Almond for giving me pre-publication access to her most recent work (Almond 2016). My thanks also to Susanna Braund for commissioning this volume for her series and for her interest and comments, to her and Paul Cartledge for accepting it, and to Alice Wright and Lucy Carroll at Bloomsbury for their encouragement, efficiency and patience. My apologies go to all four for the considerable delay in writing this book, occasioned by other pressing responsibilities and commitments. Many thanks too to Rosemary Morlin for her vigilant copy-editing, and to Kim Storry at Fakenham Prepress Solutions for her kind help in the final stages. One consequence of the delay has been the emergence and completion of a splendid AHRC-funded project which matches the subtitle I generated in 2007: Classics and Class in Britain, 1789–1917, which ran at KCL under the direction of Edith Hall in 2013 to 2016, issuing in (amongst other outputs) Hall and Stead (2015); its excellent continuation website with much archival material can be found at http://www.classicsandclass.info. I use my own Latin text of Horace throughout, generally separating the Odes into quatrain stanzas, and my own translations where not otherwise noted. SJH, Oxford, September 2016

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Preliminaries: From English Augustan to Victorian Horace

Introduction: Horace and cultural capital In English culture from the seventeenth century until the twentieth, the poetry of Horace was familiar to male members of the country’s elite through its central place in their education (Ogilvie 1964: 40–3; Stray 2015: 81–2).1 A fundamental assumption of this book is that this familiarity, gained at some cost and unachievable by modern-style short-cuts, consistently served as a means by which the members of that elite, and those who aspired to belong to it, engaged (consciously or unconsciously) in self-definition and self-fashioning,2 and in claiming and maintaining their elite status: this is fully consistent with the way in which Horace’s works and allusions to them are appropriated and manipulated with various degrees of creativity in all forms of literary reception in this period. This corresponds well to the idea of ‘cultural capital’ developed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.3 Cultural capital is built up through elite education and confers on individuals the capacity to demonstrate ‘long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body’ (Bourdieu 2007: 84; for example, a familiarity with the works of a particular Latin poet such as Horace); it is ‘marked by its earliest conditions of acquisition which, through the more or less visible marks they leave … help to determine its distinctive value’ (Bourdieu 2007: 86; for example, marked by school and university reading) and ‘is constantly required to prove itself ’ (Bourdieu 2007: 88; for example, through literary publication for one’s peers). It is allied with ‘social capital’, which is the province of the institutions (such as the English male elite society of the period and its formative schools) to which those individuals belong and which themselves reinforce and maintain

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the notion of cultural capital, through a ‘durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition – or in other words, … membership in a group’ (Bourdieu 2007: 88). In the context of this book, cultural capital can be seen as claimed through means such as the writing of literary works which show the marks of an elite education (such as Horatian allusion), and social capital can be seen as sought in pursuing the recognition of one’s cultural capital by a like-minded readership group (such as the readers of high literature) which is invited to affirm the status which the writer and reader already share, or would like to share. Readerly recognition of writerly Horatian allusion can thus mutually reinforce the elite status of both reader and writer. This volume aims to investigate the various types of Horatian reception available in English elite culture of the Victorian period against this background; the cultural capital of Horatian allusion and its recognition by readers is to be understood as a key motivation for the different kinds of appropriation and manipulation which we will find in the various texts examined, which will range from school commentaries through translations to sophisticated literary versions and refashionings. This is especially notable in the Victorian age of Horatian reception, with its many and important literary adaptations and its industry of school and university textbooks and translations, which is why I have chosen it as the prime object of my investigation. But this will be framed by some consideration of antecedents and consequences; this introductory chapter gives some of its prehistory by discussing sample material from 1660 to 1830, and my brief epilogue will turn to the post-Victorian period and the degree to which elements of the traditional English reception of Horace have survived in the modern world. The eighteenth century in England is often thought of as an aetas Horatiana or Horatian age in which many of the major poets openly and closely imitated Horace and where his supposed ‘Augustan’ virtues fitted the contemporary ‘Augustan’ ideology of moderation and order.4 Learned poets could imitate Horace’s difficult metres in impressively authentic Latin verse:5 the third and fourth of the six books of the Liber Plantarum of Abraham Cowley (d. 1667), published in his posthumous Poemata Latina (1668), show a fluent command of a range of Horatian lyric metres in the charming odes spoken by individual plants and flowers in a dialogue framework which owes something to Ovid’s



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Fasti (Moul 2012), while Joseph Addison’s Alcaic odes to Dr Edward Hannes (1699)6 and Dr Thomas Burnet (1698)7 show that he could manage Horatian lyric metres just as well as Vergilian hexameters,8 and the Sapphics and Alcaics of Anthony Alsop (d. 1726) cover a rich spectrum of Horatian topics (erotic, sympotic, political) with panache and authentically Horatian style (Money 1998). Likewise, Thomas Gray wrote Alcaic odes at school in the 1730s (a paraphrase of Psalm 84) and on his travels in 1740 (Lonsdale 1969: 285–7, 310–12), and Samuel Johnson could write poems in Horatian Alcaics to literary friends at either end of his literary career, plus a pair of odes in Alcaics and Sapphics marking his visit to Skye in 1773,9 while Walter Savage Landor could produce erotic Sapphics in his youthful 1795 Poems, and Alcaics more than half a century later on such topics as the Hungarian nationalist leader Kossuth and the Crimean War (Rudd 2010: 23–4, 85–6, 90–2). But such learned imitation and its appreciation was necessarily limited to a very small group; in what follows I will try to give an impression of the wider reception of Horace in this period through a consideration of some key translations and poetic versions of Horace.

A case study: Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century translations The period 1660 to 1790 is the age when translations of the major Latin poets emerged in England as literary products in their own right and were widely read by the male elite.10 Here I want to look at some important versions of the period, and in particular their approach to potentially obscene material, considering how far it could acceptably be rendered into English at different points in these years. I take as my case studies versions of some poems of prominent sexual colour in several Horatian genres: the misogynistic invectives Epodes 8 and 12, Satire 1.2 (on sex and adultery), and the overtly homoerotic Odes 4.1 and 4.10.11 Here I aim to show the general character of these central Horatian translations, to demonstrate that the more decorous approach to Horace we find in Victorian translations and versions (see Chapter 3) was not always predominant, and to suggest that there is something of a linear development in this respect from the period of Charles II to that of Victoria; the male elite

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of the Restoration period was clearly more at home with the more colourful side of the poet, not surprising in the world of the Earl of Rochester (see below). My first text is the earliest complete English version of Horace, with translations by several hands, edited by Alexander Brome and first published in 1666.12 Such multi-authored translations were common at the time, usually rapidly gathered by enterprising publishers.13 Brome (1620–66) was a lawyer, but was best known as a satirical and sympotic Cavalier poet.14 Brome’s collection has no problems with the homoerotic colour of Odes 4.1 and 4.10, which are closely rendered (for both these poems see further below), and in the versions of Epodes 8 and 12 in the first edition of 1666 we find a lively version of the two poems’ most crude obscenities by Brome himself: Rogare longo putidam te saeculo, viris quid enervet meas, cum sit tibi dens ater et rugis vetus frontem senectus exaret hietque turpis inter aridas natis podex velut crudae bovis. To me thou superannuated Bitch? What? Must I scratch where thou dost itch? O coal-hole-mouth! With what a comely grace Those reverend Gutters drain that face! And filthy arse ’twixt buttocks wither-dried, Like some raw-boned cows gapes so wide! (Epode 8.1–6) ‘Inachia langues minus ac me; Inachiam ter nocte potes, mihi semper ad unum mollis opus. pereat male quae te Lesbia quaerenti taurum monstravit inertem’. ‘Thou with Inachia coulds’t hold longer out Yea, thrice a night! With me at once thou’rt tir’d; A pox take Lesbia, who when I enquir’d For tuff-back’d Actors, shewed me thee so dull’. (Epode 12.14–17)

In the second edition of 1671 much is toned down, perhaps in reaction to the reception of the first edition. In the revision of Epode 8.5–8, clearly done after



Preliminaries: From English Augustan to Victorian Horace

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Brome’s death and now characterized as ‘paraphrased’ by ‘T. F.’,15 the overt reference to ‘buttocks’ is replaced by the more decorous ‘rump’ and the bovine anus reference is removed, though a witty image is deployed in compensatory padding: Around her rump, how her lean haunch-bones show! Like Ghosts bout the Pit below!

And in the 1671 version of Epode 12.14–15 (also by ‘T. F.’ and described as ‘paraphrased’) the mildly graphic ‘hold longer’ and the suggestive elision of the verb of coition is removed in favour of the blander ‘lov’st’, while the reference to pox disappears along with the suggestion of animalistic sexual athleticism in ‘tuff-backed’: Thou lov’st Inachia more than me! Inachia thrice a night, as I am told, Once serves poor me! – This ’tis to be old! Curse on that pimping Lesbia (for me) I bad her bring a Man, not thee.

The version of Satires 1.2.68–72 by Brome himself is unchanged between the two editions, perhaps because it is already a decorous rendition of an obscene original: huic si muttonis verbis mala tanta videnti diceret haec animus ‘quid vis tibi? numquid ego a te magno prognatum deposco consule cunnum velatumque stola, mea cum conferbuit ira?’ quid responderet? ‘magno patre nata puella est.’ Now if that Natural genius of his Should say to him, when he had seen all this, Sir, what do you mean? Do I require, when e’re I am inrag’d, the Daughter of a Peer Or any marri’d woman? What could he Then answer to’t? that woman’s meat for me, Who is descended of a noble stem. (Satires 1.2.68–72)

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Here the crude words mutto (‘prick’) and cunnum (‘cunt’) have been carefully transformed into the inoffensive terms ‘natural genius’ and ‘daughter’. Another early version of Horace in English is that of 1684 by Thomas Creech (1659–1700), an Oxford academic better known for his 1682 version of Lucretius.16 As in Brome’s collection, the homoerotic Odes 4.1 and 4.10 are rendered without evident embarrassment about the addressee’s gender, while the two obscene Epodes are cut out, a tactic used by many later translators and editors, and Satires 1.2 is again toned down (Satires 1.2.68–72 again): Suppose his Whore-pipe now being vext at this, Should ask him, did I want a noble Miss, A Whore of Quality to cool my Flame? No, I had been content with meaner Game: What answer could be given? What be said? Only, forsooth, she was a Noble Maid.

Here ‘whore-pipe’ is graphic, but ‘Maid’ clearly cleans up cunnus. Thus in Restoration versions of Horace we find a mixed response to issues of potential obscenity. Neither Brome’s collection nor Creech feels the need to modify homoerotic poetry, but the frankness of some of the renderings in the 1666 version of Brome’s collection was clearly felt to be problematic in 1671; and while Brome’s volume in both forms avoids the reference to the male member in Satires 1.2, Creech feels able to use a colourful (if less obscene) term for the penis. All this may reflect the uncertain cultural situation of the reign of Charles II, where an initial burst of licentiousness (led by the King and Court) as a reaction to years of Commonwealth Puritanism competed with more anxious and sober elements.17 The most important complete Horatian translation of the eighteenth century in the United Kingdom was that of Philip Francis, The Works of Horace (1742–7). Francis (1708–73), like Creech a clergyman, educator and man of letters,18 omits Epodes 8 and 12 and excises Satires 1.2.68–72 from his translation (as later versions often do). More interesting is his treatment of the two homoerotic poems to Ligurinus from Odes 4 – here is Odes 4.1.33–42 with Francis’ version: Sed cur heu, Ligurine, cur manat rara meas lacrima per genas?



Preliminaries: From English Augustan to Victorian Horace

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Cur facunda parum decoro inter uerba cadit lingua silentio? Nocturnis ego somniis iam captum teneo, iam uolucrem sequor te per gramina Martii campi, te per aquas, dure, uolubilis. Yet why, ah! fair one, still too dear, Steals down my cheek th’involuntary tear? Or why thus falter o’er my tongue The words, which once harmonious pour’d along? Swift through the fields, and flowing streams, I follow thee in visionary dreams; Now, now I seize, I clasp thy charms, And now you burst, ah cruel! from my arms.

Here the gender of the poet’s beloved is strongly implied to be female (‘fair one’); Francis is not quite as unambiguous as some others in altering the gender in Horace’s homoerotic poetry, but the strategy is clear. Francis’ version of 4.10 is less coy: O crudelis adhuc et Veneris muneribus potens, insperata tuae cum ueniet pluma superbiae et, quae nunc umeris inuolitant, deciderint comae, nunc et qui color est puniceae flore prior rosae mutatus Ligurinum in faciem uerterit hispidam, dices, heu, quotiens te speculo uideris alterum: ‘Quae mens est hodie, cur eadem non puero fuit, uel cur his animis incolumes non redeunt genae?’ O cruel still, and vain of beauty’s charms, When wintry age thy insolence disarms; When fall those locks that on thy shoulders play, And youth’s gay roses on thy cheeks decay; When that smooth face shall manhood’s roughness wear, And in your glass another form appear: Ah why, you’ll say, do I now vainly burn, Or with my wishes not my youth return?

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Here the addressee’s maleness is clear (‘manhood’); but the relatively Platonic homoeroticism here was perhaps acceptable in the contemporary context. Christopher Smart (1722–71), academic, poet, and friend of Dr Johnson,19 produced three translations of Horace, one in prose (Smart 1756), and one in verse (1767; Williamson 1996) equipped with a further accompanying revised prose translation. The 1756 prose translation renders the homoerotic 4.1 and 4.10 without problems, but Satires 1.2.68–71 (cited above) is clearly expurgated, with mutto rendered as ‘appetite’, cunnus as ‘woman’: Suppose this young man’s mind had addressed him in the words of his appetite, perceiving such evil consequences: ‘What would you have? Did I ever, when my ardour was at the highest, demand a woman descended from a great consul, and covered with robes of quality?’

Similar tactics are used in the two Epode passages (again cited above), where all the problematic terms are likewise defused, removing the buttocks and anus and turning inadequate sexual performance into conversational tediousness: Can you, grown rank with lengthened age, ask what unnerves my vigour? When your teeth are black, and old age withers your brow with wrinkles: and your back sinks between your staring hip-bones, like that of an unhealthy cow. (Epode 8.1–6) You are always less dull with Inachia than me: in her company you are three-fold plaisance; but you are ever unprepared to oblige me in a single instance. Lesbia, who first recommended you – so unfit a help in time of need – may she come to an ill end! (Epode 12.14–17)

This tendency is taken further in the 1767 verse version, which solves the problem of our dubious passages by removing them all: it leaves out Epodes 8 and 12, excises Satires 1.2.68–72 by stopping the poem at 1.2.24 (a strategy of curtailment followed by others), similarly cuts off Odes 4.1 at line 28 just before the reference to bisexuality, and omits Odes 4.10 completely. Here there are interesting issues of different intended readerships. The 1756 prose version was directed to ‘those who are desirous of acquiring or recovering a competent Knowledge of the Latin Language’,20 that is, to schoolboys and former schoolboys engaging with the Latin, pretty much a male preserve in this period;21 here Smart speaks to his fellow elite members to display his



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cultural capital. The 1767 verse version, printed with a parallel Latin text and a literal prose translation underneath, was by contrast accessible to both sexes, and women would be a clear target of the polite literary ambitions of the poetic translation. In the 1767 preface Smart is explicit about his exclusion of obscene material to protect youthful readers: ‘Lastly as I suppose the book will fall into the hands of young persons, I have been especially careful, concerning all passages of Offence …’ . ‘Persons’ is carefully chosen: in 1767 potential additional female readers form a particular area of concern for the author, and no doubt comprise the main reason for the increased and almost complete excision of any problematic material (we have seen that the prose version is mixed in this respect). As we will see in Chapter 2, the censoring of the original Latin, appreciated by elite males with the requisite education, for a wider audience of the unlearned is a key feature of Victorian versions; by the end of the eighteenth century we are already half-way to the expurgations of the nineteenth.

Rochester, Dryden and Pope: Versions in context In the period under consideration, published versions of individual Horatian poems were extremely popular, providing an economical mode of presenting oneself as a poet of gentlemanly education: in England between 1660 and 1700 ‘new translations and adaptations of poems from the Odes alone were written by at least fifty different hands’ (Gillespie 1993: 148), and in 1715 the London publisher Jacob Tonson the elder, who with his client John Dryden had been instrumental in developing the public taste for classical trans­lations over the previous generation,22 issued the so-called ‘Wits’ Miscellany’, in which versions by a wide variety of hands of half the Odes and some other Horatian poems were presented together as a collection, one of a series of such miscellaneous volumes in this period.23 In this section I want to look at some individual versions of Horatian poems from this time in order to show how closely Horace is built into contemporary English intellectual culture. My first example is ‘An Allusion to Horace’ by John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester. This satire, written in 1675 or 1676, is a version of Horace Satires 1.10, where the poet takes further his discussion of his satiric predecessor

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Lucilius from Satires 1.4, suggesting that Lucilius was crude but that in Horace’s own time he would have been more polished; 1.10 moderates some of the criticisms made in the earlier poem, but also justifies them by an appeal to Lucilius’ own attacks on other poets.24 Where Horace takes on the long-dead Lucilius, Rochester (b. 1647) tackles his older contemporary Dryden (b. 1631), who he admits is a successful stage-poet but suggests is an unsuccessful satirist. I cite the opening of both poems, with a translation of the Latin:25 Well Sir ’tis granted, I said Dryden’s Rhymes Were stollen, unequal, nay dull many times. What foolish Patron is there found of his So blindly partial to deny me this? But that his Plays embroyder’d up and down With witt and learning justly pleasd the Town, In the same Paper I as freely own. Nempe incomposito dixi pede currere versus Lucili. quis tam Lucili fautor inepte est, ut non hoc fateatur? at idem, quod sale multo urbem defricuit, charta laudatur eadem. Indeed I said that Lucilius’ lines ran on with casual foot: Who is such a clumsy fan of Lucilius As not to admit this? But the same poet is praised In the same parchment, because he scoured the city with much salt.

Horace’s Callimacheanizing criticisms of Lucilius as rough in style are here replaced by specific stylistic charges against Dryden for ponderous rhyming; for a contemporary learned readership, this would wittily imply that the living Dryden, like the dead Lucilius of a century earlier than Horace, is out of date compared to the current poetic fashion of Rochester and his friends. Like Horace, Rochester includes a lengthy passage where he lists contemporary poets, praising some and criticizing others. Then, as Horace returns to Lucilius, Rochester returns to Dryden, but with much more satiric vigour. Horace says that Lucilius was the greater man and pays tribute to his satiric achievement, even though he was ‘muddy’ in style and needed more editing, while Rochester’s mixture of criticism and praise is more personal and negative and cast in characteristically obscene terms which depart dramatically from Horace at this point:26



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Dryden in vain tryd this nice way of Witt, For he to be a tearing Blade thought fitt. But when he would be sharp he still was blunt: To frisk his frolick fancy hee’d cry Cunt; Wou’d give the Ladyes a drye bawdy bobb, And thus he gott the name of Poet Squobb.27 (71–6)

Here we find Rochester’s personal voice pushing through the surface of an imitation which otherwise sticks relatively close to its original; the impact of this passage, as of the comparison of living Dryden and long-dead Lucilius, is especially strong for the elite readership with a close knowledge of the original, a readership which is likely to enjoy the enlisting and manipulation of a classical Latin poet in a Restoration literary controversy. My second example is from Dryden himself. In his Sylvae of 1685, an important collection of translations by himself and other hands, Dryden includes four versions of Horatian poems: Odes 1.3, 1.9, 3.29 and Epodes 2.28 Here the poet makes some interesting decisions about lyric metre, an initial choice that translators and adaptors into English face constantly given Horace’s complex forms: Odes 1.9 and 3.29 are rendered into the ‘Pindarick’ stanzas (longer than the four-line stanzas of Horace’s originals) made popular by Abraham Cowley in the previous generation (who had used them to translate Odes 1.5 and 4.2; see Waller 1905: 37–8, 178–9), while 1.3 is turned into heroic couplets (I cite the opening, the Latin original, and a literal version): So may the auspicious queen of Love And the twin stars (the seed of Jove), And he who rules the raging wind To thee, O sacred ship be kind, And gentle breezes fill thy sails, Supplying soft Etesian gales, As thou to whom the muse commends, The best of poets and of friends, Dost thy committed pledge restore, And land him safely on the shore; And save the better part of me, From perishing with him at sea.

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Victorian Horace Sic te diva potens Cypri, sic fratres Helenae, lucida sidera, ventorumque regat pater obstrictis aliis praeter Iapyga, navis, quae tibi creditum debes Vergilium; finibus Atticis reddas incolumem precor et serves animae dimidium meae. So may the goddess who rules over Cyprus, So may the brothers of Helen, those bright stars, And the king of the winds steer you, Binding up all the others except the west wind, You, ship, who owe the debt of Vergil Deposited with you: may you pay him over Safe to the lands of Attica, I pray, And preserve the half of my soul.

The simple metrical choice of heroic couplets for this ode perhaps reflects the simple metre of the original, a four-line stanza which repeats an uneven pair of lines,29 but also certainly looks to its addressee, the poet Wentworth Dillon, fourth earl of Roscommon,30 who had in fact died while Sylvae was in press in early January 1685,31 giving the prayer for his safety a tragic irony; Roscommon had himself published translations of three quatrain-stanza Horatian odes (2.4, 2.8, 3.9) into the same heroic couplets in the first of the well-known series of miscellanies issued by Dryden and Tonson in 1684,32 and here we surely have a case of a metrical compliment to the addressee; Dryden picks up metrically and in author-choice prominent recent publications by his addressee. There is also a greater compliment: Horace’s original poem is addressed to Vergil, and this implicit comparison with the greatest poet of the Romans as addressee is surely meant to be appreciated by Roscommon and the male elite intellectual circle within which both poets moved.33 Dryden’s version indeed brings out what is only implicit in Horace by adding ‘best of poets and of friends’, just as it substitutes Roscommon’s westward voyage to Ireland where his main estates were for Vergil’s eastward voyage to Greece, changing the specified wind appropriately.34 Once again the deployment of an Horatian original has further meaning for an elite readership.



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My third example is from Alexander Pope. In the 1730s, towards the end of his life, Pope produced a series of ‘Imitations of Horace’, in which he adapted various Horatian poems for contemporary purposes.35 Here I turn to Pope’s imitation of Odes 4.1,36 of which I quote the opening, followed by the original Latin and a literal translation: Again? new tumults in my breast? Ah, spare me, Venus! let me, let me rest! I am not now, alas! the man As in the gentle reign of my Queen Anne. Ah, sound no more thy soft alarms, Nor circle sober fifty with thy charms. Mother too fierce of dear desires! Turn, turn to willing hearts your wanton fires, To Number Five direct your doves, There spread round Murray all your blooming loves Noble and young, who strikes the heart With every sprightly, every decent part; Equal, the injured to defend, To charm the mistress, or to fix the friend. Intermissa, Venus, diu rursus bella moves? Parce precor, precor. Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cinarae. Desine, dulcium mater saeva Cupidinum, 5 circa lustra decem flectere mollibus iam durum imperiis: abi, quo blandae iuvenum te revocant preces. Tempestiuius in domum 10 Paulli purpureis ales oloribus comissabere Maximi, si torrere iecur quaeris idoneum; namque et nobilis et decens et pro sollicitis non tacitus reis … Venus, are you stirring again Wars long interrupted? Spare me, I pray, I pray. I am not the man I was under the sway Of goodly Cinara. Cease, o cruel mother

14

Victorian Horace Of the sweet Desires To sway a hardened man of fifty years With your soft orders: begone, To where young mens’ prayers summon you instead. More seasonably you will go revelling To the house of Paullus Maximus, flying On wings of crimson, If you want to roast a suitable liver;37 For he is high-born and handsome And not silent in defence of anxious clients …

Once again we can see a Horatian ode neatly adapted for its new context. Pope’s replacement of Horace’s Cinara with Queen Anne looks back similarly to the poet’s earlier career in a happier time (for Pope, Tory politics and greater tolerance of his Catholicism under the earlier monarch, for Horace, supposed youthful love),38 but is also typically slightly barbed when we recall that Cinara is elsewhere represented by Horace as a demanding girlfriend and most likely a professional courtesan;39 we may compare the double-edged praise of Anne in The Rape of the Lock (3.7–8): ‘Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey, / Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea’.40 The ‘sober fifty’ of Horace’s years are closely matched by Pope, who was forty-eight when the poem was written (1736), and the direction to Venus to seek out the house of a younger man is given a brilliant modernity by the specific address ‘Number Five’ (i.e. 5 King’s Bench Walk); the Murray of the poem is William Murray (1705–1793), the future Lord Mansfield and Lord Chief Justice, who matches the Paullus Fabius Maximus of the original as a young lawyer on the rise and as the scion of a noble house (Maximus belonged to a great Roman family, Murray’s father was the fifth Viscount Stormont).41 Once again the Roman poet is appropriated into a modern setting in such a way as to appeal to a coterie of elite male readers.

The Romantics: Byron, Wordsworth, Keats Horace remained popular in the Romantic period.42 Byron’s tour of Italy in Childe Harold Canto IV (1818) pays tribute to Horace as he passes Mt. Soracte north of Rome, the mountain celebrated in Odes 1.9 (IV.663–6 = stanza 74):



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Athos, Olympus,—Ætna, Atlas, made These hills seem things of lesser dignity, All, save the lone Soracte’s height, displayed Not now in snow, which asks the lyric Roman’s aid.

Here ‘lyric Roman’ points to Horace and specifically to Odes 4.3.23 Romanae fidicen lyrae, ‘the player of the Roman lyre’, while Soracte ‘not now in snow’ looks to Odes 1.9.1–2 vides ut alta stet nive candidum / Soracte … ?, ‘do you see how Soracte stands bright in deep snow?’ Byron then as he passes on from Soracte regrets the dry teaching of Horace at school, something he shares with Tennyson and Kipling43 (IV.669–75 and 685–93 = stanzas 75 and 77): not in vain May he, who will, his recollections rake And quote in classic raptures, and awake The hills with Latian echoes; I abhorred Too much to conquer for the poet’s sake The drilled dull lesson, forced down word by word In my repugnant youth … Then farewell, Horace; whom I hated so, Not for thy faults, but mine: it is a curse To understand, not feel thy lyric flow, To comprehend, but never love thy verse: Although no deeper moralist rehearse Our little life, nor bard prescribe his art, Nor livelier satirist the conscience pierce, Awakening without wounding the touched heart, Yet fare thee well — upon Soracte’s ridge we part.

Byron’s confession here of his lack of enthusiasm for Horace’s poetry is consistent with his poetic output in general: in a number of places he cites and alludes to passages and lines of Horace, but only in ‘Hints from Horace’ does he take on a full version of a Horatian work (the Ars Poetica).44 This interest in hexameter sermo and not the Odes matches this passage from Childe Harold, where Byron is careful to praise the content of Horace’s hexameter works (‘moralist’ suggests Epistles, ‘prescribe his art’ suggests Ars Poetica, ‘satirist’ Satires) while professing not to feel his ‘lyric flow’. For Byron, Horace is to be appreciated for his satirical, moral and didactic content, not as an inspired

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lyric poet, in which he did not match Romantic ideals, and his scattered quotations from Horace’s various works seem once again to be markers of gentlemanly education and status in employing the common intellectual material of elite male society. This capacity to follow a particular aspect of Horace alongside superficial citations demonstrating elite education and appealing to a similar readership is matched in the poetry of Wordsworth. Unsurprisingly, the great poet of English landscape focusses on Horace’s evocation of the landscape of Italy, aroused as for Byron by a first-hand encounter in ‘Memorials of a Tour of Italy’ (1837), in ‘Musings near Aquapendente’ (255–62): Or Sabine vales explored inspire a wish To meet the shade of Horace by the side Of his Bandusian fount; or I invoke His presence to point out the spot where once He sate, and eulogized with earnest pen Peace, leisure, freedom, moderate desires; And all the immunities of rural life Extolled, behind Vacuna’s crumbling fane.

The close of this passage clearly evokes the close of Epistles 1.10 (49 post fanum putre Vacunae), a poem in which Horace expounds the virtues of the country over the city, and the ‘earnest pen’ seems to be that of Epistles 1 in general with their emphasis on peaceful and modest rural life, but the earlier part points to the poet’s Sabine country estate: ‘Sabine vales’ perhaps evokes Odes 3.1.42 valle … Sabina, and ‘Bandusian fount’ certainly translates the famous fons Bandusiae of Odes 3.13 (here placed by Wordsworth as by the most recent scholarship [Morgan 2009] on the Sabine estate). This famous spring and the ode describing it clearly caught Wordsworth’s imagination, for he evokes it at least another three times in his poetry, most extensively in ‘An Evening Walk’, describing a stream in the Lake District (72–9): Did Sabine grace adorn my living line, Bandusia’s praise, wild stream, should yield to thine! Never shall ruthless minister of death ’Mid thy soft glooms the glittering steel unsheath; No goblets shall, for thee, be crowned with flowers, No kid with piteous outcry thrill thy bowers;



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The mystic shapes that by thy margin rove A more benignant sacrifice approve …

Here Wordsworth picks up the first half of Horace’s ode in detail with its description of the sacrifice which the poet is intending to make in its honour (3.13): O fons Bandusiae, splendidior vitro, dulci digne mero non sine floribus, cras donaberis haedo, cui frons turgida cornibus primis et venerem et proelia destinat— frustra, nam gelidos inficiet tibi rubro sanguine rivos lascivi suboles gregis. O spring of Bandusia, more limpid than glass, Worthy of sweet wine and flowers too, Tomorrow you will be presented with a kid, Whose forehead, swelling with early horns, Marks it out for love and for battles: In vain, for your chilled streams Will be dyed with the red blood Of the playful herd’s offspring.

Like many modern readers, Wordsworth feels sympathy for the sacrificed kid, and suggests a less cruel offering (‘A more benignant sacrifice’) in the form of the poet’s mind and affectionate feelings. Two further passages pick up the spring specifically, first the opening of the first sonnet of the 1820 sequence ‘The River Duddon’: Not envying Latian shades – if yet they throw A grateful coolness round that crystal Spring, Bandusia, prattling as when long ago The Sabine Bard was moved her praise to sing;

Here the poet contrasts the ‘native stream’ (line 9) of the Duddon with Horace’s Italian spring, but clearly compliments Horace’s ode in evoking it with some details (‘grateful coolness’ translates 3.13.10 frigus amabile, ‘crystal Spring’ recalls 3.13.1 fons … splendidior vitro, while ‘prattling’ picks up the metaphor

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of 3.13.15–16 loquaces / lymphae, ‘chattering waters’). The same metaphor of prattling is found alongside an allusion to the Sabine estate in ‘Liberty’ (1820), (91–110), Wordsworth’ s most detailed lines on Horace: That life – the flowery path that winds by stealth – Which Horace needed for his spirit’s health; Sighed for, in heart and genius, overcome By noise and strife, and questions wearisome, And the vain splendours of Imperial Rome? Let easy mirth his social hours inspire, And fiction animate his sportive lyre, Attuned to verse that, crowning light Distress With garlands, cheats her into happiness; Give me the humblest note of those sad strains Drawn forth by pressure of his gilded chains, As a chance-sunbeam from his memory fell Upon the Sabine farm he loved so well; Or when the prattle of Bandusia’s spring Haunted his ear – he only listening – He, proud to please, above all rivals, fit To win the palm of gaiety and wit; He, doubt not, with involuntary dread, Shrinking from each new favour to be shed, By the world’s Ruler, on his honoured head!

95

100

105

110

As has been pointed out (Thayer 1916: 57–9), lines 91–9 contain a tissue of allusions to Horace: apart from the overt mentions of the ‘Sabine farm’ and the ‘prattle of Bandusia’s spring’ already discussed, at 91 ‘the flowery path that winds by stealth’ echoes Epistles 1.18.103 secretum iter et fallentis semita vitae, ‘the secret way and the path of a life which avoids notice’, the description of Rome in 94–5 recalls Odes 3.29.11–12 (to Maecenas) omitte mirari beatae / fumum et opes strepitumque Romae, ‘cease to admire the smoke and wealth and noise of rich Rome’ and the ‘questions wearisome’ put to Horace by inquisitive citizens in the street of Satires 1.6 or the pest of Satires 1.9,45 while ‘sportive lyre’ translates Odes 3.3.69 iocosae … lyrae. Here as elsewhere Wordsworth (like many poets) constructs Horace in his own image as the poet of nature and country retirement, wary of the city and the demands of the great, but leaves a trail of specific allusions to be picked up by elite male readers.



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My final example is John Keats. The extent of Keats’ classical reading, once underrated, has been recently reassessed (see Stead 2015: 269–302),46 and it seems clear that one famous passage of his owes much to Horace, the opening of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819, I.1–4): My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk …

As commentators have suggested (Allott 1970: 525; Barnard 1988: 678), this opening picks up the opening of Horace Epode 14 (1–4): Mollis inertia cur tantam diffuderit imis oblivionem sensibus, pocula Lethaeos ut si ducentia somnos arente fauce traxerim … Why has effeminate lack of action spread Such oblivion to the depths of my senses, As if I had drained with parched jaws Cups that bring Lethe’s sleep …

‘Numbness’, ‘dull opiate’ and (especially) ‘Lethe-wards’ confirm the allusion, along with the shared initial position of the two passages. Though more modest in background and education than Byron and indeed Wordsworth, Keats is eager to claim the prestige of Horatian allusion here and to appeal to a similar elite readership.

Horace and the Victorian gentleman This introduction has (I hope) shown both the diffusion of Horatian allusion amongst the English poets of the period 1660 to 1830 and the way in which that allusion functions as cultural capital for these poets and their readers, evoking a shared world of masculine elite education and its social prestige. I hope also that it has become clear that appropriation and manipulation of Horatian material has a creative function in stimulating clever and subtle adaptations which add perceptibly to the literary texture and interest of the

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poetry of the period. In this final section of the introduction I move forward to consideration of how important the figure and texts of Horace were in the construction of the Victorian gentleman. As already discussed, the prominent presence of Horace in the elite school curriculum was a key reason for his prestige. This was especially true in the Victorian period, where Horace remained popular in the newlyinfluential elite English ‘public’ (private) schools.47 Fundamental here was the reception and construction of Horace as an honorary English gentleman who represented the values of the male and homosocial Victorian English elite: moderation, sociability, leisured gentility, patriotism and (even) religion. The Oxford English Dictionary gives as one of its definitions of the term ‘gentleman’ (s.v. 4, a) ‘a man of superior position in society, or having the habits of life indicative of this; often, one whose means enable him to live in easy circumstances without engaging in trade, a man of money and leisure’. This is roughly how I will use the term here, adding some of the moral ideals and high culture to be found (for example) in the celebrated view of the Victorian gentleman given in J. H. Newman’s The Idea of a University (first published 1852): ‘a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life’.48 As we shall see, both aspects (leisured and genteel wealth, cultured behaviour and manners) make Horace an especially attractive ancient author for the Victorian male elite. The wide range of Horace’s poems meant that he could be appropriated and reprocessed by the English elite for a wide range of purposes. But a key factor was the gentlemanly status and cultural capital (see above) conferred by possessing and demonstrating a knowledge of the poet. This need not be a profound acquaintance, something of which satirical writers could make fun. Clive Newcome in W. M. Thackeray’s The Newcomes (1855) acquires enough classics at Grey Friars (based on the English ‘public’ school Charterhouse) in the 1820s ‘to enable him to quote Horace respectably throughout life’ (Chapter 8), the mark of a gentleman and elite member. Horace in fact provides the route into the gentlemanly club, literally so in Ronald Knox’s Let Dons Delight (1939), set in a senior common room in the University of Oxford in 1938 but reflecting established Victorian and Edwardian ideas (Knox 1939: 264):



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God knows why it should be so, but as a matter of observation it seems to me quite certain that the whole legend of the ‘English Gentleman’ has been built upon Latin and Greek. A meets B on the steps of his club and says: ‘Well, old man, eheu fugaces, what ?’ and B says ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’, and the crossing-sweeper falls on his knees in adoration of the two men who can talk as learnedly as that.

This entertainingly absurd exchange of unrelated Horatian tags, dimly recalled from elite education, takes place on the steps of a London gentleman’s club, which constitutes the metropolitan analogue of the select Oxford college common room in which the framing conversation itself takes place. It shows both that Horace represented a natural talisman for the elite and (behind the evident irony) how little actual knowledge of the poet was actually required for such social acceptance. Horace’s elite status was also clear from the other side of the sociological tracks. Several characters in Victorian literature seeking intellectual selfimprovement and consequent increase in social standing use Horace as a potential way to success. At one end of the Victorian period, Mr O’Bleary, the ambitious young Irishman in ‘The Boarding House’ in Dickens’ Sketches by Boz (1836–7), reads Horace in the evenings, expressive of his desire to rise in the world of London to which he has moved from Dublin, while at the other Jude Fawley in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) studies his Horace on the road with his baker’s cart in his quest to become a gentleman and scholar, and H. G. Wells’ autobiographical George Lewisham in Love and Mr Lewisham (1900: Chapter 1), reads Horace’s Odes as a set text for his external London matriculation, the route by which he too hopes to achieve gentlemanly respectability.49 Just as Horace’s Odes could be seen as offering a gateway to the leisured lifestyle of the English male elite, so they could be presented as mirroring other aspects of its ideology. Lord Lytton’s translation of the Odes and Epodes, published in 1869 and further discussed in Chapter 2, argued that Horace’s interest in moralizing aligned him with the gentlemanly clergy of the Victorian period, even including an implicit allusion to continental travel as a shared elite experience (Lytton 1869: xvii): And out of this rare combination of practical wisdom and poetical sentiment there grows that noblest part of his moral teaching which is distinct from schools and sects, and touches at times upon chords more spiritual than those

22

Victorian Horace who do not look below the surface would readily detect. Hence, in spite of his occasional sins, he has always found indulgent favour with the clergy of every Church. Among the dozen books which form the library of the village curé of France, Horace is sure to be one; and the greatest dignitaries of our own Church are among his most sedulous critics and his warmest panegyrists.

Horace’s collection in the Odes of over a hundred relatively short and diverse poems which often gave moral advice even achieved comparison with the 150 Psalms of the Hebrew Bible by the late Victorian J. W. Mackail (1859–1945;50 Mackail 1925: 148–9): […] both volumes have been taken to the heart of the world, and have become part of ourselves. It is interesting to remark that both have this note of intimacy, that the Psalms and the Odes, or at least the most familiar among them, are habitually referred to, not by their titles (for they have none), nor by their number in the series, but simply by their opening words. We do not usually speak of the 95th or 114th, the 127th or 130th Psalms, if we wish to be understood, but of the Venite, the In exitu Israel, the Nisi Dominus, the De Profundis. And so with Horace one speaks familiarly of the Integer vitae, the Aequam memento, the Eheu fugaces, the Otium divos. This secular Psalter, like its religious analogue, has to be supplemented, enlarged, re-interpreted, possibly even cut, for actual use, for application to our own daily life. But both, in their enormously different ways, are central and fundamental; permanent lights on life and aids to living.

