How to Be Content: An Ancient Poet's Guide for an Age of Excess (Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers) [Bilingual ed.] 0691182523, 9780691182520

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HOW TO BE CONTENT

Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers For a full list of titles in the series, go to https://press .princeton.edu/series/ancient-wisdom-for-modern-readers How to Be Content: An Ancient Poet’s Guide for an Age of Excess by Horace How to Give: An Ancient Guide to Giving and Receiving by Seneca How to Drink: A Classical Guide to the Art of Imbibing by Vincent Obsopoeus How to Be a Bad Emperor: An Ancient Guide to Truly Terrible Leaders by Suetonius How to Be a Leader: An Ancient Guide to Wise Leadership by Plutarch How to Think about God: An Ancient Guide for Believers and Nonbelievers by Marcus Tullius Cicero How to Keep Your Cool: An Ancient Guide to Anger Management by Seneca How to Think about War: An Ancient Guide to Foreign Policy by Thucydides How to Be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life by Epictetus How to Be a Friend: An Ancient Guide to True Friendship by Marcus Tullius Cicero

HOW TO BE CONTENT An Ancient Poet’s Guide for an Age of Excess

Horace Selected, translated and introduced by Stephen Harrison

PRINCE T O N U N IV E RSIT Y P RE SS PRINC E T O N AN D O X FO RD

Copyright © 2020 by Princeton University Press Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to [email protected] Published by Princeton University Press 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire ox20 1tr press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-0-691-18252-0 ISBN (e-book) 978-0-691-20849-7 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Editorial: Rob Tempio and Matt Rohal Production Editorial: Jenny Wolkowicki Text and jacket design: Pamela Schnitter Production: Erin Suydam Publicity: Amy Stewart and Maria Whelan Copyeditor: Maia Vaswani Jacket art: Relief of a banqueter, Roman, late Republican period, ca. 50 bc. Photograph © 2020, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston This book has been composed in Stempel Garamond and Futura Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memoriam Jasper Griffin (1937–2019) Donald Russell (1920–2020)

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgements Introduction

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1. The Search for the Good Life 25 2. The Importance of Friendship 86 3. Love—the Problem of Passion 143 4. Death—the Final Frontier 187 Index

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As in other books in the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series, the original Latin is included in addition to the translation. Unlike in most other books in the series, however, it is not on facing pages but forms part of the main text. It can be skipped by those who don’t read Latin. My warm thanks go to Al Bertrand at PUP who started this project rolling, Hannah Paul who commissioned it, and Rob Tempio who saw it to completion. I am most grateful to them for an opportunity to bring a great poet to a wider audience.

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I am especially grateful to my friend Maureen Almond, who has read and commented on the whole volume with the eye of a poet and fellow Horatian enthusiast, and to the two anonymous reviewers for PUP, who made salutary suggestions. I would also like to thank Jenny Wolkowicki and Maia Vaswani at PUP for their help in the final stages. While this book was in press, two of my early teachers and advisers died; my former tutor Jasper Griffin and my post-doctoral mentor Donald Russell, both of whom wrote illuminatingly about Horace and had his generosity of spirit; I dedicate this volume jointly to their memory.

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INTRODUCTION

A reader’s preferences and sympathies change with time and circumstances; we react most intensely to the works and writers who suit our own current situation and concerns. As I move through middle age, Horace appeals more and more to me amongst the great poets of ancient Rome for his measured and mature moral advice as well as for his marvellous musicality and technical skill. I very much welcome this opportunity to bring Horace’s real and practical wisdom (and my own enthusiasm for this great poet) to a wider audience. When I talk of “Horace” in this volume, I generally mean the figure of the poet-author 1

INTRODUCTION

found in the poems transmitted under the name of Quintus Horatius Flaccus; it is difficult indeed to access the actual thought processes of the historical individual. *** But this is a poet for whom the known facts of his life are important in understanding his work. We possess a short Latin biography of him, which may go back to one by Suetonius, author of the well-known biographies of the twelve Caesars at the end of the first century CE. This and his poems constitute the key sources for the basic data about Horace, though the first-person statements we find in his work (superficially candid and plausible) are always carefully managed, often hard to pin down, and sometimes misleading, and we must always be cautious in accepting them at face value. 2

INTRODUCTION

We can be fairly sure of his day of birth (8 December 65 BCE; for confirmation of the month see Epistles 1.10.27), his birthplace (Venusia, modern Venosa, on the border of ancient Apulia and Lucania in southeastern Italy—Satires 2.1.34–35), and his date of death (27 November 8 BCE). His father worked as a successful auctioneer and financial agent, and seems at an early age to have been temporarily enslaved following capture in the Social War (91–88 BCE), in which Italian communities fought against Rome for citizen rights. This gave Horace the low and dubious status of a “freedman’s son” (libertino patre natus—Satires 1.6.3), but his father had enough money and ambition to send his son to the prestigious school of Orbilius at Rome (Satires 1.6.76–78, Epistles 2.1.71) and later to Athens for university-style 3

INTRODUCTION

study with the sons of the Roman elite (Epistles 2.2.43–45). It was there in 43 BCE that the young Horace attached himself to the cause of Marcus Brutus, who was also in Athens after his assassination of Julius Caesar the previous year, and went with him on campaign in Greece, serving as tribunus militum, military tribune (Satires 1.6.48), a rank for young elite members. In the autumn of 42 BCE he was on the losing side in the crushing defeat of Brutus at Philippi at the hands of Mark Antony and the young Caesar, the future Augustus (a bloody battle ironically depicted in Odes 2.7), but escaped and returned to Rome. Horace himself claims that he lost his father’s estate, perhaps in the land confiscations of 41–40 BCE, and turned to poetry to make money (Epistles 2.2.49–52); but 4

INTRODUCTION

he seems to have had enough funds in this period to purchase the post of scriba quaestorius, “clerk to the quaestor,” a significant administrative position, which he retained at least to the end of the 30s BCE (Satires 2.6.36–37). By that time Horace was certainly of equestrian status (Satires 2.7.53); that is, substantially wealthy. *** This was no doubt because in the early 30s BCE he became attached to the circle of writers around Augustus’s important adviser Maecenas, introduced by no less than his fellow poet Vergil (Satires 2.6.40–42, 1.6.55–56); at some point in the 30s he received from Maecenas the gift of a substantial Sabine estate, in a beautiful and peaceful valley location about thirty miles from the centre of Rome, which 5

INTRODUCTION

contained several subordinate farms as well as a villa (Satires 2.6). The remains of this villa may well be under the later grand building close to Licenza near the modern Tivoli, which has been much investigated in recent years. In Epistles 1.7 Horace expresses warm gratitude for Maecenas’s generosity in enabling him to pursue a leisured country existence away from the pressures of city life. Horace’s personal relations with Augustus, the first Roman emperor, or princeps, proper, who wielded effective supreme power from 31 BCE, seem to have been close, and perhaps became closer after 19 BCE when the all-powerful leader, who had been absent for much of the 20s, was generally in Rome: there seems no real reason to doubt the apparent documentary evidence of their intimacy in the 6

INTRODUCTION

“Suetonian” biography, which cites passages from humorous letters between the two. The presence of the princeps in Rome as active patron perhaps explains why Maecenas receives only one (warm) mention in Horace’s latest phase of work after 19, whereas all his previous poetic books in the 30s and 20s had begun with fulsome dedications to Maecenas himself. Horace was certainly commissioned to write the extant Carmen Saeculare, or “secular hymn,” a poem of eighty lyric lines for choric performance, for the ludi saeculares of 17 BCE (celebrating the beginning of a new saeculum, or ritual period of 110 years), very likely by Augustus himself. There is no particular reason to disbelieve the “Suetonian” biography that Horace died less than two months after Maecenas in 8 BCE, temptingly close though this 7

INTRODUCTION

would be to the affectionate assertions in the poetry that the poet would not wish to outlive his patron (e.g., Epodes 1.5–6, Odes 2.17.5–9). *** Horace’s literary career lasted some three decades; the chronology and sequence of his works is largely agreed. Satires 1 belongs to around 36/35 BCE, Satires 2 and Epodes to around 30/29 BCE, Odes 1–3 to 23 BCE (with possible earlier separate publication), Epistles 1 to 20/19 BCE, the Carmen Saeculare to 17 BCE, and Odes 4 to circa 13 BCE. Only the dates of Epistles 2 and the Ars Poetica have been a matter of debate: for me these are the poet’s latest works, belonging to the period 12–8 BCE. The three earliest books of Horatian poetry begin from self-consciously low literary 8

INTRODUCTION

predecessors: Satires 1 and 2 pick up the hexameter sermo of Lucilius, the humble and parodic cousin of the grand hexameter epic; their moralising programme is described by the poet himself as ridentem dicere verum, “to utter the truth with laughter” (Satires 1.1.24). The Epodes take on the rumbustious world of archaic Greek iambus, poetry of crude aggression and comradeship, and shows some political engagement with the cause of the future Augustus in the last stages of the civil wars. The collection of Odes 1–3 is selfconsciously more elevated. These eightyeight poems show a dexterous employment of the Aeolic lyric metres of great Greek poets such as Alcaeus and Sappho, more complex than those of his previous books; they also range broadly in topic and tone from light love poems and sympotic 9

INTRODUCTION

celebrations to deep moral meditations on the Roman state, and in length from eight to eighty lines. A key feature is their considerable capacity to interact with the whole range of other literary kinds (epic, drama, elegy, epigram) and their memorable and lapidary modes of expression, such as carpe diem, “pluck the fruit of the day,” or auream . . . mediocritatem, “the golden middle position” (1.11.8, 2.10.5). The first book of Epistles (returning to the more informal hexameters of the poet’s Satires) presents a conscious contrast with the first collection of Odes. Its opening programmatic poem claims that Horace has renounced the frivolities of poetry for the serious concerns of philosophy (1.1.7–12). The pose of not writing poetry is surely ironic in this book of carefully crafted verse; but the collection’s overt shape as 10

INTRODUCTION

a letter collection points to a conspicuous genre of Greek and Roman prose literature, as does its strongly ethical content. Its humorous tone recalls that of the Satires; its warm addresses to (male) friends a central feature of Odes 1–3. Horace’s commission to write a major lyric poem for Augustus’s ideologically crucial ludi saeculares of 17 BCE (mentioned above) was probably an external stimulus for the resumption of production in the lyric genre more generally, leading to the fourth book of fifteen Odes a few years later. Most of its poems are dedicated to celebrating the military and political achievements of Augustus and his family and other elite members, with Horace assuming something of a laureate role. The three poems Epistles 2.1 and 2.2 and Ars Poetica seem to belong together in the 11