Horace, then, could be seen as proto-Christian, and his Odes as quasiscriptural, an important affinity in Victorian England where the Christian religion still held a conventional central place in elite society. ‘Part of ourselves’ blithely assumes that all Mackail’s readers are well-educated elite males who share his views. The chapters which follow consider the channels by which this perceived affinity of Horace with the Victorian leisured classes was established and expressed. Chapter 2 considers the editions and commentaries on Horace available in the Victorian period, and how these presented a certain view of the poet aimed at training the youth of the elite in both school and university, and the literary translations of Horace written in the period, usually by establishment figures; particular scrutiny is given to the areas which Victorian translators found difficult (gender, sexuality, etc.), as well as to the constant



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conscious and unconscious assimilation between the cultural social elites of Augustan Rome and Victorian Britain. Chapters 3 and 4 look at the creative uses of Horatian imitation in Victorian poetry, analysing especially the adaptation of the Horatian ode as a means by which gentlemanly poets and scholars could address each other (e.g. Tennyson to Maurice, Tennyson to Fitzgerald), and the under-remarked use of the Horatian ode in some acknowledged masterpieces of Victorian poetry and some less-discussed ones (e.g. Anglican hymnody). Chapter 5 considers the use of Horatian quotation in the gentlemanly novels of the Victorian period, especially the works of Thackeray and Trollope, written self-consciously by male elite members for a male elite readership. It looks at how this hegemonic literary form parall­eled on the page the use of oral quotation to cement social bonds between members of the cultural elite; the shallowness of this learning often emerges in the repeated use of a narrow range of quotations, which established gentlemanly solidarity at small cultural cost. The world of Victorian Horatianism is long gone, and in accordance with the brief for this series, which ‘shows how Classical ideas and material have helped to shape the modern world’, this volume concludes with a brief epilogue on the English reception of Horace since 1900. This moves from Edwardian and First World War material which shows strong continuities with its Victorian counterpart, through to the profile of Horace in modernism, and suggests that the representation and appropriation of Horace moves from the elite gentleman of the Victorian and Edwardian era to a more modern, multiform and less class-ridden representation, reflecting the parallel develop­ment of classical studies and of English-speaking culture as a whole.51

2

Horace in Victorian Commentaries, Literary Criticism, Translations

Here I consider the main commentaries and literary-critical works on Horace used in the dynamically expanding but still firmly elite school and university English education of the Victorian period, as well as some of the translations which enlarged the poet’s readership and literary reception. Commentaries in particular were the key tool with which the study of Horatian poetry in the original language was approached at the time, and influence many of the authors and texts considered later in this volume; my work here should be set in the context of recent research on individual classical commentaries and on the history of Victorian classical scholarship in general (see especially Kraus and Stray 2015 and Stray 1998).

Commentaries Three main commentaries on Horace were produced for the use of students in the higher forms of schools and at universities in the United Kingdom in the Victorian period, and these are worth particular examination as key contemporary influences on young Victorian gentlemen in the making. The earliest of these (first published in 1853) was the work of the Rev. Arthur Macleane (1812–58), the founding Principal of the private school1 Brighton College (established 1845)2 and later head of the similar King Edward’s School, Bath. It was published as the second work (after the first volume of Long’s edition of Cicero’s speeches) in the series of classical editions in the Bibliotheca Classica edited for the publisher George Bell by Macleane and the classical scholar George Long, then a master at Brighton,3 a series of commentaries on texts

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central to the school and university curriculum of the time and designed for students such as those taught by Macleane and Long,4 which soon included such still distinguished editions as that of Vergil by the senior Oxford scholars Conington and Nettleship. Macleane’s edition, which provides a substantial commentary on the whole of Horace in English (rather than Latin), was reprinted over more than forty years; its last and fourth edition of 1881 was re-published in 1894 (the edition cited here), after which it was in effect replaced by the edition of Wickham (see below). Macleane was a typical Victorian public-school headmaster, combining pedagogy with his clerical role: he was also author of Sermons for Schools and Families (1848) and Prayers for Schools and Families (1849); as we shall see, this underlies the consistent moralizing in his commentary. His work expresses traditional Victorian views on the relative qualities of Greek and Roman culture to produce a view of Horace which typifies that of his period.5 Roman literature and culture is seen as inferior to and derivative from that of Greece: ‘There is more power of tenderness and passionate feeling in some of Sappho’s small fragments than in all that Horace ever wrote’ (Macleane 1894: ix). This is reinforced in Long’s introduction to the fourth edition, produced after Macleane’s death: ‘He [Horace] gave the Romans, as far as their language would permit, a set of lyrical compositions both in matter and form unworthy copies or imitations of the Greek; and though such imitation is a confession of inferiority and sometimes is feeble and trifling, he still shows that he could infuse the vigour of the Latin tongue into the measures of Sappho and Alcaeus’ (Macleane 1894: xiv). A further criticism of Horace made by both commentators’ introductions is his lack of energy. For Long ‘[h]is poetical power was great and varied; and if he had possessed more energy of character, he might have done even more than he has’ (Macleane 1894: xiv), while for Macleane ‘[h]e was of an indolent habit, of which the unfinished state of some of his poems is one of the effects’ (Macleane 1894: xxvii), a remark which seems to combine some incomprehension of Horatian literary technique in his hexameter poetry (perhaps expecting that the deliberately rougher satiric hexameter should be more like that of Vergilian epic) with the moral exhortation to industry appropriate to a readership of boys and young men in the era of Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help (1859), a widely-read collection of short biographies of men who achieved greatness from humble beginnings.



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This presentation of Horace as lacking in some key Victorian virtues (energy, commitment and earnestness) picks up the better-known contemporary views of Matthew Arnold (see Chapter 3). Another feature of Macleane’s commentary is its prudishness, again typical of the Victorian era: especially since the first edition of Dr Thomas Bowdler’s Family Shakespeare (1807), morally undesirable material had been commonly modified in or edited out of texts published for the young in Britain (Perrin and Wunsch 1992). The obscene attacks on women in Epodes 8 and 12 (see Chapter 1) are presented in Latin wholly without comment (a tactic which is unexplained in either text or introduction), while the passage of Satires 1.2 where a man ironically addresses his penis and the finer points of prostitutes are discussed (68–89) is again uncommented, apart from a technical point and a coy general note: This part of the Satire is rather obscure, partly from the variation of the MSS. I hope I shall not be considered over fastidious if I decline entering upon the merits of the several readings, and the sense of the passage. (Macleane 1894: 343)

An interesting feature of the commentary is the provision of critical introductions to individual poems which suggest lines of interpretation to the (young, elite) reader. In the introduction to Odes 1.5, the poem addressed to the evident courtesan Pyrrha where the poet-speaker in effect congratulates himself on his earlier escape from her dominion, Macleane comments: That it [the poem] expresses any but a poetical jealousy on the part of Horace I do not believe. That Pyrrha was a freedwoman of exquisite beauty but loose character, and one of Horace’s early loves, is all imagination, and we have no clue to the origin of the poem, which expresses a lover’s jealousy under the pretence of escape from the toils of an inconstant mistress. (Macleane 1894: 20)

Here Macleane reaches the same conclusion as much modern criticism, that Horace’s odes cannot be interpreted as straightforwardly biographical, via a more moralizing route: modern interpreters stress the complexities of self-fashioning as the barrier to realism, but for Macleane such potentially subversive material must represent pure poetic fantasy rather than elements from the life of the poet on ethical grounds, since the gentlemanly Horace

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could not have described himself as really behaving in this manner. Similar attitudes underlie Macleane’s introduction to Odes 1.23, the poem addressed to the young girl Chloe who avoids the poet’s erotic pursuit like a fearful fawn: This [poem] appears to be imitated from a poem of Anacreon … In spite of which the whole matter is treated by most as another of Horace’s numerous gallantries, the bad success of which sat so ill upon him that he wrote the vindictive ode (iii.26), in which the timid fawn-like girl of this poem becomes the haughty Chloe, only to be tamed by the scourge of the Queen of Love. (Macleane 1894: 54)

Here the non-literal and fantastic nature of the poem is guaranteed for Macleane by its use of Greek material, and once again it is implied that a literal interpretation would be unworthy of the moral character of the poet. It is also suggested that the Chloe of this poem is not to be identified with the Chloe of Odes 3.26, in tune with the view of most modern scholars, who see the repeated names in Horace’s erotic odes as representing typical rather than specific female individuals. In his introduction to that later poem, which initially presents the poet-speaker as retiring from the wars of love but then ends with a plea to Venus to touch Chloe with her whip (i.e. inspire passion in her), Macleane declares: This ode represents a successful gallant’s first refusal, and his mortification and wrath at his defeat. To apply it to Horace, or to assume from the opening … that he was getting into years, and about to abandon lyric poetry, or that Chloe is ‘illa haud dubie de qua i.23; iii.9.9’, or any other Chloe whatsoever, is to mistake the character and scope of the ode, in my opinion. If any of Horace’s compositions are purely fanciful, this may be pronounced to be so. (Macleane 1894: 203)

The implied moral that a ‘gallant’ or over-keen lover may meet his come­ uppance is here conjoined with the idea that such conduct could not have been described by Horace as his own; once again the artificiality of the poet’s self-representation and the non-identity of the repeated female names, both modern views, are generated by a characteristically Victorian idea of the poet’s own high moral character. We find similar approaches to homoerotic Horatian poems. Odes 4.10, the longing address to the beautiful boy Ligurinus, which we have already



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seen as a target for excision and euphemistic gender-modification before the Victorian period (see Chapter 1), is like Odes 1.23 viewed as both Greek and fantastic: That this Ligurinus is a purely poetical personage I have not the remotest doubt, no more than that Horace composed the ode with a Greek original before him or in his mind. the absurdities which any other view of the case involves are numberless. The ode may have been written at any time. There is nothing to fix the date of the composition, for the fact of the same name occurring in the first ode of this book, merely for the purposes of poetical ornament, proves nothing at all. It reads more like an early composition than a late one. (Macleane 1894: 244)

Here we find three separate strategies for suggesting why such a poem of homosexual desire cannot reflect the ‘real’ Horace: that it deals with a purely imaginary topic, that it is drawn from the less morally robust culture of the Greeks, and (finally and very improbably) that it is an early and uncharacteristic composition that does not reflect the mature and heterosexual Horace. Here for once there is a clearly intended link between homonymous addressees, both in the same book of poems, since 4.10 clearly picks up the similar longing address to Ligurinus in 4.1, and the two interrelated poems are a key element in the structure of the book; this is again denied by Macleane in his efforts to dismiss any idea of a homosexual erotic narrative, an obvious area of concern for the headmaster of a male-only boarding school in the Victorian era.6 Similar elements are unsurprisingly also to be found in the commentary of the eminent Victorian Edward Charles Wickham (1834–1910), scholar, teacher, clergyman and son-in-law of the four-time Liberal prime minister W. E. Gladstone (for whom and Horace see further [iv] below) and successively Fellow of New College, Oxford (1860–73), Master of the public school7 Wellington College (1873–93) and Dean of Lincoln Cathedral (1894–1910).8 His The Works of Horace was published in two volumes in 1874 and 1891: it is a commentary of a slightly higher scholarly level than Macleane’s and relatively austere in its annotation, but is still directed towards ‘students’ and ‘a young reader’ (Wickham 1874: vii, ix) and displays similar prudishness. Epodes 8 and 12 are again printed wholly without comment, while ‘the unreadable discussion of vices’ (Wickham 1891: 29) in Satires 1.29 receives no

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annotation for most of this long poem. Wickham, still a headmaster at this date, has a pedagogic explanation for these dubious poems: immaturity, which the poet will grow out of into the more decorous world of the Odes. ‘Sat.2 has other signs of date earlier than that of the bulk of the Book. There is the grossness of tone (never congenial to Horace, but always bearing the look of a concession to a supposed ‘operis lex’) to be paralleled in some of the earlier Epodes’ (Wickham 1891: 5). Here Wickham combines the poet’s immaturity as an explanation for material unsuitable for an educational context, a strategy already seen in Macleane’s commentary (above), with the idea that he was obliged to produce obscene material against his own more decent (and protoVictorian) inclinations as a conventional marker of the satiric genre; this parallels Macleane’s arguments (above) that material in the Odes which is morally unacceptable for Victorians must derive from Greek sources rather than the poet’s own invention. The Epodes come in for especial criticism as early and unformed work: ‘We notice in their style indications which point the same way – occasional harshnesses of construction, a redundancy of epithets, a tendency even in the best poems to poetical commonplace; we may add a grossness of subject and language, which his mature taste would have pruned away’ (Wickham 1874: 326). The idea that grossness is an immature element to be mastered and suppressed in the growth to true manhood recalls the contemporary ideology of the Victorian school novel, influenced by the educational approach of Thomas Arnold at Rugby, best known from such works as Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) or Eric, or Little By Little (also 1857) by Wickham’s fellow headmaster and future Dean F. W. Farrar.10 Like Macleane’s, Wickham’s commentary treats Horace’s erotic odes delicately for its young gentlemanly readership. On Odes 1.5 there is no indication that Pyrrha is anything but a respectable (if capricious) young lady, while on Odes 1.23 the erotic nature of the poem is wholly elided in its summary to make Chloe sound like the unnecessarily timorous daughter of a good family: ‘You fly from me, Chloe, like a frightened kid to its dam. I am not a tiger or lion going to eat you. You are too old for such shyness’ (Wickham 1874: 72). The summary of Odes 2.5 at least admits some erotic element and some of the addressee’s past lovers, though it pointedly omits the poem’s final focus on the powerful attractions of the beautiful boy Gyges: ‘Lalage is not



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old enough for your advances. Let her be a child a little longer. Have patience, she will come to you by and by, and return the love greater than you ever gave to Pholoe or Chloris’; such a scenario would still not be wholly out of place in a polite Victorian novel. The two longing addresses to the beautiful boy Ligurinus are carefully excised, given their dangers for a Victorian schoolboy audience: in the summary of Odes 4.1 the boy’s name and gender are simply omitted in a general reference to falling in love (‘I am too old to love, to drink, to play. Yet what am I saying? My heart gives the lie to my words’ [Wickham 1874: 263]), while Odes 4.10 has almost no commentary and a summary which virtually removes its erotic content, making Ligurinus sound like a public-school athlete (‘The day will come, Ligurinus, when your youthful good looks will pass away, and you will repent that you ever gave yourself such airs on the strength of them’ [Wickham 1874: 299]). A third widely-used Victorian commentary on Horace consisted in three volumes from Macmillan, on the Odes by T. E. Page (1883), on the Satires by Arthur Palmer (1883) and the Epistles by A. S. Wilkins (1885); all were much reprinted over half a century and all three were finally published together in a collected revised volume in 1933; these were key volumes in Macmillan’s Classical Series for Colleges and Schools.11 Page (1850–1936) was the most famous schoolmaster of his time, spending all his active career at the public school Charterhouse and ending his career in retirement as editor of the Loeb Classical Library and a Companion of Honour;12 Palmer (1841–97) and Wilkins (1843–1905) were both serious and capable scholars at university level, one Professor of Latin at Trinity College Dublin,13 the other at Manchester.14 Once again Victorian prudery intervenes: the Epodes are avoided by pointedly leaving them out altogether, alone amongst Horace’s works (Page includes the Carmen Saeculare, Wilkins the Ars Poetica), while Palmer’s commentary prints only lines 1–24 of Satires 1.2, remarking that the remaining 110 lines of the poem constitute ‘scarcely profitable reading’ (Palmer 1883: 132). Once again Horace is seen as formally brilliant but lacking in inspiration compared to Greek poets, for example in Wilkins’ summary of the Odes and Horace’s career after 23 bce: ‘But the lyrical genius of Horace, exquisite as it was in the finish of his art, was far from spontaneous or copious. When he had wedded the songs of Greece to the Latin lyre, and had given to the world his perfect adaptations or imitations of Sappho and Alcaeus, clothing in language of

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unequalled felicity his commonplace reflections on a narrow range of topics, there was no inspiration to prompt him to further utterance’ (Wilkins 1885: xviii–xix). As with the commentaries of Macleane and Wickham, the erotic elements when mentioned by Page’s commentary on the Odes are played down for reasons of Victorian decorum and youthful audience. The Pyrrha of Odes 1.5 is once again made simply a flighty girl in Page’s summary of the poem: Who is thy lover now, Pyrrha? He little knows that thou art fickle as the sea: all smiles today, tomorrow, storm. Poor inexperienced youth! I have gone through similar dangers and escaped, thank heaven. (Page 1883: 147)

Here it is not even clear that the ‘similar dangers’ experienced by the poet are a previous affair with Pyrrha herself. Once again the sexual nature of the pursuit of Chloe in Odes 1.23 is wilfully obscured: ‘You avoid me like a timid fawn, Chloe, that is frightened at every sound. Yet I am no tiger or lion, and you are old enough to quit your mother’s side’ (Page 1883: 166), and the homosexual desire of Odes 4.1 and 4.10 is excised by gender-neutral language: the end of 4.1 is summarized as ‘And yet, even as I write, I find the old emotions retain their sway, I betray every sign of passion’ (Page 1883: 396), while the desire for Ligurinus in 4.10 is carefully not specified as that of the poet, though the boy’s epicene beauty is stressed: ‘Ah, Ligurinus, beautiful and proud with flowing locks and rosy cheeks, when your mirror reflects a bristly chin and a different face you will regret your beauty and your pride’ (Page 1883: 437). A more positive development in Page’s commentary is his particular emphasis on the need to look at the unity of individual odes rather than treating them as tissues of polished phrases. Here Page shows and acknow­ ledges the influence of German scholarship, in this case the Horazstudien of H. T. Plüss (1882), but expresses the characteristic self-identification of an English gentleman with the poet: ‘To understand each Ode we must endeavour to place ourselves in the position of the poet when he wrote it. If we succeed in doing so, the various portions of the Ode will at once be seen to be intimately connected and grouped around one central idea’ (Page 1883: vii). The default assumption is that the Victorian elite reader of Horace, whether

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teacher or pupil, can easily slip into the character of the poet despite the intervention of nearly two millennia.

Literary criticism Here I want to consider a few literary-critical works on Horace which were available for his Victorian readers, focussing on material which was conceived rather more for a school or general audience than for a scholarly readership.15 The earliest English literary monograph on Horace known to me is from 1870, in the series ‘Ancient Classics for English Readers’ published by the Edinburgh firm of William Blackwood. These studies of ancient authors were primarily intended for a non-gentlemanly audience since they cited ancient passages only in translation, but were composed, and indeed consumed,16 by elite members: that on Julius Caesar (1870) was contributed by the novelist Antony Trollope, that on Xenophon (1871) by Sir Alexander Grant, Principal of Edinburgh University, and that on Horace (Martin 1870) by Theodore Martin (1816–1906), future knight and biographer of Prince Albert, already the author of one of the most interesting Victorian translations of the poet (1860), which is liberally quoted in the book alongside that of John Conington (for both these versions see ‘Translations’ below).17 Martin’s preface makes clear that Horace is an honorary Victorian elite male: No writer of antiquity has taken a stronger hold upon the modern mind than Horace. The causes of this are manifold, but three may be especially noted: his broad human sympathies, his vigorous common-sense, and his consummate mastery of expression. The mind must be either singularly barren or singularly cold to which Horace does not speak. The scholar, the statesman, the soldier, the man of the world, the town-bred man, the lover of the country, the thoughtful and the careless, he who reads much and he who reads little, all find in his pages more or less to amuse their fancy, to touch their feelings, to quicken their observation, to nerve their convictions, to put into happy phrase the deduction of their experience. (Martin 1870: vii)

The book narrates the story of Horace’s career chronologically up to the gift of the Sabine estate from Maecenas, illustrated throughout by liberal quotation,

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and then turns to the contexts and themes of his poetry: the luxurious social life at Rome, love, friendship, contentment, religious beliefs, relations with Maecenas, belief in his own fame, relations with Augustus and love of independence; the last chapter then returns to a chronological sequence at the end with the poet’s death. Martin’s heavily biographizing account of Horace constantly implies close points of contact between the poet’s and Martin’s own times and culture. For example, the wealth of Rome in Horace’s day (which he rejected) is clearly paralleled with the wealth of modern London: All round him wealth, wealth, wealth was the universal aim: wealth, to build fine houses in town, and villas at Praeneste or Baiae, wealth, to stock them with statues, old bronzes (mostly fabrications from the Wardour Streets of Athens or Rome), ivories, pictures, gold plate, pottery, tapestry, stuffs from the looms of Tyre, and other articles de luxe; wealth, to give gorgeous dinners, and wash them down with the costliest wines; wealth, to provide splendid equipages, to forestall the front seats in the theatre, as we do opera-boxes on the grand tier, and so get a few yards closer to the Emperor’s chair, or gain a closer view of the favourite actor or dancer of the day … (Martin 1870: 143)

This criticism of contemporary wealth not only points to Victorian London in particular details (‘fine houses in town’, ‘splendid equipages’), but also picks up the ‘condition of England’ debate from the early Victorian period and its criticism of materialism and inegalitarianism, famously encapsulated in the opening chapter (1.1) of Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843): The condition of England … is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in this world. England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human want in every kind; yet England is dying of inanition.

Likewise, Martin’s account of Horace’s love-poetry clearly presents the poet as analogous to a modern young man of the elite classes: When young, Horace threw himself ardently into the pleasures of youth, and his friends being, for the most part, young and rich, their banquets were sure to be sumptuous, and carried far into the night. Nor in those days did the “blanche aux yeux noirs”, whose beauty and accomplishments formed the crowning grace of most bachelors’ parties, fail to engage a liberal share of his attention.

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As will be seen in ‘Translations’ below, this strategy is fully consistent with the approach of Martin’s own translation of Horace. Rather different were the Studies Literary and Historical in the Odes of Horace (1884) by the adventurous A. W. Verrall (1851–1912), better known for his work on Greek drama.18 Dedicated to E. C. Wickham, this book (typically of the author) was highly speculative and quirky, and was much concerned with a tendentious reconstruction of the historical circumstances of Odes 2.10 and its connection with the supposed plot of Caepio against Augustus, though it also interests itself in the musical metrical effects of the Odes. In two aspects it seems to look forward to scholarship a century later: it discusses the detailed arrangement of poems in the collection of the first three books of the Odes (cf. e.g. Santirocco 1986; Porter 1987), and is impressively sensible about the biographical truth-value of the erotic odes, now generally doubted: ‘The time is long past when the love-poems of Horace were taken for so many personal revelations’.19 More influential was the work of W. Y. Sellar (1825–90), whose Horace and the Elegiac Poets (the third part of his account of Roman poetry after The Roman Poets of the Republic of 1863 and The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil of 1877, both much reprinted) appeared posthumously in 1892 but represents twenty years of planning;20 the material on Horace (unlike that on the elegiac poets) comprises the author’s complete version, and provides in effect a monograph on the poet of some 200 dense pages, considerably more substantial than that of Martin (which is shorter and contains much more quotation). Sellar was Professor of Latin at the University of Edinburgh (1863–90), and his work is clearly aimed at classical students; it unostentatiously incorporates the results of contemporary British and continental research in a lively and attractive style which reflects his enthusiasm for teaching his subject,21 factors which explain the durability of his work (the Horace volume was reprinted as late as 1924 and was a standard item of student reading until 1945 and beyond).22 Sellar’s account of Horace begins with an account of his biography and personality which makes a number of links with the contemporary Victorian life of his original readers. Horace is seen as the most effective mirror of his own age (Sellar 1892: 3), but also as the ancient writer who is most sympathetic to the modern elite for whom Sellar was writing:

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Victorian Horace Among all ancient poets he suits the greatest variety of modern tastes. To a large number of those who receive a classical education he is the earliest, to some the only friend they make within the range … No other writer, ancient or modern, seems equally to speak to each individual as a familiar friend. (Sellar 1892: 4)

This unique proximity seems to depend on parallels between the life and views of Horace as presented by Sellar and those of the Victorian elite. For example, Horace’s further education at Athens is seen as matching ‘the combined advantage, which a visit to the old seats of art and letters, and residence at a great University, afford to a modern Englishman’ (Sellar 1892: 14); here we see not only a link with the university students who are some of Sellar’s main readers but also with Sellar’s own career (like Adam Smith before him, he had held the Snell Exhibition, a prestigious scholarship for Scottish students, at Balliol College, Oxford after his initial education at the University of Glasgow). The more serious poems of Horace can be seen as reflecting key Victorian ideas of nationalism and religion: Thus Horace represented in his poetry the graver interests of his time – the national sentiment in its most intense and exalted movement, the religious revival both in its national and its artistic significance … (Sellar 1892: 167)

Horace’s erotic poems are once again carefully treated for a youthful Victorian audience. Sellar sees Horace as reflecting in the female figures of the erotic odes the professional courtesans of Rome (‘the class in Rome who corresponded to the Glycerium or the Thais of Greek comedy’, decorously expressed and requiring an elite knowledge of Greek literature [Sellar 1892; 169]), but also improbably claims that: So far as these heroines of Horace’s Odes appear in his representation, they might be supposed to be refined and accomplished ladies leading a somewhat independent but decorous life. (Sellar 1892: 170)

Finally, on Horace’s flattery of the great, a striking modern example is cited in mitigation: If the deference which Horace pays to social distinction is to be condemned, he shares the reproach with one esteemed amongst the simplest and manliest of



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men of letters, Sir Walter Scott. Both lived at a time and in a state in which great stress was laid on such distinction of rank. (Sellar 1892: 176)

Here Horace is compared with a literary hero of the nineteenth century whose novels would be read by Sellar’s youthful audience: the celebrated Latin poet is seen as analogous to an equally famous modern gentleman of letters. Before his death in 1890, Sellar had been invited to contribute a volume on Latin Literature to the University Manuals series published by John Murray, intended for a student readership. In the event, this was written by his former pupil J. W. Mackail (1859– 1945), former fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, civil servant, scholar and writer on literature, and son-in-law of the artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones (Mackail 1896).23 The chapter on Horace once again distances the poet from his early work as ‘that which least shows the real man or the real poet’ (Mackail 1896: 107), characterizing the first book of Satires as showing ‘a vein of artistic vulgarity which is totally absent from his matured writing’ (Mackail 1896: 109) and claiming that in the Epodes ‘Horace may himself have been glad to get rid, as it were, of his own bad immature work by committing it to publicity’ (Mackail 1896: 109). As elsewhere, this idea seems to be associated with the idea of Horace as developing ultimately into the model gentleman: though Mackail is thoroughly aware of the historical situatedness of Horace and his poetry, he cannot at the end of his chapter resist the easy identification of the mature Horace as a congenial contemporary, showing ‘that peculiarly Roman urbanity – the spirit at once of the grown man as distinguished from children, of the man of the world, and of the gentleman – which up to now has been a dominant ideal over the thought and life of Europe’ (Mackail 1896: 119), and we have already seen in Chapter 1 how he equated the Odes with the biblical Psalms as a series of texts central to the good life of his own time. Horace remains the prototype of the Victorian gentleman.

Translations The sample Victorian verse translations I consider here were produced for elite readers who generally knew their Horace already and who could compare

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the English with the Latin, in both form and content; as Lord Lytton (see below) put it in 1869: Horatian scholars feel an interest in examining how each succeeding translator grapples with the difficulties of interpretation which have been, as many of them still are, matters of conjecture and dispute to commentators the most erudite, and critics the most acute. (Lytton 1869: xxxviii)

These poetic texts thus had a different function from the few prose versions of the time, which were aimed at assisting students in translation from the Latin.24 Here I focus for convenience on the Odes, the most frequently read of Horace’s works.

(i) Martin The first translation is that of Theodore Martin, whose 1870 monograph on the poet has already been discussed above. His version of the Odes came out in 1860 and went into a rapid second edition the next year, adding the other works in a complete translation in 1881 (with a reprint of his 1870 monograph as introduction). As we have come to expect, the obscene poems are suppressed, a gentlemanly ‘protective’ measure in translations, especially likely to be read by women and the young: Martin claims in good Victorian manner that he ‘has not hesitated to make such deviations from the text as are required by the purer morals of the day’ (Martin 1860: xxx, 1881: 1.clxxxvii). Consequently, he does not render Epode 8 or 10 and translates only the first twenty-four lines of Satires 1.2, while the homoerotic Odes 4.1 and 4.10 are heterosexualized, a strategy already used in Francis’ translation a century before (see Chapter 1): the Ligurinus of 4.1 becomes the putatively female ‘Ligurine’,25 while 4.10 is captioned ‘To a cruel beauty’, who has a ‘maiden bloom’ (for this tactic we may compare Thackeray’s version of Odes 1.38, discussed in Chapter 3). As again in the works already examined, the erotic poems are treated with some care in the translation, though some awareness of the sexual realities can be detected in the notes: there Martin is clear that the courtesan Tyndaris who is invited in Odes 1.17 to come out to Horace’s Sabine estate is invited not just for her conversation,



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but saves decorum by enquiring ‘but did she go?’26 Likewise, the devium scortum, ‘hard-to-find tart (prostitute)’, of Odes 2.11.21 is euphemistically rendered as ‘charming recluse’, with a note which suggests a more realistic view: It may be thought that the ‘devium scortum’ of the original is too much softened down in our version. But Horace obviously means to speak of this young lady playfully and kindly. She was apparently coy and hard to be got hold of – not ready to answer to everybody’s call – and ‘sly little puss’ may be substituted for ‘charming recluse’ by those who adopt this view in preference to ‘profligate puss’, which may, after all, be nearer the poet’s meaning. (Martin 1860: 281)27

The Galatea of Odes 3.27, who is evidently an erotic connection of the poet’s and who seems to be going abroad with a love-rival,28 is improbably turned into a much more decorous figure engaged in leisure travel to a destination sometimes favoured by Victorian ladies (cf. Mahn 2012): ‘The lady, to whom this beautiful Ode is addressed, appears to have been some Roman matron of Horace’s acquaintance, about to visit Greece’ (Martin 1860: 202). The poem’s extensive implicit comparison of Galatea with the kidnapped and bull-ravished young princess Europa, however, does not suit a respectable voyaging matron. Translations in any period face a fundamental choice between ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’, between the assimilation of the source text to the target culture and literature, and marking it out by using a form which recalls the original and presents it as different and alien in the new language and context.29 In the case of Horace, the issue of metre is particularly prominent: some earlier translators, such as Milton in his version of Odes 1.5, had tried to reproduce Horace’s complex quantitative metres in English, but Martin’s version reacts against this tendency: In the translations of others who have made it their aim to imitate the classical forms, the present translator does not find that, upon the whole, they escape the danger of either adding to or subtracting from the language of the original which besets the translator who adopts the more familiar forms of English verse. Such translators are, moreover, apt to forget that it is English verse, and for English readers, they are writing. (Martin 1881: 1.clxxxv)

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In fact, Martin seems to have a mixed strategy: his odes are cast in a variety of metres which commonly avoid Horace’s characteristic quatrain stanzas, and the prominent footnotes to his versions often note parallels with English poets (e.g. Wordsworth, Spenser, Thomson, Milton, Pope, Chaucer, Coleridge, Shakespeare) and even prose writers (Sir Thomas Browne). This is in some sense a strategy of domestication, turning Horace into an English poet easily compared with his English peers. On the other hand, there seems (despite the introductory disclaimer) to be some sensitivity to the metrical qualities of the originals. Martin follows Horace in repeating the same metre only once in the first ten odes of the first book (1.2 and 1.10 in Horace, 1.6 and 1.9 in Martin), and his 1.10 (the hymn to Mercury) seems to echo the form of its original in the Sapphic stanza, using a shorter last line after three of the same longer length (iambic pentameters, close enough to the hendecasyllabic original, followed by an iambic dimeter close, echoing in its brevity the five-syllable Latin adonaean – 1.10.1–4): Mercuri, facunde nepos Atlantis, qui feros cultus hominum recentum uoce formasti catus et decorae more palaestrae. Mercurius, Atlas’ grandchild eloquent, Who didst to gentle ways man’s primal race By language mould, and their uncouth limbs lent The gymnast’s grace.

That this is no accident is shown by 1.22, another Sapphic poem rendered in the same metre, and similar metres with short last lines in 2.2 and 2.8, though Martin avoids the Horatian strategy of simply alternating metres (Alcaic and Sapphic) in the first half of the second book of Odes. Thus, though Martin disclaims any real attempt to replicate classical metre, we can see that he is sometimes echoing the metrical shape of his Latin originals, an element that would be picked up by his more discerning contemporary readers. His versions of the Alcaic stanza, with the Sapphic stanza the most frequent metre in Horace’s Odes, are not so close to the original: in Odes 1.9 he uses a five-line stanza, common in English but not in Latin:



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Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte nec iam sustineant onus silvae laborantes geluque flumina constiterint acuto? See, Thaliarch, see, across the plain. Soracte white with snow! Scarce may the laboring woods sustain Their load, and locked in icy chain The streams have ceased to flow.

Here the extra line allows more room to unpack the dense original; there is also added material (‘across the plain’) and some interesting variation (‘locked in icy chain’ replaces the idea of sharpness (acuto) with that of constraint). It is clear from his 1870 critical work examined above that Martin regards Horace as an honorary English gentleman, and views the fashionable world of Rome in the Augustan world as closely analogous to Victorian London. Good evidence here is his treatment of Odes 1.8, in which the poet addresses Lydia and accuses her of turning her lover Sybaris from manly pursuits on the Campus Martius to the softer games of love. The descriptions of leisure pursuits both outdoor and indoor in this poem for Martin clearly reflect the lives of the Victorian elite, often divided between sports and socializing as in the country-house weekend, and implies that little has changed in the intervening centuries, as his note to the expanded second edition shows: ‘The whole poem, besides its value as a picture still true in all its main features of ‘Modern habits and manners, and of the amusements and lighter occupations of the higher classes of society in England’, is delightful for grace, sprightliness and Horatian shrewdness’ (Martin 1861: 283). Martin was so taken by this idea that he appended to his translation of the poem a modern adaptation, another Victorian fashion (see Chapter 4 below), in which the contemporary links are clearly made.

(ii) Conington Another widely popular translation was that by John Conington (1825–69), the first Corpus Professor of Latin at Oxford (from 1854), published in two

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volumes (Odes, 1863; Satires and Epistles, 1869, both several times reprinted; I cite the seventh edition of the Odes of 1877).30 Once again we find expurgation of erotic content deemed indecorous by genteel Victorian society: Odes 1.25, addressing the middle-aged but still sexually driven Lydia, 2.5, giving advice to a male pursuing a younger female, 3.20, addressing a man who is competing with a woman for the sexual favours of a boy, and 4.10, the poem of longing to the boy Ligurinus, are all omitted, while, following Martin’s version, 4.1 addresses the potentially female ‘Ligurine’ rather than Ligurinus. These omissions are advertised in the introduction, which also states explicitly already familiar grounds for the exclusion of the Epodes from the two volumes: The Epodes were the production of Horace’s youth, and probably would not have been much cared for by posterity if they had constituted his only title to fame. A few of them are beautiful, but some are revolting, and the rest, as pictures of a roving and sensual passion, remind us of the least attractive portion of the Odes. (Conington 1877: xxiv)

As befits a professional scholar, Conington dedicates some considerable space to metre in his introduction, written in the light of Matthew Arnold’s contemporary debate over what form and language to use in translating Homer. For Conington, Horace’s sententious brevity can only be captured by a ‘stanza … in some sort analogous to the metre of Horace’ (Conington 1877: ix), and the result is a series of versions which all (including that of 1.1) show a quatrain or distich stanza structure, in distinct contrast with Martin’s stanzaic variety, carefully calculated to mirror key features of the original complex lyric metres; where a metre is repeated between Horatian poems, it is repeated in Conington’s versions. This is based on the latest Horatian scholarship from Germany, but also seems to be part of an overall strategy of stressing the alien and historical nature of Horace and his Augustan period in the Victorian age: ‘it will not, I think, be disputed that between our period and the Augustan period the resemblances are very few, perhaps not more than must necessarily exist between two periods of high cultivation’ (Conington 1877: xxix). This is in direct opposition to the attempts of Martin and others to make Horace a Victorian contemporary, and can be seen as a more scholarly approach, shared with Conington’s own pupil Henry Nettleship. The cultural difference which exists over two millennia is thus given appropriate weight.



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Conington in fact aims at making his versions eighteenth-century rather than Victorian in style, ‘believing the poetry of that time to be the nearest analogue of the poetry of Augustus’ court that England has produced’ (Conington 1877: xxxi); this parallel of the two different periods echoes Swift and others in the ‘Augustan’ comparison which has become a commonplace of modern English studies. We can see this in action in a sample. Taking the opening of 1.10 again, we find: Mercuri, facunde nepos Atlantis, qui feros cultus hominum recentum uoce formasti catus et decorae more palaestrae. Grandson of Atlas, wise of tongue, O Mercury, whose wit could tame Man’s savage youth by power of song And plastic game!

‘Savage youth’ is a phrase from Gray’s ‘The Progress of Poesy’ (1754) [line 60], while ‘plastic game’ recalls Pope’s ‘plastic care’ from ‘The Dunciad’ (1728) [1.103]. The metre is carefully calculated to echo the original Sapphic stanza: the short last line (dimeter) recalls the five-syllable adonean, as in Martin’s version, but iambic tetrameters are used for the three hendecasyllables rather than pentameters, a choice carefully discussed in Conington’s introduction (xii–xv). Thus we find an interesting mixture in Conington’s versions: adjustments to Victorian ethical and social values in the content, and the moulding of Horace as if he were an established English classic, as well as some scholarly echoes of original metres, all elements which would be appreciated by a contemporary elite audience. The same emerges from a consideration of the opening of Odes 1.9: Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte nec iam sustineant onus silvae laborantes geluque flumina constiterint acuto? Dissolve frigus ligna super foco large reponens atque benignius deprome quadrimum Sabina, o Thaliarche, merum diota.

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See, how it stands, one pile of snow, Soracte! ’neath the pressure yield Its groaning woods; the torrents’ flow With clear sharp ice is all congeal’d. Heap high the logs, and melt the cold, Good Thaliarch; draw the wine we ask, That mellower vintage, four-year-old, From out the cellar’d Sabine cask.

This time I have quoted two stanzas of the original to show that Conington’s version is in fact a series of quatrain stanzas with abab rhyming scheme melded together in a continuous poem, which both matches and varies the structure of the original. There is some freedom here: candidum, ‘white’, is not translated, nor large, ‘generously’, perhaps playing down the alcoholic indulgence of the original, while ‘vintage’, ‘cellar’d’ and ‘cask’ suggest the contemporary world of the gentlemanly wine-cellar or wine-merchant (as opposed to the earthenware amphora of wine of Horace’s original). As a professor of Latin, Conington is appropriately attentive to details in the original: the sense of acuto, modified by Martin (above), is fully brought out in ‘with clear sharp ice is all congeal’d’, where ‘clear’ is added but ‘congeal’d’ looks to its etymological root in geluque.

(iii) Lytton Another important Horatian translation published in the 1860s is that of Lord Lytton, perhaps better known as Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73), the author early in his extensive literary career of the well-known historical novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), followed by a series of further novels and other works. By the time of the publication of his The Odes and Epodes of Horace (1869), he had been a three-time Member of Parliament, and had served as Secretary of State for the Colonies in the government of the Earl of Derby (1858–9). This political career, and Lytton’s colourful life in general (see Mitchell 2003) perhaps underlies his interest in Horace as a ‘man of the world’, emphasized in his introduction (which as we have already seen in Chapter 1 also views Horace as proto-Christian):



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From the width of his observation, and the generalizing character of his reasoning powers, Horace is more emphatically the representative of civilization than any other extant lyrical poet. Though describing the manners of his own time, he deals in types and pictures, sentiments and opinions, in which every civilized time finds likeness and expression. Hence men of the world claim him as one of their order, and they cheerfully accord to him an admiration which they scarcely concede to any other poet. It is not only the easy good-nature of his philosophy, and his lively wit, that secure to him this distinction, but he owes much also to the undefinable air of good-breeding which is independent of all conventional fashions, and is recognized in every society where the qualities that constitute good-breeding are esteemed. (Lytton 1869: xvi)

The association of gentlemanly status and ‘good-breeding’ has a clear contemporary resonance (the two are closely associated in Victorian etiquette texts)31 and once again enlists the poet as a gentleman of the writer’s own times. This is perhaps ironic given Horace’s own emphasis on his humble beginnings in the Satires, especially Satires 1.6, where he makes clear that his father was a freedman (ex-slave).32 Lytton’s translation is unusual for the Victorian period in printing Latin and English texts in parallel; given his statement about translations providing entertainment for Horatian scholars in seeing how problematic passages are taken (see above), this is presumably done so that the elite reader can see what he has done with the original. Like the other translators above, he excises passages which he deems unfit for Victorian taste – the most ‘offensive’ two stanzas of Odes 1.25 on the sex-mad Lydia (preserved in the Latin for the man of the world), the close of Odes 4.1 and the whole of 4.10 with their statement of erotic desire for the boy Ligurinus, and Epodes 8, 11 and 12 (8 and 12 as obscene attacks on ageing women, 11 presumably for its explicit bisexuality); this may be for the particular benefit of a young audience, given that the effective dedicatees of the translation are two famous public-school headmasters of the day, F. W. Farrar, then Master of Marlborough College and future Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, author of the famous moralizing school novel Eric, or Little By Little (1858) and B. H. Kennedy, the recently retired head of Shrewsbury School and author of Kennedy’s Latin Grammar, who are both acknowledged in Lytton’s preface for their help.

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Metrically, unlike Conington and Martin, Lytton avoids rhyme; in this sense his translation is less domesticating than theirs given the naturalness of rhyme in English lyric of his period, and he claims in his preface that this is especially useful in rendering classical poets, presumably on the grounds that they did not use rhyme either.33 Like both of them he uses a five-syllable line to replicate the effect of the adonaean at the end of the Sapphic stanza – see the opening of 1.10 once more: Mercuri, facunde nepos Atlantis, qui feros cultus hominum recentum uoce formasti catus et decorae more palaestrae. Mercury, thou eloquent grandson of Atlas, Who didst the rude manners of earth’s early races First mould into form, both by graceful Palaestra And by skilled language.

Here perhaps we can also see some use by the gentleman translator of Christopher Smart’s prose translation of 1756, reprinted for a mass market in a new edition in 1850:34 Mercury, eloquent grandson of Atlas, thou who artful didst form the savage manners of the early race of men by oratory, and the institution of the graceful Palaestra.

The prolific and busy Lytton may not have been above a translator’s short cut here. In his Odes 1.9 we find an English metre which clearly approximates well to the original Alcaic stanza: Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte nec iam sustineant onus silvae laborantes geluque flumina constiterint acuto?

Unlike Martin, Lytton renders line for line, and unlike both Martin and Conington, he overtly preserves the quatrain stanza structure of the original: See how white in the deep-fallen snow stands Soracte! Labouring forests no longer can bear up their burden; And the rush of the rivers is locked, Halting mute in the gripe of the frost.



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The version is close to the Latin here (‘see how’ = Vides ut, ‘deep-fallen’ = alta, ‘stands’ = stet), and picks up some of its alliteration (‘snow stands Soracte’ ~ stet … Soracte, ‘bear up their burden’ ~ sustineant onus), adding more (‘labouring … longer’, ‘rush of the rivers’); it also adds elements (the muteness of the frozen river, the metaphor of ‘locked’, perhaps taken from Martin, above) and substitutes the metaphor of grip for that of sharpness in describing the frost. The greater length of the English lines over the originals here allows line-for-line translation even with the greater compression of Latin, while still retaining a look of the original stanza with two longer lines followed by two shorter ones. Lytton’s version still deserves our attention.

(iv) Gladstone Another complete translation of the Odes (without the Epodes) by an approximate contemporary of all three translators already discussed, but written a generation later, is that of perhaps the most famous Victorian of them all, William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98), four times Liberal prime minister of the United Kingdom between 1868 and 1894. The preface to his translation is dated September 1894 when Gladstone was eighty-four, some six months after he left government for the last time, and we know from the biography by his friend and political colleague John Morley that he was already working on it in spare moments during his hectic last days as prime minister in early March of the same year (Morley 1903: III.510, 512). In his preface Gladstone sets out his principles of translation, disagreeing with Conington that all Horatian poems in a particular Latin metre should be rendered in the same English metre on the grounds that odes in the same metre can be very divergent in both density and subject-matter, both of which encourage metrical variation in translation. He regards the work of the Horatian translator as being carried out under conditions which are ‘sufficiently severe’ (Gladstone 1894: ix): He [sic] should largely abridge the syllabic length of his Latin text; should carry compression to the farthest practicable point … He should endeavour, with whatever changes of mere form, to preserve in all its cases the sense and point of his author, and should sparingly allow the perilous but seductive doctrine of free translation.

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The injunction to have fewer syllables in the lines of the translations than in those of the originals is an interesting contrast with Lytton, and entails Gladstone’s next exhortation to compression and brevity. We can see these principles in operation in Gladstone’s version of the Sapphic Odes 1.10: Mercuri, facunde nepos Atlantis, qui feros cultus hominum recentum uoce formasti catus et decorae more palaestrae. Grandson of Atlas, Mercury, ’twas thine, The new-born man’s rude manners to refine, By speech to school the mind, by gracious game To shape the frame.

The already terse original is further compressed by English lines which are in effect a syllable shorter (three lines of ten syllables and one of four rendering three of eleven and one of five); Mercury’s epithet facunde, ‘eloquent’, disappears. The deliberate separation of mind and body in the last two lines (rolled up together in feros cultus in the original) and especially the phrase ‘gracious game’ looks irresistibly to the contemporary ideal of the cultivation of both mind and body in the Victorian public school through the combination of team sport and study35 (though the young Gladstone himself at Eton College had preferred the solitary sport of sculling [Shannon 2007: 5]). Gladstone’s rendering of the first stanza of Odes 1.9 shows a similar economy: Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte nec iam sustineant onus silvae laborantes geluque flumina constiterint acuto? Behold Soracte, white with snow Its laden woods are bending low Keen frost arrests the river’s flow;

Four lines are translated in three: the snow’s depth (alta), the mountain’s standing (stet) and the pathetic fallacy of the labouring woods (laborantes) disappear, but Gladstone’s economy is generally successful in mirroring that



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of the original: ‘keen frost arrests the river’s flow’ is an excellent rendering of geluque constiterint acuto. The reframing of the whole stanza as an imperative rather than a question borrows an opening gambit from other Horatian odes which begin with a second-person exhortation to the addressee (e.g. 1.8.1 Lydia, dic; 1.11.1 tu ne quaesieris; 1.18.1 nullam … seueris arborem; 1.21.1 Dianam … dicite; 1.30.1–2 O Venus … / sperne). As we might expect, the odes mentioning Ligurinus (4.1 and 4.10) are robbed of their homoerotic colour. In 4.1 Gladstone, though he does not as in his son-in-law Dean Wickham’s earlier edition omit the whole poem and merely summarize it, in his translation cuts the poem short at line 32 just before the longing address to Ligurinus (33–40), turning it simply into an address to Venus honouring Paullus Fabius Maximus; at the bottom of the page we find a terse note ‘The concluding lines of the Ode are purposely omitted’ (Gladstone 1894: 24). The pendant poem 4.10 suggests Ligurinus’ future loss of beauty with advancing years, but gives no indication that the boy is the object of the poet’s passion and that the poem has a context of erotic persuasion.

(v) Other complete versions The four discussed above are probably the best known of the large number of Victorian complete verse versions of the Odes. There were at least twenty further versions of the complete Odes published in England between 1840 and 1900, mostly after 1860;36 this last wave is likely to have been stimulated by the successful translations of Martin, Conington and Lytton discussed above.37 In general, these were demonstrations of gentlemanly status and cultural capital by those who had attended elite educational institutions. For example, G. J. Whyte-Melville, an Etonian former army officer38 and later a country gentleman and novelist,39 dedicated his 1850 verse version of the Odes, Epodes and Carmen Saeculare to his former headmaster E. C. Hawtrey, while in 1858 Henry Thomas Liddell, then the second Baron Ravensworth and later the first Earl of Ravensworth, educated at Eton and St John’s College, Cambridge, and cousin of the Greek lexicographer and then Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, H. G. Liddell,40 published a version of the complete Odes ‘translated into English lyric verse’.

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Amongst these less-known complete versions, of some interest is that by F. W. Newman, professor of Latin at University College London and brother of Cardinal Newman. F. W. Newman was perhaps best known for his controversy with Matthew Arnold on the right way to translate Homer, prominent in Arnold’s On Translating Homer of 1861.41 There Arnold criticized Newman for his ballad-style archaizing unrhymed 1856 version of the Iliad (Arnold himself famously suggested using English hexameters and trying harder to capture Homer’s key qualities of rapidity, plainness in style and thought, and nobility). Newman’s version of Horace too is unrhymed (like Lytton’s); in his second edition of 1874, which uses slightly longer stanza-lines than the first edition of 1853, he keeps close to the original, allowing one English stanza per Latin stanza (Newman 1874: iv). This can be seen from his rendition of Odes 1.9.1–8: Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte nec iam sustineant onus silvae laborantes geluque flumina constiterint acuto? Dissolve frigus ligna super foco large reponens atque benignius deprome quadrimum Sabina, o Thaliarche, merum diota. Markest thou, how white Soracte stands Deep of snow? The forests labouring No more support the load: the rivers Halt in icy chains entangled. Melt the cold, replacing on the hearth Logs unsparingly. From Sabine jar, O Thaliarchus, largely grant me Wine that four full years have mellowed.

The language often closely evokes the original, especially in its Latinate language and word-order (‘the forests labouring’ pick up silvae laborantes, ‘no more support the load’ mirrors nec iam sustineant onus, while ‘melt the cold’ reflects Dissolve frigus, ‘replacing’ the prefix of reponens), though it can also pad out the original by addition (‘Wine that four full years have mellowed’ for quadrimum … merum).



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(vi) Partial versions Separate published versions of one or more Horatian poems or books, especially from the Odes, were common in the Victorian period as they had been in earlier periods (see Chapter 1 above). As Lytton (see above) noted in 1869: ‘There is scarcely a man of letters who has not at one time or another versified or imitated some of the odes’ (Lytton 1869: xxxviii); historical anthologies of Horatian translations by many different hands were also regularly published.42 Such small-scale versions were an easy way of demonstrating an elite education and a feeling of fellowship with the ‘gentlemanly’ Horace I have sketched in Chapter 1. In his Verses and Translations (1862) the fluent translator and composer of Latin verse C. S. Calverley (1831–84)43 published a number of Horatian translations, among them one of Odes 1.9 (again; for the Latin text see above), from which I cite the opening: One dazzling mass of solid snow Soracte stands; the bent woods fret Beneath their load; and, sharpest-set With frost, the streams have ceased to flow. Pile on great faggots and break up The ice: let influence more benign Enter with four-years-treasured wine, Fetched in the ponderous Sabine cup …

This combines neat turning and unpacking of Horace’s imagery (‘fret’ for laborant, ‘labour’, supplying the ice implicit in dissolve frigus, ‘melt the cold’) with verbal echoing of the original for the Latinate reader (‘more benign’ = benignius). Also from the 1860s, but very different in style, we find several versions by Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of Odes 1.38, one of Odes 3.1, and a quatrain only recently recognized as a version of Odes 2.17.1–4:44 Not kind! to freeze me with forecast, Dear grace and girder of mine and me. You to be gone and I lag last– Nor I nor heaven would have it be. Cur me querelis exanimas tuis? Nec dis amicum est nec mihi te prius

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Victorian Horace obire, Maecenas, mearum grande decus columenque rerum.

Here we see Hopkins’ trademark complex syntax and forceful alliteration, but also some engagement with the detail of the original (‘grace and girder’ nicely renders decus columenque, especially the architectural detail of the second noun). I will conclude here with perhaps the most celebrated translation of a single Horatian poem from the nineteenth century, Diffugere Nives by A. E. Housman (1859–1935). This translation of Odes 4.7 was included in Housman’s posthumous More Poems of 1936, but was in fact first published nearly forty years before in 1897, about the time of his famous collection A Shropshire Lad (1896): Diffugere nives, redeunt iam gramina campis arboribus comae; mutat terra vices et decrescentia ripas flumina praetereunt; Gratia cum Nymphis geminisque sororibus audet ducere nuda chorus. Inmortalia ne speres, monet annus et almum quae rapit hora diem. Frigora mitescunt Zephyris, ver proterit aestas, interitura simul pomifer autumnus fruges effuderit, et mox bruma recurrit iners. Damna tamen celeres reparant caelestia lunae: nos ubi decidimus quo pater Aeneas, quo dives Tullus et Ancus, puluis et umbra sumus. Quis scit an adiciant hodiernae crastina summae tempora di superi? Cuncta manus avidas fugient heredis, amico quae dederis animo. Cum semel occideris et de te splendida Minos fecerit arbitria, non, Torquate, genus, non te facundia, non te restituet pietas;

5

10

15

20



Horace in Victorian Commentaries, Literary Criticism, Translations infernis neque enim tenebris Diana pudicum liberat Hippolytum, nec Lethaea valet Theseus abrumpere caro vincula Pirithoo.

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25

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws And grasses in the mead renew their birth, The river to the river-bed withdraws, And altered is the fashion of the earth. The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear And unapparelled in the woodland play. The swift hour and the brief prime of the year Say to the soul, Thou wast not born for aye. Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers Comes autumn with his apples scattering; Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs. But oh, whate’er the sky-led seasons mar, Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams; Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams. Torquatus, if the gods in heaven shall add The morrow to the day, what tongue has told? Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has had The fingers of no heir will ever hold. When thou descendest once the shades among, The stern assize and equal judgment o’er, Not thy long lineage nor thy golden tongue, No, nor thy righteousness, shall friend thee more. Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain, Diana steads him nothing, he must stay; And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain The love of comrades cannot take away.

Housman’s version has been much discussed, not least because he famously recited it in a 1914 Cambridge lecture and then stated that its Latin original was in his view ‘the most beautiful poem in ancient literature’.45 Formally,

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it retains the quatrain stanzas of the original and uses iambic pentameters in an abab rhyming scheme in each, the format of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1750), with which Housman’s version shares an elegiac tone. It has many pointed and elevated expressions, with brilliant use of tactics such as alliteration, sometimes in sequential lines (‘say to the soul’, ‘hard on the heel’, ‘hard on hers’, ‘dust and dreams’, ‘tongue has told’, ‘heart has had’, ‘long lineage’), emphatic repetition (‘moon upon moon’, ‘thy heart … thy heart’), and punning (‘rebuilds it with her beams’ plays on the two senses of ‘beam’ as ‘ray’ and ‘timber’). Particularly striking is its search after lexical and stylistic elevation. This is partly accomplished through Shakespearian echoes, typical of Victorian verse,46 for example the archaic ‘steads him nothing’ (cf. All’s Well that Ends Well 3.7 ‘it nothing steads us’) or the phrases ‘not born for aye’ (cf. Hamlet 3.1 ‘This world is not for aye’) and ‘golden tongue’ (Troilus and Cressida 1.2), while the King James Bible (KJB) of 1611, another Victorian favourite,47 also intervenes: for ‘the fashion of the earth’ compare 2 Kings 16.1 ‘the fashion of the altar’, while the archaic phrases ‘the morrow’ and ‘thy righteousness’ occur forty-seven and thirtysix times respectively in the KJB; the phrase ‘god in heaven’, here pluralized for a pagan context by Housman, like the archaic ‘thou wast not’, is regularly found in both great English texts. But perhaps the main reason for Housman’s attachment to this particular poem and the intensity and beauty of this particular translation is its last stanza celebrating the ‘love of comrades’. As modern scholarship has noted, this phrase was prominently used by the homoerotic poet Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass 24) and picked up from him by Housman’s older contemporary the gay activist Edward Carpenter,48 and in Tom Stoppard’s play The Invention of Love the young Housman is presented as using Theseus’ feelings for Pirithous as an attempt to explain his own feelings to his Oxford friend Moses Jackson with whom he was in love (Stoppard 1997: 79). The appearance here of the theme no doubt evoked in Housman his feelings for Jackson, the deepest relationship of his life;49 this would not be the only occasion in the 1890s, the decade of the condemnation of Oscar Wilde, when Housman would allude to the issue of homosexuality in his poetry.50 Here for once through the translation of Horace we can see traces of Victorian homoeroticism in connection with classical learning, the



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opposite of the kind of consistent expurgation of homosexual elements we have noted in other works of Horatian commentary, scholarship and translation, traces which are now receiving appropriate attention in reception scholarship.51

3

Horace and the Victorian Poets I: Tennyson, Arnold, Clough, Fitzgerald

In this chapter I turn to four well-known Victorian poets who made significant use of Horace in their poetry: Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92), Matthew Arnold (1822–88), Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–61) and Edward Fitzgerald (1809–83). Their Horatian allusions have been only partly catalogued in modern editions and older studies,1 usually without much comment, and deserve some fuller and more literary discussion, as they not only demonstrate an elite gentlemanly education but also contribute materially to the texture and understanding of some key literary works.

Tennyson Hallam Tennyson’s biography of his father records that Tennyson, like Byron before him,2 was initially put off Horace by too much dry pedagogical instruction in youth and returned to him only later in life (Tennyson 1899: I.13); the poet seems to have memorized all the Odes as a schoolboy (Markley 2004: 106). In Tennyson’s copy of Horace3 we find three early translations from his teenage years, which were not published until 1982.4 I will here consider the two versions of the Odes (the other is of Epodes 5.1–14). The first of these is of most of the Soracte ode (1.9), from which I cite the first half: Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte nec iam sustineant onus silvae laborantes geluque flumina constiterint acuto?

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Victorian Horace Dissolve frigus ligna super foco large reponens atque benignius deprome quadrimum Sabina, o Thaliarche, merum diota. Permitte divis cetera, qui simul strauere ventos aequore fervido deproeliantis, nec cupressi nec veteres agitantur orni.

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See! how Soracte’s hoary brow And melancholy crags uprear Their weight of venerable snow: And scarce the groaning forests bear The burthen of the gloomy year And motionless the stream remains Beneath the weight of icy chains. Thou of the social banquet King, Now store of welcome faggots bring, Now bid a brighter flame arise, Now let the rich and rosy wine Within the joyful goblets shine, That wine whose age hath seen the ray Of four long summers roll away Along yon wintry skies. Leave to the Gods the rest – whose force Can stay the whirlwind’s wasting course; When they have smoothed the maddening jar Of mingled elemental war, Nor those tall ash-trees dread the storm Nor cypress bows his shadowy form.

Here the young Tennyson adopts an ample style of translation. In the section cited he renders the three opening quatrain stanzas of Horace’s poem in longer stanzas of his own, two of seven lines in different rhyming schemes (ababbcc, aabccddb) and one of three straightforward rhyming couplets. Expansion occurs through supplying extra elements not in the original (‘brow’, ‘melancholy crags’, ‘venerable’, ‘of the gloomy year’, ‘beneath the weight’), almost all of which add a typically Tennysonian gloom. Another added element is the



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triple ‘now’ of the second stanza, actually an Horatian stileme elsewhere;5 in the same stanza the single word quadrimum is expanded to fill three lines by paraphrase, while the details of the wine-jar are omitted. By contrast, the third stanza begins with a rendering which is literal down to the word order (‘Leave to the Gods the rest’ = permitte divis cetera), but then becomes paraphrastic and expansive once more, with each tree receiving its own sentence, though two tellingly alliterative phrases suggest the poet’s talent (‘whirlwind’s wasting course’, ‘mingled elemental war’). The second translation is similar, this time of Odes 3.3. I cite the version of 3.3.1–12: Iustum et tenacem propositi virum non civium ardor prava iubentium, non vultus instantis tyranni   mente quatit solida neque Auster, dux inquieti turbidus Hadriae, nec fulminantis magna manus Iovis: si fractus inlabatur orbis,   impavidum ferient ruinae. Hac arte Pollux et vagus Hercules enisus arces attigit igneas, quos inter Augustus recumbens   purpureo bibet ore nectar …

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The people’s fury cannot move The man of just and steadfast soul For he can brook The tyrant’s look And red right-arm of mighty Jove: What! though the echoing billows roll, And on the lonely sea-beach dash, What time the cold and cheerless blast From the dim south has o’er them past, What though upon this earthly ball Heaven’s canopy itself should fall, Yet fearless would he brave the crash. Thus to Pollux was it given And to the hero by whose might

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Victorian Horace Hell’s tremendous gates were riven To reach the fiery citadels of Heaven Where amid the powers divine In the realms of endless light Augustus quaffs ambrosial wine.

Horace’s first two stanzas are rendered in two syntactically continuous units with complex rhyming structures (abccab/abbcca), the third by a seven-line stanza (likewise unseparated in the manuscript)6 with the structure abaacbc. Tennyson begins with a close rendering of Horace’s opening lines, with the fine phrase ‘the man of just and steadfast soul’ for Horace’s famous iustum et tenacem propositi virum; he also echoes in his ‘red right-arm of mighty Jove’ the phrase ‘red right arm of Jove’ in his teenage idol Byron’s similarly expansive version of the poem’s first two stanzas, published in Hours of Idleness in 1807.7 Tennyson’s second stanza expands the Roman poet’s reference to adverse weather conditions: ‘From the dim south’ picks up Auster, but the ‘echoing billows’, ‘lonely sea-beach’ and ‘cold and cheerless blast’ are essentially additions of characteristic Tennysonian gloom; by contrast, ‘fearless would he brave the crash’, though making person not universe the subject of the verb, neatly mirrors the original word order impavidum ferient ruinae. The third stanza evidently Christianizes the pagan Olympus: ‘the hero by whose might / Hell’s tremendous gates were riven’ refers to Hercules but could equally well describe Christ,8 while Augustus’ divine location among ‘powers divine’ ‘in the realms of endless light’ is equally Christian.9 Both Horatian learning and religious colour reflect Tennyson’s traditional classical education in the period 1820–7 through the tuition of his clergyman and Cambridge-educated father.10 This traditional education is also neatly seen in the later poem ‘Will’ of 1854, of which I cite the first stanza: O well for him whose will is strong! He suffers, but he will not suffer long; He suffers, but he cannot suffer wrong: For him nor moves the loud world’s random mock, Nor all Calamity’s hugest waves confound Who seems a promontory of rock, That, compass’d round with turbulent sound, In middle ocean meets the surging shock, Tempest-buffeted, citadel-crowned.



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As commentators have pointed out, this combines an imitation (in lines 1–4) of the famous description of the imperturbability of the strong-willed sage at Odes 3.3.1–8, which we have just seen Tennyson translate (‘the loud world’s random mock’ looks to civium ardor prava iubentium, ‘the ardour of fellow-citizens who command wrong actions’) with one in lines 5–8 of the description of the relentless warrior Mezentius in the midst of battle in Vergil’s Aeneid (10.693–6): ille (velut rupes vastum quae prodit in aequor, obvia ventorum furiis expostaque ponto, vim cunctam atque minas perfert caelique marisque ipsa immota manens) … He (like a rock that projects into the vast sea-plain, Open to the raging of the winds and exposed to the ocean, Bears all the force and threats of sea and sky, itself remaining unmoved) …11

But it has not been noted that the references to ‘turbulent sound’ and ‘surging shock’ in fact pick up another use of the same simile in the Aeneid, where the aged king Latinus momentarily resists the pressure of his people to go to war (7.586–90): ille velut pelago rupes immota resistit, ut pelagi rupes magno veniente fragore, quae sese multis circum latrantibus undis mole tenet; scopuli nequiquam et spumea circum saxa fremunt laterique inlisa refunditur alga. He like a rock which resists the sea unmoved, Like a rock in the sea as a great wave-crash comes, Which holds its mass firm as waves bark around; In vain do the cliffs and foaming rocks roar about it, And the seaweed is smashed on its side and tossed back.12

Tennyson’s classical education can here be seen emblematically in a suturing of the two greatest Roman poets.13 Tennyson’s most Horatian work occurs unsurprisingly in two Horace-style odes to male intellectual friends who shared Tennyson’s traditional classical education. The first of these, ‘To the Revd F. D. Maurice’, was written in

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1854 to an old Cambridge friend who had recently been dismissed from his post as Professor of Moral Theology at King’s College London for religious unorthodoxy. As Niall Rudd has pointed out in an excellent article, this ode in twelve short quatrain stanzas (again immediately evoking the form of the Horatian model in Alcaic stanzas) has a number of points of connection with Odes 3.29, addressed by Horace to Maecenas (Rudd 2005: 181): At a time when there are anxieties about Russia and the Middle East, a major poet, aged about forty, belonging to the foremost imperial power of the day, writes from the country to a slightly older friend, a distinguished figure who is residing in the capital. He speaks attractively of the countryside, inviting his friend to come and forget his worries amid the joys of good wine and conversation. Horace to Maecenas from the Sabine hills, or Tennyson to F. D. Maurice from the Isle of Wight?

This general resemblance of context is matched by a number of detailed links between the two poems, neatly catalogued by Rudd: the host’s country residence ‘far from noise and smoke of town’ recalls Horace’s Sabine estate away from the fumum et opes strepitumque Romae (3.29.12 ‘the smoke and wealth and din of Rome’), the guest is encouraged to leave behind the cares of responsibility and office (Maurice and King’s College, Maecenas and his oversight of Rome in Augustus’ absence) for a visit to the country (17–24): You’ll have no scandal while you dine, But honest talk and wholesome wine, And only hear the magpie gossip Garrulous under a roof of pine: For groves of pine on either hand, To break the blast of winter, stand; And further on, the hoary Channel Tumbles a breaker on chalk and sand …

Tennyson’s conjunction of hospitality and rural peace is likewise key to Horace’s poem (3.29.13–24): Plerumque gratae divitibus vices mundaeque parvo sub lare pauperum cenae sine aulaeis et ostro sollicitam explicuere frontem.

15



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iam pastor umbras cum grege languido rivumque fessus quaerit et horridi dumeta Siluani caretque ripa vagis taciturna ventis. Most often a change is welcome to the wealthy And decent dinners in the humble house of the poor Without hangings and purple cloth Have served to smooth the troubled brow. Already the bright father of Andromeda has shown His hidden fire, already Procyon rages And the star of the mad Lion As the sun brings back dry days: Already the shepherd with his languid flock In fatigue seeks shade and streams and the bristling tussocks Of Silvanus, and the bank is quiet And free from the wandering winds.

Tennyson turns into conversation about foreign and domestic policy Maecenas’ similar concerns for public issues and the safety of Rome: We might discuss the Northern sin Which made a selfish war begin; Dispute the claims, arrange the chances; Emperor, Ottoman, which shall win: Or whether war’s avenging rod Shall lash all Europe into blood; Till you should turn to dearer matters, Dear to the man that is dear to God; How best to help the slender store, How mend the dwellings, of the poor; How gain in life, as life advances, Valor and charity more and more.

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Cf. Odes 3.29.25–8: Tu civitatem quis deceat status curas et urbi sollicitus times quid Seres et regnata Cyro Bactra parent Tanaisque discors. You take care for what condition fits the state And in your anxiety have fears about What the Silk People are planning for the City, and Bactria Once ruled by Cyrus, and the discordant Don.

The earnest social labours of the enlightened Victorian clergyman neatly replace Maecenas’ stewardship of Rome, but in both cases concerns about contemporary politics are raised.14 The second poem to an old friend with Horatian overtones comes from towards the end of Tennyson’s career. This is the dedicatory ode (1883) attached to ‘Tiresias’, addressed to Edward Fitzgerald, a friend since the 1830s and author of the famous translation of The Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám. I cite the opening eight lines: Old Fitz, who from your suburb grange Where once I tarried for a while, Glance at the wheeling Orb of change, And greet it with a kindly smile; Whom yet I see as there you sit Beneath your sheltering garden-tree, And watch your doves about you flit, And plant on shoulder, hand and knee …

Though Tennyson’s fifty-six-line poem is not set out in quatrains, its abab rhyming scheme encourages the reader to divide it in Horatian mode into four-line metrical units, and it has many details in common with Horace’s poems to friends. Like a number of these, it begins with the name of its addressee (‘Old Fitz’; cf. Odes 1.1.1 Maecenas, 1.29.1 Icci, 1.33.1 Albi, 2.6.1 Septimi, 3.17.1 Aeli); it also specifies the place where the friend is located (‘who from your suburb grange’, referring to Fitzgerald’s home at Little Grange, Woodbridge, Suffolk; we may compare Odes 1.18.2, referring to Varus’ estate at Tibur, 2.3.17–20, pointing to Dellius’ Tiber-side villa, or 3.29.7–10, alluding



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to Maecenas’ towered residence on the Esquiline). More Horatian elements appear in later lines of the poem. It teases Fitzgerald as a vegetarian (9 ‘who live on milk and meal and grass’), a common technique of humour in Horace (e.g. Odes 1.22, which teases Fuscus for his Stoic ideas, or Satires 2.1, which teases Trebatius for his swimming in the Tiber, eccentric for an older man). As in Horace’s odes to fellow-writers, it alludes to Fitzgerald’s literary work, his Omar Khayyám (32 ‘your golden Eastern lay’, 37 ‘your Omar’), just as the odes to the elegists Tibullus (1.33) and Valgius (2.9) and the historian and tragedian Pollio (2.1) mention their writings. Even the mention of the poet’s age is a Horatian touch: ‘But we old friends are still alive, / And I am nearing seventy-four, / While you have touched at seventy-five’ picks up Horace’s identification of his age as fifty at Odes 4.1.6, and the pairing of two old friends recalls Horace’s address to his middle-aged contemporary Fuscus in Epistles 1.10 where the two of them are said to be vetuli notique columbi, ‘old pigeons well known to each other’ (1.10.3). All this is highly appropriate to the author of Omar Khayyám, which has some Horatian colour (see below), and to a poetic address from one Cambridge graduate to another.15 Perhaps Tennyson’s most famous poem, In Memoriam A.H.H., the 1850 extended elegy in 131 sections to his Cambridge friend Arthur Hallam who died at the age of twenty-two in 1833, has naturally been most often compared in terms of classical models16 to Roman elegy rather than Horatian lyric.17 However, both in overall form and occasional topics it bears clear marks of Horace’s Odes. Its 131 sections are all in short quatrain stanzas, the structural form of most of Horace’s 102 odes; the verse-form used by Tennyson (iambic tetrameter, abba rhyme scheme) is a form of English verse from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, suggesting an historical metrical perspective which is consistent with Horatian imitation18 These sections, as well as being comparable in number to Horace’s total of poems, are almost all of the length of individual Horatian odes, between twelve and sixty-four lines, with only one exception (the 120-line section 85) apart from the 144-line epilogue, and In Memoriam as a whole is much the same length (2,900 lines) as Horace’s lyric output in Odes 1–4 (3,040 lines); these formal resemblances are unlikely to be accidental for a poet who knew the Odes very well. Several sections indeed invoke particular Horatian poems, as has often been noted; these will now be considered with some fresh literary reflections.

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Section 9 of In Memoriam refers to the ship which is bringing Arthur Hallam’s body home from Vienna where he died; commentators have rightly associated this with the classical propemptikon (poem wishing a good journey to a friend or lover) and in particular with Odes 1.3, where Horace wishes a prosperous voyage to Greece for his friend Vergil:19 Fair ship, that from the Italian shore Sailest the placid ocean-plains With my lost Arthur’s loved remains, Spread thy full wings, and waft him o’er. So draw him home to those that mourn In vain; a favourable speed Ruffle thy mirror’d mast, and lead Thro’ prosperous floods his holy urn. All night no ruder air perplex Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor, bright As our pure love, thro’ early light Shall glimmer on the dewy decks. Sphere all your lights around, above; Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow; Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now, My friend, the brother of my love; My Arthur, whom I shall not see Till all my widow’d race be run; Dear as the mother to the son, More than my brothers are to me.

Compare Odes 1.3.1–8: Sic te diva potens Cypri, sic fratres Helenae, lucida sidera, ventorumque regat pater obstrictis aliis praeter Iapyga, navis, quae tibi creditum 5 debes Vergilium, finibus Atticis reddas incolumem precor et serves animae dimidium meae.



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So may the goddess who rules Cyprus, So may Helen’s brothers, those shining stars, And the father of the winds direct you, Constraining all except the Western breeze, O ship, who owes as debt the Vergil Entrusted to you, to Attic shores may you Render him up safe, I pray, and preserve The true half of my soul.

More can be said about the rich significance of this literary connection. Tennyson’s sequence can be seen as a clear inversion of Horace’s poem, addressed to a similar close poetic friend;20 where Horace’s poem dispatches Vergil alive from Italy to eastern Europe, Tennyson’s welcomes the return of Hallam’s body from the same direction. This seems all the more pointed when we consider that the voyage to Greece of Odes 1.3 was commonly believed in the Victorian period to be identical with the journey immediately after which Vergil died at Brundisium according to his ancient biographies;21 Tennyson was thus using in his elegy for Hallam a poem which could be closely associated with Vergil’s death. The section’s detailed echoes of Odes 1.3 are multiple. The invocation of the ship carrying the friend is picked up from Horace’s ode, formally addressed to Vergil’s vessel; its initial position also perhaps recalls the opening of Odes 1.14 to the ship of state (1.14.1 O navis, ‘o ship’), while the ‘placid ocean-plains’ recall in both adjective and metaphor a common usage of Latin poetry.22 ‘From the Italian shore’ points to a common element in the two voyages: Vergil leaves Italy eastwards for Greece, while Hallam’s body leaves Italy westwards for England. Both poems concern themselves with favourable weather conditions for the voyage, a topos of the classical propemptikon; Tennyson’s focus on the winds (‘ruffle thy mirror’d mast’, ‘all night no ruder air perplex / thy sliding keel’) may recall Horace’s concerns that only the right winds should blow and that the potentially disruptive ones should be constrained; and both poems appeal to stars to aid the voyage, in the case of Horace the constellation Gemini (Castor and Pollux), in the case of Tennyson the classically-named Phosphor, the dawn-star.23 In both poems the friend is prominently named; in In Memoriam this is unusual (this section contains two of the five uses of ‘Arthur’ in the whole work), and may well be stimulated by Horace’s Vergilium. Finally, in both poems love for the friend is expressed in hyperbolic terms:

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Vergil is ‘the true half of my soul’ for Horace, while for Tennyson Hallam is ‘My friend, the brother of my love’. Similarly evident are the Horatian links of In Memoriam 107, where the poet marks his dead friend’s birthday (1 February, probably in 1835): It is the day when he was born, A bitter day that early sank Behind a purple-frosty bank Of vapour, leaving night forlorn. The time admits not flowers or leaves To deck the banquet. Fiercely flies The blast of North and East, and ice Makes daggers at the sharpen’d eaves, And bristles all the brakes and thorns To yon hard crescent, as she hangs Above the wood which grides and clangs Its leafless ribs and iron horns Together, in the drifts that pass To darken on the rolling brine That breaks the coast. But fetch the wine, Arrange the board and brim the glass; Bring in great logs and let them lie, To make a solid core of heat; Be cheerful-minded, talk and treat Of all things ev’n as he were by; We keep the day. With festal cheer, With books and music, surely we Will drink to him, whate’er he be, And sing the songs he loved to hear.

The celebration of the dead man’s birthday is a kind of Horatian symposium; we might recall Odes 4.11, where Horace invites Phyllis (but not Maecenas himself, certainly still alive) to celebrate Maecenas’ birthday. But the winter setting of Tennyson’s section has rightly been seen by commentators24 as paralleling Horace’s Soracte ode (1.9), translated by Tennyson as a schoolboy (see above), where we find a similar symposiastic celebration by the fire amid ice and snow (1.9.1–8):



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Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte nec iam sustineant onus silvae laborantes geluque flumina constiterint acuto? Dissolve frigus ligna super foco 5 large reponens atque benignius deprome quadrimum Sabina, o Thaliarche, merum diota. Permitte divis cetera, qui simul strauere ventos aequore fervido deproeliantis, nec cupressi nec veteres agitantur orni.

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Do you see how Soracte stands all white, Deep in snow, and the labouring woods Cannot sustain their burden, and the streams Stand still with the sharpness of frost? Melt away the cold and lay logs on the fire With lavish hand, and bring out More generously the four-year-old vintage, Thaliarchus, from its two-eared Sabine jar. Leave the rest to the gods, who all at once Can lay low the winds that strive On the seething sea, while the cypress-trees And aged ashes are not subject to shaking.

The key line that triggers the Horatian allusion is ‘Bring in great logs and let them lie’, an injunction to the company at large which parallels Horace’s instruction to Thaliarchus to ‘lay logs on the fire’; further links are the metaphor of ‘ice / makes daggers at the sharpen’d eaves’, echoing that of ‘the sharpness of frost’, the reference to the battle of the winds, ‘Fiercely flies / The blast of North and East’, picking up ‘the winds that strive / On the seething sea’, and the reaction of trees in the woods to the weather, ‘Above the wood which grides and clangs / Its leafless ribs and iron horns / Together,’ echoing (or rather inverting) ‘while the cypress-trees / And aged ashes feel no quivering’. A further section which has evident Horatian colour is In Memoriam 115:

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Victorian Horace Now fades the last long streak of snow, Now burgeons every maze of quick About the flowering squares, and thick By ashen roots the violets blow. Now rings the woodland loud and long, The distance takes a lovelier hue, And drown’d in yonder living blue The lark becomes a sightless song. Now dance the lights on lawn and lea, The flocks are whiter down the vale, And milkier every milky sail On winding stream or distant sea; Where now the seamew pipes, or dives In yonder greening gleam, and fly The happy birds, that change their sky To build and brood; that live their lives From land to land; and in my breast Spring wakens too; and my regret Becomes an April violet, And buds and blossoms like the rest.