INTRODUCTION

final phase of Horace’s poetic career, a closural return to the form of hexameter sermo with which he began in Satires 1. All three share a sense of Horace’s self-location in the Roman literary tradition, and deal with the theme of the usefulness of the poet and of Horace in particular to the community of Rome (Epistles 2.1.124, 2.2.121, Ars Poetica 396–401). The Ars Poetica at 476 lines is the longest as well as the last of Horace’s poems, addressed to two young brothers from a leading family and suitably providing a range of poetic precepts from the ageing master for a new generation of the Roman elite. *** Horace’s poetic style is rich, terse, and pointed; an early critic rightly points to Horace’s curiosa felicitas, his “happy 12

INTRODUCTION

expression achieved by effort” (Petronius, Satyrica 118.5). The more informal hexameter poems have a more colloquial flavour, while still coining memorable phrases, especially when encapsulated in a single line; the Odes have a mosaic and jewelled quality, with densely crafted phrasing and elegantly interlaced word order. This volume reproduces Horace’s Latin text for those who are fortunate enough to be able to tackle it, but also tries to render some of its key qualities in the English verse translation that comes after. There is a long and distinguished tradition of translating Horace into English verse, which involves some of the greatest poetic names (e.g. Jonson, Milton, Dryden, and Pope long ago, or Louis MacNeice and Seamus Heaney more recently). My versions cannot compete with theirs, but I 13

INTRODUCTION

hope to give some idea of what makes Horace special. I have usually used approximate metrical equivalents—lines of roughly the same length for hexameters, and stanzas of analogous short lines for the Odes, almost all of which fall into four-line units in the originals. I hope that this volume can do its part in introducing readers to one of the world’s great short-form poets, or in taking them back to an earlier acquaintance. The works of this writer who lived in an alien culture more than two millennia ago still have much to say to twenty-first century humanity, even if they present tensions as well as continuities with modern existence and values. His commendations of Roman racial exceptionalism and Rome’s aspirations to world domination, like those of his friend Vergil, are hard to read in our times, 14

INTRODUCTION

though they were much more congenial to readers of past colonial eras. Critics have also rightly pointed to the strongly homosocial character of his poetry: women appear mainly as stereotypical love objects and the like, though he can, for example, create a memorable picture of Cleopatra (Odes 1.37); female readers have often had difficulty with him. On the other hand, more modern elements in his work have sometimes been underestimated in the past; it is only recent scholars, for example, who have brought out the bisexual aspects of some of his erotic poems. *** In claiming that his poems have real value as advice for the good life, I am following Horace himself, who set out the ethical lessons of great poetry in considering Homer, 15

INTRODUCTION

the earliest extant Greek poet and author of the Iliad and Odyssey, supreme epic poems that by Horace’s own time had been allegorised and moralised for several centuries (Epistles 1.2.1–31): Troiani belli scriptorem, Maxime Lolli, dum tu declamas Romae, Praeneste relegi; qui, quid sit pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non, plenius ac melius Chrysippo et Crantore dicit. Cur ita crediderim, nisi quid te distinet, audi. Fabula, qua Paridis propter narratur amorem Graecia barbariae lento conlisa duello, stultorum regum et populorum continet aestum. 16

INTRODUCTION

Antenor censet belli praecidere causam; quid Paris? Vt saluus regnet uiuatque beatus cogi posse negat. Nestor componere litis inter Pelidem festinat et inter Atriden; hunc amor, ira quidem communiter urit utrumque. Qucquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achiui. Seditione, dolis, scelere atque libidine et ira Iliacos intra muros peccatur et extra. Rursus, quid uirtus et quid sapientia possit, utile proposuit nobis exemplar Vlixes,* qui domitor Troiae multorum prouidus urbes, * Here I print my own conjecture Ulixes (nominative, subject) for the transmitted Ulixen (accusative, object), matching the presentation of Odysseus as subject in lines 19–22. 17

INTRODUCTION

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, uixisset canis inmundus uel amica luto sus. Nos numerus sumus et fruges consumere nati, sponsi Penelopae nebulones Alcinoique in cute curanda plus aequo operata iuuentus, cui pulchrum fuit in medios dormire dies et ad strepitum citharae cessatum ducere curam. 18

INTRODUCTION

Lollius Maximus, while you are declaiming at Rome I have been rereading the writer of the Trojan War at Praeneste: What is noble, what shameful, what is expedient, what not, He states more fully and finely than Chrysippus and Crantor. Hear how I have come to think this, unless some business detains you. The plot, in which the story is told of how Greece clashed with non-Greece In a slow-moving war on account of Paris’s passion, Contains the seethings of foolish kings and peoples. Antenor proposes cutting free the cause of the war: What does Paris say? He claims that he cannot be compelled 19

INTRODUCTION

To reign healthily or live happily. Nestor makes haste To settle the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon— Paris is seared by love, both the other pair by the same anger together: Whatever the ravings of their kings, the Greeks get a beating. Mutiny, trickery, crime, lust, and rage— these sins Are committed inside and outside the walls of Troy. And again, as to what courage and wisdom can do, Odysseus has set out a useful role model for us, He who having conquered Troy inspected with foresight The cities and characters of many types of men, and through the wide ocean 20

INTRODUCTION

Endured many hardships in seeking return for himself And his companions, insubmersible by the waves of fortune against him. You know well the sounds of the Sirens and the cups of Circe; If he had drunk these up with his foolish and lustful fellows, He would have been shamed and senseless under a courtesan’s control And led the life of a filthy dog or a mud-loving pig. We are mere ciphers, born to be mere eaters of bread, Wastrel suitors of Penelope, or the suite of Alcinous, Spending more time than is right on skin-care, Who found it fine to sleep to the middle of the day 21

INTRODUCTION

And to lull their cares to rest to the sound of the lyre.

Here the Iliad and the Odyssey are mined by Horace (as previously by various kinds of philosophers) for moral instruction; indeed, the Greek poet Homer is said to outdo distinguished Greek moral authorities (the Stoic Chrysippus and the Platonist Crantor, representing two of the great philosophical schools) as a guide to virtue and vice. As in Wolfgang Petersen’s film Troy (2004), we see the seamy side of the Trojan War (“Mutiny, trickery, crime, lust, and rage”) in the account of the Iliad, but it is the hero of the Odyssey who is held up for admiration for his sense and endurance (a little like his comic descendant Ulysses Everett McGill in the Coen brothers’ 2000 O Brother, Where Art Thou?). Typically, 22

INTRODUCTION

Horace then casts himself, his addressee, and his readers as morally weak characters who cannot compete with Odysseus, but rather follow the self-indulgent suitors on Ithaca or the luxurious court of the hedonistic Phaeacians; as often, the poet’s moral teaching is framed and softened by an expression of his own inadequacy, a successful persuasive strategy. *** In his slave-owning, chauvinistic, imperialistic and often brutal society, Horace, like other enlightened Romans such as Cicero and Seneca, nevertheless managed to engage instructively with issues which we still confront today. Chief among these are how to avoid stress and excess in an age of anxieties and extremes, how to live a thoughtful and moderate life in the midst 23

INTRODUCTION

of unthinking over-consumption, how to achieve and maintain true love and friendship, and how to face disaster and death with appropriate courage and patience. His brilliant poetic framings of these perennial issues of human existence, and his thoughtful solutions to the difficulties they create, provide memorable advice and assistance which have real value after more than two millennia. That is the rationale of this volume.

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Chapter 1 THE SEARCH FOR THE GOOD LIFE

Horace’s poetry consistently advocates being content with one’s lot in life, being satisfied with a small sufficiency of possessions, and not worrying about what the future may bring. These are seen as the key strategies to combat mental stress and discomfort in an anxious and acquisitive society, and the prime routes to the peace of mind that was the central goal of most of the important philosophies of the poet’s own time. This chapter considers this complex of related themes in various parts of the poet’s output. 25

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Being Content with One’s Lot Qui fit, Maecenas, ut nemo, quam sibi sortem seu ratio dederit seu fors obiecerit, illa contentus vivat, laudet diversa sequentis? “o fortunati mercatores” gravis annis miles ait, multo iam fractus membra labore; contra mercator navem iactantibus Austris: “militia est potior. quid enim? concurritur: horae momento cita mors venit aut victoria laeta.” agricolam laudat iuris legumque peritus, sub galli cantum consultor ubi ostia pulsat; ille, datis vadibus qui rure extractus in urbem est, solos felicis viventis clamat in urbe.

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cetera de genere hoc—adeo sunt multa—loquacem delassare valent Fabium. ne te morer, audi, quo rem deducam. si quis deus “en ego” dicat “iam faciam quod voltis: eris tu, qui modo miles, mercator; tu, consultus modo, rusticus: hinc vos, vos hinc mutatis discedite partibus. eia, quid statis?” nolint. atqui licet esse beatis. quid causae est, merito quin illis Iuppiter ambas iratus buccas inflet neque se fore posthac tam facilem dicat, votis ut praebeat aurem? praeterea, ne sic ut qui iocularia ridens percurram: quamquam ridentem dicere verum

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quid vetat? ut pueris olim dant crustula blandi doctores, elementa velint ut discere prima.

How does it come about, Maecenas, that none of us can live Content with the lot that choice has accorded or chance has cast in our way, But rather praise those who follow different paths? “Happy are the traders,” says the soldier weighed down with years, His limbs now shattered with many a struggle; The trader, for his part, when the storm winds shake his ship, says: “Military service is better: what is there to it? There’s a charge:

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In the brief space of an hour there comes rapid death or the joy of victory.” The farmer is applauded by the expert in equity and statute, When at cock-crow his client knocks on his door; But the farmer, when dragged from country to city after standing surety, Proclaims that only those who live in the city are happy. All the other complaints of this kind, so many are there, Would wear out even the garrulous Fabius. Not to hold you up, Let me tell you where I’m taking my topic: If some god were to say, “Here I am, I’ll do what you want: You, who were just now a soldier, will be a trader:

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You, just now a lawyer, a countryman; go off here, Go off there, and change the parts you play. Hey! Why are you standing around?” they would not comply: And yet they have their chance to be happy. What reason is there to stop Jupiter puffing both cheeks at them In anger, and saying he won’t be so affable in future In lending an ear to their supplications? But aside from this, let me not run through my material In the spirit of one who laughs at what is amusing: Though what prevents the laugher from truth-telling?