A number of details indicate that this section recalls the first half of Horace’s celebrated ode to Sestius similarly celebrating the coming of spring (1.4.1–10):25 Soluitur acris hiems grata vice veris et Favoni trahuntque siccas machinae carinas, ac neque iam stabulis gaudet pecus aut arator igni nec prata canis albicant pruinis. Iam Cytherea choros ducit Venus imminente luna iunctaeque Nymphis Gratiae decentes alterno terram quatiunt pede, dum gravis Cyclopum Volcanus ardens visit officinas. Nunc decet aut viridi nitidum caput impedire myrto aut flore, terrae quem ferunt solutae …

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The sharp winter is melting with the pleasant change of spring and the west wind And the cranes drag out the dry keels And the herd no longer joys in its folds or the ploughman in his fire Nor are the meadows white with hoar-frost.



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Now Venus of Cythera leads out her dancing-bands as the moon looms And, joined with the Nymphs, the shapely Graces Make the earth shake with one foot following another, while burning Vulcan Goes to visit the heavy factories of the Cyclopes. Now it is fitting to bind the shining head with green myrtle or the flowers Which the earth bears, freed from frost …

Both poems consist of exactly twenty lines overall and move from an initial view of the external marks of spring in the melting of snow and frost to recurring internal feelings, in Horace the return of interest in symposiastic celebration and (in famous lines which follow this extract) the idea of the omnipresence of death, in Tennyson the similarly melancholic resurgence of regret for his lost friend. Both poems are articulated by repeated references to ‘now’ (five times in Tennyson, three times in the lines of Horace cited)26 and the changes effected by the coming of spring; both poems refer to renewed sailing as a springtime activity, to the appearance of flowers and the reactions of animals at the coming of the warm weather (flocks in Horace, birds in Tennyson). Even the metaphor of ‘dance the lights on lawn and lea’ might pick up the reference to Venus leading her dancing-bands and the ballet of the Graces from Horace’s original.

Arnold In his essay ‘On the Modern Element in Literature’ of 1857, a version of his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford in the same year, Matthew Arnold went through a number of Greek and Roman writers judging whether they were ‘adequate’ to express the character of their own times and cultures. Having criticized Lucretius and Vergil for lack of cheerfulness, he characterizes Horace as lacking seriousness (Arnold 1970: 74–5):27 We come to Horace: and if Lucretius, if Virgil wants cheerfulness, Horace wants seriousness. I go back to what I said of Menander: as with Menander so it is with Horace: the men of taste, the men of cultivation, the men of the world are enchanted with him; he has not a prejudice, not an illusion, not a blunder. True! yet the best men in the best ages have never been thoroughly satisfied with Horace. If human life were complete without faith, without enthusiasm,

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Victorian Horace without energy, Horace, like Menander, would be the perfect interpreter of human life: but it is not; to the best, to the most living sense of humanity, it is not; and because it is not, Horace is inadequate. Pedants are tiresome, men of reflection and enthusiasm are unhappy and morbid; therefore Horace is a sceptical man of the world. … Horace warms himself before the transient fire of human animation and human pleasure while he can, and is only serious when he reflects that the fire must soon go out. Damna tamen celeres reparant coelestia lunae: / Nos, ubi decidimus, –‘For nature there is renovation, but for man there is none!’ – it is exquisite, but it is not interpretative and fortifying.28

The attitude expressed here is consistent with Arnold’s later development in Culture and Anarchy (1869) of the idea of ‘sweetness and light’, the joint concept of beauty and elegance on the one hand and moral seriousness on the other, with both being needed for full cultural development (Arnold 1993: 67): But the idea of beauty and of a human nature perfect on all its sides, which is the dominant idea of poetry, is a true and invaluable idea, though it has not yet had the success that the idea of conquering the obvious faults of our animality, and of a human nature perfect on the moral side, which is the dominant idea of religion, has been enabled to have; and it is destined, adding to itself the religious idea of a devout energy, to transform and govern the other.

Horace, then, has beauty but not moral seriousness. In effect, Arnold criticizes Horace for not showing the characteristics of Victorian virtue as he sees it, for being ‘without faith, without enthusiasm, without energy’ (see above). The younger Arnold, nevertheless, the recipient of a traditional classical education at his father’s Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford,29 had used Horatian imitation in his poems,30 not least ‘Horatian Echo’ of 1847:31 Omit, omit, my simple friend, Still to inquire how parties tend, Or what we fix with foreign powers. If France and we are really friends, And what the Russian Czar intends, Is no concern of ours. Us not the daily quickening race Of the invading populace Shall draw to swell that shouldering herd. Mourn will we not your closing hour,



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Ye imbeciles in present power, Doom’d, pompous, and absurd! And let us bear, that they debate Of all the engine-work of state, Of commerce, laws, and policy, The secrets of the world’s machine, And what the rights of man may mean, With readier tongue than we. Only, that with no finer art They cloak the troubles of the heart With pleasant smile, let us take care; Nor with a lighter hand dispose Fresh garlands of this dewy rose, To crown Eugenia’s hair. Of little threads our life is spun, And he spins ill, who misses one. But is thy fair Eugenia cold? Yet Helen had an equal grace, And Juliet’s was as fair a face, And now their years are told. The day approaches, when we must Be crumbling bones and windy dust; And scorn us as our mistress may, Her beauty will no better be Than the poor face she slights in thee, When dawns that day, that day.

Arnold’s poem can be interestingly compared with Horace Odes 2.11, cited in commentaries only for the resemblance of its opening stanza:32 Quid bellicosus Cantaber et Scythes, Hirpine Quincti, cogitet Hadria divisus obiecto, remittas quaerere nec trepides in usum poscentis aevi pauca: fugit retro levis iuventas et decor, arida pellente lascivos amores canitie facilemque somnum.

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Victorian Horace Non semper idem floribus est honor vernis neque uno luna rubens nitet voltu: quid aeternis minorem consiliis animum fatigas? Cur non sub alta vel platano vel hac pinu iacentes sic temere et rosa canos odorati capillos, dum licet, Assyriaque nardo potamus uncti? dissipat Euhius curas edacis. Quis puer ocius restinguet ardentis Falerni pocula praetereunte lympha?

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Quis devium scortum eliciet domo Lyden? Eburna dic, age, cum lyra maturet, in comptum Lacaenae more comas religata nodum. What the warlike Cantabrian and Scythian Is planning, Quinctius from Hirpinum, Sundered from us by the intervening Adriatic, Don’t seek to ask, and don’t excite yourself Over the needs of an age that asks little: Smooth youth and beauty flees away As playful loves and sleep that is easy Are driven off by arid old age. The flowers of spring do not have the same beauty For ever, nor does the moon shine with one face only: Why do you harass with long-term plans A mind that is not up to them? Why shouldn’t we lie under a lofty plane Or this pine just as we happen to be, Our white hair fragranced with roses, While we can, and drink away Anointed with Syrian nard? Bacchus dispels The cares that gnaw at men. What boy will Move quickly and quench the cups of burning Falernian From the passing stream?



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Who will lure from her house Lyde, The tart hard to find? Come, tell her To hurry with her ivory lyre, her hair Bound in a neat knot like a Spartan girl’s.

It has been recently claimed that Arnold’s poem ‘owes as much to the French poet Béranger as it does to Horace’ (Shrimpton 2015: 476), but its combination of sympotic pleasure and reflections on mortality seems much more typical of the Roman lyric poet than of the lighter confections of the French chansonnier,33 and its engagement with the Horatian ode and the atmosphere of Horatian lyric in general is detailed and illuminating. Both poems have six stanzas (quatrains in Horace, six-line units of aabccb rhyme scheme in Arnold); the initial emphatic anaphora of the verb (‘Omit, omit’) is an Horatian trope in the Odes (cf. e.g. 2.17.10 ibimus, ibimus, 4.1.2 precor, precor, 4.4.70 occidit, occidit), and the verb ‘omit’ itself governing an infinitive is a recognizably Latinate and Horatian expression (cf. e.g. Odes 3.29.11 omitte mirari). The name of the beloved Eugenia is Latinate, though not Horatian (we may contrast the Lisette and Adele of Béranger), while the rejection of the ‘shouldering herd’ and the false ambitions of everyday life recall the opening of Odes 1.1, where athletics, politics, riches and trade are rejected for the symposium and the select life of poetry away from the vulgar activities of the general population (‘populace’ may indeed pick up populo at 1.1.32).34 Particular allusions to Odes 2.11 extend well beyond Arnold’s opening: the rose garlands for the young Eugenia nicely modify the sympotic rose garlands for the greying poet and Quinctius (2.11.14–15), while the last stanza of Arnold’s poem combines the thoughts of loss of beauty and rapidly coming death in the first three stanzas of Horace’s ode with the common Horatian idea that the lover who spurns the poet now will in time suffer the lot of ageing and death common to all mortals (cf. e.g. Odes 1.25, 4.10, 4.13). The last two stanzas also bring in another famous Horatian ode about life and death, 4.7, the spring ode translated by Housman (see Chapter 2), neatly blending it with Shakespearian allusion:35 the expression ‘we must / Be crumbling bones and windy dust’ seems to combine the noun-pairing of Odes 4.7.16 pulvis et umbra sumus in a similar context with the famous rhyme of Shakespeare’s ‘Golden lads and girls all must / As chimney-sweepers come to dust’ (Cymbeline Act 4 Scene 2), while Odes 4.7’s triplet of great Roman kings

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who have nevertheless all died (Aeneas, Tullus and Ancus) is matched in Arnold’s more erotic poem with a pair of celebrated attractive heroines, one from classical antiquity (Helen) and one from Shakespeare (Juliet). A similar mixture of ancient and modern elements can be seen in the poem’s final line, ‘When dawns that day, that day’, combining an allusion to the Horatian idea of the dawning of the last day of life and the need to enjoy it (cf. e.g. Odes 1.11.8 carpe diem quam minimum credula postero, ‘harvest the day, and believe as little as you can that the next one will come’, Epistles 1.4.13 omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum, ‘believe that every day that has dawned is your last’) with one to the Christian dies irae and Last Judgement as rendered by Arnold’s early favourite Sir Walter Scott36 in The Lay of the Last Minstrel: ‘That day of wrath, that dreadful day, / When heaven and earth shall pass away’, a neat combination of the two ideological sources of Victorian elite training. Another poem clearly related to Horatian lyric in both form and content and from the same period is ‘To Marguerite, Continued’ (1849): Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone. The islands feel the enclasping flow, And then their endless bounds they know. But when the moon their hollows lights, And they are swept by balms of spring, And in their glens, on starry nights, The nightingales divinely sing; And lovely notes, from shore to shore, Across the sounds and channels pour – Oh! then a longing like despair Is to their farthest caverns sent; For surely once, they feel, we were Parts of a single continent! Now round us spreads the watery plain – Oh might our marges meet again! Who order’d, that their longing’s fire Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?



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Who renders vain their deep desire? – A God, a God their severance ruled! And bade betwixt their shores to be The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.

This meditative poem (which anticipates both the scenario and the themes of the more celebrated ‘Dover Beach’, 1851), uses a similar six-line stanza to that of ‘Horatian Echo’ (but with ababcc rhyme scheme as opposed to aabccb). As commentators note,37 the final stanza echoes 1.3.21–4: nequiquam deus abscidit prudens Oceano dissociabili terras, si tamen impiae non tangenda rates transiliunt vada. In vain did the wise god sunder The lands from the unsocial ocean, If yet impious vessels cross The seas that are not to be touched.

The anaphora ‘A God, a God’ in the same stanza may also be Horatian,38 but the larger point is that the central theme of Arnold’s poem, the regrettable isolation of humans from each other as if islands in a separating sea, is a neat inversion of the main topic of Horace’s ode, the regrettable way in which humans have crossed the seas to no good purpose and brought trouble and danger upon themselves in violating the paradisiacal isolated conditions of the golden age. Once again we can see the argument of an Horatian poem driving the content of an Arnoldian one, making poetic capital from the results of an elite education.

Clough The range of classical receptions in the poetry of Arnold’s friend and slightly older contemporary Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–61), who received the same education as Arnold at Rugby and Balliol, has been recently surveyed in an excellent chapter by Isobel Hurst (Hurst 2015), but once again more can be said in detail of his engagement with Horace, especially in his Amours de Voyage (1849).39 This is a kind of epistolary novel in verse which narrates the

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story of a Clough-style highly educated young Englishman, Claude, and his unsuccessful love affair with a young English lady Georgina Trevellyn, during touristic travels in Rome and Italy amid the struggles of Garibaldi’s brief-lived Roman Republic in the summer of 1848, which Clough himself witnessed; the plot unfolds through letters written by the two protagonists to confidants back home in England and elsewhere, in parts a fictionalization of the letters written by Clough himself at the time. The structure combines classicizing metrical forms (English hexameters for the main narrative,40 English elegiac couplets for authorial commentary, usually at the start or end of episodes) with a Renaissance-style five-canto structure, with each canto containing between six and fifteen mostly short letters which results in a poem of more than fifty letters and 1,200 lines overall. In metre, length and format Clough’s poem thus bears considerable resemblances to the first book of Horace’s Epistles (twenty hexameter letters in just over 1,000 lines),41 though the mixed authorship of the letters and their clear narrative drive makes it also look like epistolary novels such as Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782). Epistles 1 seems to be formally proclaimed as the model in the poet’s elegiac commentary which ends the work by addressing the book (V.217–24): So go forth to the world, to the good report and the evil! Go, little book, thy tale, is it not evil and good? Go, and if strangers revile, pass quietly by without answer. Go, and if curious friends ask of thy rearing and age, Say, I am flitting around from brain unto brain of, Feeble and restless youths born to inglorious days, But, so finish the word, I was born in a Roman chamber When from Janiculan heights thundered the cannon of France.

Though unnoted by commentators, this evokes both the start and the end of the final poem of Epistles 1 also addressed to the poet’s book as it is released to the world (Epistles 1.20.1–5 and 19–28): Vertumnum 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. Fuge quo descendere gestis … ….

5



Horace and the Victorian Poets I Cum tibi sol tepidus pluris admouerit auris, me libertino natum patre et in tenui re maiores pinnas nido extendisse loqueris, ut quantum generi demas, uirtutibus addas; me primis urbis belli placuisse domique, corporis exigui, praecanum, solibus aptum, irasci celerem, tamen ut placabilis essem. Forte meum siquis te percontabitur aeuum, me quater undenos sciat impleuisse Decembris collegam Lepidum quo dixit Lollius anno.

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My book, you seem to gaze at Vertumnus and Janus’ shrines, So, I suppose, that you may sell yourself, prettied by the pumice of the Sosii. You dislike keys and the seals dear to the chaste, You groan at being shown to the few and praise what is public. That’s not your background. Be off to the depths you desire … … When the warm sun brings a number of ears close to hear you, You will mention me as born of a freedman father and in poverty, And as stretching out wings that were too big for his nest. Make sure you add as much to my virtues as you take from my family: That I found favour with the first of the city in war and at home, That I was of small body, grey early, sun-loving, Swift to anger – but inclined to be easily appeased. If anyone happens to ask you my age, let him know That I completed forty-four Decembers In the year when Lollius declared Lepidus consular colleague.

Both passages are epilogues from the poet’s perspective personifying the work now completed and dispatching it to the world at large, both imagine it being questioned about its origins and supply the answers, and both give a date at the end which in some sense places the work in Rome at a particular time (Horace by referring to the entry into office of the consuls of 21 bce,42 Clough to the events of the early summer of 1848). But where Horace’s poem pursues in a series of puns the image of the book as a slave-boy leaving home and prostituting himself for sexual services,43 Clough is merely ironic rather than risqué, suiting his Victorian context and the decorous novelistic material of his work which appeals to readers of both sexes.

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Larger resemblances and contrasts between the two works are similarly worth considering. Both collections are set in particular places and times: Horace addresses his various correspondents from specified Italian locations (Rome, the Sabine estate, favoured holiday destinations), just as Claude does (Rome, Florence, Bellagio, Bologna) and against the background of the public events of a particular period (Claude’s few summer months condense the few years of Horace’s book, which seems to be set in the period 21–19 bce).44 But there is also a fundamental difference of set-up: Horace presents only his own letters to male correspondents, while Clough, though giving the main space to Claude’s letters to Eustace (his only correspondent, perhaps recalling Cicero’s letters to Atticus or Seneca’s to Lucilius), adds letters by Georgina Trevellyn to her confidant Louisa and (later) letters from Georgina’s sister Mary to Miss Roper, giving the female perspective suitable for the novelistic romantic plot. Within this framework, it is unsurprising that further Horatian allusions appear; we find both more from the Epistles and echoes of other works.45 These begin among the initial epigraphs, where we find qui persaepe cava testudine flevit amorem / non elaboratum ad pedem (Epodes 14.11–12, ‘who very often on his hollow lyre wept for his love / to an uncomplicated metre’), Horace’s description of the Greek erotic poet Anacreon and of the simple repeated ‘Anacreontic’ line linked with him, an apt encapsulation both of the content of Claude’s lamenting letters and of their form of the repeated line of Clough’s colloquial English hexameter. In the elegiac introduction to Canto I, the couplet ‘’Tis but to prove limitation, and measure a cord, that we travel; / Let who would ’scape and be free go to his chamber and think’ (7–8) expands the one-liner of Epistles 1.11.27 caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt, ‘it’s sky and not soul they change who speed across the sea’, suggesting similarly that travel by itself cannot ease the mind (certainly clear from Claude’s experience in the travel-narrative of Amours de Voyage). In Canto I letter VIII (161–7) Claude, visiting the Pantheon, the temple dedicated to all the pagan deities, appropriately himself translates a list of divinities from Odes 3.4.58–64 (the passage in Latin is added in an authorial footnote to ensure the allusion is observed):



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Eager for battle here Stood Vulcan, here matronal Juno, And with the bow to his shoulder faithful He who with pure dew laveth of Castaly His flowing locks, who holdeth of Lycia The oak forest and the wood that bore him, Delos’ and Patara’s own Apollo. Hic46 avidus stetit Vulcanus, hic matrona Juno, et Nunquam humeris47 positurus arcum, Qui rore puro Castaliae lavit Crines solutos, qui Lyciae tenet Dumeta natalemque silvam, Delius et Patareus Apollo.

Clough’s version is highly Latinate and elevated, closely invoking the original in both lexicon (‘matronal Juno’, ‘laveth’) and word order (the last line), no doubt with some irony. Surely ironic is the Horatian echo at Canto I Letter XI (214), where the snobbish Claude describes his condescending small talk with Louisa whom he thinks of as from a mercantile family and therefore beneath him as ‘the horrible pleasure of pleasing inferior people’, which seems amusingly to vary Epistles 1.17.35 principibus placuisse viris non ultima laus est, ‘it is not the lowest achievement to please the leading men’.48 Likewise, Claude’s description of his increasing erotic interest at Canto I Letter XII (I would suggest) picks up Horace’s wittily allegorical reading of the Odyssey at Epistles 1.2.18–26:49 But I have made the step, have quitted the ship of Ulysses; Quitted the sea and the shore, passed into the magical island; Yet on my lips is the moly, medicinal, offered of Hermes. Rursus, quid uirtus et quid sapientia possit, utile proposuit nobis exemplar Ulixes,50 qui domitor Troiae multorum prouidus urbis, et mores hominum inspexit, latumque per aequor, dum sibi, dum sociis reditum parat, aspera multa pertulit, aduersis rerum immersabilis undis. Sirenum uoces et Circae pocula nosti; quae si cum sociis stultus cupidusque bibisset, sub domina meretrice fuisset turpis et excors …

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Victorian Horace And again, as to what virtue and wisdom can do, Odysseus has set out a useful model for us: He who conquered the city of Troy and foresaw many things, And scrutinised the ways of men, and on the broad sea-plain While he tried to bring about return for himself and his companions, Bore many sufferings, unsinkable by the hostile waves of fortune. You know well the stories of the Sirens’ voices and Circe’s cups: If he with his companions had drunk these in the stupidity of desire, He would have been shamefully senseless in the service of a slut.

Clough condenses the Horatian passage, but the shared allegory and his similar focus on Circe’s seductive erotic nature confirm the allusion. More obvious is Canto II Letter II, where the Romans’ likely lack of resistance to the French, matched by that of Claude himself, is marked by the ironic citation of Horace’s famous exhortation to die for the fatherland of Rome (30–1, 46–7): Dulce it is, and decorum, no doubt, for the country to fall,–to Offer one’s blood an oblation to Freedom, and die for the Cause; … Sweet it may be and decorous, perhaps, for the country to die; but, On the whole, we conclude the Romans won’t do it, and I sha’n’t.

The initial Latin words, and their later close translation, point indubitably to Odes 3.2.13, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, ‘it is sweet and noble to die for one’s country’, with an appropriate suggestion of the ideological gulf between the stern moralism of Horace’s Roman Odes and the lighter world of the romantic novel. More unexpected perhaps is the echo in the poet’s introduction to Canto III (15–16):51 Ah, that I were far away from the crowd and the streets of the city, Under the vine-trellis laid, O my beloved, with thee!

To the reader of Horace this suggests the self-presentation of the poet at Odes 1.38.5–8, the very last lines of the first book of Odes, addressed to the poet’s young man wine-pourer: Simplici myrto nihil allabores sedulus curo: neque te ministrum

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dedecet myrtus neque me sub arta vite bibentem That you should labour to add nothing to simple myrtle I am carefully concerned; myrtle is not unbefitting For you as server, or for me, drinking Under the close-set vine.

The vine-trellis in the country would seem to point to this poem. Recent Horatian analysis has seen 1.38 as a homoerotic address to the wine-pourer given the link of myrtle with Venus (see e.g. West 1995: 191); Clough’s phrase ‘my love’ seems to anticipate this erotic colour, but as in Thackeray’s version of this poem (see Chapter 4), Clough appears to change the gender of the beloved to the more acceptable female. The other main Horatian allusion in Amours de Voyage picks up another key Horatian theme, that of the Italian countryside. In Canto III Letter XI Claude anticipates from his reading of Horace a visit to the poet’s Sabine estate which does not in fact take place (214–29): Tibur is beautiful, too, and the orchard slopes, and the Anio Falling, falling yet, to the ancient lyrical cadence; Tibur and Anio’s tide; and cool from Lucretilis ever, With the Digentian stream, and with the Bandusian fountain, Folded in Sabine recesses, the valley and villa of Horace:– So not seeing I sang; so seeing and listening say I, Here as I sit by the stream, as I gaze at the cell of the Sibyl, 220 Here with Albunea’s home and the grove of Tiburnus beside me; Tivoli beautiful is, and musical, O Teverone, Dashing from mountain to plain, thy parted impetuous waters, Tivoli’s waters and rocks; and fair unto Monte Gennaro (Haunt, even yet, I must think, as I wander and gaze, of the shadows, Faded and pale, yet immortal, of Faunus, the Nymphs, and the Graces). Fair in itself, and yet fairer with human completing creations, Folded in Sabine recesses the valley and villa of Horace:– So not seeing I sang …

Once again as in Canto I Letter VIII Clough supplies relevant Latin lines from Horace in a footnote, quoting Odes 1.7.12–14.

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Clough’s line 221 renders much of these Latin lines, and the river Anio comes in his lines 214 and 216. But these lines contain further locations from Horace’s poetry: the Sabine mountain Lucretilis is mentioned in Odes 1.17.1, the Sabine river Digentia in Epistles 1.18.104, while the Bandusian spring (here rightly located in the Sabine country)52 is the subject of Odes 3.13. As in his other major poetic work of the 1840s, The Bothie of Tober-naVuolich (1848), Clough in Amours de Voyage combines sophisticated classical allusion and texture with a novelistic plot which is essentially that of a summer vacation romance of a Clough-style hero; in the Bothie the romance is set in Scotland and successful, ending in marriage, while in Amours de Voyage it is set on the Continent and is unsuccessful. In The Bothie Clough looks to mock-epic and pastoral as his key classical intertexts,53 but in Amours de Voyage the epistolary framework, hexameter metre, specific allusions and ironization of the narrator look to the first book of Horace’s Epistles as a key text for the work’s understanding.

Fitzgerald Edward Fitzgerald (1809–83), already noted above as a friend of Tennyson and addressee of a Horatian poem from him, is most celebrated as the author of an 1859 version of the medieval Persian lyric The Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám, extremely popular in the late Victorian period.54 Fitzgerald’s original version in seventy-five short-line aaba quatrain stanzas takes its structure and rhyme scheme from the Persian original, but the form has an obvious affinity with the quatrains characteristic of the Horatian ode which would not be lost on the Cambridge-educated Fitzgerald, though it is interesting to note that Fitzgerald began by translating some of the Persian text into long-line stanzas



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of rhythmical Latin of medievalizing colour (rhyming aaba) rather than conceiving the poem as in classical Latin form.55 The Rubáiyat, a long lyric which is hard to summarize, has a number of passages which could be seen as echoing the themes of the poetry of Horace:56 its repeated emphasis on the need to take pleasure before the advent of death, its frequent use of nature symbolism and its strong exhortations to the reader are notably Horatian, as is the characterization of its narrator as a worldweary older man interested in wine and the symposium. One of the poem’s most famous stanzas memorably expresses human mortality in Horatian tones (51): The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

This address to the implied audience of Omar’s younger friend resembles Horace’s address to his friend Torquatus in Odes 4.7.21–4: Cum semel occideris et de te splendida Minos fecerit arbitria, non, Torquate, genus, non te facundia, non te restituet pietas. When once you have perished and Minos has made His distinguished judgement on you, Not your lineage, Torquatus, not your eloquence, Not your piety will bring you back.

‘Piety’ and ‘Wit’ surely pick up facundia and pietas. The symposiastic scenarios of the Rubáiyat also recall those of the Odes. For example, stanza 11: Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness – And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

The opening ‘Here’ and the shady location for drinking point to Odes 1.17.17–22, addressed to the courtesan Tyndaris:

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hic in reducta valle caniculae vitabis aestus et fide Teia dices laborantis in uno Penelopen vitreamque Circen. hic innocentis pocula Lesbii duces sub umbra … Here in a secluded valley you’ll shun The heat of the Dog-star, and perform on Teian lyre The tale of two women troubled for one man, Penelope and shining Circe. Here you will drink cups of mild Lesbian Under the shade.

Stanza 75, the poem’s conclusion in its original version, can be compared with the brief concluding poem of Odes 1 (Odes 1.38): And when Thyself with shining Foot shall pass Among the Guests Star-scatter’d on the Grass, And in thy joyous Errand reach the Spot Where I made one – turn down an empty Glass! Persicos odi, puer, apparatus, displicent nexae philyra coronae, mitte sectari, rosa quo locorum sera moretur. simplici myrto nihil allabores sedulus curo: neque te ministrum dedecet myrtus neque me sub arta vite bibentem. Persian elaboration I dislike, my boy: I take no pleasure in garlands bound with flax. Cease to pursue the regions where The late rose lingers. That you should labour to add nothing to simple myrtle I am carefully concerned; myrtle is not unbefitting For you as server, or for me, drinking Under the close-set vine.



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Both texts stress the superiority of the natural and simple over the artificial and elaborate, and both stress the closeness between poet and wine-serving friend; the homoerotic element of Horace’s poem (discussed in the treatment of Clough above) is fully at home in Omar’s homosocial world, and also fits Fitzgerald’s own likely homosexuality.57 Above all, there is a structural echo, as the last image of the Rubáiyat echoes that of the first book of Odes in focussing on the fellowship of the symposium (albeit after Omar’s envisaged death). Perhaps the most prominent Epicurean message of Horace’s sympotic odes, that we should enjoy pleasure now since we do not know what tomorrow brings, is memorably expressed by Fitzgerald in stanzas 20, 25 and 37: Oh, my Beloved, fill the Cup that clears Today of past Regrets and future Fears – Tomorrow? – Why, Tomorrow I may be Myself with Yesterday’s Sev’n Thousand Years. …. Alike for those who for Today prepare, And those that after a Tomorrow stare, A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries “Fools! your Reward is neither Here nor There!” …. Ah, fill the Cup – what boots it to repeat How Time is slipping underneath our Feet: Unborn Tomorrow, and dead Yesterday, Why fret about them if Today be sweet!

For scepticism about whether tomorrow may come and the consequent need for current indulgence today we may compare Odes 1.9.13–14 quid sit futurum cras, fuge quaerere, et / quem fors dierum cumque dabit, lucro / adpone, ‘avoid asking what will be tomorrow, and mark as profit whatever days chance may give you’, Odes 1.11.8 carpe diem quam minimum credula postero, ‘harvest the day, and believe as little as you can that the next one will come’, or Odes 4.7.17–18 quis scit an adiciant hodiernae crastina summae / tempora di superi?, ‘who knows whether the gods may add tomorrow’s moments to the sum of today’s?’ The image of time slipping under one’s feet may also recall another famous Horatian image at Odes 2.14.1–2 Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, /

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labuntur anni, ‘alas, the fleeting years slip away, Postumus, Postumus’, again in the context of an implicit injunction to present sympotic pleasure. A final striking echo is found at stanza 17: They say the Lion and the Lizard keep The Courts where Jamshýd gloried and drank deep; And Bahrám, that great Hunter – the Wild Ass Stamps o’er his Head, and he lies fast asleep.

The image of a great city in ruins and occupied again by wild creatures recalls the pessimistic prophecy of Epodes 16.9–12: impia perdemus devoti sanguinis aetas ferisque rursus occupabitur solum: barbarus heu cineres insistet victor et Vrbem eques sonante verberabit ungula. We, an impious generation of accursed blood, will destroy [the city], And its site will once again be occupied by wild beasts: Alas, the barbarian victor will step on its ashes, And a horseman will stamp on the City with resounding hoof.

Fitzgerald’s allusion to the ruined great city of Persepolis, the supposed capital of the legendary Persian king Jamshýd, picks up Horace’s allusion to the similar putative end of Rome, and the element of the stamping quadruped as evidence of abandonment, along with the wild beasts’ reoccupation, is common to both passages. Horace’s envisioned nightmare has come to pass. In this chapter I have sought to show the importance of Horatian material in four well-known Victorian poets, arguing that Horatian allusion enriches the texture of classic Victorian poetry to a greater extent than is generally realized, and enhances its appeal to the elite educated readers of the time; the Horatian knowledge they share with the poets themselves provides the satisfaction of recognition and builds solidarity between author and audience.

4

Horace and the Victorian Poets II: Other Imitations

Previous chapters have dealt with Horatian editions and commentaries, major translations, and the use of Horace in the work of some of the best-known Victorian poets. In this chapter I turn to less well-known poetic imitations of Horace, and especially to parodies, which were everywhere in the Victorian period, paralleling the burlesques of classical works and material which were simultaneously popular on the London stage,1 as well as more serious engagements in darker poetry and in Christian hymnody. One key assumption behind such reappropriations of Horace was (as we have seen in Chapter 1) that the poet could thus be easily identified as a member of the contemporary gentlemanly class who had studied his works at elite educational establishments. Here we find many examples of what Norman Vance has usefully termed ‘recreation of Horatian effects in a different context’ (Vance 1997: 177).

Horace updated The practice of humorously updating Horace’s poetry to describe modern life in contemporary verse had begun before the Victorian period, especially in the 1813 Regency volume Horace in London: Consisting of Imitations of the First Two Books of the Odes of Horace.2 This popular collection, reprinted twice in its year of publication, begins with a Lucian-style dialogue in the Underworld between Horace and ‘the Author’ (Smith and Smith 1813: 10), in which the latter, dissatisfied with contemporary translations of the Roman poet, asks the former:

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What say you to a work entitled “Horace in London,” consisting of parodies and imitations of your odes? Converting the Amphitheatre into Drury-Lane, Maecenas into Lord Such a one, the Palatine Mount into Tower Hill, and in short, writing as I suppose you would have written, had you lived in these times, and in the metropolis of Great Britain?

The poet replies: An excellent thought. It will insure me an increase of readers. A man milliner will enter Hyde Park, who would fly from the Campus Martius, and a Citizen may be enticed up Highgate-Hill, who would turn with disdain from Mount Soracte, because there is no ordinary [i.e. dinner] on Sundays at the top of it.

The version of the opening ode 1.1, in which Maecenas is replaced by ‘John Bull, Esq.’, gives a good idea of the collection’s character: Dread sir! half human, half divine, Descended from a lengthen’d line, Of heroes famed in story — Of Ocean, undisputed lord; Of Europe and her recreant horde, The “riddle, jest and glory.”3 What various sports attract your sons! Some to Hyde Park escape from Duns,4 In Curricle or Tandem: In dusty clouds envelop’d quite, Like Jove, who, from Olympus’ height Hurls thunderbolts at random. One draws his gold from Lombard-street, And ’mongst the Barons buys a seat; The Lord knows why or wherefore! Another, give him rural sports, And crowded cities, splendid courts, He not a jot will care for. The merchant, baulk’d by Boreas, vents His idle anger, and laments Some luckless speculation Of ease, and Clapham Common talks, But soon on Gresham’s murmuring Walks Resumes his daily station …



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Horace’s opening priamel describing the alternative careers of Olympic charioteer, Roman politician, farmer and merchant is wittily relocated and updated in amusingly neat verse which in its stanza-structure owes something to Horatian metrics (the short third and sixth lines perhaps recall the final adonean of the Sapphic stanza). The range of topical subjects treated in the fifty-eight imitations of the collection, and the element of satire can be seen from their titles: Book 1 Ode 3 ‘The Baron’s Yacht’ (picking up the boat carrying Vergil to Greece), Book 1 Ode 6 ‘Sir Walter Scott’ (as poet, matching the Roman epic poet Varius in Horace’s original), Book 1 Ode 10 ‘Tributary Stanzas to Grimaldi the Clown’ (praising the entertainer so admired by Dickens), Book 1 Ode 15 ‘the Parthenon’ (Lord Elgin attacked by Athene mid-voyage for his removal of the Marbles), Book 1 Ode 16 ‘To The Edinburgh Reviewers’ (the literary-critical authorities of the time), or Book 1 Ode 25 ‘My Godwin’ (on the radical novelist William Godwin). The fashion set by the Smiths lasted the whole Victorian period. Another witty updating is to be found in W. M. Thackeray’s version of Odes 1.38 (the book-closing brief poem to the wine-pourer already cited in Chapter 3): Persicos odi, puer, apparatus, displicent nexae philyra coronae, mitte sectari, rosa quo locorum sera moretur. simplici myrto nihil allabores sedulus curo: neque te ministrum dedecet myrtus neque me sub arta vite bibentem. Persian elaboration I dislike, my boy: I take no pleasure in garlands bound with flax. Do not pursue the regions where The late rose lingers. That you should labour to add nothing to simple myrtle I am carefully concerned; myrtle is not unbefitting For you as server, or for me, drinking Under the close-set vine.

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Thackeray’s version of 1841 was originally set in the context of a humorous narrative of a visit to Paris and makes the contrast between elaborate French gourmandizing and the simple tastes of the English gentleman:5 Dear Lucy, you know what my wish is, — I hate all your Frenchified fuss: Your silly entrées and made dishes Were never intended for us. No footman in lace and in ruffles Need dangle behind my arm-chair; And never mind seeking for truffles, Although they be ever so rare. But a plain leg of mutton, my Lucy, I prithee get ready at three: Have it smoking, and tender, and juicy, And what better meat can there be? And when it has feasted the master, ’Twill amply suffice for the maid; Meanwhile I will smoke my canaster, And tipple my ale in the shade.

Here, as Norman Vance has well noted, Thackeray ‘humorously transforms Horace’s preference for Roman simplicity instead of exotic Persian elaboration into a celebration of plain English fare’ (Vance 1997: 181). More interestingly, Thackeray also transforms Horace’s address to his male wine-pourer into one to a female attendant (in later reprints the poem is entitled Ad Ministram). As already noted in the last chapter, modern Latin scholars have suggested a homoerotic tinge in Horace’s address to the wine-pourer and suggestions for his coiffure (West 1995: 191), and Thackeray has changed the gender to avoid any problem of decorum, as well as to reflect the realities of the life of the Victorian gentleman with whom Horace is otherwise easily identified, whose cook would be female. Theodore Martin’s translation of Horace (1860), already discussed in Chapter 2, sometimes adds modernizing versions to his translation. A good example is Odes 1.8, which Martin regarded as particularly easily transferable to contemporary London social life:



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The whole poem, besides its value as a picture still true in all its main features of ‘Modern habits and manners, and of the amusements and lighter occupations of the higher classes of society in England’, is delightful for grace, sprightliness and Horatian shrewdness.

Martin was so taken by this idea that he appended to his translation of the poem a modern version. In its rendering of 1.8.3–12, in which the original asks why Sybaris is not engaging in Augustan-type exercises of riding, swimming, sword-play, javelin and discus, the version refers to the Victorian gentlemanly sports of hunting, rowing, cricket, boxing, fencing and general athletics: Before his eyes by love were seal’d, He headed every hunting field, In horsemanship could all eclipse, And was the very best of whips. With skulls6 he was a match for Clasper, His bat at cricket was a rasper, And ne’er was eye or hand so quick With gloves, or foil, or single-stick; A very stag to run or jump – In short, he was an utter trump.

This version’s appeal to contemporary gentlemen is marked not just by the evocation of typical male elite sporting activities but also by allusions to sporting heroes of the time (Clasper)7 and to technical sporting idiolects (‘whip’ in hunting)8 and slang terms (‘rasper’9 and ‘trump’10), all reinforcing class solidarity for gentlemanly readers. Like Martin, the brilliant translator and parodist C. S. Calverley (1831– 84), whose Horatian translations we have encountered in Chapter 2, wrote modern updatings too,11 for example his ‘Ode to Tobacco’ (1862), celebrating that key indulgence of the Victorian elite male, of which I cite the first two of five stanzas: Thou who, when fears attack, Bid’st them avaunt, and Black Care, at the horseman’s back Perching, unseatest; Sweet when the morn is gray;

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Sweet, when they ’ve cleared away Lunch; and at close of day Possibly sweetest: I have a liking old For thee, though manifold Stories, I know, are told, Not to thy credit; How one (or two at most) Drops make a cat a ghost— Useless, except to roast— Doctors have said it …

Calverley’s whole-poem lyric address to tobacco recalls Horace’s extended address to the wine-jar in Odes 3.21 in its extended personification of a substance of pleasure, and in the notion that the relevant substance takes away anxiety – cf. Odes 3.21.17–20: Tu spem reducis mentibus anxiis viresque et addis cornua pauperi, post te neque iratos trementi regum apices neque militum arma You bring back hope to the minds of the fearful And add vigour and horns to the poor man Who after you trembles neither at the angry crowns Of kings, nor at the weapons of soldiers.

The general Horatian colour is confirmed by ‘Black Care, at the horseman’s back perching’, translating Odes 3.1.40 post equitem sedet atra Cura, and by the metre, which although it avoids the quatrain stanzas of Calverley’s formal translations, could be seen as a version of a double Sapphic stanza with three identical short lines followed by an even briefer one corresponding to the final adonean. A similar metrical match is seen in Calverley’s later ‘Contentment’ (1872), explicitly presented in its subtitle as ‘After the manner of Horace’, which uses Horatian-style quatrains again with a short last line close to the adonean of the Sapphic stanza. The topic is equally Horatian; the man of contentment undisturbed by mishaps is a comic version of the indifference of the Stoic sage to external disaster famously promoted in such prominent passages as Odes



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1.22.1 Integer vitae scelerisque purus, ‘the man who is unblemished in life and pure of crime’ and 3.3.1 (Iustum et tenacem propositi virum, ‘the man who is just and firm of purpose’). The poem begins with a Horatian-type address to a friend and an imitation of the priamel opening of Odes 1.1, which identifies various alternative groups before settling on one to which the poet himself belongs: Friend, there be they on whom mishap Or never or so rarely comes, That, when they think thereof, they snap Derisive thumbs; And there be they who lightly lose Their all, yet feel no aching void; Should aught annoy them, they refuse To be annoy’d.

The strongly Latinate construction of ‘there be they’ points to the source at Odes 1.1.3 sunt quos. The poem ends with a celebration of the happy life of the carefree English gentleman as he takes a train, evoking the elite pleasure of travel: And when they travel, if they find That they have left their pocket-compass Or Murray12 or thick boots behind, They raise no rumpus, But plod serenely on without: Knowing it’s better to endure The evil that beyond all doubt You cannot cure. When for that early train they’re late, They do not make their woes the text Of sermons in the Times, but wait On for the next; And jump inside, and only grin Should it appear that that dry wag, The guard, omitted to put in Their carpet-bag.

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The English gentleman’s equanimity in the face of the inconveniences of modern travel perhaps also recalls Horace’s wry observations in Satires 1.5 about the discomforts of his journey to Brindisi (slow progress, lack of sleep, sore eyes and poor food). A similarly modernizing evocation in Horatian imitation of the railway, that quintessential Victorian mode of transport,13 can be found in G. C. Oxenden’s The Railway Horace (1862),14 a collection of Horatian versions which is programmatically prefaced with an imitation of Horace Odes 1.26. The original is a brief twelve-line poem where the poet opens by claiming to be Musis amicus ‘friend to the Muses’, alludes to dangers in different parts of the world including the activities of the current Armenian king Tiridates, and then turns to the idea of making a wreath for his friend Lamia, concluding with an exhortation to the Muses to join the poet in praising the latter. Oxenden’s imitation gives a good idea of the humorous and topical nature of his collection: Dog of the Muse, I send to Spain All sorrow, by the next mail-train; To me it matters little How the young Russian Despot fares, Or who with L. Napoleon shares His throne and sceptre brittle. A kindlier, lighter task is mine, This Anglo-Latin wreath to twine For one time-honoured brow; Alcaic Gas if this infuse, Light will my labour be, O Muse, And not dishonoured thou.

The poet becomes the Muses’ dog rather than friend, and the reference to the Armenian monarchy is replaced by topical allusions to the mail-train, the ‘young Russian despot’ (Alexander II, ruled 1855–81) and L.(ouis) Napoleon (Bonaparte), the French Emperor Napoleon III (ruled 1852–70). Where Horace’s poem makes a garland for his friend Lamia, however, Oxenden makes one for Horace, a neat structural allusion to the poet’s garland claimed by Horace himself for his own brow in his own programmatic opening ode (1.1.49–50). The allusion to ‘Alcaic Gas’ is both learned, identifying the



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Roman poet’s key Greek lyric model Alcaeus (cf. Odes 1.32), and a witty pun, pointing both to the colloquial ‘gas’ of the volume’s frivolous tone15 and to contemporary technology (note the semi-technical ‘infuse’; gas lighting was widely popularized after its installation in the Houses of Parliament in 1859).16 Similarly in his version of Odes 1.2 Gladstone is called on to save the country, in 1.5 ‘at Neptune’s door / … I have hung my Hat to dry’, and in 1.9 the Scottish Grampians replace Soracte as the locale of snow. Particularly entertaining is Oxenden’s version of 3.26, where the poet’s famous renunciation of the warfare of love and his offering to Venus of his lyre and the tools of the lover to break down doors are replaced by dedicating the equipment of the elite Victorian writer of billets doux: The ladies played me, O what tricks, When I was in the army; But now, against this wall I fix The harp that used to charm me. And here I hang my grey-goose quill, And here my gilt-edged paper, With envelopes, that gave me hopes Of winning damsel’s taper.17

Another poet in the same vein is Austin Dobson (1840–1921), literary biographer and civil servant,18 whose poem ‘To QHF’ (1873), is marked in its subtitle as ‘suggested by a chapter in Sir Theodore Martin’s “Horace”’.19 Addressing Horace by his initials as if he were a well-known contemporary or friend, the poem evokes the now familiar idea that modern London, a metropolis set at the heart of an empire, parallels Horace’s Rome in the characters and foibles of its genteel population: Ours is so advanced an age! Sensation tales, a classic stage, Commodious villas! We boast high art, an Albert Hall, Australian meats, and men who call Their sires gorillas! We have a thousand things, you see, Not dreamt in your philosophy.

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Victorian Horace And yet, how strange! Our “world” to-day, Tried in the scale, would scarce outweigh Your Roman cronies: Walk in the Park – you’ll seldom fail To find a Sybaris on the rail By Lydia’s ponies, Or hap on Barrus, wigged and stayed, Ogling some unsuspecting maid. The great Gargilius, then, behold! His “long-bow” hunting tales of old Are now but duller; Fair Neobule too! Is not One Hebrus here – from Aldershot? Aha, you colour! Be wise. There old Canidia sits: No doubt she’s tearing you to bits.

Here ‘world’ refers to the social world of the Victorian elite, and the social context is clearly that of the upper classes: ‘the Park’ is plainly London’s Hyde Park, resort of the rich for a constitutional ride or walk (though it also skilfully echoes Horace’s similarly abbreviated use of campus for the analogous Roman Campus Martius at Odes 1.8.4, the poem from which the lovers Sybaris and Lydia are also taken), while Hebrus from Aldershot, a town of regimental headquarters, is clearly an army officer (his name and Neobule’s passion come from Odes 3.12). Though other Horatian genres outside the Odes are alluded to here (Barrus is from the Satires, Gargilius from the Epistles, Canidia from the Epodes), we are clearly in the world of Horatian erotic lyric. The metre chosen by Dobson, though an eight-line rather than four-line stanza, again recalls the Sapphic stanza of the Odes by echoing the length and rhythm of its short last adonean line in the short third and sixth line (compare the metre of Calverley’s ‘Contentment’, above): ‘Commodious villas’ is a good English stressed equivalent of the adonean, e.g. terruit urbem (Odes 1.2.4). In Dobson’s ‘A Roman Round-Robin’ (1885), again addressed to Horace, this time as if it were a collective letter from ‘His Friends’, that is, his modern (elite) Victorian readers, we find a rare Victorian complaint about Horace’s sententious moralizing. This is wittily prefaced by a quotation (in Latin) of



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Ars Poetica 365, a warning that what is ten times repeated will not find favour. Here are the opening five stanzas of this nine-stanza poem: Flaccus, you write us charming songs: No bard we know possesses In such perfection what belongs To brief and bright addresses; No man can say that Life is short With mien so little fretful; No man to Virtue’s paths exhort In phrases less regretful; Or touch, with more serene distress, On Fortune’s ways erratic; And then delightfully digress From Alp to Adriatic: All this is well, no doubt, and tends Barbarian minds to soften; But, HORACE—we, we are your friends— Why tell us this so often? Why feign to spread a cheerful feast, And then thrust in our faces These barren scraps (to say the least) Of Stoic common-places?

This poem goes on to exhort Horace to ‘Sing Lydë’s lyre and hair’ rather than moralize. Dobson indeed had already written an entertaining version of an Horatian erotic ode in ‘Tu quoque: An idyll in the conservatory’ (1873), updating the poetic dialogue of Odes 3.9, where a young pair who were once a couple meet, competitively praise each other’s current lovers, and then decide to get back together again. Here is the opening confrontation, where as in the original the lovers speak alternately capping stanzas: Nellie: If I were you, when ladies at the play, sir, Beckon and nod, a melodrama through, I would not turn abstractedly away, sir, If I were you!

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Frank: If I were you, when persons I affected, Wait for three hours to take me down to Kew, I would, at least, pretend I recollected, If I were you! Nellie: If I were you, when ladies are so lavish, Sir, as to keep me every waltz but two, I would not dance with odious Miss M’Tavish If I were you! Frank: If I were you, who vow you cannot suffer Whiff of the best, the mildest ‘honey-dew’, I would not dance with smoke-consuming Puffer, If I were you!

As in the Horatian original, the surprise reconciliation is rapidly effected at the end of the poem: Nellie: One does not like one’s feelings to be doubted, Frank: One does not like one’s friends to misconstrue, Nellie: If I confess that I a wee-bit pouted? Frank: I should admit that I was piqué, too. Nellie: Ask me to dance. I’d say no more about it, If I were you!

(Waltz – Exeunt)

Here too the metrical form is recognizably Horatian, using (at least in the initial part of the poem)a quatrain stanza with a shorter last line, echoing (again) the form of the Sapphic stanza. A particularly political topicality is seen in The Hawarden Horace (1894) by the Irish humourist C. L. Graves (1856–1944), a success which was followed by his More Hawarden Horace (1896). These collections, referring in their titles



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to W. E. Gladstone’s country home at Hawarden Castle and no doubt aware of the great man’s own just-published 1894 translation of Horace discussed in Chapter 2, recontextualized Horace’s odes in the Liberal politics of the mid-1890s in poems originally published in magazines such as the Spectator:20 in the 1894 volume there are jaunty and loose imitations of Horatian odes addressed (amongst others) to John Morley, Gladstone’s future biographer and current Secretary of State for Ireland, to Lord Acton, Gladstone’s intimate friend and Liberal historian, George Armitstead, Liberal MP and orator (subtitled Ad Ciceronem Nostrum), and the Earl of Rosebery, Gladstone’s (brief) successor as Liberal Prime Minister (1894–5). The primary note is one of male elite companionship (the Latin texts of the relevant original Horatian ode are provided on facing pages) and shared political interests, but two odes are more striking. The first of these is an imitation of the famous Odes 1.5 to the femme fatale Pyrrha, neatly turned into an allegorical address of Ireland Ad Hiberniam, whose independence or Home Rule was a key political question of the day: Redolent of ‘Jockey Club’ Pliant as a lath Is the boy you now decoy Down the primrose path. Him with neatly braided locks Lovingly you lure, Clad in green, and in your mien Studiously demure. Soon from off the gingerbread Vanishes the gilt: Ere the year be spent and sere, You will prove a jilt …

The liquid fragrance (1.5.2 liquidis … odoribus) worn by Horace’s anonymous young man is updated to ‘Jockey Club’, a cologne first produced in 1840 and still available;21 ‘primrose path’ puns on the surname of the new Prime Minister (Archibald Primrose, the Earl of Rosebery), struggling with the Irish issue, and the allegorical Ireland is appropriately dressed in the national colour of green, while the implication that all those who engaged with the Irish issue come to grief is not an unjust observation of the previous decade

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in British politics: Gladstone had lost the 1886 UK general election immediately following the rejection of his first Irish Home Rule Bill, and his second had been rejected by the House of Lords in 1892. Horace’s courtesan Pyrrha of Odes 1.5 is made into the similarly destructive femme fatale Ireland, a neat conceit but also a way of sidestepping her dubious moral status in Victorian terms. Much the same happens with the courtesan Phyllis invited to a symposium in Odes 4.11 to celebrate Maecenas’ birthday, who becomes the speaker’s young granddaughter Dorothy, asked to a party to celebrate the speaker’s wedding anniversary – a highly decorous transformation.

Horace the Victorian young man One attraction of Horatian imitation for young elite Victorian males was the poet’s own unusually specific references to his own elite education, first at the top Roman school run by Orbilius and then as student at the higher education level in Athens (Satires 1.6.71–80, Epistles 2.1.70–7, 2.2.41–5). The latter in particular was a natural invitation to regard Horace as parallel to the elite undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge who had studied him at school. In 1861 the future politician and baronet George Otto Trevelyan (1838–1928),22 who in the same year graduated second in the Classical Tripos at Cambridge, published Horace at The University of Athens, a verse drama which represented Horace as a contemporary Cambridge undergraduate. That work will be more closely analysed in Chapter 5, but in 1864 Trevelyan, by then in the Indian Civil Service, a traditional destination for classically educated Oxbridge graduates through competitive examination,23 published as The Competition Wallah a fictionalized series of letters from India which had previously appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine (Trevelyan 1864). Here a young Indian administrator, a lightly disguised version of Trevelyan himself, writes to a male friend in England (a sharer of his elite education at Trinity College, Cambridge) of his experiences as a colonial civil servant. There is much serious content and analysis of Indian affairs here, but the fictional frame of dialogue between two young English gentlemen is also well maintained. In one letter the Wallah says ‘I have some thoughts of publishing a translation of the Odes of Horace, adapted to the use of Indian readers’, and then gives



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three samples (Trevelyan 1864: 154–8). The first and best of these is a version of Odes 3.7, where the poet addresses a young woman in Rome whose lover is trading abroad and may be subject to some erotic temptation: My dear Miss White, forbear to weep Because the North West breezes keep At anchor off Rangoon That youth who, richer by a lac, May safely be expected back Before the next monsoon. Beneath his close musquito nets With love and prickly-heat he frets On Irawaddy’s water, Nor heeds a dame on board the ship. Who lets no fair occasion slip For praising up her daughter. She talks of maiden’s heart so true. And angry brothers six foot two Demanding satisfaction. And, as a last resource throws out Hints very palpable about A breach-of promise action. She tells how Pickwick’s glance of fire Quailed ’neath an angry woman’s ire; But let not that alarm ye. He still remains as deaf as those Who govern India to the woes Of Bengal’s ill-used army.

This is a clever adaptation of the original: the rich Bithynian trading-location of Horace’s poem is replaced by an equally distant and profitable Rangoon, and his dangers of a seductive female hotel-keeper are turned into those of an insistent shipboard mother promoting her daughter. Most wittily, the paradigmatic myths quoted by the hotel-keeper in Horace’s original to support her case to the young man, suggesting that he ought to yield to her (Bellerophon and Peleus, both of whom in fact did not yield to erotic dangers) become the famous story of the landlady Mrs Bardell’s breach of promise of marriage

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case against Mr Pickwick from Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers (1836), which Mr Pickwick also survived unscathed. The novelistic allusion neatly suits the imagined reading of Miss White, who as a female without the benefit of elite male education is condescendingly presented with a parallel from Dickens rather than Greek mythology. Trevelyan’s 1861 idea of Horace as a modern undergraduate appears again a generation later in the Cambridge-educated Owen Seaman’s Horace at Cambridge (1895).24 Here we find some witty reworkings with new titles of some well-known Horatian odes to describe contemporary undergraduate life, always citing the Latin incipit as a reminder of the original to the elite reader. Odes 1.22, Integer vitae, describing the man who is ‘unblemished in life’, becomes ‘Of the Perfect Undergraduate’: The man that never told a lie Or cut a College Chapel, That lives within his tutor’s eye And is, in fact, its apple: Whether by fabled heights of Gog Or Granta’s mazy winding Upon his customary jog He goes serenely grinding …

Here, in appropriately Horatian quatrain stanzas, Horace’s philosophical hero becomes a student paragon, and the exotic and dangerous Eastern travel locations of the original ode (North Africa, the Caucasus, India) become local Cambridge landmarks (the Gog Magog Downs south of the city and its river Granta). Similarly, the poet’s injunction to Licinius to voyage carefully in life (Odes 2.10) is transformed into ‘Of Counsel to Coxwains’, advice on the Cambridge sport of rowing addressed to the person in charge of steering the boat: One’s better course is, as a rule To take the golden mean for motto; Therefore, my cherished coxswain, you’ll Try not to Call like a penny steamer at Each shore with stolid iteration, Rousing antiphonies of flat Damnation;



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Nor yet conversely sin a sin Dull as the after-dinner riddle, And cleave the current fairly in The middle.

Here amusing updating is matched with witty recall of Horatian metre: the short last line of the quatrain stanzas again recalls the adonean from the Sapphic stanza (the metre of the original poem). We also (again) find a neat modernizing of the Pyrrha ode, 1.5, ‘Of Evergreen Sirens’: What slender stripling in his primal year His lip bedewed with “Tricholina”, Amid your flower-pots with alluring leer Woos you, Georgina? Across the counter leans his blazered arms, And, plying you with laboured sallies Of amorous wit, around your waning charms Heavily dallies?

As in Graves’ version above, a modern cosmetic product is invoked by its brand name,25 and the scenario is a recognizable one of the time, the privileged undergraduate dallying with a lower-class shop-worker (Georgina seems to be a middle-aged florist).26

Loftier allusions Though most Horatian imitations in the Victorian period were humorous or parodic, some were not. In this final part of the chapter I turn to some of these more earnest texts. The Carmen Saeculare is famously unique amongst Horace’s lyric poems in being certainly composed for performance, by a choir of twenty-seven girls and twenty-seven boys on the great public occasion in Rome of the Ludi Saeculares of 17 bce.27 It is therefore unsurprising to find it laid under contribution in connection with one of the great public occasions of Victorian Britain, the London Great Exhibition of 1851, which was the occasion for many literary and musical works.28 One of the more intriguing of these is the ‘May-Day Ode’ by W. M. Thackeray,29 whom we have already seen above imitating Horace a decade earlier. This substantial poem in

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twenty-three eight-line stanzas (more than twice the length of Horace’s poem) celebrates the official inauguration of the Exhibition on 1 May 1851,30 I quote its opening (1–24): But yesterday a naked sod The dandies sneered from Rotten Row; And cantered o’er it to and fro; And see ’tis done! As though ’twere by a wizard’s rod A blazing arch of lucid glass Leaps like a fountain from the grass To meet the sun! A quiet green but few days since, With cattle browsing in the shade: And here are lines of bright arcade In order raised! A palace as for fairy Prince, A rare pavilion, such as man Saw never since mankind began, And built and glazed! A peaceful place it was but now, And lo! within its shining streets A multitude of nations meets; A countless throng I see beneath the crystal bow, And Gaul and German, Russ and Turk Each with his native handiwork And busy tongue.

The poem’s public occasion and propaganda content recall the Carmen, which is also cleverly echoed in its metre: Thackeray uses an eight-line stanza which could be seen as a doubling of the Sapphic stanza used in the Carmen. The structure of three iambic tetrameters plus a final dimeter, doubled, looks (as so often) to the shape of the Sapphic stanza (three Sapphic hendecasyllables plus a final adonean). This opening makes it clear that another Latin intertext is operating here – Vergil’s Aeneid. The triumphant assembling of foreign races in the imperial capital (note the Latinizing ‘Gaul’ for ‘Frenchman’) and the transformation



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of a pastoral landscape into a miracle of building both seem to recall Aeneid 8. There Aeneas famously visits the future site of Rome (8.97–369), a then primitive village whose architectural wonders are anticipated by the poet-narrator; the particular detail of moving from a site for grazing cattle to great buildings in Thackeray picks up Aeneid 8.360–1, where the future smart quarters of the city have only bovine occupants, just as the ‘quiet green’ of Hyde Park is transformed by Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace. This is succeeded by an equally celebrated scene in which Aeneas is presented with a prophetic shield which represents a pageant of Roman history, cumulating in the triumph of Augustus in Rome in 29 bce, in which various specified conquered peoples are gathered in Rome (8.722–6). Vergil’s imperial and military triumph with its assembly of subject races is transformed in Thackeray’s ode into a modern triumph of peaceful industry uniting worldwide wondering visitors, though subject races are not absent in modern London, already seen as the head of Victoria’s empire. In lines 81–8 Thackeray points to: The representatives of man Here from the far Antipodes, And from the subject Indian seas In Congress meet: From Afric and from Hindustan, From Western continent and isle, The envoys of her empire pile Gifts at her feet;

The presentation of gifts by diverse races to the great monarch in the imperial city again goes back to Vergil’s shield and its depiction of Augustus, who sits on the steps of his great temple of Apollo and ‘acknowledges the gifts of the peoples’ (8.721). The Carmen Saeculare returns towards the end of the poem, in the praise of Britain’s peaceful world domination (129–36): Look yonder where the engines toil: These England’s arms of conquest are, The trophies of her bloodless war: Brave weapons these. Victorious over wave and soil, With these she sails, she weaves, she tills,

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Pierces the everlasting hills And spans the seas.

England’s bloodless victory ‘over wave and soil’ surely picks up the Carmen’s mention of the peace achieved by Rome over sea and land (CS 53), just as its mention of its domination of other far-flung races, including the Indians subject to Victoria (CS 55–6), is another source for this motif in Thackeray’s poem. Here, then, in Thackeray’s poem we have an interesting reprocessing of the Carmen Saeculare for a great Victorian occasion matching the Augustan Ludi Saeculares in its national and political message, which combines Horatian allusion with Vergilian reminiscence in a reactivation of some key texts of Augustan imperialism. All the Horatian work so far in this volume has been by men, unsurprising given that access to Horace usually came about through male-only elite education. One exception here is Christina Rossetti (1830–94), now being recognized as a major poet of the Victorian period.31 Her 1854 sonnet ‘A Study (A Soul)’, describing a woman under pressure, owes clear debts to two Horatian odes:32 She stands as pale as Parian statues stand; Like Cleopatra when she turned at bay, And felt her strength above the Roman sway, And felt the aspic writhing in her hand. Her face is steadfast toward the shadowy land, For dim beyond it looms the light of day; Her feet are steadfast; all the arduous way That foot-track hath not wavered on the sand. She stands there like a beacon thro’ the night, A pale clear beacon where the storm-drift is; She stands alone, a wonder deathly white; She stands there patient, nerved with inner might, Indomitable in her feebleness, Her face and will athirst against the light.

The sonnet begins with an allusion to Odes 1.19.5–6 urit me Glycerae nitor / splendentis Pario marmore purius, ‘I am burned by the brightness of Glycera, shining more purely than Parian marble’; where the Latin original seems to pay a compliment to female white skin, the marble-pallor of Rossetti’s woman



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is an indication of her complex psychological state. This leading quotation then suggests that the comparison to Cleopatra, which seems to look to her famous death-scene in Shakespeare (Anthony and Cleopatra Act 5, Scene 2), might in fact derive from its narration in Horace Odes 1.37 (I quote Odes 1.37.21–32): quae generosius perire quaerens nec muliebriter expauit ensem nec latentis classe cita reparauit oras, ausa et iacentem uisere regiam uultu sereno, fortis et asperas tractare serpentes, ut atrum corpore conbiberet uenenum, deliberata morte ferocior: saeuis Liburnis scilicet inuidens priuata deduci superbo non humilis mulier triumpho. She, seeking to die More nobly, did not in womanly wise Fear the sword or repair To hidden shores in her swift fleet, Daring with serene features both To see her palace flattened, and to be strong enough To handle scaly serpents, in order to drink to the end The dark poison with her body, Fiercer through her planning of death: Clearly as a private citizen she grudged the cruel Liburnian ships the chance to lead her in a proud triumph, a woman who was far from humble.

Two details in Rossetti pick up elements emphasized in Horace’s poem but not in Shakespeare’s scene: Cleopatra’s strength and resolution, and her physical handling of the asp that poisons her. It has been noted (Fowler 1973: 249; Murgatroyd 2009/10) that Horace’s Odes are the most frequent text in the classical allusions of the Decadent poet Ernest Dowson (1867–1900). Dowson tends to transpose Horace into the

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notably un-Horatian arena of low and obsessive physical passion, and to pick up female names of beloved girls from Horace’s Odes without especially close reference to the original contexts.33 His poem ‘Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae’ (published 1896) appropriates Odes 4.1.3–4 as its title (‘I am not the man I was under the sway of the kindly Cinara’). Cinara [sic] is mentioned only a few times by Horace, each time very briefly and with gentle nostalgia (also at Odes 4.13.21, Epistles 1.7.28, 1.14.33), as a former flame of his long-distant youth; Dowson, not yet thirty and destined to die before reaching thirty-three, turns Cynara/Cinara into an obsessive, Swinburnian figure representing the pain of lost love which cannot be extirpated by mere physical self-indulgence (lines 7–12): All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat, Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay; Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet; But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, When I awoke and found the dawn was grey: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

Dowson’s poem is significant for the distance it travels from its original allusion; Cynara is Horatian only in the sense of representing an old passion. A little more Horatian is his poem ‘Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam’, the epigraph of his Verses (1896). This again uses a Horatian quotation as a title (Odes 1.4.15 ‘the brief sum of life forbids us start longdistance hope’), and has rather more authentically Horatian colour in its stress on the brevity of human experience and pleasure before we pass to the world of the dead:34 They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate: I think they have no portion in us after We pass the gate. They are not long, the days of wine and roses: Out of a misty dream Our path emerges for a while, then closes Within a dream.



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Here there may be detailed connections; its pairing of ‘wine and roses’ perhaps also looks to joining of the two in the context of a symposium at Odes 3.15.15–16, while as we have so often seen already its metre of quatrain stanzas with a final shorter line looks back to Horace’s Sapphic stanza. It is often forgotten that the majority of Victorians, in an age of mass church attendance, encountered poetry most often in the form of hymns sung in the context of Christian worship.35 The most common form of English hymns, the quatrain stanza of the ‘Common Metre’,36 provided a natural analogy with the quatrain stanzas of Horace’s Odes, and the Odes themselves contain a number of prominent hymns to deities (e.g. Odes 1.10 to Mercury or Odes 1.35 to Fortuna). However, in the standard English hymnals such as Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861) and The English Hymnal (1906), direct imitations of Horatian odes are not to be found, but rather indirect ones, for example, a few translations of Christian Latin hymns in the Horatian Sapphic metre. 37 The contrast with the widespread use of Horace’s Odes in the secular verse of the period is striking; their general associations with the poetry of love and wine perhaps makes them dubious sources for Christian hymnody. In the best-selling collection The Christian Year of the writer and cleric John Keble (1792–1866), which was first published in 1827 and went through over a hundred editions in the author’s lifetime,38 each major festival of the liturgical year is assigned a poetic meditation which is often in practice a hymn (and several of the poems have indeed been adapted to make famous English hymns).39 Keble knew his Horace well, as shown by his lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry, which probably influenced Matthew Arnold (see Chapter 3); but very little Horatian imitation is detectable in The Christian Year, though it contains 110 lyric poems, closely analogous to the 103 odes of Odes 1–4. Two possible exceptions are both in quatrain stanzas, and both can be seen as appropriating Horatian matter in a very different Christian context. One of these is the poem for Monday of Easter Week, the festival of Peter and Cornelius, which begins with the analogy between a stream and prayer: Go up and watch the new-born rill Just trickling from its mossy bed, Streaking the heath-clad hill With a bright emerald thread.

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Canst thou her bold career foretell, What rocks she shall o’erleap or rend, How far in ocean’s swell Her freshening billows send? Perchance that little brook shall flow The bulwark of some mighty realm, Bear navies to and fro With monarchs at their helm.

Both form (a quatrain stanza of two longer lines followed by two shorter ones) and content (the symbolic stream) seem to recall the well-known fons Bandusiae of Odes 3.13 (1–3, 13–16): O fons Bandusiae splendidior vitro, dulci digne mero non sine floribus, cras donaberis haedo … fies nobilium tu quoque fontium me dicente cavis impositam ilicem saxis, unde loquaces lymphae desiliunt tuae.

15

Spring of Bandusia, outshining glass, Worthy of sweet wine and flowers too, Tomorrow you will be presented with a kid … You too will become one of the celebrated springs When I tell of the holm-oak laid across the hollow rocks. From which your babbling Waters leap down.

Horace’s spring, which in the original ode is offered a pagan blood-sacrifice, probably on the occasion of the Roman Fontinalia or festival of springs,40 is metamorphosed into a metaphor for Christian prayer (Keble continues ‘Even so, the course of prayer who knows …?’, line 21). Both poems look ahead to the future greatness of what appears now to be a small watercourse; Keble imagines the stream meeting other streams in a mighty torrent of prayer (25–8), while Horace presents it as a poetic Roman spring which through his proclaiming of it will match those celebrated in the Greek world such as Hippocrene.



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Another poem from The Christian Year which may rework a prominent Horatian ode is that for the Purification of the Virgin Mary (2 February), now a well-known hymn41 (lines 1–4): Blest are the pure in heart, For they shall see our God; The secret of the Lord is theirs, Their soul is Christ’s abode.

This opening seems to recall the famous opening of Odes 1.22 (1–4): Integer vitae scelerisque purus non eget Mauris iaculis neque arcu nec venenatis gravida sagittis, Fusce, pharetra. He that is untainted in life and pure of crime Needs no Moorish javelins or bow Or quiver teeming with poisoned arrows, Fuscus …

This initial echo is corroborated by Keble’s later use in the same poem of the idea from the same Horatian stanza that the virtuous person does not need conventional armed protection (17–20): No pomp of earthly guards Attends with sword and spear, And all-defying, dauntless look, Their monarch’s way to clear …

This is a neat modification of the idea that the wise man of strong mind and high integrity has nothing to fear into the notion that the six-week-old divine Christ child does not need the normal trappings of human monarchy; the pair of weapons in each case point to the allusion. A similar and more extensive adaptation of a Horatian ode concerning philosophical virtue in a context of Christian exemplary morality is found in a hymn celebrating St Alban, the supposed proto-martyr of England, by the Rev. Samuel J. Stone (1839–1900), a member of the editorial committee of Hymns Ancient and Modern and author of the well-known hymn ‘The Church’s one foundation’.42 The Horatian model for Stone’s hymn43 is Odes 3.5, where the Roman general Regulus chooses principled self-sacrifice and a

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gruesome death rather than betraying his promise to return to his captors in Carthage; the English poem’s parallel narrative concerns the soldier Alban’s willing substitution of himself for a Christian priest as a victim of persecution and his consequent self-sacrifice under similar cruel conditions, when like Regulus he could have easily escaped danger. The two texts are on a similar scale: Stone’s hymn consists of five eight-line stanzas each followed by the same four-line refrain (sixty lines in all), while Horace’s poem is fifty-six lines long in fourteen quatrain stanzas. Stone’s poem opens with an allusion to another poem in the same Horatian sequence of the Roman Odes: England, by thine own Saint Alban, Put thy Christian heart to school: Learn to sacrifice and suffer By thy Proto-Martyr’s rule.44

Cf. Odes 3.2.1–3: Angustam amice pauperiem pati robustus acri militia puer condiscat … To suffer narrow poverty as a friend Let the boy learn, made strong by keen soldiering …

In both poems the brave military hero makes a speech justifying his self-sacrificing decision; in Horace Regulus’ words occupy the central third of the poem (18–40), while in Stone Alban’s are condensed into a few lines (stanza 4): ‘I am Christ’s: I therefore suffer: I am Christ’s: I therefore die: I am Christ’s: so I am happy, And my life is His on high’; Thus he faced the Roman’s torture, Youth, wealth, honour sacrificed; Losing thankfully the whole world That he might be found in Christ.

Both the idea that the hero is happy in death and the statement that he was prepared to face his enemy’s torture derive from the end of Horace’s poem (49–56):



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atqui sciebat quae sibi barbarus tortor pararet; non aliter tamen dimovit obstantis propinquos et populum reditus morantem quam si clientum longa negotia diiudicata lite relinqueret, tendens Venafranos in agros aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum. But he knew what the barbarian torturer Had in store for him; yet none the less He moved aside the relatives who stood in his way And the crowd who tried to delay him, Just as if he were leaving a long case for clients After the suit had been judged, heading For the fields of Venafrum Or Spartan-founded Tarentum.

Alban’s self-proclaimed happiness parallels the simile in Horace which points to a lawyer leaving the stress of the Roman courts for a relaxing country holiday. Here, then, a famously self-sacrificing figure from Horace’s Roman odes and from the heroic age of the Punic wars is recast as a similarly selfsacrificing early Christian martyr. This chapter has shown that imitation of Horace was a factor in a wide range of minor poetic texts in the Victorian period, ranging from comic parodies to Christian hymnody. In all cases there is an assumption that the poet and his characters can be easily transferred to the Victorian period, and that there is a clear continuity between the Roman elite of Horace’s day and the English elite of the nineteenth century who had absorbed his poem as part of their gentlemanly education.

5

Horace in Victorian Fiction

Though the Victorian period saw the rise of the novel to cultural centrality1 and the rapid growth of historical novels, including those about the classical world,2 it is hard to find a novel of the time in which Horace features as a character, parallel to the way in which the prose-writer Apuleius has a minor role in Walter Pater’s Marius The Epicurean (1885), or in which the poet Cornelius Gallus appears as the eponymous hero of W. A. Becker’s textbook novel Gallus (1838).3 One minor exception from just before the period is Zillah (1828), a Scott-inspired novel by Horace Smith, friend of Keats and earlier the co-author with his brother James of the parodic verse collection Horace in London of 1813 (discussed in Chapter 4). Zillah is a tale mostly set in Herod the Great’s Jerusalem of the 30s bce whose eponymous character is the daughter of the Deputy High Priest. In one narrative sequence set at a dinner at Mark Antony’s house in Rome, we find among the guests two young poets who turn out to be Horace and Vergil (the only scene in the novel in which either appears). Horace is asked by his host about his future poetic plans: ‘And what says your friend Flaccus? Like myself, he has been at Athens, and trod the groves of Academus, till Brutus coaxed him away, and made him a military Tribune. He has tried both — which means he to celebrate? — peace or war?’ ‘Love, wine, the philosophy of the Epicureans, and the pleasures of peace, will be my first subjects’, said Horace ; ‘but should I live to see the Temple of Janus shut, I may, perhaps, celebrate the exploits that led to it, and sing of the sword, the spear, and the battle’. ‘Sing of the sword and spear by all means, but say not a word of the shield; chant as loudly as you will of battles, but always except that of Philippi.’ A shout of laughter, at the bard’s expense, signalized the success of this coarse raillery,

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which bore allusion to his ignominious flight, and his leaving his shield behind him at the fight of Philippi.

This passage draws on a number of ‘autobiographical’ moments in Horace’s poetry. The reference to Athens, the groves of Academus and Brutus paraphrases Epistles 2.2.41–8, while that to the Temple of Janus looks to the envisaged praise of Augustus in Odes 4.15.4–12 and Epistles 2.1.250–9, and the teasing evocation of Horace’s humiliation at Philippi echoes the poet’s famous account in Odes 2.7. Horace’s own summary of his poetic themes looks firmly to the Odes, even though at the dramatic time of the novel these were to come only after two books of Satires and one book of Epodes, an indication that he is conceived here (as usual) as primarily the author of his best-known lyric poems.

Horace at Athens One fiction where Horace is the protagonist is the one-act verse play Horace at the University of Athens (1861), published by the young G. O. Trevelyan (already encountered in Chapter 4 as a young Indian civil servant) in the year he graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge. As we saw in Chapter 4, the unusual amount of detail to be found in Horace’s poetry about his education was a clear stimulus to Victorian writers to portray him as analogous to the elite Oxbridge undergraduates of their day; in this work we also find clear interaction with the recently established genre of the Oxbridge student novel, represented by parts of the Cambridgeeducated W. M. Thackeray’s The History of Pendennis (1850), Edward Bradley’s The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, an Oxford Freshman (1853, published under the pseudonym ‘Cuthbert Bede’), George Griffith’s The Life and Adventures of George Wilson (1854) and Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown at Oxford (1861).4 The University of Athens of Trevelyan’s play is a thinly disguised Cambridge, and Horace is (perhaps improbably) a leading athlete of his college as well as a pleasure-seeking dandy and poet with philosophical interests. In the first scene two undergraduates with Roman names introduce him as a topic of conversation:



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Caius:5 Young Horace too, the college Martin Tupper,6 Asked me last night to join a freshman’s supper. Balbus: Horace! Who’s Horace? Caius: Bless you! Don’t you know him? The same as got the Chancellor’s Prize poem.7 Balbus: I think I know the man. I’ll bet a dollar You mean the young Apulian minor scholar – Caius: Who wears six rings, and curly as a maid is – Balbus: Who’s always humming songs about the ladies – Caius: Who never comes inside the gates till three – Balbus: Who wrote a chorus for the A.D.C.8 Caius: Enough, you’ve seen the man, and know him too; But here he comes, with all our first-boat’s crew, Who round the backs have had their morning’s run – Let’s ask in how few minutes it was done.

When Horace finally appears, he is a young man in love who confides his passion to his close friend Decius Mus: Why is my colour gone, my visage lank? Why did I steer our boat against the bank? Why is my wine untasted in the glass? Why do I tremble when the proctors pass? By Proserpine below, by Jove above, By mine own head I swear that I’m in love!

Here the poet’s love-signs wittily recall those assigned to the suffering lovers of Horace’s odes: the four-fold ‘Why’ echoes the three-fold cur of Horace’s questioning of his own erotic symptoms at Odes 4.1 (tears and sudden silences), while the change of colour is a mark of jealousy in Odes 2.13, lack of interest in wine one of love-sickness in Odes 3.12, and loss of athletic capacity

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affects the lover Sybaris in Odes 1.8. Seeking to identify the object of his friend’s passion, Decius amusingly cites in Latin the opening lines of two Horatian odes addressed to different lovers (Pyrrha, Odes 1.5.1; Lyce, Odes 3.10) but discovers that Horace shares his own love for ‘lovely lissom Lydia’, evoking the most common beloved-name in the Odes.9 Horace then proceeds to sing a serenade to Lydia, whose house is close by, prefacing it by a detailed reference to one of his own odes to Lydia, adding a brief contemporary student bibliography: And now I’ve come to spend some anxious hours Prostrate before her threshold, crowned with flowers. Such was the custom, as good scholars know, Of classic lovers long long time ago. And if they doubt it, let them please to look At my sixth line, ode twenty-fifth, first book; And as a penance let them learn by heart The note by Anthon, and the verse by Smart.10

The serenade itself is not especially Horatian, but when Lydia emerges unimpressed Horace greets her by citing in Latin the opening two lines of Odes 1.8, which as we have already seen neatly describes his own erotic pains (Lydia, dic per omnes / te deos oro, Sybarin cur properas amando),11 ‘Lydia, I beg you by all the gods, why do you rush to [destroy] Sybaris by loving him’. The play’s second scene opens with Horace drinking with his friends, reciting a version of Odes 1.27 – I cite the first two stanzas followed by the opening of the original (1.27.1–8): To fight o’er cups for joy ordained Suits well barbarian morals; Let us our blushing Bacchus keep From taint of bloody quarrels. For Median daggers don’t agree With beer-cup rich and brown; So rest your elbow on the couch, And take your liquor down. Natis in usum laetitiae scyphis pugnare Thracum est; tollite barbarum morem verecundumque Bacchum sanguineis prohibete rixis.



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Vino et lucernis Medus acinaces immane quantum discrepat; impium lenite clamorem, sodales, et cubito remanete presso.