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Just as sometimes insinuating instructors give pastries to boys, To make them want to learn their earliest letters. (Satires 1.1.1–26)

This, the opening of Horace’s earliest poetry book (Satires 1), criticises the vice called by the Greeks mempsimoiria, criticism of one’s own lot in life and concomitant envy of the lot of others. As often, Horace makes his moralising more palatable to his readers by implying that he is as deficient as everyone else and in equal need of correction (note “none of us” in the opening line). He also brings it vividly home to his original readers by his list of examples; there must have been few of his elite Roman readers who had not had

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personal contact with war, trade, farming, or the law, and the poet himself (as we have seen) came from a trade background, had been a soldier, and was soon to be a Sabine farmer. Likewise, the particular situations evoked of the instant moment of battle and chronic veteran pains, high-risk storms at sea, the early rising required of lawyers, and the reluctant city business trips of the farmer are familiar Roman features and anchor the moral precept in a contemporary social context. Humour is also effectively deployed; the jibe at the “garrulous Fabius” wittily attacks a Stoic moralist for longwindedness when the Stoics prized brevity as one of the main literary virtues, while the picture of the supreme god Jupiter puffing out his cheeks in anger and speaking in highly colloquial mode (“Hey!”) is an amusing anthropomorphising of the deity 32

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commonly thought of as the stern arbiter of destiny. This immediate appeal to contemporary Rome is matched for more sophisticated readers with subtle allusions to literary traditions. The god who intervenes in human affairs is a recognisable descendant of the deus ex machina, the “god from the crane” held suspended above the stage who often appears to sort out an apparently impossible situation at the end of a Greek tragedy. Likewise, the image of teachers bribing their pupils with patisserie is an entertaining transformation of a famous simile of Lucretius, the great Epicurean moral poet of the previous generation, who had compared his poem to a cup of medicine tinged with honey given to the young; in both cases sweet products are deployed for philosophically pedagogic purposes. 33

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These features from more elevated literary sources are appropriately lightened for the context of the Satires, which as Horace says here presents moral truth with greater impact through the strategy of laughter; this is his mode of making the medicine palatable. Stop Thinking about Tomorrow and Enjoy Today Tu ne quaesieris (scire nefas) quem mihi, quem tibi finem di dederint, Leuconoe, nec Babylonios temptaris numeros. ut melius quicquid erit pati! Seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam, quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare 34

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Tyrrhenum, sapias, vina liques et spatio brevi spem longam reseces. Dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

Don’t search (for it’s forbidden to know), Leuconoe, What end the gods have given me, given you, and don’t resort To the calculations of the Babylonians. How much better it is To endure whatever will be! Whether Jupiter has given you further winters Or this one as your last, which is now wearing out the Tyrrhenian sea With pebbles in its path, be wise, strain your wine and cut back 35

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Long-springing hope within a small space: as we speak, time the envious Will have fled away. Harvest the present day, trust minimally in the next. (Odes 1.11, complete)

The emphasis in Horace’s poems on accepting one’s present situation with equanimity is matched by an equal concern not to worry about the future. For a postChristian Western society this is a familiar notion: in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus exhorts his followers, “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” (Matthew 6:34).** In this complete lyric poem from the first book of Odes, which has ** All biblical citations refer to the King James Version. 36

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an epigrammatic brevity and pithiness, the poet asks a woman (who has a Greek name and may be imagined as a freedwoman girlfriend) not to use the means of horoscope astrology (traditionally associated with Babylon and the East, and here presented as ineffectual and perhaps disreputable) to calculate the length of her own or his future life. This appeals to contemporary fashion, as astrology was popular at Rome in Horace’s time, and recurs elsewhere in his work (e.g., in Odes 2.17). Further domesticating elements reinforce the poem’s location in the Roman present and bolster the vividness of its appeal to the original reader. The pebble beaches of the Tyrrhenian Sea evoke the long west coast of Italy, while the metaphors of “strain,” “cut back,” and “harvest” (the famous carpe diem, perhaps more familiar in the form “seize 37

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the day,” the motto of Robin Williams’s Mr. Keating in Peter Weir’s 1989 film Dead Poets Society) look to the Roman culture of wine and vines. Roman wine needed to be strained before drinking to filter out impurities, and earlier in the wine-making process (then as now) vines needed pruning and grapes picking. This is one of the many poems in the Odes where the implied setting is at a symposium, or drinking party; this context is an important background to Horace’s presentation of friendship, as we will see in the next chapter, though here Leuconoe seems to be characterised as a lover urged to enjoy both wine and the poet’s presence as her guest. Like the tranquil location of the country (see below), the symposium for Horace is a space of relaxation, albeit of a rather more active kind than quiet contemplation. The 38

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stress on enjoying the pleasure of the moment neatly fits this poem’s main ethical point: relish what you have now and do not be anxious about the future, where anything can happen and which you cannot control. This is recognisably akin to the modern therapy of mindfulness, where we are invited to fix our attention on the details of the moment in order to shut out anxieties about the present or the past. The Virtues of a Moderate and Peaceful Life Horace’s own preferred quiet residence on his Sabine country estate (see figure 1) is the material symbol of his moderate mode of living; this secluded rural existence is especially consistent with the ataraxia (“freedom from disturbance”) and tranquil life 39

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Figure 1. Horace’s estate in the Sabine hills, with the town of Licenza above (watercolour by William Havell, c. 1828–29). The visible remains are of a later imperial villa (it is possible that Horace left the estate to Augustus and that it became imperial property). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File : Licenza, _near _Rome - _Horace %27s _Villa _MET _DP805669.jpg

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of the mind cultivated by Epicurean philosophy. Like the symposium, the country can provide an escape from the cares and pressures of urban living: Viuere naturae si conuenienter oportet, ponendaeque domo quaerenda est area primum, nouistine locum potiorem rure beato? Est ubi plus tepeant hiemes, ubi gratior aura leniat et rabiem Canis et momenta Leonis, cum semel accepit solem furibundus acutum? Est ubi diuellat somnos minus inuida cura? Deterius Libycis olet aut nitet herba lapillis? Purior in uicis aqua tendit rumpere plumbum 41

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quam quae per pronum trepidat cum murmure riuum? Nempe inter uarias nutritur silua columnas, laudaturque domus longos quae prospicit agros. Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret et mala perrumpet furtim fastidia uictrix. Non qui Sidonio contendere callidus ostro nescit Aquinatem potantia uellera fucum certius accipiet damnum propiusue medullis quam qui non poterit uero distinguere falsum. Quem res plus nimio delectauere secundae, mutatae quatient. Siquid mirabere, pones inuitus. Fuge magna; licet sub paupere tecto reges et regum uita praecurrere amicos. 42

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If we are meant to live in accordance with nature, And we are to begin by seeking a site for building a home, Do you know any place to be preferred to the blessed countryside? Is there somewhere where winters are warmer, where a more pleasing breeze Tames the madness of the Dog Star, and the influence of the Lion, So wild once it has received the piercing rays of the sun? Is there a place where envious care disrupts sleep less? Does the grass have less scent or shine than floors of African marble? Is the water that on city blocks strains to burst the lead piping Purer than that which hurries along in a downward stream? 43

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Of course, a forest can be cultivated amid many-coloured columns, And that house is praised which has a distant prospect of fields: But though you thrust nature out with a pitchfork, it will always return. The man who does not know how to make the fleeces that have drunk The dye of Italian Aquino compete with the purple of Sidon Will incur no loss that is surer or closer to his inner self Than the man who cannot distinguish true from false. The man who has been over-pleased by fortune’s favour Will be shaken when it changes. Avoid great surroundings: in a humble house

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You can surpass kings and kings’ friends in living. (Epistles 1.10.12–33)

In this poem, presented as a letter written from country to city, Horace teases his friend the schoolmaster Fuscus about the latter’s taste for urban life, contrasting with the poet’s own rural preferences. He argues that if we ought to live according to nature, as the Stoics famously pronounced, then the country existence (not Fuscus’s city life) is the right, “natural” choice; this is likely to play on Fuscus’s own Stoic interests and to imply amusingly that he is not living up to his own chosen philosophy. The passage picks out the advantages of the simple rural life: milder weather (true of the Sabine hills), a quieter environment (Rome then

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as now was notoriously noisy), the attractive traditional elements of an ancient ideal landscape, or locus amoenus (grass, flowing water, trees). The city cannot compete with this, though it tries to with its factitious forests of stone columns, its artificial lead watercourses, and its mere distant views of greenery; nature will always reassert itself, an idea expressed in the memorable one-liner (a frequent Horatian mnemonic technique) naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret, “Though you thrust nature out with a pitchfork, it will always return.” Here we have glimpses of Horace as a proto-environmentalist. The arguments for the superiority of country life continue: the capacity to tell true from false in ethics, reinforced by rustic meditation, is more important than expert discrimination in urban commerce (here 46

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represented by dyeing wool for clothes, a key industry in Rome; fuller’s vats were evident at its crossroads). Moreover, the material opportunities of the city may be only temporary; the wise man must always be prepared for a change of fortune (a common and salutary Horatian message). The end of the passage perhaps presents a little self-irony on the poet’s part: this is after all the Horace who had regularly enjoyed the luxurious dinners of Maecenas in “great surroundings” in his patron’s far from “humble house” on the Roman Esquiline, and is in a sense himself a “king’s friend,” and in another poem in the same book he presents himself as in fact unable to decide between urban and rural living (Epistles 1.8.12). The same kind of debate is conducted in another poem from the first book of Epistles, in which the poet addresses (again 47

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from the country) a young friend, Lollius, who seeks to rise in society. At the end of the poem Horace encapsulates his ethical message to the young man alongside a commendation of his own modest rural life on the Sabine estate: Inter cuncta leges et percontabere doctos, qua ratione queas traducere leniter aeuum, num te semper inops agitet uexetque cupido, num pauor et rerum mediocriter utilium spes, uirtutem doctrina paret naturane donet, quid minuat curas, quid te tibi reddat amicum, quid pure tranquillet, honos an dulce lucellum, an secretum iter et fallentis semita uitae. 48

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Me quotiens reficit gelidus Digentia riuus, quem Mandela bibit, rugosus frigore pagus quid sentire putas, quid credis, amice, precari? “Sit mihi quod nunc est, etiam minus, et mihi uiuam quod superest aeui, siquid superesse uolunt di; sit bona librorum et prouisae frugis in annum copia, neu fluitem dubiae spe pendulus horae.” Sed satis est orare Iouem qui ponit et aufert; det uitam, det opes; aequum mi animum ipse parabo.