A number of elements here are closely translated so as to recall the phrasing of the original for the knowledgeable elite reader (‘barbarian morals’ ~ barbarum / morem, ‘blushing Bacchus’ ~ verecundumque Bacchum, ‘bloody quarrels’ ~ sanguineis … rixis). The poem sets the tone for a scene of riotous drinking and horseplay, which is interrupted by Brutus and Cassius recruiting for their army, which Horace and Decius join. The third scene is set in the Senate House, neatly punning on the Roman Curia and the Cambridge ceremonial building designed by Wren, where Augustus is present to witness Maecenas take an honorary degree; in presenting the latter, the Vice-Chancellor addresses Maecenas as o et praesidium et dulce decus nostrum, ‘our protection and sweet ornament’, quoting the second line of Odes 1.1); Decius speaks a complimentary address to Augustus and asks in return for Lydia, whom Augustus grants to him rather than to the ‘secessionist’ Horace. This term points to the contemporary American Civil War as a parallel for the war of Philippi, an analogy further pursued in the fourth scene, set in front of Brutus’ tent at Philippi, where Horace sings a song about the recent first battle of Bull Run (July 1861) which is a distant version of Odes 2.7. This song is in quatrains with three identical lines and a shorter final fine, evoking the Sapphic stanza, and ends with a comic version of the Union retreat which matches the shield-jettisoning of Horace at Philippi: The panic thickens. Off, ye brave! Throw down your arms; your bacon save! Waive, Washington, all scruples waive, And fly with all your chivalry.

The traditional jettisoning of the shield occurs in the drama’s fifth scene, where Horace presents the motif in a parody of Thomas Moore’s patriotic Irish song ‘The minstrel-boy to the wars is gone’, commemorating the young dead of the 1798 rebellion: The minstrel-boy from the wars is gone All out of breath you’ll find him;

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He has run some five miles off and on, And his shield has flung behind him.

In the sixth and final scene the defeated Horace enters the camp of Augustus. Attacked by Decius and in danger of a death sentence, he seeks the protection of Maecenas in a version of the opening of Odes 1.1: My loved protector, patron kind and true Of hapless genius, I appeal to you, To you, Maecenas sprung from royal sire, My sweetest glory, and my fond desire. There are whom it delights with wondrous gust To have collected the Olympic dust … Maecenas atavis edite regibus, o et praesidium et dulce decus meum, sunt quos curriculo pulverem Olympicum collegisse iuvat …

The obvious Latinisms ‘There are whom’ (= sunt quos) and ‘to have collected the Olympic dust’ (= pulverem Olympicum / collegisse) again point the elite reader to the linguistic details of the original. On Maecenas’ intervention, Augustus agrees to spare Horace if he can parody Vergil’s tenth Eclogue, which he then proceeds to do; Augustus is satisfied and appoints Horace to the ‘public treasury’ provided he can pass the necessary examinations.12 Lydia is allowed to choose between Decius and Horace, and part of the finale is a neat version of the reconciliation drama of Odes 3.9, which we have already seen amusingly adapted by Austin Dobson in Chapter 4: Horace: While you still loved your Horace best Of all my peers who round you pressed Though not in expurgated versions More proud I lived than King of Persians. Lydia: And while as yet no other dame Had kindled in your breast a flame Not Mrs Yelverton of story13 Could boast a name more bright with glory.



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Note the allusion to ‘expurgated versions’, pointing to the common censoring of the erotic material in Horace’s Odes in the Victorian period (see Chapter 2), though the harmless 3.9 itself is not usually a victim of this procedure. The drama ends with the gift to Horace of the Sabine estate, here enforced on Maecenas by Augustus: I’ll give you, won by her transcendent charms, The choicest of your patron’s Sabine farms. There shall you live ’midst roses, wine and rhymes, The darling of your own and future times …

The ending then celebrates the wedding of Horace and Lydia (‘Light Hymen’s torch’). This often witty student drama is revealing for our purposes, since it is the product of a writer who was still very close to an intimate experience of Horace in Victorian elite education; the many quotations and close adaptations reveals both the author’s internalization of the poet and his concern to appeal to a gentlemanly readership which has shared his educational experience. As noted earlier, Horace at the University of Athens is clearly related to the Victorian university novel, in which the student hero after some vicissitudes becomes a full and independent member of society. In Trevelyan’s drama, as in both Mr Verdant Green and Tom Brown at Oxford, this comes about through the happy ending of matrimony, which explains the marrying off of the traditionally firmly bachelor Horace and the historically early gift of the Sabine estate to provide appropriate financial security.

Horace and the major Victorian novelists (i) Charles Dickens Dickens (1812–70) was the least classically educated of the major Victorian novelists; owing to his father’s financial troubles, he had a disrupted education which finished at fifteen.14 This fits the relative infrequency of classical allusion in his works, which is largely limited to common mythological references.15 Two specific brief references to Horace can be found, both in the same context of classical education as a means to social advancement. Amongst the inmates

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of ‘The Boarding House’ in Sketches by Boz (1836) we find the uncouth but ambitious Mr O’Bleary: Mr. O’Bleary was an Irishman, recently imported; he was in a perfectly wild state; and had come over to England to be an apothecary, a clerk in a government office, an actor, a reporter, or anything else that turned up—he was not particular … One evening, the different inmates of the house were assembled in the drawing-room engaged in their ordinary occupations … O’Bleary was reading Horace, and trying to look as if he understood it.

Here classical (self-)education is clearly presented as a route for upward mobility; though O’Bleary has clearly not received the advantage of an English elite education, he is anxious to come across to others as if he had. In Chapter 11 of Dombey and Son (1848), the unsympathetic Mr Dombey is anxious to push ahead with the elite education of his six-year-old son Paul: […] instead of being behind his peers, my son ought to be before them; far before them. There is an eminence ready for him to mount upon. There is nothing of chance or doubt in the course before my son. His way in life was clear and prepared, and marked out before he existed. The education of such a young gentleman must not be delayed. It must not be left imperfect.

He chooses the school of Dr Blimber which matches his purpose: Doctor Blimber’s establishment was a great hot-house, in which there was a forcing apparatus incessantly at work. All the boys blew before their time. Mental green-peas were produced at Christmas, and intellectual asparagus all the year round. Mathematical gooseberries (very sour ones too) were common at untimely seasons, and from mere sprouts of bushes, under Doctor Blimber’s cultivation. Every description of Greek and Latin vegetable was got off the driest twigs of boys, under the frostiest circumstances. Nature was of no consequence at all.

In the following interview between Mr Dombey and Dr Blimber and his wife, there is a specific mention of Horace by the pretentious Mrs Blimber as she compares the young Paul to a bee about to enjoy the flowers of learning: ‘Like a bee, Sir,’ said Mrs. Blimber, with uplifted eyes, ‘about to plunge into a garden of the choicest flowers, and sip the sweets for the first time. Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Terence, Plautus, Cicero. What a world of honey have we here.’16



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Dickens was not averse to suggesting a gentlemanly acquaintance with Horace on his own part. In Chapter 11 of Pictures from Italy (1846), his account of his trip to Italy in 1844, Dickens presents himself as having knowledge both of wines and of Horace as he passes through Lazio: Mola di Gaeta, whose wines, like those of Albano, have degenerated since the days of Horace, or his taste for wine was bad: which is not likely of one who enjoyed it so much, and extolled it so well.

Mola di Gaeta is part of the commune of Formia (ancient Formiae), and the reference here is to Odes 1.20.11–12, where Horace expresses admiration for Formian wine.

(ii) William Makepeace Thackeray As we have already seen in Chapter 4, Thackeray (1811–63), classically educated at the elite school Charterhouse and at Trinity College, Cambridge, echoed Horace in his light and occasional verse, and a number of allusions are also found in his novels, usually brief quotations in Latin for instant recognition and for characterization of speakers as elite members.17 A (superficial) knowledge of Horace is explicitly presented as a requirement for gentlemanly status in The Newcomes (1855), where (in a passage noted already in Chapter 1) Colonel Newcome, returning from overseas, is told by a learned friend that his son Clive has acquired just enough classics in five years at Grey Friars (= Charterhouse) in the 1820s ‘to enable him to quote Horace respectably throughout life, and what more do you want from a young man of his expectations?’ (Chapter 8); the expectations are that Clive will enter the army or some other elite profession. Even the bluff and unintellectual soldier Rawdon Crawley in Vanity Fair (1848) is happy that his son is to receive a good classical education at Whitefriars (= Charterhouse again) for reasons of social respectability: Rawdon Crawley, though the only book which he studied was the Racing Calendar, and though his chief recollections of polite learning were connected with the floggings which he received at Eton in his early youth, had that decent and honest reverence for classical learning which all English gentlemen feel, and was glad to think that his son was to have a provision for life, perhaps, and a certain opportunity of becoming a scholar. (Ch. 52)

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Similarly, in Thackeray’s historical novel The History of Henry Esmond (1852), set in the early decades of the eighteenth century, the reading and quotation of Horace is presented as a characteristic activity of cultured country gentlemen. In Book II Chapter 6 Thomas Tusher, the chaplain of Esmond’s foster-brother Viscount Castlewood, is concerned to stress to Esmond when he returns from fighting at Cadiz that he and his patron have been reading Horace together: ‘I am charmed to see Captain Esmond’ says he. ‘My lord and I have read the Reddas incolumem precor, and applied it, I am sure, to you. You come back with Gaditanian laurels; when I heard you were bound thither, I wished, I am sure, I was another Septimius. My Lord Viscount, your lordship remembers Septimi, Gades aditure mecum?’ ‘There’s an angle of earth that I love better than Gades, Tusher’ says Mr. Esmond. ‘Tis that one where your reverence hath a parsonage, and where our youth was brought up.’

Here there is some elaborate elite literary game-playing around Horatian quotation: the chaplain first evokes Odes 1.3.7 and Horace’s prayer for the safe return of his friend Vergil, ‘I pray that you may return him unharmed’, fitting the return of Esmond from the wars, and then quotes the opening line of Odes 2.6, where Horace imagines his friend Septimius as prepared to accompany him to distant Cadiz (Latin Gades, hence ‘Gaditanian’) as a token of friendship (‘Septimius, ready to go to Gades with me’), the very place from which Esmond has just arrived. He then appeals to his pupil’s memory to confirm this common cultural capital of elite education. Not to be outdone, Esmond caps the quotation with an allusion to the same ode to Septimius, paraphrasing 2.6.13–14 ille terrarum mihi praeter omnis / angulus ridet, ‘that corner of the earth smiles on me above all’, with ‘angle of earth’ clearly evoking the Latin phrase terrarum … angulus.18 As Elizabeth Nitchie has noted (Nitchie 1918: 395–6), Thackeray had his favourite Horatian quotations to which he returned regularly: the most common is post equitem sedet atra Cura, ‘dark Care sits behind the rider’ (Odes 3.1.40), alluded to more than ten times in the novels. Another is the description of Fortune at Odes 3.29.49–56: Fortuna saevo laeta negotio et ludum insolentem ludere pertinax



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transmutat incertos honores, nunc mihi, nunc alii benigna. Laudo manentem; si celeris quatit pinnas, resigno quae dedit et mea virtute me involvo probamque pauperiem sine dote quaero. Fortune, happy in her cruel business And set on playing her proud game Transforms the uncertainties of honours Kind now to me, now to another. If Fortune shakes her swift wings, I give up her gifts and wrap myself In my virtue, and I seek Righteous Poverty without a dowry.

This passage is treated in some detail on a number of occasions in the novels. Clive Newcome in The Newcomes, proving indeed that his elite education has equipped him with the capacity to quote Horace, uses it in an appropriately sympotic context when the family fortunes suffer a severe setback (Chapter 71): ‘Here’s a good end to it’, says Clive, with flashing eyes and a flushed face, ‘and here’s a good health till tomorrow, father!’, and he filled into two glasses the wine still remaining in the flask. ‘Good-bye to our fortune, and bad luck go with her – I puff the prostitute away – Si celeres quatit pennas, you remember what we used to say at Grey Friars – resigno quae dedit, et mea virtute me involvo, probamque pauperiem sine dote quaero.’ And he pledged his father, who drank his wine, his hand shaking as he raised the glass to his lips, and his kind voice trembling as he uttered the well-known old school words, with an emotion that was as sacred as a prayer.

In quoting liberally from a well-known Horatian ode, Clive here explicitly appeals to the elite education he shares with his father, and many of Thackeray’s intended readers. There is also a further allusion here: ‘I puff the prostitute away’ is taken from Dryden’s version of the ode,19 clearly also a favourite of Thackeray’s as he had already put the phrase in the mouth of Dryden’s friend the poet Joseph Addison in Chapter 11 of The History of Henry Esmond. Another allusion to the same passage is found in Chapter 16 of The Adventures of Philip (1862). There the protagonist Philip Firmin’s father in

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a letter to his son after a financial disappointment again cites the passage extensively: We are puppets in the hands of fate, most of us. We are carried along by a power stronger than ourselves. It has driven me, at sixty years of age, from competence, general respect, high position, to poverty and exile. So be it! laudo manentem, as my delightful old friend and philosopher teaches me – si celeres quatit pennas … you know the rest. Whatever our fortune may be, I hope that my Philip and his father will bear it with the courage of gentlemen. … You have probam pauperiem sine dote. You have courage, health, strength, and talent. I was in greater straits than you are at your age. My father was not as indulgent as yours, I hope and trust, has been. From debt and dependence I worked myself up to a proud position by my own efforts. That the storm overtook me and engulfed me afterward is true. But I am like the merchant of my favorite poet – I still hope – ay, at sixty-three! – to mend my shattered ships, indocilis pauperiem pati.

Once more the common elite education of father and son is appealed to at a moment of crisis. Odes 3.29 is here supplemented with further Horatian allusion, to the merchant who suffers reverses in trading but persists at Odes 1.1.17–18, mox reficit rates / quassas indocilis pauperiem pati, ‘In time he refits his shaken ships / Not to be taught to endure poverty’.20 In Pendennis (1850) the Thackeray-like hero Arthur Pendennis, beginning to meet with some literary success, dreams of fame and fortune (Chapter 32): Is it true, thought Pendennis, lying on his bed and gazing at a bright moon without, that lighted up a corner of his dressing-table, and the frame of a little sketch of Fairoaks drawn by Laura, and hung over his drawers – is it true that I am going to earn my bread at last, and with my pen? That I shall impoverish the dear mother no longer; and that I may gain a name and reputation in the world, perhaps? These are welcome if they come, thought the young visionary, laughing and blushing to himself, though alone and in the night, as he thought how dearly he would relish honour and fame if they could be his. If fortune favours me, I laud her; if she frowns, I resign her.

The end of this passage clearly invokes Odes 3.29.54–6, this time paraphrased in English rather than cited in Latin, though ‘laud’ and ‘resign’ point specifically to the verbs laudo and resigno in the original, triggering the allusion for the elite reader. In The History of Henry Esmond we find three further allusions to this poem in addition to Addison’s quotation of Dryden’s version (see above). The



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first concerns Esmond’s love for his heartless and flighty cousin Beatrix. In Book I Chapter 12 we have a full description of the latter: She was the darling and torment of father and mother. She intrigued with each secretly; and bestowed her fondness and withdrew it, plied them with tears, smiles, kisses, cajolements; when the mother was angry, as happened often, flew to the father, and sheltering behind him, pursued her victim; when both were displeased, transferred her caresses to the domestics, or watched until she could win back her parents’ good graces, either by surprising them into laughter and good-humor, or appeasing them by submission and artful humility. She was saevo laeta negotio, like that fickle goddess Horace describes.

Here the naming of Horace and the Latin quotation pinpoint the passage, and the knowledgeable reader is left to identify the fickle goddess as the Fortuna of Odes 3.29. In Book II Chapter 1 we find Esmond in misfortune, when he is imprisoned after assisting at the duel which leads to the death of his patron and relative the older Lord Castlewood: The blow had been struck, and he had borne it. His cruel goddess had shaken her wings and fled: and left him alone and friendless, but virtute sua.

Here the Latin virtute sua, pinpointing the quotation for the elite reader, is accompanied by a paraphrase of the preceding lines. As in The Newcomes and Philip, the passage is deployed at a moment of particular ill-fortune. The final citation of this passage perhaps suggests why it has been so common in Henry Esmond. In Book III Chapter 4 we find the story of Esmond’s old army friend Tom Trett, who goes into business but is relieved to become bankrupt: So it was that when Fortune shook her wings and left him, honest Tom cuddled himself up in his ragged virtue, and fell asleep.

The echo is clearly a parodic version of Horace’s statement of philosophical independence in Odes 3.29 (note ‘cuddled’, ‘ragged’ and the changed, bathetic ending). In this same chapter, however, it marks an important moment of realization for Esmond, who sees at last that his ill-starred passion for his cousin Beatrix is similarly ‘bankrupt’ as she is now engaged to a duke: Esmond did not tell his friend how much his story applied to Esmond too; but he laughed at it, and used it; and having fairly struck his docket in this

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love transaction, determined to put a cheerful face on his bankruptcy. Perhaps Beatrix was a little offended at his gaiety. ‘Is this the way, sir, that you receive the announcement of your misfortune’, says she, ‘and do you come smiling before me as if you were glad to be rid of me?’ Esmond would not be put off from his good-humour, but told her the story of Tom Trett and his bankruptcy. ‘I have been hankering after the grapes on the wall’, says he, ‘and lost my temper because they were beyond my reach; was there any wonder? They’re gone now, and another has them—a taller man than your humble servant has won them.’ And the Colonel made his cousin a low bow.

This leads to the crucial final turn of the plot, where Esmond realizes that his true love is Beatrix’s mother, Lady Castlewood, marries her and emigrates to Virginia. The message of Horace’s poem, that the truly wise man focusses on his own virtue rather than irrelevant externals, can thus be seen as parallel to the moral of Thackeray’s novel: Esmond needs to disencumber himself of his worldly passion for Beatrix and start again. Finally, another repeated Horatian quotation has major thematic relevance to the plot of the novel. Overall, as we have seen, Esmond’s affections move from daughter to mother, and this is marked by the quotation of Odes 1.16.1 o matre pulchra filia pulchrior, ‘o daughter more beautiful than your beautiful mother’. In Book II Chapter 7 Esmond returns to his childhood home and is greeted by the pair of them, holding the mother’s arm as the daughter, grown to beauty in his absence, appears: She approached, shining smiles upon Esmond, who could look at nothing but her eyes. She advanced holding forward her head, as if she would have him kiss her as he used to do when she was a child. ‘Stop’, she said, ‘I am grown too big! Welcome, cousin Harry’, and she made him an arch curtsy, sweeping down to the ground almost, with the most gracious bend, looking up the while with the brightest eyes and sweetest smile. Love seemed to radiate from her. Harry eyed her with such a rapture as the first lover is described as having by Milton. ‘N’est-ce pas?’ says my lady, in a low, sweet voice, still hanging on his arm. Esmond turned round with a start and a blush, as he met his mistress’s clear eyes. He had forgotten her, rapt in admiration of the filia pulchrior.

Horace’s line thus points here to the main issue of the novel, the mother and daughter beloved by Esmond and his initial ill-starred preference for the younger, which is ultimately to be reversed in his happy final choice of the



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elder. At the start of Book II Chapter 2 the essayist Richard Steele is similarly presented as an admirer of both women, likewise rating Beatrix over her mother; the narrator comments ‘It was matre pulchra filia pulchrior’. But at the end of the same chapter, the same ode of Horace is invoked in a slightly different judgement by Steele: ‘Faith, the beauty of filia pulchrior drove pulchram matrem out of my head; and yet as I came down the river, and thought about the pair, the pallid dignity and exquisite grace of the matron had the uppermost, and I thought her even more noble than the virgin!’

Steele’s oscillation between the charms of the two looks forward to Esmond’s own dilemma, and his final preference here looks forward to Esmond’s ultimate choice at the end of the novel. Thackeray’s use of Horace thus goes beyond respectable gentlemanly quotation and deployment of favourite passages. As in his similar appropriation of Vergil,21 we can see subtle and careful use of repeated Horatian quotation to emphasize central moral ideas (how to cope with misfortune) and plot-elements (the hero’s choice between two women).

(iii) George Eliot Mary Ann Evans, later Mary Ann Cross (‘George Eliot’, 1819–80), had a good classical education, and Horace is the Latin poet most often alluded to in her writings.22 In her historical novel Romola (1863), set in quattrocento Florence, we naturally find a number of Horatian quotations in the mouths of its characters, some of whom are famous humanists, but in her novels with English settings, as for Thackeray’s Clive Newcome, Horatian quotation generally appears as a social necessity for gentlemanly status rather than indicating a deep intellectual interest. The young squire Arthur Donnithorne in Adam Bede (1859) is a good example (Chapter 16): ‘It’s well if I can remember a little inapplicable Latin to adorn my maiden speech in Parliament six or seven years hence. Cras ingens iterabimus aequor, and a few shreds of that sort, will perhaps stick to me, and I shall arrange my opinions so as to introduce them. But I don’t think a knowledge of the classics is a pressing want to a country gentleman; as far as I can see, he’d much better have a knowledge of manures’.

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Such a sketchy knowledge of hackneyed quotations for country gentlemen23 is similarly seen in the old-fashioned and relatively unintellectual Mr Brooke of Middlemarch (1871), who comments on Will Ladislaw’s potential ability to sort out his papers (Chapter 34) that: ‘I can see he is just the man to put them into shape—remembers what the right quotations are, omne tulit punctum, and that sort of thing …’

Here with a vaguely applicable quotation of the familiar Ars Poetica 343 ‘he has gained every point’, Mr Brooke presents his view of an effective intellectual as one who can martial his Latin quotations. The same character shows a similarly vague and partial Horatian learning in Chapter 38: ‘My dear Chettam, that is all very fine, you know’, said Mr Brooke. ‘But how will you make yourself proof against calumny? You should read history—look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know. But what is that in Horace?—fiat justitia, ruat … something or other.’

Here Mr Brooke in fact cites a traditional legal maxim (fiat iustitia, ruat caelum, ‘let justice be done, though the sky fall in’) which derives from Terence (Heautontimoroumenos 719 quid si nunc caelum ruat?, ‘what if now the sky were to fall in?’); but the context makes clear that he is imperfectly recalling the sage of Horace Odes 3.3.7–8, impassive in disaster: si fractus illabatur orbis, / impavidum ferient ruinae, ‘if the world smashed and collapsed / its ruins would strike him unafraid’. The ideal country gentleman, indeed, seems to be one who once learned Latin but has now forgotten it, as seen in the dialogue between Tom Tulliver and his fellow-pupil Philip Waken at Rev. Stelling’s school in The Mill on the Floss (1860; Book II Chapter 3): ‘I can’t think why anybody should learn Latin’, said Tom. ‘It’s no good’. ‘It’s part of the education of a gentleman’, said Philip. ‘All gentlemen learn the same things’. ‘What! do you think Sir John Crake, the master of the harriers, knows Latin?’ said Tom, who had often thought he should like to resemble Sir John Crake. ‘He learned it when he was a boy, of course’, said Philip. ‘But I dare say he’s forgotten it’. ‘Oh, well, I can do that, then’, said Tom, not with any epigrammatic intention,



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but with serious satisfaction at the idea that, as far as Latin was concerned, there was no hindrance to his resembling Sir John Crake.

But this is not the whole story. In The Mill on the Floss we find one or two Horatian allusions which like Thackeray’s send us back with profit to the original text. Tom’s personal struggle to learn Latin at school is subtly ornamented with the Horatian texts which are likely to form part of his future syllabus of reading. At first he prays for divine help (Book II Chapter 1): But his faith broke down under the apparent absence of all help when he got into the irregular verbs. It seemed clear that Tom’s despair under the caprices of the present tense did not constitute a nodus worthy of interference, and since this was the climax of his difficulties, where was the use of praying for help any longer?

Here the Latin word nodus points us to Ars Poetica 191–2 nec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus / inciderit, ‘nor let a god be present, unless a difficulty worthy of a champion occur’.24 The original context is highly relevant here, since Horace is talking about a deus ex machina coming down to solve an impossible situation on stage, neatly parallel to Tom, who has been praying for divine assistance with his Latin. Later on, Tom’s tutor becomes more lax (Book II Chapter 4): Perhaps it is that high achievements demand some other unusual qualification besides an unusual desire for high prizes; perhaps it is that these stalwart gentlemen are rather indolent, their divinæ particulum auræ being obstructed from soaring by a too hearty appetite. Some reason or other there was why Mr Stelling deferred the execution of many spirited projects,—why he did not begin the editing of his Greek play, or any other work of scholarship, in his leisure hours, but, after turning the key of his private study with much resolution, sat down to one of Theodore Hook’s novels.

The Latin is a slight error (perhaps an uncorrected printer’s slip) for divinae particulam aurae. Once more the original context is relevant, Satires 2.2.79–80 hesternis vitiis animum quoque praegravat una / atque adfigit humo divinae particulam aurae: ‘[The body] also weighs down the mind with it by means of yesterday’s excesses / and fixes to the earth the portion of the divine spirit’, where ‘yesterday’s excesses’ are a surfeit of food and drink, clearly suggested for Mr Stelling in ‘a too hearty appetite’.

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(iv) Anthony Trollope In his autobiography Trollope (1815–82) suggests that he gained little from his classical teaching at the elite English schools Harrow and Winchester,25 but that in later life he turned to reading Latin authors, especially after studying Julius Caesar for his study The Commentaries of Julius Caesar (1870); at the end of his life he also published a substantial biography of Cicero (1881). His novels, written for a gentlemanly audience, have many classical allusions, and Horace is the most frequently cited classical author.26 The pattern of Horatian citation and echo is similar to that in Thackeray: we find favourite quotations repeated, quotation exchange between male elite members to reinforce their shared gentlemanly status, and (occasionally) more elaborate literary allusions. Here I will concentrate on the six Palliser novels (1864–80), which set out a rich picture of Victorian political and aristocratic life and are especially fertile in classical allusions. Like Thackeray, Trollope uses some Horatian tags regularly. In Can You Forgive Her? (1865), the heroine Alice Vavasour hesitates between town and country and two possible lovers (Chapter 14): It was her special fault, that when at Rome she longed for Tibur, and when at Tibur she regretted Rome. Not that her cousin George is to be taken as representing the joys of the great capital, though Mr Grey may be presumed to form no inconsiderable part of the promised delights of the country. Now that she had sacrificed her Tibur, because it had seemed to her that the sunny quiet of its pastures lacked the excitement necessary for the happiness of life, she was again prepared to quarrel with the heartlessness of Rome, and already was again sighing for the tranquillity of the country.

The allusion here is to Epistles 1.8.12 where Horace criticizes himself for discontent with his surroundings wherever they are, Romae Tibur amem, ventosus Tibure Romam, ‘at Rome I should prefer Tibur, at Tibur Rome, changing like the breeze’. The same passage is used in a similar context in Phineas Redux (1874), where the novel’s hero Phineas Finn is torn between London and Dublin (Chapter 1): When in London he had often told himself that he was sick of it, and that he would better love some country quiet life. Now Dublin was his Tibur, and the fickle one found that he could not be happy unless he were back again at Rome.



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Another repeated quotation is also from the Epistles. In The Prime Minister (1876) the Duke of Bungay pleads old age to the premier the Duke of Omnium (Plantagenet Palliser) as an excuse for not taking Cabinet office again (Chapter 76): I might perhaps add myself, were it not that I had hoped that in any event I might at length regard myself as exempt from further service. The old horse should be left to graze out his last days, ne peccet ad extremum ridendus.

This echoes Epistles 1.1.8–9, where the ageing Horace argues that he should not enter the arena of lyric poetry again: solve senescentem mature sanus equum, / ne peccet ad extremum ridendus et ilia ducat, ‘come to your senses in due time and unyoke the ageing horse, / lest he stumble at the last as an object of laughter with his flanks heaving’. In The Duke’s Children (1880), the same character makes the same allusion to the same recipient to the same purpose, this time in a letter (Chapter 22): But for myself, I am bound at last to put in the old plea with a determination that it shall be respected. Solve senescentem. It is now, if I calculate rightly, exactly fifty years since I first entered public life in obedience to the advice of Lord Grey.

The Latin quotation from one duke to another reinforces their bond of social and cultural privilege and serves to support a personal request.27 Another repeated quotation is shared with Thackeray. In The Prime Minister the narrator comments on the doomed adventurer Ferdinand Lopez as he embarks on his honeymoon (Chapter 25): It is easy for a man to say that he will banish care, so that he may enjoy to the full the delights of the moment. But this is a power which none but a savage possesses, – or perhaps an Irishman. We have learned the lesson from the divines, the philosophers, and the poets. Post equitem sedet atra cura. Thus was Ferdinand Lopez mounted high on his horse …

Post equitem sedet atra Cura, ‘dark Care sits behind the rider’ (Odes 3.1.40), is, as we saw above, Thackeray’s favourite Horatian tag. Trollope uses it again in another scene between two educated aristocrats, and for once extends the allusion. In The Duke’s Children, the Duke of Omnium converses with his unsatisfactory son Lord Silverbridge and his brother Lord Gerald on the subject of money (Chapter 25):

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‘A ten-pound note will do so much’, said Silverbridge. ‘But beyond that it ought to have no power of conferring happiness, and certainly cannot drive away sorrow. Not though you build palaces out into the deep, can that help you. You read your Horace I hope. Scandunt eodem quo dominus minae.’ ‘I recollect that’, said Gerald. ‘Black care sits behind the horseman.’

Here the younger son (perhaps intervening to save his older brother’s embarrassment) caps the father’s allusions to the same Horatian poem (Odes 3.1): ‘build palaces out into the deep’ paraphrases 3.1.34–7, while Scandunt eodem quo dominus minae (‘threats climb as high as the master’) reorders 3.1.37–8 sed timor et minae /scandunt eodem quo dominus; Gerald’s close translation picks up the same poem with an omission of only a single line. Once again appeal is made to a shared elite knowledge of Horace expected of an English gentleman (‘I hope’). A similar incident which reinforces elite solidarity is found in Chapter 33 of The Prime Minister where the gentlemanly brothers John and Arthur Fletcher converse on the hunting field (the former, a steady character, is concerned about his younger brother’s troubled emotional state): ‘Every man howls who is driven out of his ordinary course by any trouble. A man howls if he goes about frowning always’. ‘Do I frown?’ ‘Or laughing.’ ‘Do I laugh?’ ‘Or galloping over the country like a mad devil who wants to get rid of his debts by breaking his neck. Aequam memento – you remember all that, don’t you?’ ‘I remember it, but it isn’t so easy to do, is it?’

Here the older brother reminds the younger of a key Horatian lesson, citing the opening of Odes 2.3 (1–2), Aequam memento rebus in arduis / servare mentem, ‘be sure to keep a balanced mind in times of difficulty’, triggering the allusion by the poem’s traditional Latin incipit. Their joint knowledge of the poet through common elite education is here presented as a stimulus for proper gentlemanly behaviour. A parallel scene is found in Phineas Redux, where the cousins Ned and Tom Spooner discuss Tom’s (the Squire’s) unsuccessful wooing of Adelaide Palliser (Chapter 29):



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‘The jade almost made me angry’. ‘I suppose that’s the way with most of ’em. Ludit exsultim metuitque tangi.’ For Ned Spooner had himself preserved some few tattered shreds of learning from his school days. ‘You don’t remember about the filly?’ ‘Yes I do; very well’, said the Squire. ‘Nuptiarum expers. That’s what it is, I suppose. Try it again.’ The advice on the part of the cousin was genuine and unselfish.

Here the poem at issue is Odes 3.11, where the poet laments Lyde’s erotic unwillingness (9–12): quae velut latis equa trima campis ludit exsultim metuitque tangi nuptiarum expers et adhuc protervo cruda marito. Who, like a three-year-old filly on the broad plains Plays and leaps and fears to be touched Free from marriage and still too raw For a forceful mate.

Here commiseration and encouragement is expressed through shared memory of Horace between a pair of young gentlemen who naturally fall into the male perspective of the poet on the undesirable behaviour of young females; the word ‘jade’, referring strictly to a horse of poor quality (OED s.v.1.a), both anticipates the equine poem and indicates male solidarity against the other sex. The suggestion of the Latin quotations is that Adelaide is young and may come round (she doesn’t). Chapter 40 of the same novel contains perhaps Trollope’s most extensive and interesting use of an Horatian ode. Here the issue is whether the villainous Mr Bonteen is to be elevated to the Cabinet. His enemy Lady Glencora (the Duchess of Omnium) is anxious to engineer a deal to allow this in return for office for her favourite Phineas Finn: She had sworn an oath inimical to Mr Bonteen, and did not leave a stone unturned in her endeavours to accomplish it. If Phineas Finn might find acceptance, then Mr. Bonteen might be allowed to enter Elysium. A second Juno, she would allow the Romulus she hated to sit in the seats of the blessed, to be fed with nectar, and to have his name printed in the lists of unruffled Cabinet meetings, but only on conditions. Phineas Finn must be allowed a seat also, and a little nectar, though it were at the second table of the gods.

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The poem invoked here is Odes 3.3, where the goddess Juno (parallel to Lady Glencora as the consort of the supreme ruler) is presented as agreeing to the elevation to Olympus of Romulus whom she had previously opposed (32–5): illum ego lucidas inire sedes, ducere nectaris sucos et adscribi quietis ordinibus patiar deorum. He I will allow To enter the abode of light, to drink Draughts of nectar, and to be entered In the tranquil rows of the gods.

‘Seats’ and ‘nectar’ look to specific words in the original (sedes, nectaris), while inclusion in Cabinet minutes neatly updates the quasi-senatorial right to sit in the rows of Olympus. In the scene which follows the Duke of St Bungay and the political fixer Mr Gresham debate Mr Bonteen’s possible inclusion in the Cabinet, with Gresham advocating this and the Duke opposing it: ‘He got into a very unpleasant scrape when he was Financial Secretary’, said the Duke. But whither would’st thou, Muse? Unmeet For jocund lyre are themes like these. Shalt thou the talk of Gods repeat, Debasing by thy strains effete Such lofty mysteries? The absolute words of a conversation so lofty shall no longer be attempted, but it may be said that Mr. Gresham was too wise to treat as of no account the objections of such a one as the Duke of St. Bungay.

The narrator here breaks off the discussion scene using Theodore Martin’s contemporary translation (discussed in Chapter 2) of the end of the same Horatian ode (3.3.69–72): Non hoc iocosae conveniet lyrae; quo, Musa, tendis? Desine pervicax referre sermones deorum et magna modis tenuare parvis.



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Trollope thus repeats Horace’s narrative strategy of cutting away from material which does not suit his purposes, sending back the elite reader to the same Horatian ode evoked a few pages earlier. The use of a current translation perhaps makes some concession to the Latinless reader, but the linking of the two allusions is subtle and sophisticated. A final example shows how Horace is the default Latin poet for Trollope and his readers. In Phineas Finn (1869), the hero, intending to propose to Lady Laura Standish, fears the worst but is determined to bear whatever occurs (Chapter 5): He expected to be blown into fragments, to sheep-skinning in Australia, or packing preserved meats on the plains of Paraguay; but when the blowing into atoms should come, he was resolved that courage to bear the ruin should not be wanting. Then he quoted a line or two of a Latin poet, and felt himself to be comfortable.

Modern editors28 have rightly suggested that the allusion is to the famous description of the wise man undeterred by disaster at Horace Odes 3.3.7–8: si fractus illabatur orbis, / impavidum ferient ruinae, ‘if the world smashed and collapsed / its ruins would strike him unafraid’. The elite reader is left to supply both author and quotation, with ‘ruin’ (= ruinae) the main clue. Trollope’s use of Horace is thus parallel to that of Thackeray. It expresses elite male solidarity both between reader and author and between interacting characters. Horatian allusion is also used to pinpoint particular issues relevant to the world described in the Palliser novels: whether to live in London (= Rome) or elsewhere, when or when not to participate in politics, or the anxieties of public and private life. Horace is often seen as a source of moral and practical wisdom, no doubt continuing the way in which he was presented in elite education (see Chapter 2).

(v) Thomas Hardy Like Dickens, Hardy (1840–1928) did not have the benefit of a full elite classical education; like Trollope, he made up for this deficiency by private study in later life. Horace certainly formed part of his reading in the 1850s and 1860s,29 and ‘his familiarity with Horace is evident in echoes scattered right through his published writings, notes, and letters’ (Steele 2000: 62). Here I will

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discuss a few of the more prominent instances of Horatian allusion in Hardy’s novels (all of which were written in the Victorian period). In the early A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), the Hardy-like architect’s assistant Stephen Smith tragically pursues his social superior the beautiful vicar’s daughter Elfride Swancourt. In Chapter 7 of the novel the capping of a quotation from Horace serves as a social touchstone for Elfride’s father, who then wrongly assumes that Stephen shares his own elite education (Stephen has in fact studied on his own with help by correspondence from the Oxford-educated Henry Knight, a parallel for Hardy’s own classical mentor Horace Moule): Mr Swancourt was sitting with his eyes fixed on the board, but apparently thinking of other things. Half to himself he said, pending the move of Elfride: ‘Quae finis aut quod me manet stipendium?’ Stephen replied instantly: ‘Effare: iussas cum fide poenas luam’ ‘Excellent – prompt – gratifying!’ said Mr Swancourt with feeling, bringing down his hand upon the table, and making three pawns and a knight dance over their borders by the shaking. ‘I was musing on those words as applicable to a strange course I am steering – but enough of that. I am delighted with you, Mr Smith, for it is so seldom in this desert that I meet with a man who is gentleman and scholar enough to continue a quotation, however trite it may be.’

Here we have a Hardyesque twist on the idea that Horatian quotation expresses elite social solidarity: sadly, the main problem of the novel is that Stephen is not the ‘gentleman and scholar’ that he here appears to be. Though Mr Swancourt refers to the quotation as ‘trite’, it comes in fact from an unusual source in the Victorian period, the Epodes: in context (Epodes 17.36–7) the poet is protesting about his rough treatment by the witch Canidia, and saying that he will do whatever she requires (‘what end or what payment awaits me? / Tell me: I will pay the required penalty faithfully’). The original Horatian context in fact points towards the personal reason for Mr Swancourt’s quotation, ‘applicable to a strange course I am steering’, for we will soon learn in the novel that he is courting a rich local widow who becomes his second wife, a parallel for the quasi-erotic ‘bewitchment’ of the poet by Canidia in Epode 17. Horatian quotation as a sign of social status and social difference also plays a role in Tess of the D’Urbevilles (1891). There the middle-class and educated



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clergyman’s son, Angel Clare, confesses a previous erotic liaison to his newlymarried working-class bride Tess on their wedding-night, a confession soon to be capped by hers of her seduction by Alec D’Urbeville which leads disastrously and unfairly to the couple’s separation (Chapter 34): ‘Tess, as much as you, I used to wish to be a teacher of men, and it was a great disappointment to me when I found I could not enter the Church. I admired spotlessness, even though I could lay no claim to it, and hated impurity, as I hope I do now. Whatever one may think of plenary inspiration, one must heartily subscribe to these words of Paul: ‘Be thou an example– in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity’. It is the only safeguard for us poor human beings. ‘Integer vitae,’ says a Roman poet, who is strange company for St. Paul:

The man of upright life, from frailties free, Stands not in need of Moorish spear or bow.

Well, a certain place is paved with good intentions, and having felt all that so strongly, you will see what a terrible remorse it bred in me when, in the midst of my fine aims for other people, I myself fell.’

As in Trollope, ‘a Roman poet’ is enough to identify Horace, and the Latin citation is the familiar opening of Odes 1.22 (Integer vitae scelerisque purus, ‘the man who is unblemished in life and pure of crime’). Angel’s emphasis on ‘impurity’ and ‘purity’ in this passage surely looks to the unquoted Latin word purus, though its specifically sexual reference here suits St Paul better than the Horatian context where it refers to more general moral uprightness. Angel’s evocation of his clergy background and elite education serves here to stress his distance from the humble Tess in social terms, and looks forward to the dramatic separation which is about to occur. The translation of Horace’s lines here is likely to be Hardy’s own, but there is another passage where he cites another translation. In the early Desperate Remedies (1871), the hero Edward Springrove, engaged to his cousin Adelaide Hinton, attends church and sits near Cytherea Graye, for whom he still has strong feelings (Chapter 12): The congregation sang the first Psalm and came to the verse –

‘Like some fair tree which, fed by streams, With timely fruit doth bend,

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Cytherea’s lips did not move, nor did any sound escape her; but could she help singing the words in the depths of her being, although the man to whom she applied them sat at her rival’s side? … As for Edward – a little like other men of his temperament, to whom, it is somewhat humiliating to think, the aberrancy of a given love is in itself a recommendation – his sentiment, as he looked over his cousin’s book, was of a lower rank, Horatian rather than Psalmodic –

‘O, what hast thou of her, of her Whose every look did love inspire; Whose every breathing fanned my fire, And stole me from myself away!’

The neat juxtaposition of the scriptural and pagan texts here, both in shortline quatrains, recalls the deployment of both St Paul and Horace together in Angel Clare’s confession in Tess. The Horatian lines are a version of Odes 4.13.18–20: Quid habes illius, illius, quae spirabat amores, quae me surpuerat mihi …

In Hardy’s own edition of Horace these English lines are pencilled in and attributed to Congreve,30 but no version of Odes 4.13 is known by the latter. Comparison with the original context shows a witty reworking: in his ode Horace is pointing out that Lyce has become old and no longer has the charms of her youth which once carried him away, whereas Edward seems rather to use the lines to engage in an unfavourable comparison between his cousinfiancée (whom he does not love) and his former beloved Cytherea (whom he still loves and will eventually marry). The social status of classical learning is a key issue in Jude the Obscure (1895) in which the would-be scholar Jude Fawley fails with tragic consequences to overcome his poor background in order to study at Christminster (Oxford). Early on we find him Dr Livingstone-like studying his Latin texts as he delivers bread from his country bakery (Book I Chapter 5):



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As soon as the horse had learnt the road and the houses at which he was to pause awhile, the boy, seated in front, would slip the reins over his arm, ingeniously fix open, by means of a strap attached to the tilt, the volume he was reading, spread the dictionary on his knees, and plunge into the simpler passages from Caesar, Virgil, or Horace, as the case might be, in his purblind stumbling way, and with an expenditure of labour that would have made a tender-hearted pedagogue shed tears; yet somehow getting at the meaning of what he read, and divining rather than beholding the spirit of the original, which often to his mind was something else than that which he was taught to look for. The only copies he had been able to lay hands on were old Delphin editions, because they were superseded, and therefore cheap. But, bad for idle schoolboys, it did so happen that they were passably good for him. The hampered and lonely itinerant conscientiously covered up the marginal readings, and used them merely on points of construction, as he would have used a comrade or tutor who should have happened to be passing by. And though Jude may have had little chance of becoming a scholar by these rough and ready means, he was in the way of getting into the groove he wished to follow.

Like Stephen Smith, Jude is getting his classical learning through the hard route of self-study rather than elite educational institutions. The ‘old Delphin’ editions he uses recall the Delphin edition of Horace owned by the young Hardy for self-study in the 1860s.31 In the same chapter, it becomes clear that Horace is one of the authors he is reading: On a day when Fawley was getting quite advanced, being now about sixteen, and had been stumbling through the ‘Carmen Saeculare’, on his way home, he found himself to be passing over the high edge of the plateau by the Brown House. The light had changed, and it was the sense of this which had caused him to look up. The sun was going down, and the full moon was rising simultaneously behind the woods in the opposite quarter. His mind had become so impregnated with the poem that, in a moment of the same impulsive emotion which years before had caused him to kneel on the ladder, he stopped the horse, alighted, and glancing round to see that nobody was in sight, knelt down on the roadside bank with open book. He turned first to the shiny goddess, who seemed to look so softly and critically at his doings, then to the disappearing luminary on the other hand, as he began: ‘Phoebe silvarumque potens Diana!’ The horse stood still till he had finished the hymn, which Jude repeated under the sway of a polytheistic fancy that he would never have thought of humouring in broad daylight.

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The citation here in Latin perhaps shows how far Jude has got in his studies; his moving application of his reading to the rising of the real moon shows his internalization of the text, but a career as elite quoter of Latin is never going to be his. This chapter’s survey has shown the widespread presence of Horatian allusion in the major fiction of the Victorian age, just as Chapters 3 and 4 have shown its broad diffusion in Victorian verse; it is striking that Horace is the favourite classical author of both George Eliot and Trollope. In general, Horatian allusion serves as a self-conscious marker of social class, whether for author, fictional character or implied reader: the capacity to make and recognize references to the Latin poet, a key part of Victorian elite education, is consistently presented as an identifier of gentlemanly status. In some cases we find subtle and well-worked allusions to Horatian poems which take us back to the originals; but here again, these serve to give pleasure to readers equipped with the appropriate knowledge as well as to demonstrate the author’s literary skill.

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This volume has sought to show that Horatian quotation and allusion lie at the heart of the cultural identity of the elite Victorian gentleman. In this brief epilogue I give a few examples of how Horace has been adapted to more modern scenarios in British culture, and how Horatian reception may be said to have been to some degree ‘democratized’ in more recent literary contexts.1 In the period 1900 to 1930 Horace is still the traditional poet of elite values. In ‘Laudabunt alii’ (1907) the Empire poet Sir Henry Newbolt could produce an updated version of Odes 1.7, evoking in the final mythical story his fellowDevonian Sir Francis Drake’s heroic circumnavigation of the globe instead of the post-Homeric tale of Teucer’s foundation of Salamis. Similarly traditional in Horatian reception in general is the poetry of the First World War; despite Wilfred Owen’s famously ironic quotation of Odes 3.2.13 dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, ‘it is sweet and noble to die for one’s country’ as ‘the old lie’ in ‘Dulce et decorum’ (1917–18),2 the same line is much more often echoed with straightforward patriotic purpose in other contemporary poets.3 And though Rudyard Kipling could affectionately parody Horace’s style in the splendid ‘A Translation’ of 1917, the story ‘Regulus’ in which the parody appears points to the serious moral and political lessons of Horace Odes 3.5 in a wartime context.4 In the poets of British Modernism, Horace, though still the property of an elite classical education, can be used to reflect on the problems of the modern world in a more complex way. In ‘Out on the lawn I lie in bed’ (1933), W. H. Auden adapts the Horatian sympotic ode to the fragile contemporary world of the 1930s. The poem recalls an occasion when Auden was teaching classics at The Downs School, Malvern, in 1933, where he had a quasi-religious experience sitting with colleagues on the lawn of the school’s attractive main house:5

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Equal with colleagues in a ring I sit on each calm evening Enchanted as the flowers The opening light draws out of hiding With all its gradual dove-like pleading, Its logic and its powers … … And, gentle, do not care to know, Where Poland draws her Eastern bow, What violence is done; Nor ask what doubtful act allows Our freedom in this English house, Our picnics in the sun. Soon, soon, through dykes of our content The crumpling flood will force a rent And, taller than a tree, Hold sudden death before our eyes Whose river dreams long hid the size And vigours of the sea.

The second stanza quoted here is multiply Horatian. Its order to the reader, addressed with the early modern ‘gentle’,6 picks up the beginning of Horace’s ode to Quinctius (Odes 2.11.1–4) in which the addressee is asked ‘not to ask what the warlike Cantabrian and Scythian is planning with the Adriatic between us’; the phrase ‘Eastern bow’ looks both to Horace’s use of ‘Eastern’ in such contexts of potential frontier threat (cf. Odes 1.35.31) and of the bow as a symbolic weapon of Rome’s enemies (Odes 3.8.23). In both poems warlike stirrings in distant parts are presented as temporarily dismissed for the sake of current pleasure, though Auden’s version has a typically dark and ironic sense of the precarious and dubious status of that momentary peace. The flood imagery of the last stanza quoted (perhaps thinking of the nearby River Severn) may also be Horatian in origin, recalling the flood of the Tiber described in Odes 1.2 which like Auden’s flood functions as a symbol of larger political disorder and presents the forces of the sea forcefully and destructively invading the land.7 Thus Horatian sympotic contentment is juxtaposed here with Horatian awareness of the larger and darker political background.



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A much later poem by Auden, ‘The Horatians’ (1968), forms one of a number of his poems which show a close interest in Horatian stanzaic metre, especially Alcaics.8 Here Auden imagines a modern Horace and his ilk as countrymen, owning ‘a farm near Tivoli / or a Radnorshire village’, points out the Church of England as the modern Maecenas as patron of poets, ‘how many have / found in the Anglican Church / your Maecenas who enabled / a life without cumber’, and concludes with stanzas admiring Horatian moderation and resignation: You thought well of your Odes, Flaccus, and believed they Would live, but knew, and have taught your descendants to Say with you: ‘As makers go, Compared with Pindar or any Of the great foudroyant masters who don’t ever Amend, we are, for all our polish, of little Stature, and, as human lives, Compared with authentic martyrs, Like Regulus, of no account. We can only Do what it seems to us we were made for, look at This world with a happy eye, But from a sober perspective.’

Here with allusions to Odes 4.2 (where Horace contrasts his own poetry with the grander style of Pindar) and Odes 3.5 (where Regulus is presented as a great patriotic martyr), Auden seems to class himself with Horace and his descendants as careful poetic craftsmen and thoughtful observers of the world, rather than brash and ambitious writers keen to make an impact. Another major British poet of the 1930s concerned with Horace was Louis MacNeice, like Auden a teacher of classics in his early career.9 MacNeice produced some interesting translations of individual Horatian odes, especially his version of Odes 1.4 (1936–8) in quatrains, from which I cite the first stanza: Winter to Spring: the west wind melts the frozen rancour, The windlass drags to sea the thirsty hull: There is no longer welcome to beast or fire to ploughman, The field removes the frost-cap from its skull.

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Soluitur acris hiems grata vice veris et Favoni trahuntque siccas machinae carinas, ac neque iam stabulis gaudet pecus aut arator igni nec prata canis albicant pruinis.

Here the sharp, personifying imagery (‘rancour’, ‘thirsty hull’, ‘frost-cap from its skull’) is effectively modern, but sometimes also looks back closely and playfully to the Horatian original: ‘rancour’ rendering acris, and ‘thirsty’ rendering siccas clearly pun on the various senses of the Latin words. Like Auden, MacNeice turned to Horace at the end of his career.10 In ‘Memoranda to Horace’ (1962), like Auden in ‘The Horatians’, he links modern and ancient poets: both have a realistic attitude to life, and both know when to pursue private pleasure and retirement. The poem begins with doubt about whether Horace can be appreciated in the modern future, but then concludes by echoing Horace’s own self-immortalization from Odes 3.30 in reasserting his permanence: Yet your image ‘More lasting than bronze’ will do: for neither Sulphuric nor other acid can damage, Let alone destroy, your Aeolian measures Transmuted to Latin – aere perennius.

Amongst other British Modernists, the Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting (1900–85), at the start of his career a protégé of Ezra Pound, has many Horatian qualities; we may note the significant titles of his collections The First Book of Odes, 1965, and The Second Book of Odes, incorporated in his Collected Poems of 1968.11 His carefully crafted brief nature poems strongly recall Horatian lyric, for example the early (1924) first item in The First Book of Odes: Weeping oaks grieve, chestnuts raise mournful candles. Sad is spring perpetuate, sad to trace mortalities never changing.

The link with Horatian spring odes (1.4, translated by MacNeice, see above, and 4.7, translated by Housman, see Chapter 2) is irresistible, and the personification of grieving oaks seems to recall the ‘labouring woods’ of the Soracte ode (Odes 1.9.3, see Chapter 1). Bunting also wrote several translations of



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Horatian odes, including a lively condensed version of Odes 1.13 (from 1931), of which I cite the opening followed by the original (1.13.1–8): Please stop gushing about his pink neck smooth arms and so forth, Dulcie; it makes me sick, bad-tempered, silly: makes me blush. Dribbling sweat on my chops proves I’m on tenterhooks. Cum tu, Lydia, Telephi cervicem roseam, cerea Telephi laudas bracchia, vae, meum fervens difficili bile tumet iecur. Tunc nec mens mihi nec color certa sede manet, umor et in genas furtim labitur, arguens quam lentis penitus macerer ignibus.

The stark physicality of Horace’s symptoms of jealousy are amusingly rendered in modernist idiom, and the substitution of ‘Dulcie’ for the original’s ‘Lydia’ could allude to ‘Glycera’, which it translates, another erotic object in Horatian erotic odes (e.g. 1.30.3, 1.33.2). Much later (1971) Bunting also wrote a version of Odes 2.14 (to Postumus) which again frames the Horatian point with firm physicality and (this time) in a Horatian quatrain format (I cite the opening stanzas of each poem): You cant grip years, Postume, that ripple away nor hold back wrinkles, and soon now, age, nor can you tame death … Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, labuntur anni nec pietas moram rugis et instanti senectae adferet indomitaeque morti ...

‘Ripple away’ (~labuntur), wrinkles (~rugis) and ‘nor can you tame’ (~indomitae) point to a closer rendering of the original than in the earlier version of 1.13. In the great generation of poets who emerged in Ireland in the 1960s, Michael Longley, well known for his brilliant lyric miniaturizations of Homer, has applied something of the same reductionist technique to Horace’s Ars

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Poetica in his poems ‘After Horace’ and ‘The Mad Poet’.12 Here he has juxtaposed witty, brief versions of the beginning and the end of Horace’s longest poem which combine translation with ironic commentary. I cite the first stanza of ‘After Horace’ followed by Ars Poetica 1–5 and a translation: We post-modernists can live with that human head Stuck on a horse’s neck, or the plastering of multiColoured feathers over the limbs of assorted animals (So that what began on top as a gorgeous woman Tapers off cleverly into the tail of a black fish). Humano capiti ceruicem pictor equinam iungere si uelit et uarias inducere plumas undique collatis membris, ut turpiter atrum desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne, spectatum admissi, risum teneatis, amici? If a painter wished to join a horse’s head To a human neck, and clothe with feathers Limbs gathered from all sources, so that a woman Fair-formed on top should end in the ugliness of a dark fish, Would you, if let in to view, restrain your laughter, my friends?

Seamus Heaney’s ‘Anything Can Happen’ presents an adaptation in Horatianstyle quatrains of Odes 1.34. This marks the events of 11 September 2001, with a clear allusion to the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. I cite the middle of the poem13 with the relevant part of the Horatian original (1.34.12–16): Anything can happen, the tallest towers Be overturned, those in high places daunted, Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one, Setting it down bleeding on the next. … valet ima summis mutare et insignem attenuat deus, obscura promens; hinc apicem rapax Fortuna cum stridore acuto sustulit, hic posuisse gaudet.



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The rendering is close but with some original twists; the more specific but crucial ‘towers’ is added (the original refers to summis, ‘highest things’, rendered ‘the tallest things’ in Heaney’s earlier version),14 while Horace’s reference to a deity (deus) is taken out. Horace’s poem begins with the portent of lightning coming out of a clear sky, reasserting for him the surprising and supreme power of the traditional gods. Heaney has noted how the attacks of 9/11 led him to read Horace’s poem about tremendous force from the sky with new appreciation, exemplifying the function of poetry ‘to bring us to our senses about what is going on inside and outside ourselves’ (Heaney 2004: 14), and encapsulating ‘the shock-and-awe factor in the Horace poem matched what I and everybody else was feeling’ (O’Driscoll 2008: 424). Like his contemporary Tony Harrison,15 Heaney is well aware of the capacity of classical literature to engage fittingly with the extreme events and problems of the modern world for which it provides striking parallels owing to the permanence of the human condition. Another Heaney contemporary, Derek Mahon, born in Belfast, has also engaged in Horatian translation, with an updating of Odes 1.11 entitled ‘How to Live’,16 which ends as follows: The days are more fun than the years which pass us by while we discuss them. Act with zest one day at a time, and never mind the rest.

This is a witty version of the original lines (1.11.7–8 dum loquimur, fugerit inuida / aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero, ‘while we speak, envious time / will have escaped; harvest the day, and believe as little as you can that the next one will come’). Horace is also employed to meditate on contemporary events in Donald Davie’s poem ‘Wombwell on Strike’,17 written in an Horatian-style stanzaic metre. Here Davie, on a railway journey which takes him past striking coalminers in 1984, meditates like Auden and MacNeice on Horace’s poetic qualities. He presents the Roman poet’s ‘streaming style’ as a way of avoiding difficult issues:18 though Horace is seen as ‘not / a temporizer’, his ‘sudden and smooth transitions’ and invitation to ‘Press on’ when the topic gets too sensitive indicate a way to avoid political problems like those of the current Yorkshire miners’ strike; but Davie, the son of a Yorkshire miner himself, cannot follow Horace’s lead all the way:

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Yours was solid advice, Horace, and centuries have endorsed it; but over this tunnel large policemen grapple the large men my sons have become.

This use of Horace by Davie, a working-class boy who went to the University of Cambridge via grammar school, can be seen both as evidence of his elite education and an attempt to apply Horatian reception to non-elite social issues. A similarly Northern voice is that of Maureen Almond from Teesside, one of the few woman poets who have appropriated Horace, whose especially homosocial world has perhaps particularly deterred female interest;19 she has little Latin and works with translations and scholarly collaboration, a common model for modern poetic versions of classical texts.20 Her 2004 collection The Works vividly relocates the grit, wit and sense of precarious existence of Horace’s Epodes to the working-class Teesside of her youth. Take for example ‘Trafalgar Street Men’, her version of Epode 2, the quasi-ironic praise of country life, transformed in the voice of cynical and grasping landlords urging the joys of the steel-works as the default local employer for youth: ‘It’s a lucky man who can follow his dad into the works, tread in his footsteps, use his know-how and not get into debt. Why would you need an education or little bits of paper? You won’t be buying and selling shares or knocking at Number Ten …’

Similarly, her 2009 collection Chasing the Ivy uses versions of the first book of the Odes to provide an ironic commentary on the world of the contemporary aspiring poet trying to break into the bourgeois literary club. See for example her version of the famous Pyrrha ode (1.5), recontextualized as ‘Ode to the Possible Future Laureate (and his current hot girlfriend)’, of which I quote the opening: Who is she making up to now, that long-haired redhead,



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that blarney-kissed girl, that temptress in the red dress? And in a jealous rage, will he too, end up firing her big, hard lines along with her mascara?

Her new collection, Affectionately Yours (Almond 2016) brings to new life the special qualities of the second book of Horace’s Odes, its emphasis on affection and friendship, its mature wisdom and humour, and its focus on the need for moderation and for recognizing the limits of human existence. Her version of Odes 2.6, ‘To The Ends of the Earth, Bri’, neatly turns Horace’s meditations on places of retirement in Greece and Italy to analogous locations in England and Wales: Bri, I know you’d go with me to the ends of the earth; go south, which isn’t burdened by the name cultural desert; to Cumbria’s fathomless lakes, but I want Teesside, foundered by iron men, to be my place of pension. I’m tired, Bri; wind down the steadies,21 don’t renew our passports, close the gates. And if I can’t have the Tees, I’ll settle for the Llyn, for knowing sheep on wild hills, for slate; for the trickling water of the Daron, ruled by Darona.

Horatian reception thus has a vivid life in the English and Irish poetry of the twenty-first century. Access to Horace no longer requires an elite male education or close knowledge of Latin, and can belong to the periphery as well as the metropole (note the Northern origins of Bunting, Davie and Almond, as well as the Irish Longley, Heaney and Mahon). Not that the metropolitan elite is unHoratian: each year the members of The Horatian Society and their guests meet in a prestigious London location such as the Old Hall of Lincoln’s Inn to celebrate the poet with a high-class dinner and speeches, usually one from an Horatian scholar and one from a lay fan. In 2014, the assembly included several very distinguished lawyers, a former Permanent Secretary in

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the Civil Service, a former chairman of a clearing bank, and a former Foreign Secretary, showing that the modern English elite still has some appreciation of the poet.22 But in general, knowledge of Horace is no longer a distinguishing and excluding mark of gentlemanly status, itself thankfully an outmoded concept. This can only be good for Horace and the broader appreciation of his poetry, which can continue to take its merited place in the history of world literature.

Envoi Post/Face to Classical Inter/Faces series, 2 November 2016 The genesis of this series came during a productively inebriated lunch in London’s Savile Row exactly twenty years ago in 1997, when Duckworth was still Duckworth and its Classics list was managed by visionary editor and director Deborah Blake. At that lunch, your series editors, Paul Cartledge (Cambridge and still Cambridge) and Susanna Braund (then Royal Holloway, since then Yale, Stanford and now UBC), were lamenting the lack of venues for more experimental scholarship written in a strongly personal voice and dealing with the intersection and interaction between classical antiquity and modernity. We thought that the imminent arrival of the new millennium presented an ideal opportunity to reflect on the interface between the classical world and the contemporary scene, and so we proposed a radical new series which would offer a venue for the exploration of ways in which classical ideas and material have been appropriated into and have shaped the modern experience. We planned to seek out as contributors both established experts and younger scholars who would combine accessibility with rigour in relatively short books without an overwhelming scholarly apparatus. We wanted to encourage articulation of highly personal views which would invite and provoke engagement. Deborah Blake and fellow directors Robin Baird Smith and John Betts gave us the go-ahead, and we launched the series in 2000 to 2001 with several lively volumes designed to offer highly readable provocations to academics and the general public alike. The title Classical Inter/Faces, with the forward slash, was fundamental to our initial vision of the series as something alternative and pushing the envelope. The format and distinctive cover design were Deborah Blake’s contributions to enhance the appeal of the series. When in 2012

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Bloomsbury took over the Duckworth list from Overlook, Classics editors, first Charlotte Loveridge and now Alice Wright willingly embraced our vision. We are most grateful for that. Our launch volumes covered an exciting spectrum of ideas, texts and eras. Since then we continued actively to recruit authors capable of thinking outside the box and producing provocative volumes. We believe we succeeded in that aim. Sadly, a few wonderful ideas never saw the light, but we are happy to have brought to the public a total of fourteen titles, including the present one. We here offer a retrospect on the series as our envoi.

Lorna Hardwick Translating Words, Translating Cultures (2000) Professor Hardwick, now emeritus of the UK’s Open University, is the doyenne of Classical reception studies, founder and founding editor of Classical Receptions Journal and author of a standard bibliographical guide to the field (Greece & Rome New Surveys in the Classics 33, 2003), published only three years later than this book, which indeed launched the Classical Inter/Faces series as a whole. Her title more or less encapsulates what the series, not just her book, is about, and her inclusion in the series was considered a matter of course then, as it seems perfectly just in retrospect now. Translating Words, Translating Cultures combines theoretical analysis (translation as cultural politics; metaphors of image, window and dissection; postcolonialism) with empirical and practical illustrations (Derek Walcott’s Philoctete, Brian Friel’s play Translations, obviously), and historical retrospection (nineteenth-century reverence and subversion) with contemporary cultural critique, and does so brilliantly. ‘Transformative power’, as one reviewer (Susan Bassnett) put it, is indeed what this book achieves, as a key part of the reinvention of classical studies for new generations of readers.

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W. R. Johnson Lucretius in the Modern World (2000) We were thrilled to recruit Ralph Johnson, now Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, to contribute one of the launch volumes to the series. As one of the giants of the profession and someone who had guided many of us to challenge accepted mantras, we felt he would set things moving in just the right direction. We offered him a free choice of topic, and he told us that he wanted to write about the crucial role played by Lucretius’ Epicurean epic poem, On the Nature of Things, in the modern era. His Lucretius in the Modern World explores major relevant texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Dryden, Diderot, Voltaire, Tennyson, Santayana) and speculates on why Lucretius and the ancient scientific tradition he championed became marginalized in the twentieth century. The book closes with a discussion of what value the poem has for students of science and technology in the new century: what advice it has to offer us about how to go about reinventing our machines and our morality. The book is a refreshing and stimulating read from someone passionate to rehabilitate an important poet and text.

Lillian Doherty Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth (2001) Professor Lillian Doherty (University of Maryland) boldly tackles two enormous topics in this slender volume, both ‘myth’ and ‘gender’. She sets out to explore encounters between the two areas and she allows a dialogue to unfold between ‘popular’ and ‘scholarly’ approaches. One central tenet is that classical myths are continually being reworked in ways that speak vividly to our world, because they are ‘good to think with’. Chapter 1 on ‘Myth and Gender Systems’ features the Demeter-Persephone story while exploring handbooks of myth such as those by Edith Hamilton and Thomas Bulfinch alongside 1960s popular fiction. Chapter 2 on ‘Psychological Approaches’ tackles Freud and Jung on Oedipus and Perseus and the Olympian succession narratives. Chapter 3 on ‘Myth and Ritual’ explores a range of scholarly positions from the work of Jane Harrison and the

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‘Cambridge School’ through to developments later in the twentieth century by scholars including Walter Burkert and René Girard. In Chapter 4 on ‘Myth as Charter’ the main issue is the ‘Goddess movement’, whose adherents believe that prehistoric culture was structured on peaceful, matriarchal lines with a Great Goddess as the focus of worship. Chapter 5 on ‘Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Approaches’ studies readings of myths including those of Oedipus, Prometheus and Pandora. In Chapter 6 on ‘Myth, Folklore, and Popular Culture’, Doherty stresses the value of the study of popular culture as a point of comparison between elite and popular texts. The book is essentially driven by Doherty’s feminist agenda. It covers an enormous amount of ground with a light touch and it admirably fulfilled the brief of providing material that could appeal to the layperson and the beginning student as well as to the scholarly expert.

David Konstan Pity Transformed (2001) How does it feel? Nobel laureate Bob Dylan’s question has prompted more than one work by the polymathic David Konstan (formerly of Brown University, now New York University), who was as usual well ahead of the game in treating emotion as a respectable, indeed urgent subject for close, comparative analysis. Psychology, biology, anthropology, philosophy and literary-critical studies are all drawn upon in this engaging and engaged book. After situating pity as an emotion and contrasting it with compassion, Konstan studies the ways in which victors treated the conquered in a chapter on pity and power. Divine pity, before and after the coming of Christianity, is then explored at length, and the book closes with a detailed appendix examining Aristotle’s ever-controversial views of pity and pain in Rhetoric and Poetics. Throughout there is an emphasis on the evaluative and cognitive aspects of pity as an emotion, an emphasis which it is persuasively argued corresponds to that of the Greeks and Romans themselves.

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Melissa Lane Plato’s Progeny. How Plato and Socrates Still Captivate the Modern Mind (2001) Like her Cambridge doctoral supervisor, Myles Burnyeat, Professor Lane (now of Princeton University) is firmly of the view that Plato and his ‘Socrates’ properly understood remain good to think with. An apologia for her own vita philosophica? Indeed so, but much more than that too. The organizing problematic of this highly original study is how the individual and his or her philosophy stand in relation to the demands of the city and the assumptions of culture. To explicate that, Lane begins by asking who Socrates – or ‘Socrates’ – was. One key mistake to avoid, she contends, is to segregate analytically the civic Socrates from the Socrates of the ethical traditions, both ancient and modern. (A useful complement to this book is Lane’s provocative essay printed in the Times Literary Supplement of 13 December 2002: ‘Socrates had it coming: A Martin Luther King? A Thoreau? A Gandhi?’.) She then explores Plato the philosopher in a technical sense: his forms and other putatively metaphysical foundations. Special emphasis is placed upon the interpretation and reception of this Plato by Nietzsche and his followers and opponents. Plato is then turned upside down, as it were, and explored as a philosopher of politics, whether totalitarian, communist or idealist. Works by members of the Stefan George Circle may well not have been especially familiar to Anglophone readers, but Lane shows that they are integral to a proper, non-compartmentalized understanding of this most elusive and difficult of political thinkers. In short, as one reviewer correctly noted, the book demonstrates a magisterial command of the modern as well as ancient interpretation of Plato. Readers who wish to pursue Professor Lane’s own thinking would be well advised to consult her recent Greek and Roman Political Ideas (2014).

Rush Rehm Radical Theatre: Greek Tragedy in the Modern World (2003) Already well known as a drama producer and director of modern as well as ancient plays, and author of Greek Tragic Theater (1992), Rush Rehm (Professor of Theater and Performing Studies and of Classics at Stanford University) was,

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we thought, just the person to try to explain why ancient Greek tragedies still exercise such a powerful grip on modern audiences, despite the yawning gulf between the respective cultures and societies involved in their production and receptions. We also thought that he might offer an impassioned exploration of how Greek tragedy can still today help modern audiences to face the problems – some not altogether alien from those of the fifth century bce, most very desperately foreign – of their contemporary world. He did not disappoint us at all. Many ancient plays are either referred to or quoted, in the service of engagement with five main areas of concern: the physical circumstances of performance; the emotional charge of fear (an overlap here with Konstan), fate and agency, ideology, and time. For Rehm the value of extant Greek tragedy is that it tells hard truths, its form is essential to understanding its subtlety and power, and it is rooted in the ancient community and natural environment. To one reviewer the book seemed to have been written ‘in a white heat’. Whether or not that was so, it certainly turned out as it was intended to be – a provocation rather than a salve.

Geoffrey Lloyd Delusions of Invulnerability: Wisdom and Morality in Ancient Greece, China and Today (2005) Delusions of grandeur – French folie de grandeur – is a cant phrase that trips off the tongue and onto the page. But delusions of … invulnerability? That’s somehow something altogether more mettlesome, and especially so when coupled, seemingly oxymoronically, with wisdom and morality. Readers of Professor Sir Geoffrey Lloyd’s earlier works, however, will not have been amazed or fazed by the conjunction, since this work continues a series in which he sometimes solo, sometimes in collaboration, first and principally compares (and contrasts) ancient Greek and classical Chinese cultures and then, secondly and secondarily, draws salutary lessons for students (in the broadest sense) attempting to cope with the rigours of life in the modern West. Lloyd, now Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Science at the University of Cambridge, is at bottom a philosopher and historian of science, and especially a contextualist historian of the generation, reception and modulation of governing ideas and ideals from within the respective

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governing orders and classes, whether politically savvy intellectuals or (mere) bureaucrats. Learned elites and their audiences are put under the microscope, and their models for living or, rather, living better are minutely scrutinized, from Greek Pythagoreans or Epicureans to Chinese philosophers propagating and pursuing their versions of dao, the right because allegedly natural way. In the end the Chinese come off rather better from this comparison within these specified parameters: their harmonizing of wisdom with morality and especially political ethics contrasts strongly with the Greek thinkers’ desire for but also fear of personal as well as political freedom. But it is we in the modern West who come off worst of all. Genuinely deluded as to the possibility, let alone wisdom of consumerist self-realization, and about our supposed invulnerability to the slings and arrows of outrageous market mentality, we are invited to heed the potentially corrective value of ancient Greek and Chinese traditions in such fundamental matters as the organization of learning, the credentials of learned elites and the transmission across the generations – unaided or unhampered by electronic ‘social’ media – of social and political roles.

Vassilis Lambropoulos The Tragic Idea (2006) Tragedy is perhaps always with us. But, as Rehm’s earlier volume already made clear, ‘the tragic’ (das Tragische) can vary pretty drastically from period to period, and culture to culture. Professor Lambropoulos (now the Cavafy Professor at the University of Michigan) had the deceptively simple idea of offering extracts, sometimes quite short, from the works of thirty-three critics, philosophers and other thinkers about tragedy who were writing between 1672 and 1935, adding a page or two of commentary, and prefacing the whole with an introduction designed to show that, and how, ideas of tragedy have expanded beyond their original, ancient Greek theatrical origins and have taken tragedy into a bewildering variety of early-modern and modern contexts. These recontextualized ideas are shown to be the product of intellectual changes of which many are ‘steeped in’ Germanic Idealism (hence das Tragische). It was particularly pleasing that a book written in English by a US-based Greek should have received one of its most substantial reviews from

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an Italian scholar writing – in Italian – in a US-based online review journal (http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2006/2006-12-28.html).

Nancy Shumate Nation, Empire, Decline: Studies in Rhetorical Continuity from the Romans to the Modern Era (2006) Professor Nancy Shumate of Smith College rises to the series brief to be provocative in her heterodox view that there are transhistorical categories of social and political activity. She argues that the rhetoric of empire and nation, which provided for Rome the essential building blocks in its self-conception, actually constituted the ‘templates’ for nationalistic and imperial rhetoric of the modern period. She examines the often overlapping discourses of nationalism and imperialism, along with related ideas of social decline, which have been central in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo–European views of the world. She then offers four readings of Latin literary texts to show that the templates for these ‘modern’ discourses were forged in their essentials by the early Roman imperial period. Chapters 1 and 4 tackle some of Juvenal’s Satires, Chapter 2 takes another look at Horace’s ‘Roman Odes’ and Chapter 3 deals with the Germania of Tacitus. For example, in Chapter 3 Shumate explores how Tacitus’ Germania reprises the familiar ‘noble savage’ topos: the German barbarian is a mirror of Roman imperial society that serves to reaffirm norms that are perceived to be under threat. She introduces comparanda from British texts of the High Empire: Darwin, Kipling, and the early field reports of Winston Churchill, which are not so well known. Throughout, Shumate challenges us to revise our notions of the relevance of Classics by directing us to contemporary critical work on nationalism, imperialism and othering.

Robert Garland Celebrity in Antiquity: From Media Tarts to Tabloid Queens (2006) Ought a serious academic monograph series with some pretensions to inclusive comprehensiveness – surely not folie de grandeur – descend to the level of ‘celebrity culture’? Well, yes, it should – and we make no bones about

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or apology for inviting Professor Robert Garland of Colgate University in upper New York State, more used to writing about the Peiriaeus port city of Athens or constructions of physical deformity in Greece and Rome, to get down and dirty with this peculiarly twenty-first-century manifestation of what used to be called, more genteelly, popular culture in the ancient Graeco– Roman world. Actually, Garland’s self-appointed remit is far wider than his subtitle might suggest. If Alcibiades was indeed a media tart, and Cleopatra and Theodora in their diverse ways tabloid queens, that still leaves the author plenty of wiggle room for Alexander the Great (a royal icon), Julius Caesar (consummate populist politician), Olympic victors (sports stars), Socrates (celebrity guru), Pythagoras (religious charismatic), and a variety of showbiz stars. In comparative sociolinguistic perspective, of course the very fact that the word ‘celebrity’ has mutated from its original abstract sense (meaning the fact of being famous/celebrated) into being concretely ‘a celebrity’ (a generic term for a kind of goldfish-bowl luminary) is revealing enough. But placing antiquity under this peculiarly modern spotlight yields always entertaining, often genuinely illuminating insights.

Victoria Emma Pagán Rome and the Literature of Gardens (2006) ‘The garden is an invitation to explore and renegotiate the self against culture’, writes Professor Victoria Pagán of the University of Florida in the introduction to her book, Rome and the Literature of Gardens (2006). This central aperçu made this project a must for our series. And accordingly, Professor Pagán proposes the garden as a site of transformation and transgression and she explores images of gardens from a kaleidoscope of genres, especially those that the Romans made their own: satire, annalistic history, and autobio­ graphy. Under this rubric Professor Pagán offers new readings of Columella’s De Re Rustica, Horace’s Satires, Tacitus’ Annals and the Confessions of Saint Augustine. By yoking together Latin literature and garden history she bridges the gap between material culture and cultural history. In keeping with the approach of this series, her concluding chapter examines the reincarnation of the concerns of the ancient texts in the modern world in select texts: a poem

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by Carolyn Forché, a novel by J. M. Coetzee and Tom Stoppard’s plays, Arcadia and The Invention of Love. Alongside her work on Roman conspiracy and on Tacitus, Professor Pagán remains concerned with the cultural significance of gardens. Since writing her Classical Inter/Faces book she has co-edited a collection called Disciples of Flora: Gardens in History and Culture and she plans a further book on the relationship between the rhetoric of Roman gardens and environmental sustainability. She finds that the way the Romans talked about gardens and the natural world reveals deep patterns of thought that still speak to us. It is exciting for us to see a book commissioned from a relatively junior scholar shaping her mature career.

Sarah Spence Figuratively Speaking: Rhetoric and Culture from Quintilian to the Twin Towers (2007) The titles of Sally Spence’s earlier books – Rhetorics of Reason and Desire: Vergil, Augustine, and the Troubadours (1988) and Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century (1996) – on their own hint at why we wanted to recruit her to Classical Inter/Faces. Professor Spence, now Emeritus at the University of Georgia, fulfilled our expectations in delivering a polemical book that makes rhetoric a purveyor of truth in the form of particular figures of speech which, she argues, provide touchstones for different eras from Cicero to the present: in other words, figurative speech – using language to do more than name – allows language to articulate concerns central to each cultural moment. In this study, Spence identifies the embedded tropes for four periods in Western culture: Roman antiquity, the High Middle Ages, the Age of Montaigne, and our present, post-9/11 moment. In so doing, she reasserts the fundamental importance of rhetoric, the art of speaking persuasively. She starts in the present post-9/11 era with a chapter entitled ‘Weapons of Mass Creation: Repetition versus Replication’, or ‘It’s Déjà vu all over again’, with discussions of Baudrillard, Woody Allen, the movie Memento, Umberto Eco, Fox News [sic] and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Chapter 2 takes us back to Roman antiquity, in ‘Looking Back: Figures of Speech and Thought in the Roman World’, where she shows how her argument works for Cicero, Quintilian, Virgil and Ovid. Chapter 3 takes us to the medieval era with ‘Dwelling on a

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Point: Rhetoric and Love in the Middle Ages’. The final chapter, ‘The Chiastic Page: The Rhetoric of Montaigne’s Essais’, moves the discussion on to the sixteenth century. The selection of an Eadweard Muybridge stop-motion photographic sequence for the cover drives home Spence’s central point about the modern cultural fascination with the figure of repetition.