Amidst it all, read, and interrogate the wise, 49

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About the way to get through your life without friction: Whether unfulfilled desire is always to harass and vex you, And panic and the hope for things of modest use, Whether learning leads to virtue or heredity confers it, What reduces your cares, what reconciles you to yourself, What gives you real contentment—office and sweet lucre, Or the road of retirement and the path of life that passes unknown. Every time the cool stream of Digentia refreshes me, That Mandela drinks of, that hamlet shrivelled with cold, What do you think I feel, my friend, what do you believe I pray for? 50

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“May I have what I have now, less even, and may I live for myself What remains of my days, if the gods grant any remainder: May I have a good supply of books and corn planned for the year, And never hang and float in waiting for an uncertain hour.” But it’s enough to pray to Jupiter who gives and who takes away To give me life and resources: a steady mind I will acquire for myself. (Epistles 1.18.96–112)

Here the young Lollius is advised to study ethics (and perhaps cross-examine philosophy professors, available in Rome), seeking answers to fundamental moral questions: how to lead a tranquil life, how to deal with desire, whether virtue is 51

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acquired or inherited, how to reduce anxiety, how to be happy with oneself, whether the public or the private life is better; most of these are still key considerations for the good life. The poet’s own perspective is then immediately made clear: his Sabine estate, here identified by its named stream and local village, provides pretty much all his modest needs (though, as for the modern intellectual, a supply of reading matter, presumably from the city, is a key element); he would not be troubled even if he had even less to live on, and the important things are not to worry about the all too unpredictable future and to maintain mental steadiness. As in Odes 1.11, one should accept what life and resources the gods give; the key task is to cultivate the right kind of mind, independently of external resources. 52

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This emphasis on relative indifference to material circumstances is found again in the first poem in the third book of Odes, once more presenting the Sabine estate as the specific paradigm of the modest and moral life: Desiderantem quod satis est neque tumultuosum sollicitat mare, nec saevus Arcturi cadentis impetus aut orientis Haedi, non verberatae grandine vineae fundusque mendax, arbore nunc aquas culpante, nunc torrentia agros sidera, nunc hiemes iniquas. Contracta pisces aequora sentiunt iactis in altum molibus: huc frequens caementa demittit redemptor cum famulis dominusque terrae fastidiosus: sed Timor et Minae scandunt eodem quo dominus, neque 53

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decedit aerata triremi et post equitem sedet atra Cura. Quod si dolentem nec Phrygius lapis nec purpurarum sidere clarior delenit usus nec Falerna uitis Achaemeniumque costum, cur invidendis postibus et novo sublime ritu moliar atrium? Cur valle permutem Sabina divitias operosiores?

He who longs only for what is enough Is not stirred to fear by the sea’s tumult, Or by the fierce force of the falling Northern star or of the rising Kid, Or by the vines beaten down by hail And the disappointing farm, where the trees 54

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Blame now the rainwaters, now the constellations That roast the fields, now the hostile winters. Fish feel the seas shrunk as piles are driven Into the deep; down there the constant contractor With his slave crew consigns his rubble, Together with the master who scorns dry land: But Fear and Threats can climb As high as the master, and dark Care Stays on the copper-sheathed trireme, And takes her seat behind the horseman. But if neither Phrygian marble or the wearing 55

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Of purple that surpasses the brightness of stars Cannot relieve the sick man, or Falernian wine, Or ointment from the Persian East, Why should I labour to build a hall with doorposts To attract envy, setting a new fashion for height? Why should I exchange my Sabine valley For riches that bring bigger burdens? (Odes 3.1.25–48)

By seeking only a material sufficiency rather than great riches, argues Horace, the good man is insured against distress and disappointment; appropriate indifference to storms at sea and unsatisfactory agricultural productivity again locate the 56

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argument vividly in the world of the Roman elite, where (as we saw in Satires 1.1, above) maritime trading and farm ownership, and their associated risks, were widespread. The poem then focuses specifically on excessive modern building projects and the driving of piles into the sea in order to support massive villas that obliterate the natural difference between sea and land. In the Roman world this points to the luxurious shoreside residences of the Bay of Naples, but for us finds an echo in the ocean-encroaching beach houses of Los Angeles’ Malibu or the bizarre multistorey basements of London’s Kensington, while the copper-sheathed trireme (a warship adapted to private use) is an apposite match for the billionaire’s superyacht or private jet as a symbol of superfluity; the point of unnatural excess is an effective one, along with 57

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the idea that wealth cannot bring happiness. If one is truly ill in spirit, one cannot be healed by ownership of prestige consumer items, whether in building materials (for Phrygian read Carrara marble), dress (for purple dye for clothing read haute couture), wine (Chateau Pétrus?), or party ointment (DKNY Golden Delicious Million Dollar Fragrance Bottle?). Striving to outdo others in luxury creates only envy and trouble; better far to remain content with the modest Sabine estate and its meditative tranquillity. The overall psychological message is that great riches bring anxiety rather than an escape from it; the striking image of Fear and Threats clinging tightly behind the elite horseback rider, however fast he goes, expresses this brilliantly (this image was the favourite Horatian quotation of the great Victorian novelist W. M. Thackeray). 58

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Much the same point about the disquiet brought by great possessions and the superiority of a modest sufficiency is made in Epistles 1.2: quod satis est cui contingit, nil amplius optet. Non domus et fundus, non aeris aceruus et auri aegroto domini deduxit corpore febris, non animo curas; ualeat possessor oportet, si comportatis rebus bene cogitat uti. Qui cupit aut metuit, iuuat illum sic domus et res ut lippum pictae tabulae, fomenta podagram, auriculas citharae collecta sorde dolentis. Sincerum est nisi uas, quodcumque infundis acescit. 59

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Let those who possess enough wish for nothing more ample: No house or farm, no mound of bronze and gold Will fend fever from their ailing owners’ physique, Or cares from their mind. A proprietor needs to be in proper health, If he plans to make real use of the goods he’s amassed. The person who suffers from longing or fear is as little pleased By house or wealth as paintings please the purblind, Hot compresses those with gout, or the music of lyres Please ears that ache from dirty deposits: If the vessel is not clean, whatever you pour in goes sour. (Epistles 1.2.46–54) 60

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Here again material goods cannot guarantee their owner’s welfare, either physical or psychological; as often in Horace’s moral thought, bodily and mental wellbeing are seen as analogous, illustrating the unseen inner distemper (psychological imbalance) by the visible outward signs of corporeal disease (poor sight, gout, and earache). Once again the details look to the lifestyle of the Roman elite, but also fit our modern context: a fine city house, a delightful country residence, deep monetary holdings, or an extensive art collection cannot help those who are fundamentally unhealthy in soul, just as they cannot alleviate their bodily pain. The opening of the passage again contains the key solution in memorable one-liner form: he who has enough need not strive for more (quod satis est cui contingit, nil amplius optet, 61

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“let those who possess enough wish for nothing more ample”), while its end states its moral truths in down-to-earth, even crude imagery about bodily and domestic hygiene, the kind of tactic associated with Stoic ethics. The futility of vast possessions in comparison with psychic well-being and the superiority of a modest competence can be linked with another strand in Horace’s moral thought, the need to be unimpressed by merely material things. This is well articulated at the start of Epistles 1.16: Nil admirari prope res est una, Numici, solaque quae possit facere et seruare beatum. Hunc solem et stellas et decedentia certis tempora momentis sunt qui formidine nulla 62

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imbuti spectent. Quid censes munera terrae, quid maris extremos Arabas ditantis et Indos? Ludicra quid, plausus et amici dona Quiritis? Quo spectanda modo, quo sensu credis et ore? Qui timet his aduersa, fere miratur eodem quo cupiens pacto; pauor est utrubique molestus, inprouisa simul species exterret utrumque. Gaudeat an doleat, cupiat metuatne, quid ad rem, si, quicquid uidit melius peiusue sua spe, defixis oculis animoque et corpore torpet? Insani sapiens nomen ferat, aequus iniqui, ultra quam satis est uirtutem si petat ipsam. 63

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To be daunted by nothing is the one and only thing, Numicius, that can make and keep you happy. There are some who can look on the sun and stars And the seasons yielding at fixed times, untinged with fear: How, with what feelings and features, do you think we should look On the gifts of the earth, or those of the sea that enriches The far-distant Arabs and the Indians, or the shows, The applause and the gifts of our citizen body in friendly mode? He who fears the opposite of these is as good as daunted, Desiring them by the same token: both kinds of awe are disturbing. 64

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In both cases the unexpected sight brings terror. Joy or sorrow, longing or fear, what point is there If whatever someone sees that is over or under expectation Leads to fixed eyes and freezing in mind and body? May the wise man bear the name of fool, the just of wrongdoer, If he pursues even virtue itself beyond what is sufficient. (Epistles 1.6.1–16)

Here “to be daunted by nothing” is a reformulation of the striving for equanimity and mental tranquillity generally shared by the major philosophies of Horace’s own time, but it is specifically framed in a very Roman context of material possessions and 65

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public success: Arabia (the object of a military expedition in the previous decade) and India (linked with Rome through trade and diplomacy at this time) are seen as exotic, rich sources of jewels and spices, and the sweet applause of the Roman people evokes contemporary spectacular shows given by magistrates (and members of the imperial family) to increase their popularity. These conventionally desirable elements of material wealth and political prosperity should be treated with indifference, just like their opposites; that way the good man is insured against mental distress. Again, the key idea is that of sufficiency and moderation: even the pursuit of virtue beyond what suffices becomes a form of madness and wrongdoing, and modest aims and attainments are the best, alongside the capacity to tolerate any outcome, good or bad. 66

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Resisting Travel and Riches Horace’s emphasis on a quiet and moderate country life presents a firm contrast with the energetic expansion of the Roman Empire during his lifetime; the life of contemplation at home for him surpasses in personal fulfilment the opportunities offered to his friends to traverse the Mediterranean world in search of pleasure, conquest, or riches. This comes out clearly in Epistles 1.11, where he writes to his friend Bullatius, who has travelled to what is now the western coast of Turkey: Quid tibi uisa Chios, Bullati, notaque Lesbos, quid concinna Samos, quid Croesi regia Sardis, Zmyrna quid et Colophon? Maiora minoraue fama, 67

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cunctane prae Campo et Tiberino flumine sordent? An uenit in uotum Attalicis ex urbibus una? An Lebedum laudas odio maris atque uiarum? Scis Lebedus quid sit: Gabiis desertior atque Fidenis uicus; tamen illic uiuere uellem, oblitusque meorum, obliuiscendus et illis, Neptunum procul e terra spectare furentem. Sed neque qui Capua Romam petit, imbre lutoque aspersus uolet in caupona uiuere; nec qui frigus collegit, furnos et balnea laudat ut fortunatam plene praestantia uitam; nec si te ualidus iactauerit Auster in alto, idcirco nauem trans Aegaeum mare uendas. Incolumi Rhodos et Mytilene pulchra facit quod 68

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paenula solstitio, campestre niualibus auris, per brumam Tiberis, Sextili mense caminus. Dum licet ac uoltum seruat Fortuna benignum, Romae laudetur Samos et Chios et Rhodos absens. Tu quamcumque deus tibi fortunauerit horam grata sume manu neu dulcia differ in annum, ut quocumque loco fueris uixisse libenter te dicas; nam si ratio et prudentia curas, non locus effusi late maris arbiter aufert, caelum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt. Strenua nos exercet inertia; nauibus atque quadrigis petimus bene uiuere. Quod petis, hic est, 69

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est Vlubris, animus si te non deficit aequus.

How did Chios seem to you, Bullatius, and famous Lesbos, And pretty Samos, and the palace of Croesus at Sardis, What of Smyrna and Colophon—better or worse than their fame? Or are they all as dirt beside the Campus and the Tiber’s stream? Or does one of the cities of Attalus surface in your prayers, Or do you commend Lebedus, now sick of sea and travel? You know what Lebedus is, a mere village, emptier Than Gabii or Fidenae—yet there I’d like to live, 70

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And forgetting my friends, to be forgotten by them, Watch Neptune raging at safe distance from the shore. But he who makes for Rome from Capua, spattered With rain and mud, would not want actually to live in an inn, And even he who has caught a cold does not praise stoves and hot baths As the only purveyors of the truly happy life. Nor would you, if a strong south wind should toss you on the deep, Sell off your ship across the Aegean as a consequence. For one in good health, Rhodes and fair Mytilene Do the same as a cloak in midsummer, a light tunic in snowy blasts, 71

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A Tiber dip in midwinter, a furnace in the month of August. While you can and Fortune keeps her features kind, Let Samos and Chios and Rhodes be praised at Rome for their distance. Grasp every hour god has kindly bestowed on you With grateful hand, and don’t postpone pleasure for another season: This way you can say that wherever you were You lived most gladly: for if reason and good sense, Not a place that commands a wide spread of ocean, banish cares, Those who speed across the sea change their climate, not their temper. Our energetic sloth gives us a workout: by ship and chariot 72

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We seek for the good life. But what you seek is here, Here at Ulubrae, if you have sufficient steady mind.

The poem begins with a travelogue of the glamorous Greek cities and islands of Ionia, which for the poet Horace all have particular literary associations that the cultivated Bullatius may share: Chios is the birthplace (according to some) of Homer, Lesbos of Sappho, Samos of Epicurus, Smyrna of the minor poet Bion, Colophon of the minor poet Nicander, while the palace of Croesus at Sardis recalls Herodotus, father of Greek history, who set a famous anecdote about Solon there (Herodotus 1.29–33). But the key point is that these attractive places actually do nothing for the sick mind; given the choice of locations in the region, Horace 73

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would actually rather choose the distinctly unglamorous peninsula of Lebedos, which he had probably visited when with Brutus in 43–42 BCE (Satires 1.7 narrates an incident that he witnessed at nearby Clazomenae). This tiny place (190 yards long, with an isthmus 220 yards wide) is a kind of overseas Sabine estate, where the poet could imagine living his quiet and secluded Epicurean existence without material distractions; this Epicurean angle is reinforced by the picture of watching storms at sea from the safety of the shore, which draws on the famous opening of book 2 of Lucretius’s great Epicurean poem De Rerum Naturam (2.1–4). In general, Horace suggests in another brilliantly memorable oneliner, travel does not broaden the mind but merely relocates its anxieties; caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt, 74

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“Those who speed across the sea change their climate, not their temper.” This again recalls Lucretius’s poem, this time the end of book 3, where the poet presents troubled elite Romans trying in vain to run away from their troubles, rushing from Rome to the country with their smart carriagehorses (3.1060–75). Once again we find a commendation of living in and for the present, however mundane that present may be; there is no need to seek peace of mind via distant journeying. It is “reason and good sense” that banish cares, not expensive cruises, and the ideal “steady mind” can be attained without extensive travel—it can be found at Ulubrae, a humble wayside community twenty-five miles south of Rome on the Via Appia and the edge of the unhealthy Pomptine Marshes, where Cicero was once serenaded 75

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by a chorus of frogs (Ad Familiares 7.18.3). Even in this unpromising environment, the poet argues, the truly wise person can feel content and at home. The last twelve Latin words of this poem are inscribed above the entrance of the neoclassical Auchinleck House in Scotland, the ancestral home of Dr Johnson’s biographer James Boswell; the person of balanced mind is content anywhere, whether in an elegant country mansion, in an insalubrious local village, or in a small place on another continent, and has no need to range the world in search of tranquillity. Once again the poet advocates a kind of mindfulness, of appreciating and meditating on one’s actual situation. The very next letter in the Epistles (1.12) takes up a similar theme, writing to Iccius, who is serving Augustus’s deputy Agrippa in Sicily: 76

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Fructibus Agrippae Siculis quos colligis, Icci, si recte frueris, non est ut copia maior ab Ioue donari possit tibi; tolle querellas; pauper enim non est cui rerum suppetit usus. Si uentri bene, si lateri est pedibusque tuis, nil diuitiae poterunt regales addere maius. Si forte in medio positorum abstemius herbis uiuis et urtica, sic uiues protinus, ut te confestim liquidus Fortunae riuus inauret, uel quia naturam mutare pecunia nescit uel quia cuncta putas una uirtute minora.

Iccius, if you have proper enjoyment Of the Sicilian yields you collect for Agrippa, 77

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No greater abundance can be given you by Jupiter. Cut your complaints: no one is poor who has the use of plenty. If all is well with your stomach, your midriff, and your feet A king’s wealth will add nothing more. If you happen to live on a frugal diet of herbs and nettles Though surrounded by ready-made dainties That way you will lead a smooth course of life Even though Fortune’s clear stream suddenly gild you, Either because you cannot change your nature Or because you think that everything is inferior to virtue supreme. (Epistles 1.12.1–12) 78

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Here Iccius’s role as manager of a great man’s rich revenues abroad exposes him to a traditional kind of moral temptation; such provincial appointments often led to unscrupulous self-enrichment, not least in fertile and prosperous Sicily, plundered half a century before by the rapacious governor Verres famously prosecuted by Cicero. Horace urges his friend (whom we know from an earlier poem, Odes 1.29, is not without ethical interests) to make proper use of his situation and ignore its enticing seductions, by behaving as if he were not in fact surrounded by such material abundance; as in 1.11, the wise man can be at home anywhere with the right mind-set, and can be indifferent to seductive foreign locations. As long as Iccius is healthy in body and mind, does his job while resisting the corruption of easy wealth, and 79

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concentrates on philosophy rather than peculation, he will be fine; his situation as the trusted agent of Agrippa will allow him a comfortable life, an idea again expressed in a sparkling one-liner, pauper enim non est cui rerum suppetit usus, “no one is poor who has the use of plenty.” Once again we see the exhortation of indifference to external circumstances: the gods have been kind to Iccius and brought him good fortune, but he should still live a moderate life, just as if that had never happened. One Poet to Another on the Good Life I conclude this chapter with Horace’s poem to another poet, Albius, very likely the love-elegist Albius Tibullus (Epistles 1.4):

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Albi, nostrorum sermonum candide iudex, quid nunc te dicam facere in regione Pedana? Scribere quod Cassi Parmensis opuscula uincat, an tacitum siluas inter reptare salubris, curantem quicquid dignum sapiente bonoque est? Non tu corpus eras sine pectore; di tibi formam, di tibi diuitias dederunt artemque fruendi. Quid uoueat dulci nutricula maius alumno, qui sapere et fari possit quae sentiat, et cui gratia, fama, ualetudo contingat abunde, et mundus uictus non deficiente crumina? Inter spem curamque, timores inter et iras omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum; grata superueniet quae non sperabitur hora.

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Me pinguem et nitidum bene curata cute uises, cum ridere uoles, Epicuri de grege porcum.

Albius, you kindly critic of my satires, What shall I say you now are doing in the region of Pedum? Writing something to outperform the pieces of Cassius of Parma? Or strolling peacefully amid the healthgiving woods, Caring for all that is worthy of the man of wisdom and virtue? You were never a body without a soul. The gods gave you good looks, The gods gave you wealth and the art of enjoying it. For what more would a fond nurse wish for her beloved charge— 82

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To be able to have taste and express his thoughts, To have grace, fame, and health fall to him in abundance, With a refined lifestyle and a never-failing purse? Amid your hopes and cares, amid your fears and passions, Believe every day that dawns your last; Sweet is the hour that comes that’s not expected. Come and see me, fat and sleek with skin well curated When you want to laugh at a hog from Epicurus’s herd.

Here one poet teases another; Horace notes his friend’s relative wealth where the elegist Tibullus in an earlier collection had prominently advertised his relative poverty 83

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(Tibullus 1.1.5, 1.5.61–66), and the line “Amid your hopes and cares, amid your fears and passions” neatly picks up the range of emotions that the lover Tibullus had expressed in his poems about his tempestuous erotic life. Horace presents his fellow poet as combining love poetry with philosophical meditation in woodlands near his country home not far from Rome, Tibullus’s version of Horace’s Sabine estate, and the several Epicurean traces in the poem suggest that here the two are seen as sympathetic to that particular philosophy; both are presented in the poem as combining ethical interests with material comfort, especially in the final joke about Horace as a “hog” (picking up a slur sometimes cast on Epicureans for their supposed mindless hedonism, and perhaps pointing ironically to the poet’s regular bouts of luxury living 84

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with Maecenas in Rome). Once again, the key message is that it is pointless to think about the unpredictable future; Tibullus, like Horace, should enjoy the good life of the present while it lasts. Once again, too, this is pithily and memorably expressed, this time in a pair of one-liners: omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum, “Believe every day that dawns your last,” followed immediately by grata superueniet quae non sperabitur hora, “Sweet is the hour that comes that’s not expected.” These passages taken together give a clear Horatian recipe for the good life: do not be discontented with your lot; do not worry pointlessly about the future; live in and appreciate the moment, especially in association with friends; and seek a tranquil and materially moderate life. These are persuasive and attractive precepts for our own age. 85

Chapter 2 THE IMPORTANCE OF FRIENDSHIP

Horace’s choice to write in poetic genres (such as lyric and satire) where the firstperson writer typically addresses another individual naturally tends to highlight oneto-one relationships, and his inclination towards Epicureanism noted in the previous chapter also leads in this direction. Most ancient philosophies focused on the mental self-care of the individual and the need to achieve personal peace, and friendship could be difficult to accommodate. Epicureanism, however, firmly embraced the concept of friendship; amongst the 86

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aphoristic “Principal Doctrines” of Epicurus listed by his later biographer Diogenes Laertius, number twenty-seven states, “Of the things that wisdom provides for the blessedness of one’s whole life, by far the greatest is the possession of friendship.” A further reason for the prominence of friendship in Horace’s work is the structure of Roman elite society, where the richest and most influential citizens characteristically extended their patronage to the less powerful, creating extensive social and economic networks. The more formal name for this arrangement was clientela, with the lesser functioning as “clients” of the greater, but informally it was commonly called amicitia, the normal Latin word for “friendship.” Though Horace was clearly a client of his patron Maecenas and a recipient of many material benefits 87

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from him, including the Sabine estate, his poetry (like most Roman literary discourse) always refers to this relationship as amicitia, allowing him to present the two of them as equal friends when it suits him. All this may sound a different world from our own, but Horace’s treatment of friendship (as we shall see) has many apt lessons for modern life. Horace and Maecenas Horace is anxious to present Maecenas as interested in him for his personal moral qualities, even if it was in fact his poetic prowess that originally attracted the great man’s attention. At the start of Satires 1.6 he stresses that Maecenas selects his associates for their good character rather than their high social status: 88

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Non quia, Maecenas, Lydorum quidquid Etruscos incoluit finis, nemo generosior est te, nec quod avus tibi maternus fuit atque paternus olim qui magnis legionibus imperitarent, ut plerique solent, naso suspendis adunco ignotos, ut me libertino patre natum; cum referre negas, quali sit quisque parente natus, dum ingenuus, persuades hoc tibi vere, ante potestatem Tulli atque ignobile regnum multos saepe viros nullis maioribus ortos et vixisse probos amplis et honoribus auctos; contra Laevinum, Valeri genus, unde Superbus Tarquinius regno pulsus fugit, unius assis non umquam pretio pluris licuisse, notante 89

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iudice quo nosti, populo, qui stultus honores saepe dat indignis et famae servit ineptus, qui stupet in titulis et imaginibus.