Karelisa V. Hartigan Performance and Cure: Drama and Healing in Ancient Greece and Contemporary America (2009) In this innovative book Karelisa Hartigan, now Emeritus Professor at the University of Florida, ranges widely through the fields of archaeology, medicine, theatre and epigraphy in her study of the relationship between theatrical performance and individual convalescence in the Asklepieion of Ancient Greece and the modern American hospital. The BMCR reviewer rightly says that the book ‘blazes a new trail for scholarly exploration’ (http:// bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2010/2010-02-54.html). The central thesis of the book is that drama was regularly performed in the theatres built within or adjacent to the ancient sanctuaries of Asklepios. Hartigan, professional classicist and amateur actor, argues that a pageant which showed the enactment of the god healing prompted the dream therapy that patients experienced at the sanctuary while they slept in the dormitory at the Asklepieion. Hartigan’s material is informed by her first-hand experience with healing as a member of the Arts-in-Medicine Program at Shands Hospital at the University of Florida: in performing improvisational scenes at the bedside or in a community space, she witnessed how the mini-dramas could lift the patients’ spirits and offer them hope for a successful outcome to their illness. Hartigan organizes her material into five sections: Drama and Healing in Contemporary Medicine (I); Drama and Healing in Ancient Greece (II); Drama and Healing in the Contemporary American Hospital (III); Asklepios Beyond the Classical World (IV); and Conclusion and Epilogue (V). In the last of these, she reveals that she herself was also on the receiving end of drama-therapy during her own hospital treatment. Of all the books in the series, this one encroaches most fully on our experience of lived life. It offers food for thought about the

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mind-body relationship in the healing process not only for classicists but also for the medical profession.

Stephen Harrison Victorian Horace: Classics and Class (2017) The author of this, the final volume in the series is Stephen Harrison, Professor of Latin Literature at Oxford University and accomplished scholar in the field of Latin literature and its reception, especially Virgil and Apuleius. This book looks at the English reception of Horace in Victorian culture, a period (here defined as roughly 1830–1900) which saw the consolidation of the discipline of modern classical scholarship in England and of many associated and lasting social values. Jumping off from Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital, Harrison shows that the scholarly study, translation and literary imitation of Horace in this period were crucial elements in reinforcing the social prestige of Classics as a discipline and its function as an indicator of ‘gentlemanly’ male status through its domination of the elite educational system and its prominence in literary production.Harrison’s book on Victorian Horace has four central chapters dealing with Victorian commentaries, translations, imitations and adaptations of Horace in poetry and fiction. Framing these are chapters that look backwards and forwards. The introductory chapter gives some prehistory by discussing sample material from 1660 to 1830. The brief epilogue gives a few examples of how Horace has been adapted to more modern scenarios in British culture, and how Horatian reception may be said to have been to some degree ‘democratized’ in more recent literary contexts, matching the movement of Classics from a discipline which reinforces traditional and conservative social values to one which can be seen as both marginal and liberal. This strikes us as a highly suitable note on which to end the series.

Envoi Our series was ahead of its time in the turn towards reception in classical studies and we believe that our pioneering vision made a significant contribution to the very healthy developments in the field of reception studies.

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Since then, the major university presses in the field have published many fine volumes on dozens of aspects of the reception of classical antiquity, some as stand-alone volumes and some in dedicated series. Now, after an engagement of nearly twenty years with the series, it is time for us to dedicate ourselves to other treasured projects. Our collaboration on this series has been exciting and fun, and it has forged a deep and lasting friendship for which we are both deeply grateful. Susanna Morton Braund and Paul Cartledge Vancouver and Cambridge

Notes Chapter 1: Preliminaries: From English Augustan to Victorian Horace 1

2 3 4

5 6 7 8

9 10

11 12 13

Cf. also Wilson 2005: 174 on the period 1660 to 1790 in England: ‘Any educated man would have been expected to know large parts of Horace’s works, including entire odes, by heart in the Latin’. On self-fashioning in literature see e.g. Greenblatt 1980. See Bourdieu 2007 (English translation; French original 1979) with (e.g.) the commentary of Robbins 2000: 32–7. For a convenient treatment see Ogilvie 1964: 34–73; cf. further Goad 1918, Martindale 1992 (esp. 198), Martindale and Hopkins 1993: 159–98, Ayres 1997, Money 2007 and Sowerby 2015. For some studies of the Latin poetry of English poets in this period see Binns 1974. Later Sir Edward, poet and physician: see Curthoys 2008. Master of Charterhouse (an elite English public [= private] school) and natural philosopher: see Mandelbrote 2008. On the ode to Hannes (which compliments Hannes’ own Horatian lyric compositions) see Haan 2005a, and on the general character of Addison’s Latin poetry (especially his hexameters) see Haan 2005b. In 1738 (to Edward Cave) and 1778 (to Thomas Lawrence); see Baldwin 1995: 37–41, 117–19 and (for the two poems on Skye) 97–106. Cf. Gillespie 2005, 2011, and on English translations and versions of Horace before 1660 and their generally stylistic and moralizing purposes see Scodel 2010: 213–20. This section develops material from Harrison 2012. For this translation and its various contributors see Brooks 1938 and Cameron 1957. A famous example is Garth 1717, published by Jacob Tonson and bringing together Dryden, Addison and others to translate Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Such collective volumes became less common in the later eighteenth century after the celebrity solo efforts of Dryden’s Virgil and Pope’s Homer and the emergence of translated verse as a literary kind in its own right.

170 Notes 14 For his career and works see Dubinski 2008. 15 Identified as the poet and miniaturist Thomas Flatman, a contributor to both editions, by Brooks 1938; for his career see Murdoch 2010. 16 For his career see Real 2004. 17 For a contemporary view see Burnet 1900: 165–6. 18 For his career see Fagan 2008. 19 For Smart’s career see Williamson 2004, and for his Horatian translations, with a text of the poetic parts of the 1767 version, see Williamson 1996. 20 Subtitle of Smart 1756. 21 Important exceptions are Aphra Behn, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Anna Seward, all of whom (for example) wrote verse translations of Odes 1.5 (published 1684, 1768 and 1799; texts are conveniently found in Storrs 1959: 37, 42, 49). 22 For Tonson’s career see MacKenzie 2008. 23 Tonson 1715; for brief discussion see Sowerby 2015: 268–9. 24 For detailed studies of Rochester’s relationship to the Latin original see Weinbrot 1972 and Rogers 1982. 25 The text of Rochester is that of Love 1999. Modern editors agree that these opening lines are a non-Horatian addition. 26 Though with ‘cunt’ Rochester could point to Horace’s own use of cunnus at Satires 1.2.70 (see above; this is one of only three uses of the term in Horace, all in the Satires, while Rochester has twenty-three other uses). 27 Love 1999 elucidates the references in the last two lines; ‘a drye bawdy bobb’ refers to male orgasm without ejaculation, while ‘Squobb’ (= ‘Squab’ ) could mean either ‘short and stout’ or ‘young and undeveloped’ (so OED) and is likely to be an attack on Dryden’s virility. 28 For examinations of the other versions see on 1.9 Mason 1985 and Martindale 1993: 79–83, on 3.29 Mason 1981 and Gillespie 1993, on 1.3 Mason 1984, and on Epode 2 Mason 1979 and 1980; modern texts of the poems can be found in Hammond 1995: 362–85. 29 The so-called Fourth Asclepiad, pairing a glyconic line with an asclepiadic line – cf. Nisbet and Hubbard 1970: xxxix. 30 For his life see Gillespie 2004. 31 The anthology came out on 10 January 1685 (Hammond 1995: 362); Roscommon died on 21 January (Gillespie 2004). 32 Dryden 1684; for the miscellany series see Gillespie and Hopkins 2008. 33 Though he never produced a long epic poem and was a rather lesser figure, in context the comparison between Roscommon and Vergil is not wholly

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inappropriate; Roscommon was in 1685 mainly known for two mediumlength poems, his 1679 version of Horace’s Ars Poetica and his 1684 Essay on Translated Verse, just as in the 20s bce (the time of Odes 1.3) Vergil was known for his Eclogues and Georgics before the later emergence of the Aeneid (after 19 bce). 34 Iapyx is the west wind that blew ships from Italy to Greece while the Etesians are winds associated with summer, the probable time of Roscommon’s Irish voyage. 35 For the fullest treatment see Stack 1985; see also Rudd 1994: 61–90. 36 For analyses see Stack 1985: 99–111, Deutsch 1996: 162–6. 37 The liver was seen in Greek and Roman culture as a seat of the passions: cf. Nisbet and Hubbard 1970: 172. 38 On the role of Cinara for Horace see Thomas 2011: 88–9. 39 Cf. Epistles 1.14.33 (the poet talks again of his youth) quem scis inmunem Cinarae placuisse rapaci, ‘whom you know to have pleased the greedy Cinara though without gifts’. 40 Cf. also Windsor-Forest 161–4, where Anne (by then a heavily overweight widow in her late forties and survivor of seventeen pregnancies, of which sadly only one had ended in a child who survived more than a few days) is fulsomely compared to the fit virgin huntress Diana: ‘Nor envy, Windsor! since thy shades have seen / As bright a Goddess, and as chaste a Queen; / Whose care, like hers, protects the sylvan reign, / The Earth’s fair light, and Empress of the main’. 41 On Murray see Oldham 2008. 42 See the many examples of poetic allusion collected by Thayer 1916: 53–94. 43 For Tennyson see Thayer 1916: 44 and Chapter 3 in this volume; for Kipling see Medcalf 1993: 218. 44 For this poem and its adaptation of Horace see Thayer 1916: 69–73 and Stabler 1994. 45 I add the latter to Thayer’s 1.6, especially thinking of 1.9.43 ‘Maecenas quomodo tecum?’, ‘how is Maecenas with you?’ 46 See Stead 2015. 47 For the background see especially Stray 1998, and for a case study see Gaisser 1994. 48 Cited from Newman 1873: 208–9. For more on the Victorian gentleman see e.g. Brander 1975. 49 For more detail on Dickens and Hardy’s use of Horace see Chapter 5. 50 For Mackail’s career see Bailey and Smail 2004, and for further similar work of his on Horace see Chapter 2.

172 Notes 51 On the latter development see further Harrison 2009b: 1–16.

Chapter 2: Horace in Victorian Commentaries, Literary Criticism, Translations 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19

Brighton would later become a ‘public’ school, a member of an elite group emerging in the 1860s of (still private) schools, which were ‘public’ by contrast with the elite alternative of private home-based tuition. For his stormy tenure there and career in general see Jones 1995: 26–40. For Long’s career see Wroth and Jones 2004. Macleane 1894: v. For the valuing of Greek over Roman in the Victorian period see especially Turner 1989. See e.g. Bristow 1991: 80–92, Hickson 1995: 22–55. See note 1 above. For his career see Atlay and Curthoys 2004. Compare Mr Cornwallis in E. M. Forster’s Maurice (set in the late 1890s), who in reading an unspecified Greek text (probably Plato) instructs his class at the University of Cambridge to leave out a particular passage as ‘a reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks’ (Forster 1975: 50); Forster might well have used Wickham’s Horace during his time at Tonbridge School in 1893–7. For these works see e.g. Richards 1988. These editions were intended ‘for the use of Middle and Upper Forms of Schools, or of Candidates for Public Examinations at the Universities or elsewhere’ (Page 1883, advertisements at rear of volume, p. 7). For his career see Rudd 1981. For his career see Tyrrell and Smail 2004. For his career see Sandys and Smail 2004. It is hard to find monographs on Horace at all before 1900, let alone for a broader audience: Verrall 1884 (eccentric and focussed on speculative historical allusions) is certainly for a scholarly readership – see below. For a partly elite readership see the reference to ‘those who know their Horace well’ at Martin 1870: ix. Martin’s book was later reprinted as an extended introduction to a further two-volume edition of his translation (Martin 1881) – see this chapter. For his career see Smail 2004a. Verrall 1884: 150.

Notes 20 21 22 23 24

25

26 27

28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37

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It is mentioned as already planned in the preface to the 1877 Virgil. See Andrew Lang’s memoir (prefixed to Sellar 1892: xxi–xlv). See Rudd 1972: vii. For his distinguished career see Bailey and Smail 2004. For prose versions see that in H. G. Bohn’s Classical Library (1850), a revision of that of 1756 by the poet Christopher Smart (see Chapter 1; the reviser was T. A. Buckley, on whom see Richardson 2013). Macmillan’s Globe Edition series published a much-reprinted prose version for students in 1873 by the London academics James Lonsdale and Samuel Lee, and Methuen’s Classical Translations series published a similar prose version by the Oxford academic A. D. Godley in 1898. An alteration coyly glossed in the notes as ‘necessary to bring it into harmony with the modern diction of the other translations’ (Martin 1860: 207); for ‘diction’ here understand ‘morals’. Martin 1860: 265. The note is removed in the third edition by the now grand ‘Sir Theodore Martin, K.C.B.’ The sense of ‘profligate’ here is ‘debauched’ rather than the modern ‘extravagant’ (OED s.v. 2), while ‘puss’ means ‘a girl or woman, esp. one exhibiting characteristics associated with a cat, as spitefulness, slyness, attractiveness, playfulness’ (OED s.v. 3a). This note shows the highly ambivalent approach to women for the Victorian male elite (genteely chivalrous towards female peers, sexually exploitative of female inferiors). See e.g. Nisbet and Rudd 2004: 319–20. This idea goes back at least as far as A. W. Schlegel, but has been conveniently formulated by Venuti 1995. For Conington see Smail 2004b. E.g. Anon. 1839: 77; Hartley 1860: 22–3. It is interesting that neither Macleane nor Wickham makes any specific comment on the lines where Horace reveals his freedman origin (Satires 1.6.45–6). Lytton 1869: xxxviii. See note 24 above. For this idea see Vance 1985. There are twenty-one held by the Bodleian Library at Oxford (see http://solo. bodleian.ox.ac.uk/). Three separate versions appeared in 1867 (following Martin 1860 and Conington 1863) and two in 1876 (following Lytton 1869 and his second edition of 1872).

174 Notes 38 Billing himself on the title page as ‘former Coldstream Guards’, ensuring a mention of his smartest of army regiments. 39 For his career see Hinings 2004. 40 H. G. Liddell’s uncle, his father’s elder brother, was Lord Ravensworth’s father. 41 For Newman’s career see Stunt 2004. 42 E.g. Cooper 1880 (with a second half anthologizing English imitations, very rich in eighteenth-century material, only pre-1830), Anon. 1889. 43 For his career as an academic and barrister see Stephen and Mullin 2004; for his works cited here see Calverley 1913. 44 For texts of all three see Phillips 2002, and for the recognition of the fragment see MacKenzie 1984. 45 For the details see Burnett 1997: 427. 46 Cf. e.g. Poole 2004. 47 Cf. e.g. Ryken 2011: 195–210. 48 See Burnett 1997: 428–9. 49 Cf. further Harrison 2002; the same line is pursued by Gaskin 2013: 51–2. 50 See Ricks 2002: 282–6. 51 See e.g. Orrells 2011.

Chapter 3: Horace and the Victorian Poets I: Tennyson, Arnold, Clough, Fitzgerald 1

2 3 4

5 6 7 8

See especially Ricks 1987, Allott and Allott 1979, and Phelan 1995; for Tennyson see also Mustard 1904: 107–20 and Thayer 1916: 94–101. For more modern studies see especially Markley 2004 and Rudd 2005: 177–90 on Tennyson. See Chapter 1 above. Baxter et al. 1822 (selections); the original is in the Tennyson Research Centre in Lincoln, UK. For the initial publication see Pollard 1982, and for some metrical discussion Markley 2004: 106–11. All other Tennyson poems are cited from Ricks 1987. Compare the triple nunc in close succession at Odes 1.37.1–2, 3.1.30–2. For an image see Pollard 1982: 23. Noted by Markley 2004: 111. Cf. ‘Hell’s gates at Thy descent were riven’, line 11 of Catherine Winkworth’s translation of St Ambrose’s hymn Veni redemptor gentium (published in Winkworth 1865).

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Cf. e.g. Milton, Paradise Lost 5.159 ‘Power Divine’ and At a Solemn Music 28 ‘To live with Him, and sing in endless morns of light’. 10 For this education see Martin 1980: 30–48. 11 My translation. 12 My translation. 13 For Tennyson’s use of Virgil see Collins 1891: 1–23, Mustard 1904: 91–105, Vance 1997: 149–53, Markley 2004: 238 (with a good list of Tennysonian references). 14 For the full Victorian context see Rudd 2005: 177–80. 15 Tennyson and Fitzgerald were in adjacent years at Trinity College, Cambridge (matriculating in 1827 and 1826 respectively), and had met there, though their friendship really dated from 1835 (Martin 1980: 198). 16 English formal and thematic models include Shakespeare’s Sonnets (154 poems of similar length, the first 128 addressed to a young man) and the 55 (nine-line) stanzas of Shelley’s Adonais, the 1821 elegy for his similarly prematurelydeceased fellow-poet Keats. 17 Shatto and Shaw 1982: 26–32, Markley 2004: 70–9. 18 Shatto and Shaw 1982: 158–9, Ricks 1987: II.311–12. 19 Shatto and Shaw 1982: 172. 20 Hallam’s Poems had been privately printed in 1830, the year of Tennyson’s own first significant solo collection. 21 Cf. e.g. Macleane 1894: 13, Page 1886: 142. 22 Cf. Vergil Aeneid 8.96 placido aequore, 10.103 placida aequora, Propertius 1.8.20 placidis … aequoribus (aequor = ‘flat surface, plain’, used by transference of the sea). 23 Not to be found in Horace or Vergil, but named in a Latin poetic account of dawn at Seneca Hercules 128. 24 E.g. Shatto and Shaw 1982: 266–7. Here again I specify the parallels which are left general there. 25 Thayer 1916: 99 notes merely the parallel of Tennyson’s first stanza with Horace’s opening pair of lines; no other commentator records any further link between the two poems. 26 A fourth (another nunc) occurs in line 11 just after the extract. 27 Norman Vance plausibly suggests that this view derives something from the lectures of John Keble as Oxford Professor of Poetry in the 1830s (Vance 1997: 179); for the relevant material in Keble see Francis 1912: II.466–8. 28 The Latin quotation is Horace Odes 4.7.13–14 (for this poem and Housman’s translation see the end of Chapter 2 above).

9

176 Notes 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54

55

For Arnold’s education see e.g. Honan 1981: 27–63. Cited here from the edition of Allott and Allott 1979. Published only at the end of Arnold’s life in 1887. Cf. e.g. Allott and Allott 1979: 59. Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780–1857); for Arnold’s student enthusiasm for him, later tempered, see Phelan 2006. The phrase ‘the world’s machine’ also echoes Lucretius 5.96 machina mundi. As noted by Allott and Allott 1979. For Arnold’s enthusiasm for Scott see Honan 1981: 25. E.g. Allott and Allott 1979: 131. Used in a similar context of divine command at Epodes 14.6 deus, deus nam me vetat, ‘for a god, a god forbids me’ (noted by Allott and Allott 1979: 131). Cited here from Phelan 1995. On Clough’s hexameters see Phelan 1999. See Hurst 2015: 499. Dixit here refers to Lepidus’ addition as suffect consul replacing Augustus himself – see further Mayer 1994: 274. See further Mayer 1994: 269–71. See e.g. Mayer 1994: 10–11. Almost all these allusions are noted but not elaborated by Phelan 1995; I have noted my additions. Modern texts here print hinc … hinc rather than hic … hic. In this quotation I reproduce Clough’s typically Victorian aspirated orthography (I would spell umeris). A point not made by commentators. Again, a point not made by commentators. Ulixes is my conjecture for the transmitted Ulixen, easily corrupted into the accusative in its apparent object position immediately after the verb: for further arguments see Harrison 2014: 87. Not noted by commentators. For the location see Morgan 2009. For classical elements in the Bothie see Harrison 2012. The Bodleian Library holds fourteen editions published between 1883 and 1900. Fitzgerald himself issued four versions during his own lifetime (all available together in Decker 1997); here I cite the text of Karlin 2009 and agree with him that the unexpanded first version is the best. For the translation’s initial Victorian reception cf. e.g. Behtash 2012. What remains of these versions is collected in Decker 1997: 233–7. A later Latin

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version by H. W. Greene used four-line stanzas consisting of two Latin elegiac couplets, but not Horatian lyric quatrains (Greene 1893). 56 One or two of the parallels below are noted by Mierow 1917. 57 For which see Karlin 2009: xix.

Chapter 4: Horace and the Victorian Poets II: Other Imitations 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

See e.g. Hall and Macintosh 2004: 350–90, Monros-Gaspar 2015. Smith and Smith 1813. For the two brothers James and Horace (Horatio) Smith see Robertson 2009. A quotation from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, Epistle II, line 18. ‘Dun’ = debt-collector. For the original context see Thackeray 1841: 722. That is ‘sculls’ (oars for rowing). The Claspers, father and son, Henry (Harry) Clasper (1812–70), and John (Jack) Clasper (1836–1908), were both famed professional oarsmen (see Halladay 2004); the son is likely to be meant here given his especial fame in the 1850s. ‘Whip’ here is short for ‘whipper-in’, ‘A huntsman’s assistant who keeps the hounds from straying by driving them back with the whip. Also called shortly a whip’ (OED s.v. ‘whipper-in’ 2). A slang term meaning ‘Anything remarkable or extraordinary’ (OED s.v. 3a). ‘A person of surpassing excellence; a first-rate fellow; a “brick’’’ (OED s.v. 3a). All to be found in Calverley 1913. A reference to A Hand-book for Travellers on the Continent, published by John Murray in London in many editions from 1836. See e.g. Freeman 1999. Oxenden (1798–1875) was a Kent country gentleman, a correspondent of Charles Darwin in the 1860s, and much earlier the author of Poems (London, 1829). ‘Empty or boastful talk; bombast, “hot air”; nonsense’ (OED s.v. ‘gas’, II.5). See e.g. Barefoot 2001. The meaning of ‘taper’ is very obscure here. For his career see Gwynn 2004. A reference to the 1870 monograph, not the translation – see Chapter 2. On this poem see Vance 1997: 183–4. For a brief discussion of this collection see Vance 1997: 188–9.

178 Notes 21 Jockey Club Caswell Massey for men (fragrance), http://www.fragrantica.com/ perfume/Caswell-Massey/Jockey-Club-8517.html (accessed 12 August 2016). 22 For his career see Jackson 2008. 23 See Vasunia 2013: 193–238. 24 Seaman (1861–1936) studied at Clare College, Cambridge (1880–7) and was later editor of Punch (1906–32). 25 ‘Tricholina’ is presumably a hair-oil given its Greek etymology (from thrix, ‘hair’). 26 See e.g. Weber 2007: 154–5. 27 See e.g. Feeney 1998. 28 See Davis 1999: 183–204. 29 Published in The Times on 1 May 1851, and later reprinted in Thackeray 1856. 30 For the event see Davis 1999: 124–35. 31 Cf. e.g. Harrison 1988, Bristow 1995. 32 Cited from Crump 1979–90. 33 As noted by Vance 1997: 182. 34 Expressed not only in the poem from which the title is drawn (Odes 1.4.13–20) but also in a number of other odes (1.11.8, 2.3.17–28, 2.14.17–28, 2.18.29–40, 4.7.13–28). 35 For Victorian hymnody see Watson 1997: 320–460. 36 Alternating four-stress and three-stress lines (‘Amazing grace, how sweet the sound / That saved a wretch like me’). 37 Especially in the more traditional and Anglo–Catholic English Hymnal (1906): for English Sapphic equivalents of Latin Sapphics from Late Antiquity or the Carolingian period cf. e.g. EH 165 (?Gregory the Great), 224 (Paul the Deacon), 242 (Rabanus Maurus). 38 Over 100 are listed in the Bodleian Library catalogue (SOLO = http://solo. bodleian.ox.ac.uk). 39 E.g. ‘Morning’ has been adapted as ‘New every morning is the love’, ‘Evening’ as ‘Sun of my soul! Thou Saviour dear’, ‘Septuagesima Sunday’ as ‘There is a book, who runs may read’, and ‘Whitsunday’ as ‘When God of old came down from heaven’. See also below for ‘Blest are the pure in heart’. 40 See Nisbet and Rudd 2004: 173. 41 E.g. abbreviated and rearranged as English Hymnal 330. 42 English Hymnal 489. 43 First published in Stone 1897. 44 These lines then become the refrain. For a full text see conveniently http://www. historichymns.com (accessed 12 August 2016).

Notes

179

Chapter 5: Horace in Victorian Fiction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10

11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

As recognized at the time by Trollope: Trollope 2014: 137 (Chapter 12). On the rise of fiction in the Victorian period see e.g. Kucich and Taylor 2012. See especially Rhodes 1995. For these see Harrison 2004 and Harrison 2011. Trevelyan’s ‘Sempronius Viridis, a Freshman’ looks like a pun on the fictional freshman Verdant Green. For these university novels see further Proctor 1957. No doubt alluding to the name of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Martin Tupper (1810–89), philosophically inclined poet and author of Proverbial Philosophy (1838) – see Dingley 2004. Cf. the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for poetry at Cambridge, won e.g. by T. B. Macaulay in 1819 and by Tennyson in 1829. Cf. the Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club, founded in 1855. This no doubt evokes Horace’s authorship of the Carmen Saeculare for a similarly youthful performance at the Ludi Saeculares of 17 bce (see Chapter 4 note 30). Odes 1.8.1, 1.13.1, 1.25.8, 3.9.6. Referring to the edition of Horace by the American scholar Charles Anthon (Anthon 1830; many times reissued subsequently on both sides of the Atlantic, e.g. Anthon 1850) and the English verse translation of 1767 by Christopher Smart (for which see Williamson 1996 and Chapter 1 above). The text generally read at the time (modern editions read per omnis / hoc deos vere and properes). This refers to the contemporary debate about examinations for the UK civil service following the Northcote/Trevelyan Report of 1854 (its co-author was G. O. Trevelyan’s father, C. E. Trevelyan). A topical reference to the sensational contemporary legal battle by the Hon. Theresa Yelverton against her bigamous husband (for the case see Crow 1966). For a convenient account see Tomalin 2001: 10–31. See Hollington 1999. The authors mentioned here are typical school authors of the period such as a headmaster’s wife might know by name. For some basic material, supplemented here, see Nitchie 1918. This passage is cited again by Thackeray in Chapter 16 of The Virginians (1859). For details and studies of Dryden’s poem see Chapter 1 note 36. The double allusion here is noted by McMaster 1991: 34. This passage from Odes 1.1 is alluded to again twice in Henry Esmond (Book I Chapter 9 and Book II Chapter 1).

180 Notes 21 For some interesting examples see Harrison 2000. 22 See Rendell 1948 and especially Rignall 2000a. 23 cras ingens iterabimus aequor is the last line (32) of Odes 1.7, ‘tomorrow we will re-enter the mighty ocean’. 24 As seen by Rendell 1948: 149. 25 Trollope 2014: 10–19, esp. 19. 26 Clark 1975: 179 counts eighty-one classical quotations in Trollope, of which forty are from Horace; for Trollope’s use of classical literature see Clark 1975: 178–88, Tracy 1982 and Osborne 1999. Most of those discussed here are merely noted by commentators without further discussion. 27 Trollope uses the passage again in his Autobiography, talking of the possibility of retirement from novel-writing (Trollope 2014: 145, Chapter 12). 28 E.g. Berthoud 2008: 362, Dentith 2011: 583. 29 See the excellent account of Hardy’s classical education and reading in Steele 2000. 30 See Steele 2000: 62. 31 See Steele 2000: 65.

Chapter 6: Epilogue – Modernizing Horace 1

For recent ‘democratization’ of the classics see Harrison 2009b: 1–16 and the essays in Hardwick and Harrison 2013. For the twentieth-century reception of Horace see Tomlinson 1993 and Ziolkowski 2005. 2 See e.g. Vandiver 2010: 107–8. 3 Convincingly shown by Vandiver 2010: 393–5 (see also Vandiver: 129 n.25). 4 See Medcalf 1993 and Leary 2008 on Kipling’s Horace. 5 Auden 1989: 69: ‘One fine summer night in June 1933 I was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues. … [Q]uite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. … For the first time in my life I knew exactly … what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself ’. 6 See Oxford English Dictionary s.v. B.1.c. 7 See e.g. the analysis of Commager 1962: 175–94. 8 For a discussion of these see Talbot 2009. 9 For his life see Stallworthy 1995. 10 See also his interesting radio play ‘Carpe Diem’ (1956), edited with comment in Wrigley and Harrison 2013; 365–91, which includes several of his Horace translations (Odes 1.11 and 2.3 as well as 1.4; all are reprinted in MacNeice 2006).

Notes

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11 All also included in Bunting 2002, cited here. 12 Both in Longley 1995. For Longley’s work with classical poets see further his own account in Longley 2009. 13 From Heaney 2006. 14 An earlier version in Heaney 2004 reads ‘the tallest things’ for ‘the tallest towers’, as does the first version, published as ‘Horace and the Thunder’ in The Irish Times, 17 November 2001. 15 See e.g. Harrison, T. 2009, seeing Hecuba as representing modern suffering of war victims, especially in the context of Iraq. 16 Published in Mahon 1999. 17 Published in Davie 1990. 18 Also discussed by Tomlinson 1993 and Martindale 2005: 89–90. 19 ‘Horace has always been a poet more for men than for women’. So Oliensis 2007: 221, in one of the most interesting modern accounts of gender issues in Horace. 20 See her own account in Almond 2009a. 21 ‘Steadies’ are stabilizers for caravans. 22 As listed in The Horatian Society Addresses Delivered at the Dinner held in The Old Hall, Lincoln’s Inn, on Wednesday, 24th September, 2014, a privately published booklet distributed to the society’s members.

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Index Addison, Joseph 3 Alban, St. (protomartyr of England) 113–15 Almond, Maureen 152–3 Alsop, Anthony 3 Anne, Queen 14 Arnold, Matthew 50, 71–7 Culture and Anarchy (1869) 72 ‘Horatian Echo’ (1847) 72–6 ‘On the Modern Element in Literature’ (1857) 71–2 ‘To Marguerite, Continued’(1849) 76 Auden, Wystan Hugh 145–7 biographical literary criticism 27, 34 Blackwood, William 33 Bourdieu, Pierre 1 Bowdler, Dr Thomas: The Family Shakespeare (1807) 27 Brome, Alexander 5 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 21, 44–7 Bunting, Basil 148–9 Byron, 6th Baron (poet) see Gordon, George Calverley, Charles Stewart 51–2, 93–6 ‘Contentment’ (1872) 94–6 ‘Ode to Tobacco’ (1862) 93–4 capital, cultural 1, 19, 20 capital, social 1 Carlyle, Thomas 34 Clough, Arthur Hugh 77–84 Amours de Voyage (1849) 77–84 Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, The (1848) 84 Conington, John 26, 41–4 Cowley, Abraham 2, 11 Creech, Thomas 6 Davie, Donald 151–2 Dickens, Charles 21, 123–5

Dombey and Son (1848) 124–5 Pictures from Italy (1846) 125 Sketches by Boz (1836–7) 21, 124 Dillon, Wentworth, 4th Earl of Roscommon 12 Dobson, Austin 97–100 ‘Roman Round-Robin, A’ (1885) 98–9 ‘To QHF’ (1875) 97–8 ‘Tu quoque: An idyll in the conservatory’ 99–100 domesticization, in translation theory 39, 46 Dowson, Ernest 109–11 Verses (1896) 109–11 Dryden, John 9, 11–12 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans/Cross) 131–3 Adam Bede (1859) 131–2 Middlemarch (1871) 132 Mill on the Floss, The (1860) 132–3 England, condition of (Victorian cultural issue) 34 expurgation, of Horace’s poetry 5, 6, 8, 27–33, 38, 42, 45, 49, 54, 79, 83, 102 Farrar, Frederic William 45 fiction, Victorian, and Horace 116–44 Fitzgerald, Edward 64–5, 84–8 Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyam, The (1859) 84–8 foreignization, in translation theory 39 Francis, Philip 6 gentleman, Victorian, and Horace 19–23, 25, 37, 45–9, 89, 125, 144, 145 Gladstone, William Ewart 4, 47–9 Gordon, George, 6th Baron Byron Childe Harold Canto IV (1818) 14–15 ‘Hints from Horace’ (1811) 15

198 Index Hours of Idleness (1808) 60 Grant, Sir Alexander 33 Graves, Charles Larcom: The Hawarden Horace (1894) 100–2 Gray, Thomas 3 Hardy, Thomas 139–44 Desperate Remedies (1871) 141–2 Jude the Obscure (1895) 21, 142–4 Tess of the D’Urbevilles (1891) 140–1 Pair of Blue Eyes, A (1873) 141 Harrison, Tony 151 Heaney, Seamus 150–1 homoeroticism, in Horace 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 28–9, 32, 38, 49, 54–5, 83, 87 homosociality 20 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 51–2 Horace and Christianity 22 commentaries on, Victorian 25–33 poems Ars Poetica 15, 132, 133, 150 Carmen Saeculare 105–8 Epistles 1.1 135 Epistles 1.2 81–2 Epistles 1.8 134 Epistles 1.11 80 Epistles 1.17 81 Epistles 1.20 78–9 Epodes 2 152 Epodes 8 4, 5, 8 Epodes 12 4, 5, 8 Epodes 14 19, 80 Epodes 16 88 Epodes 17 140 Odes 1.1 75 Odes 1.2 146 Odes 1.3 11, 66–8, 77 Odes 1.4 70–1, 147–8 Odes 1.5 27, 101–2, 105 Odes 1.7 83–4, 145 Odes 1.8 41, 93, 120 Odes 1.9 14–15, 40–1, 43–4, 46–7, 48, 50, 57–9, 87, 148 Odes 1.10 40, 43, 46, 48–9 Odes 1.11 87, 151 Odes 1.13 149 Odes 1.14 67 Odes 1.17 85–6

Odes 1.19 108 Odes 1.2 104, 141 Odes 1.23 28, 30 Odes 1.27 120–1 Odes 1.34 150–1 Odes 1.37 109 Odes 1.38 82–3, 86 Odes 2.3 136 Odes 2.5 30 Odes 2.6 126 Odes 2.7 121–2 Odes 2.10 104 Odes 2.11 73–4, 146 Odes 2.14 87–8, 149 Odes 2.17 51 Odes 3.2 82, 145 Odes 3.1 126, 135–6 Odes 3.3 59–60, 132, 138, 139 Odes 3.4 80–1 Odes 3.5 113–15 Odes 3.7 103 Odes 3.11 137 Odes 3.13 17, 112 Odes 3.27 39 Odes 3.29 62–4, 126–30 Odes 3.30 148 Odes 4.1 8, 13 Odes 4.7 52–5, 75–6, 85, 87, 148 Odes 4.10 7, 28–9 Odes 4.11 68–9 Odes 4.13 142 Satires 1.2 5, 6, 8, 27, 30 Satires 2.2 134 translations, pre-Victorian 1–12 translations, Victorian 37–55 Horatian Society (London) 153 Housman, Alfred Edward 52–5 hymnography, Victorian, and Horace 111–16 Johnson, Samuel 3 Keats, John: ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819) 18–19 Keble, John: The Christian Year (1827) 111–13 Kennedy, Benjamin Hall 45 Kipling, Rudyard 145 Knox, Ronald: Let Dons Delight (1939) 20–1

Index Landor, Walter Savage 3 Long, George 25 Longley, Michael 149–50 Lytton, 1st Earl of see Bulwer-Lytton, Edward Mackail, J. W. 22, 37 Macleane, Rev. Arthur 25–9 MacNeice, Louis 147–8 Mahon, Derek 151 Mansfield, 1st Earl of see Murray, William Martin, Sir Theodore 33–5, 38–41 Maurice, Revd. Frederick Denison 61–2 metre 11, 12, 39–55, 57–60, 65, 77, 78, 84, 94, 100, 106, 111 misogyny 3 moralizing 28 Murray, John 37 Murray, William, 1st Earl of Mansfield 14 Nettleship, Henry 26, 42 Newbolt, Sir Henry 145 Newman, Francis William 50 Newman, John Henry (Cardinal): The Idea of a University (1852) 20 novel, historical, Victorian 116 novel, school, Victorian 30 novel, university, Victorian 118, 123 obscenity 4, 5, 27, 38 Owen, Wilfred 145 Oxenden, George Chichester: The Railway Horace (1862) 97 Page, Thomas Ethelbert 31–2 Palmer, Arthur 31–2 parody of Horace, Victorian 89–105 Pope, Alexander 12–14 readership, issue of 8–9, 16, 18, 19, 32, 33, 144 Rochester, 2nd Earl of see Wilmot, John Rossetti, Christina: ‘A Study (A Soul)’ (1854) 108 Rudd, Niall 62 schools, in Victorian England 20, 25–33 Seaman, Owen: Horace at Cambridge (1895) 103–5

199

self-fashioning 1 Sellar, William Young 35–7 Smart, Christopher 8 Smiles, Samuel: Self-Help (1859) 26 Smith, Horace: Zillah (1828) 117–18 Smith, Horace and Smith, James: Horace in London (1813) 89–91 Stone, Rev. Samuel James 113–14 Tennyson, Alfred, 1st Baron 57–71 early Horace translations 57–60 ‘In Memoriam A. H. H.’ (1850) 65–71 ‘To the Revd. F. D.Maurice’(1854) 61–2 ‘Tiresias’ (1883), dedicatory ode of 64 ‘Will’ (1854) 60–1 Thackeray, William Makepeace Ad Ministram (1841) 91–2 Adventures of Philip, The (1862) 127–8 History of Henry Esmond, The (1852) 126, 127, 128–31 ‘May-Day Ode’ (1851) 105–8 Newcomes, The (1855) 20, 125, 127 Pendennis (1850) 128 Vanity Fair (1848) 125 Tonson, Jacob, the elder (publisher) 9 Trevelyan, Sir George Otto Competition Wallah, The (1864) 102–4 Horace at the University of Athens (1861) 102, 118–23 Trollope, Antony Can You Forgive Her? (1865) 134 Commentaries of Caesar, The (1870) 33, 134 Duke’s Children, The (1880) 135–6 Life of Cicero, The (1880) 134 Phineas Finn (1869) 139 Phineas Redux (1874) 134, 135–9 Prime Minister, The (1876) 135–6 unity, poetic 32 Vergil Aeneid 7.585–90 61 Aeneid 8.97–369, 8.720–6 107 Aeneid 10.693–6 61 Verrall, Arthur Woollgar 35 Wells, Herbert George (H. G.): Love and Mr Lewisham (1900) 21

200 Index Wickham, Edward Charles 29–31 Wilkins, Augustus Samuel 31–2 Wilmot, John, 2nd Earl of Rochester: ‘An Allusion to Horace’ (1675-6) 9–11

Wordsworth, William ‘Evening Walk, An’ (1793) 16–17 ‘Liberty’ (1820) 18 Memorials of a Tour of Italy (1837) 16 ‘River Duddon, The’ (1820) 17