Although, Maecenas, of all of the Lydians who came to inhabit The Etruscan lands, none is more nobly born than you, And though your ancestors on both male and female sides Were the kind who gave orders to great regiments, You do not look down your hooked nose as most do At nobodies—like myself, born from a freedman father; When you claim it makes no odds what sire a man is born from, 90

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Provided that he is noble in character, you are truly convinced That before Tullius came to power and his low-born rule, There were regularly many men who had no ancestors Who lived lives of virtue crowned with ample honours; That, on the contrary, Laevinus, the scion of Valerius, at whose hand The Proud Tarquin was driven from his kingdom and fled, Was valued at the price of a single penny, never more, With the people marking his worth, that jury you know so well, Which foolishly often hands office to the worthless And senselessly plays the slave to reputation, 91

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Stunned by inscriptions and ancestor-masks. (Satires 1.6.1–17)

Here Horace suggests that both he and Maecenas belong to an aristocracy of virtue that transcends Rome’s normal class hierarchy; the two are friends, despite the fact that Maecenas comes from grand and ancient Etruscan stock, while Horace is a lowly freedman’s son. This disjunction of impressive ancestry and virtuous achievement is proved by Roman history, the poet suggests: Servius Tullius, one of Rome’s most successful early kings, was of servile birth, while the disreputable Laevinus, probably a contemporary of Horace, whose ancestors claimed the glory of expelling the last, tyrannical Tarquin king at the beginning of the Roman Republic, was 92

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judged of no account even by the Roman people, who are often misled by the traditional trappings of aristocratic ancestors. Probity, not pedigree, is what matters. The suggestion that one should choose friends and associates on the grounds of their good character rather than of their social status is as valuable today as it was in Rome. In Odes 1.20 we see the friendship of Horace and Maecenas in action in the context of the symposium, as often in Horace the place where friends come together as well as a means of achieving the life of contentment (see chapter 1): Vile potabis modicis Sabinum cantharis, Graeca quod ego ipse testa conditum levi, datus in theatro cum tibi plausus, care Maecenas eques, ut paterni 93

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fluminis ripae simul et iocosa redderet laudes tibi Vaticani montis imago. Caecubum et prelo domitam Caleno tu bibas uvam; mea nec Falernae temperant vites neque Formiani pocula colles.

You will drink cheap Sabine wine From modest cups, wine which I myself Stored and sealed in a Greek jar, when Applause rang out for you at the theatre, Maecenas, dear amongst knights, with the result That the banks of your ancestral river Repeated your praises along with The glad echo sounding from the Vatican hill. 94

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You may usually drink Caecuban and the grape Mastered by the wine press of Cales; My goblets are mellowed by neither The vines of Falerii or the hills of Formiae. (Odes 1.20, complete)

Here a brief and apparently casual invitation to a drinking party is richly coloured with allusions to the strong personal bond between host and guest. Horace offers Maecenas a humble wine well below his patron’s normal level, something clear from the poem’s last stanza, which lists the impressive vintages Maecenas is used to; but it has been lovingly bottled by the poet himself, and more importantly comes from the Sabine estate Maecenas has given him, a subtle token of recognition and gratitude. Even more personally, the poet claims to have laid 95

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it down on a particular occasion (attested elsewhere) when Maecenas appeared at the main theatre in Rome after a long absence due to illness and was warmly applauded by the crowd. The wine thus signifies not just Horace’s dependence on his patron but also his personal affection and Maecenas’s general standing in society; though only an eques (knight) and not a senator, he is dear (care) both to Horace and to the Romans at large. The element of gift in this poem is extended if the Sabine wine in a Greek jar is taken to represent Horace’s own ode, Latin content in a Greek metre, in this case the signature Sapphic stanza of Sappho herself; Horace then presents Maecenas with a lyric poem, a further reciprocation for Maecenas’s implied generosity to him. This warm expression of affection and gratitude is a model of true friendship; 96

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reciprocity is a key element in affection, but each should give what is appropriate to him or her. Further, the modest nature of the hospitality offered suggests that the affectionate meeting of friends is much more important than the material circumstances of their mutual consumption. This remains excellent advice: with the right person the humblest beer is better than the most sophisticated cocktail. We find another sympotic invitation to Maecenas at Odes 3.8: Martis caelebs quid agam Kalendis, quid velint flores et acerra turis plena miraris positusque carbo in caespite vivo, docte sermones utriusque linguae. Voveram dulcis epulas et album Libero caprum prope funeratus arboris ictu ? 97

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Hic dies anno redeunte festus corticem adstrictum pice dimovebit amphorae fumum bibere institutae consule Tullo. Sume, Maecenas, cyathos amici sospitis centum et vigilis lucernas perfer in lucem; procul omnis esto clamor et ira. Mitte civilis super urbe curas. Occidit Daci Cotisonis agmen, Medus infestus sibi luctuosis dissidet armis, servit Hispanae vetus hostis orae Cantaber sera domitus catena, iam Scythae laxo meditantur arcu cedere campis. Neglegens ne qua populus laboret, parce privatus nimium cavere et dona praesentis cape laetus horae, linque severa. 98

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Are you wondering what I, a bachelor, am doing on the first of March, What the flowers mean and the box Full of incense and the coal laid on Turf that’s still living, You who are skilled in the speech of the two tongues? Once I vowed a delicious feast and a white he-goat To Bacchus, after I was almost killed off By a tree’s impact. This day of festival as the years return Will shift the cork fixed with pitch From the wine-jar set to drink in the smoke When Tullus was consul. Take a hundred measures of wine, Maecenas, 99

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For your friend’s saving and stretch the wakeful lamps Into the dawn: may all shouting and anger Be in the distance. Drop your political preoccupations for the city: The army of Dacian Cotiso lies low, The Parthian is his own enemy, in internal dispute, A grievous conflict, Our ancient enemy of the Spanish shore, The Cantabrian, serves us, mastered by late-achieved chains, Now the Scythians plan to abandon the plains Loosing their bowstrings.

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Cease to care whether the people is in trouble: Stop your over-caring, be a private citizen, And gladly take the gifts of the present hour, Shedding the serious. (Odes 3.8, complete)

The symposium is set on 1 March, the Matronalia, or festival of married women, ironically for the bachelor Horace; but for him the date is the anniversary of his escape from death under a falling tree, an incident alluded to several times in the poems, and he invites Maecenas to a celebration. This party marking the poet’s preservation neatly parallels Odes 1.20 (above), marking Maecenas’s preservation from illness with similar celebrations: serious drinking is

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legitimated in both cases by commemorating the saving of the closest of friends. Once again the date of the wine is symbolically significant. In 1.20 it was bottled on the day of Maecenas’s return to health; here it was bottled in the year when Tullus was consul. This is probably 33 BCE, very likely the year of Horace’s escape from the tree, a very suitable vintage on this occasion. The private space of relaxation and release offered by the symposium (already raised as a feature of the good life in chapter 1) is here specifically contrasted with the pressing concerns of the public world. Though never a senator or an official magistrate, Maecenas is presented as deeply engaged with the welfare of Rome, and as a close friend of Augustus may have acted as his representative in the city during the supreme leader’s frequent overseas absences 102

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in the period of the Odes (20s BCE). Horace urges him to remember he is a private citizen without formal responsibilities, and suggests that all is well on the borders of the empire; he does not need to worry. As often, the geographical references in the last stanza are both topical (all were or had recently been theatres of Roman war) and directionally distributed to suggest worldwide domination: from an ancient Italian perspective, Dacia (= the Balkans) represents the near East, Parthia (= Iraq and Iran) the far East, Spain the far West, and Scythia (= Ukraine/southern Russia) the North. Here, then, Horace urges Maecenas to relax and retreat from political concerns to the private life of friendship and sympotic celebration. Others are taking care of the empire militarily (the Roman reader thinks 103

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especially of Augustus in Spain, from where he returns in the same poetic book at Odes 3.14), creating the peace that the civilians Horace and Maecenas can enjoy. The poem thus not only marks the poet’s concern for his friend’s well-being and their closeness, but also the way in which both of them depend on their further friend Augustus for their tranquil way of life. Political stability allows and licenses private pleasure; we are all entitled to rest and recreation, and indeed need to pursue it regularly. The opening of Odes 2.17 is perhaps the most extensive expression of Horace’s personal attachment to Maecenas: Cur me querelis exanimas tuis? nec dis amicum est nec mihi te prius obire, Maecenas, mearum grande decus columenque rerum. 104

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a! te meae si partem animae rapit maturior uis, quid moror altera, nec carus aeque nec superstes integer? ille dies utramque ducet ruinam. non ego perfidum dixi sacramentum: ibimus, ibimus, utcumque praecedes, supremum carpere iter comites parati. me nec Chimaerae spiritus igneae nec, si resurgat centimanus Gyges, diuellet umquam: sic potenti Iustitiae placitumque Parcis.

Why do you kill me with your complaints? It is not pleasing to the gods or to me that you, Maecenas, should perish first, great glory And centre-beam of my fortunes. 105

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Ah! If some force were to steal you away earlier than me, You, one half of my soul, why should I hold back the other, Equally dear to no one else and destined not to be whole Should I survive you? That day will bring Destruction on both of us. True indeed was the oath I pronounced: we will go, we will go, Wherever you lead ahead, comrades Ready to tread that last journey. I will never be torn from you by the breath Of the fiery Chimaera, or by the return rising Of the hundred-handed Gyges: this Is the resolve of Justice and the Fates. (Odes 2.17.1–16) 106

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Here Horace professes the ultimate proof of friendship, his unwillingness to survive Maecenas should his friend die first; he would have only half a life without him. In a striking architectural metaphor, Maecenas is represented as the “centre-beam” that holds up the edifice of Horace’s life, alluding to a standard feature of Roman roof construction. The poet’s matching loyalty is then expressed in an equally Roman way by evoking the traditional oath sworn by soldiers to their commander, promising to follow him wherever he may lead; the word comites, “comrades,” strongly suggests a military context. Though the rhetoric here might seem exaggerated by modern standards, the sentiment is relevant across the centuries. We are told in the ancient life of Horace that he died just two months after Maecenas; if that is not derived from this 107

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passage, we have here a poem that is movingly prophetic as well as a timeless expression of devoted friendship. Tolerance amongst Friends In Horace’s Satires and Epistles the nature of friendship is discussed in a more overtly didactic way. A good example is Satires 1.3, where we find a detailed and amusing argument for putting up with our friends’ foibles: cum tua pervideas oculis mala lippus inunctis, cur in amicorum vitiis tam cernis acutum quam aut aquila aut serpens Epidaurius? at tibi contra evenit, inquirant vitia ut tua rursus et illi. iracundior est paulo, minus aptus acutis 108

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naribus horum hominum; rideri possit eo quod rusticius tonso toga defluit et male laxus in pede calceus haeret: at est bonus, ut melior vir non alius quisquam, at tibi amicus, at ingenium ingens inculto latet hoc sub corpore. denique te ipsum concute, numqua tibi vitiorum inseverit olim natura aut etiam consuetudo mala; namque neglectis urenda filix innascitur agris. illuc praevertamur, amatorem quod amicae turpia decipiunt caecum vitia aut etiam ipsa haec delectant, veluti Balbinum polypus Hagnae. vellem in amicitia sic erraremus et isti errori nomen virtus posuisset honestum. 109

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ac pater ut gnati, sic nos debemus amici siquod sit vitium non fastidire. strabonem appellat paetum pater, et pullum, male parvus si cui filius est, ut abortivus fuit olim Sisyphus; hunc varum distortis cruribus, illum balbutit scaurum pravis fultum male talis. parcius hic vivit: frugi dicatur; ineptus et iactantior hic paulo est: concinnus amicis postulat ut videatur; at est truculentior atque plus aequo liber: simplex fortisque habeatur; caldior est: acris inter numeretur. opinor, haec res et iungit iunctos et servat amicos.

When you notice your own errors only dimly with sore and ointmented eyes, 110

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Why do you, in the matter of your friend’s failings, See sharper than the eagle or the snake of Epidaurus? But I tell you, it comes about in retaliation That he for his part forages for your faults. “He’s a little too irritable, not really suited for the sensitive nostrils Of the kind of men you find here; he could be ridiculed Because of his rustic haircut and his trailing toga, And his shoe fitting too loosely on his foot”; but he’s a good guy, Indeed, there’s no better man, but he’s your friend, But a mighty talent lies hidden under his understyled physique. Shake yourself out to see if nature has long ago sown faults in you, 111

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Or even bad habits: the weed that deserves to burn Grows in fields that suffer neglect. But let us turn first to the fact that the blind lover is taken in By the deforming faults of the beloved, or that they even give him pleasure, As Hagna’s nasal polyp does for Balbinus. I wish that we made this kind of error in friendship, And that virtue had assigned a name of honour to it. Just as with father and son, so we should not despise Whatever our friends’ faults are: a father calls A son with a wall eye “squinty,” “chick” if he’s undersized, As Sisyphus once was at his premature birth; he babbles about “bandy legs” 112

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If he has crooked calves, “lamey” if he rests unsteady on crooked calves. This one lives too stingily: let him be called “careful,” This one’s a fool and a little too likely to boast: He needs to be seen as “clever” by his friends. This one is too fierce and over-free in his ways: Let him be thought “honest” and “strong-minded.” This one is too hot-tempered: let him be classed as “sharp.” As I see it, this is what joins friends and keeps them joined. (Satires 1.3.25–54)

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faults than our own, has a famous parallel in Christian discourse, Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:3–5): “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” Both Jesus and Horace provide a prudential argument for this charitable approach: if you criticise others excessively, they will do the same to you (Matthew 7:1 “Judge not, that ye be not judged”). As often, this piece of Horatian moralising is persuasively reinforced by its implicit application to the poet himself. The sore 114

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eyes at the start of the passage allude to a condition he suffers from elsewhere and which is endemic among writers in an age of poor illumination (in Satires 1.5 it is an affliction common to both Horace and Vergil), while the disordered dress is another Horatian foible found in Epistles 1.1, and the underlying “mighty talent” is that of the poet. In general, this is excellent advice: true affection will ignore the minor failings of others and even turn them into points of admiration. It is life enhancing as well as charitable to make the best of our friends’ little ways. Poetic and Political Friends One of Horace’s most memorable narratives is that of Satires 1.5, a journey south-east 115

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from Rome to Brundisium (Brindisi), the main east-facing port on Italy’s heel. This trip of 340 miles now takes some six hours by car, still starting along the same Via Appia (the modern SS27); in Horace’s time it lasted several days by horse-wagon and boat, with the nights spent at various inns and villas of friends. The poet’s journey seems to have taken place in the context of a top-level diplomatic mission of Maecenas to Antony on behalf of the future Augustus, probably in 37 BCE; in Horace’s narrative it is treated as a chance for Maecenas’s literary friends to meet up and accompany him and each other for at least part of the way, and its strategic political importance is partly played down in the interests of presenting a humane and harmonious group of fellow travellers and their comic adventures along the road. Incidents and issues 116

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in this low-life Odyssey include dyspepsia, clamorous and choleric boatmen, hostile midges and noisy frogs, an amusing battle of invective between two vulgar characters they encounter (a contrast with the easy fellowship of the travellers), a missed erotic assignation, and overpriced provisions. Horace starts out from Rome to Aricia (a short stage) with the Greek rhetorician Heliodorus; soon afterwards at Anxur he is joined by Maecenas himself, but after a night at Formiae, the second of the journey, even more congenial company arrives: postera lux oritur multo gratissima; namque Plotius et Varius Sinuessae Vergiliusque occurrunt, animae, qualis neque candidiores terra tulit neque quis me sit devinctior alter. o qui conplexus et gaudia quanta fuerunt. nil ego contulerim iucundo sanus amico. 117

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The next dawn rises, the most pleasing of all: For Plotius and Varius and Vergil meet us at Sinuessa, Souls such as the earth never produced more sunny, And bound to me closer than any other. What embraces and what great joys there were: In my right mind I would regard nothing as matching a pleasing friend. (Satires 1.5.39–44)

The warmth of the language here is clear: Horace is bound to his friends, just as Polonius advises Laertes to chain himself to his: “Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, / Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel” (Hamlet, act 1, scene 3). These are especially congenial 118

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companions, not least because they are all poets or men of letters—Plotius Tucca, the later editor of the Aeneid after Vergil’s death; Varius Rufus, the epic and tragic poet; and Vergil himself—all three of whom are classed at the end of this same poetic book as amongst its ideal readers (Satires 1.10.81). Just as this moment of meeting is joyous, so too the later stage of separation is sorrowful (1.5.93: flentibus hinc Varius discedit maestus amicis, “at this point Varius left, sadly, to weeping from his friends”). This poem neatly explores and intertwines several degrees of friendship. The group of affectionate literary companions have been called to escort their loftier patron/friend Maecenas as he makes his politically significant journey; cultivated elite Romans often took along intellectuals 119

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on trips for entertainment and fellowship. This journey, in turn, is aimed at reconciling the two most important friends in the Roman state, the supreme rulers and uneasy associates in power, young Caesar (the future Augustus) and Antony; it is notable that Maecenas and his diplomatic colleague Cocceius are here presented as habitual arbitrators in the often tense relations of those at the top in these years of fragile alliance (1.5.29: aversos soliti componere amicos, “accustomed to settle the case of friends at odds”). The poem underlines the central importance and positive influence of friendship at every level in Roman society; it thus suggests that properly functioning interpersonal relationships are central not only to personal happiness but also to the effective operation of society as a whole. 120

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Supporting Friends I now turn to poems where Horace seems to console and support friends who have suffered in some way. In Odes 1.7 Horace addresses Plancus, an experienced politician and soldier (and the founder of the future French city of Lyon) with whom he shares residence in and affection for Tibur (Tivoli; see Odes 2.6 below): Albus ut obscuro deterget nubila caelo saepe Notus neque parturit imbris perpetuo, sic tu sapiens finire memento tristitiam vitaeque labores molli, Plance, mero, seu te fulgentia signis castra tenent seu densa tenebit Tiburis umbra tui. Teucer Salamina patremque cum fugeret, tamen uda Lyaeo 121

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tempora populea fertur uinxisse corona, sic tristis affatus amicos: “Quo nos cumque feret melior fortuna parente, ibimus, o socii comitesque. Nil desperandum Teucro duce et auspice Teucro: certus enim promisit Apollo ambiguam tellure nova Salamina futuram. O fortes peioraque passi mecum saepe viri, nunc vino pellite curas; cras ingens iterabimus aequor.”

Just as often the clearing south wind wipes away the clouds from the sky And does not always spawn showers, So, if you are wise, be sure to set limits to sadness And life’s tribulations, Plancus, 122

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By means of mellow wine, whether your home be the camp Shining with standards, or (in time) the dense shade Of your beloved Tibur. Teucer, though fleeing Salamis and his father, Still, they say, bound his temples wet with wine With a wreath of poplar leaves, and with these words Addressed his grieving friends: “Wherever fortune, kinder than my father, shall take us, We shall go, comrades and companions: There is no cause for despair with Teucer as prince and prophet: For sure is the promise of Apollo That there will be a competitor Salamis in a new land. 123

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Men of courage, who have often endured Worse than this with me, dispel your cares now with wine: Tomorrow we will take again to the mighty ocean.” (Odes 1.7.15–31)

Here the poet seems to be engaging in the consolation of a friend: there is a limit to sadness and tribulation, illustrated by the story of Teucer from the cycle of Trojan myth. Teucer, the brother of the great Greek warrior Ajax, was traditionally banished from his home on the Attic island of Salamis because of his failure to bring his brother home safely from Troy, but courageously set out again on a new voyage and founded a new Salamis on Cyprus, thus replacing family tragedy with political success. 124

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A key issue in the interpretation of this poem has been how the story of Teucer relates to the addressee, Plancus. I agree with those who see in this mythical narrative an allusion to the colourful career of Plancus himself, and want to suggest further that the Teucer story is used to console Plancus for a major personal loss. In 43 BCE the new triumvirate (three-man junta) in charge of the state, consisting of the young Caesar (the future Augustus), Antony, and Lepidus, published its list of proscriptions, extrajudicial executions in time of civil war; a leading name on the list was that of Plotius, brother of Plancus, at that time a loyal lieutenant of Antony (Appian, Civil Wars 4.12). Horace’s myth of Teucer presents a hero who has to endure the death of a brother but comes through the experience successfully and establishes a new political 125

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beginning; this is surely also the case for Plancus, whose brother duly died, but who re-established his own political career by supporting the young Caesar at Actium and by (in 27 BCE, probably a few years before the time of this poem) proposing the title of “Augustus” for him in the Senate. Some twenty years on from the moment of trauma, Horace can be seen as consoling his friend for the loss of his brother with the thought that Plancus (like Teucer) has done the right thing after his brother’s death; he has shown the courage to support the young Caesar in establishing the new Roman state, just as Teucer has moved resolutely forward to establishing the new Salamis. Plancus had been criticised as unprincipled for his changing of sides in the civil wars (Velleius 2.83.1), but Horace’s link with Teucer suggests a more positive 126

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view, and expresses subtle support for a friend. Another friend from public life who receives consolation for a setback is Lollius, soldier and politician and the addressee of Odes 4.9: Paulum sepultae distat inertiae celata virtus. Non ego te meis chartis inornatum silebo totve tuos patiar labores impune, Lolli, carpere lividas obliviones. Est animus tibi rerumque prudens et secundis temporibus dubiisque rectus, vindex avarae fraudis et abstinens ducentis ad se cuncta pecuniae, consulque non unius anni es, sed quotiens bonus atque fidus iudex honestum praetulit utili, 127

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reiecit alto dona nocentium vultu, per obstantis catervas explicuit sua victor arma. Non possidentem multa vocaveris recte beatum; rectius occupat nomen beati, qui deorum muneribus sapienter uti duramque callet pauperiem pati peiusque leto flagitium timet, non ille pro caris amicis aut patria timidus perire.

Courage concealed is little distant From cowardice covered up: I shall not pass over you Undecorated in my pages, or allow, Lollius, Those many labours of yours to be carped at

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By ill-feeling forgetfulness without response. You have a spirit shrewd in affairs And upright when times are good And when they’re doubtful, A spirit that punishes greedy fraud And that abstains from all-attracting cash; And you are consul not just for a single year, But whenever a good and faithful man Prefers as judge the honourable to the expedient, Rejects the gifts of enemies with lofty expression, Or victoriously extricates his forces Passing through besieging hordes.

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Correctly could you call him who possesses much A happy man; even more correctly does that man Capture the name of happy, who has the sense To use the gifts of the gods with wisdom And to endure the harshness of poverty, And fears disgrace worse than destruction: He is not petrified to perish For his dear friends or his fatherland. (Odes 4.9.29–52)

The praise of Lollius here is some of the most laudatory language in the Odes about a living individual. Horace seems to be a family friend of Lollius, whose son is the most likely candidate for the Lollius addressed in Epistles 1.2 and 1.18, and there 130

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is a pressing reason why Lollius needs support at the time of this ode (16–13 BCE). In 16 BCE, during a campaign against the German Sygambri, he had been ambushed and was deprived of a legionary standard (Velleius 2.97.1), a major symbolic loss; Augustus himself hastened in support, though by the time he arrived the Sygambri had made terms with Lollius and little real harm was in fact done. Despite its minor nature, Lollius’s setback has gone down in Roman history as the clades Lolliana, “the disaster associated with Lollius” (Tacitus, Annals 1.10; Suetonius, Augustus 23). Horace’s ode can be seen as a specific effort to rehabilitate his friend and rebut contemporary criticism of him following this episode. The allusion to Lollius’s lack of materialism seems to counter adverse comments on his interest in money (e.g. 131

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in Velleius, above), while the reference to extricating his forces from besieging hordes appears to be a positive gloss on his eventual escape from the Sygambri in the forests of Germany, and the assertion that he is not afraid to die for his country counters any suggestion that Lollius’s behaviour was less than courageous. In both these odes, then, we can see Horace showing fidelity to friends who had been through trouble in politics or war, and defending them against contemporary criticism. Personal loyalty to friends in adversity remains an admirable trait. Friendship and Retirement As already noted in chapter 1, Horace’s poetry resonates closely with the modern desire to escape from the stresses of 132

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everyday existence to more relaxed environments. Today, too, retirement and community in retirement are more significant than they have ever been, given modern longevity. These two themes are combined with the topic of friendship in Odes 2.6, Horace’s poem to his friend Septimius, whom he recommends a few years later to the future emperor Tiberius in Epistles 1.9, and who may also have been a friend of the emperor Augustus: Septimi, Gades aditure mecum et Cantabrum indoctum iuga ferre nostra et barbaras Syrtis, ubi Maura semper aestuat unda, Tibur Argeo positum colono sit meae sedes utinam senectae, sit modus lasso maris et uiarum militiaeque. 133

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unde si Parcae prohibent iniquae, dulce pellitis ouibus Galaesi flumen et regnata petam Laconi rura Phalantho. ille terrarum mihi praeter omnis angulus ridet, ubi non Hymetto mella decedunt uiridique certat baca Venafro, uer ubi longum tepidasque praebet Iuppiter brumas et amicus Aulon fertili Baccho minimum Falernis inuidet uuis. ille te mecum locus et beatae postulant arces; ibi tu calentem debita sparges lacrima fauillam uatis amici.

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And the Cantabrians not yet taught to bear our yoke, Or the wild Syrtes, where the African swell Seethes unrelenting, May Tibur, established by an Argive founder, Be the place of rest for my old age, May it be the end-point for one who is tired of sea, Journeys and service! But if the Fates’ unkindness deny this wish, I will seek out the Galaesus river, sweet water For leather-jacketed sheep, and the fields once ruled by Spartan Phalanthus. 135

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That corner of the world smiles to me above all other, Where the honey yields no place to Hymettus, Where the olive fruit is able to compete With green Venafrum, Where Jupiter grants a lengthy spring And warm midwinters, and the Aulon valley, Friend to fertile Bacchus, need feel no envy of The grapes of Falerii. That is the place that calls you and me With its happy citadels: there you will scatter With due tears the still-warm ashes of Your friend the poet. (Odes 2.6, complete) 136

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Horace begins by looking forward to his own retirement in Tibur (Tivoli in Lazio), a place he commends in other contexts (Odes 1.7 and 1.18); it is an ancient city set on and among spectacular hills and waterfalls, a prime tourist site close to Rome, and the temple of Vesta from Horace’s day is still to be seen in a prominent position above the gorge of the Aniene river (see figure 2). Though it is only twelve miles from the likely site of Horace’s Sabine estate, the poet seems to have had a separate residence there a few years later (Epistles 1.8); this elegant town would have been a pleasant alternative retreat to the more rustic villa. Here, then, the poet may be wishing to stay in a favourite house in old age, a wish that finds an echo in the modern desire for independent living in one’s beloved home in retirement. 137

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Figure 2. The temple of Vesta at Tibur (modern Tivoli, close to Rome and to Horace’s Sabine estate). This building from Horace’s day is still to be seen in a prominent position above the gorge of the Aniene river. Photograph by Stephen Harrison

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Though Septimius is not yet called on to share this retirement, the opening of the poem in which he is said to be willing to follow his friend anywhere (a traditional token of friendship, which is here drawn from an earlier poem [11] by Catullus), suggests that he is already included. If Tibur does not work out (it is not clear why it would not, but perhaps the poet’s residence there depends on the favour of greater friends, such as Maecenas), Septimius is certainly invited to a common retirement in Tarentum (Taranto in Puglia), a cultured and Hellenised city in a warm and fertile part of the south of Italy that is still a popular holiday destination. This may or may not have been a serious realworld proposition; Horace seems to have been a lifelong singleton (no lasting life partner is mentioned in his work or in the 139

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ancient biographical tradition about him), and we know nothing of Septimius except that he was probably a soldier and was certainly available a few years later to take up an appointment on the staff of Tiberius in the East, far from Italy (Epistles 1.9). The retirement is envisaged as belonging to the future rather than the present: Horace himself is around forty at the time of writing, as the topical references in the poem’s opening confirm, and Septimius may be even younger, and in the Roman world the “old age” mentioned here should mean the age of sixty or above. Perhaps surprisingly, this is not one of the poems in which Horace explicitly argues for the country over the town as a place to live, though the rural attractions of Tarentum are much stressed, including its sheep, who wore hide jackets to preserve 140

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their top-class fleeces, and its fame as a producer of honey, olives, and wine (“Bacchus”) with an enviable climate would not be out of place in a travel brochure. Only in the last stanza do we get some specific philosophical colour: the “happy . . . citadels” here, while reflecting the actual topography of this walled city, also suggests the symbolic “citadel of wisdom,” picking up Lucretius’s high sanctuary from which the wise man observes the struggles of the ignorant in the opening of the second book of the De Rerum Natura. Lucretius’s status as the great poet of Epicurean philosophy from the previous generation is clearly important here in colouring its ideas. The potential for Epicurean-style quiet and contentment in the poet’s proposed Tarentine retirement is a key point in its favour, just as the friendship of Horace and Septimius 141

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looks to another core Epicurean value, even if the final vignette of the younger Septimius lamenting Horace’s future demise puts a stress on mourning that is more Roman than Epicurean. Horace’s poetry thus treats friendship from a number of angles that are still important today: the delicate question of how to deal effectively with those who are both personal intimates and vital economic or professional associates, how it is better to select friends for their personal qualities rather than their socio-economic status, the need to be tolerant of friends’ foibles, how to support friends in their times of stress and adversity, and the role of friends in the life of retirement.

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The central importance of peace of mind and moderation in Horace’s approach to the good life (see chapter 1) means that his poetry consistently takes a negative view of extreme erotic passion of a romantic kind. This is consistent with most of the philosophical schools of the time, which as we have seen stressed the potentially deleterious effects of such acute emotions on the human psyche, and the consequent need to be impassive, rational, or serene in response. Here Horace differs markedly from the melodramatic approach of the elegiac love 143

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poets of his own time, such as Tibullus (whom we met in chapter 2 and who will be encountered again below). They presented the lover as a form of play-slave to the beloved (a powerful metaphor in a real slave-holding society), emphasised the emotional highs and lows for the lover of the beloved’s typical erotic unreliability, and even suggested that the life of love is an alternative form of war in which the lover should engage as heartily as his Roman contemporaries entered into actual conflict on the battlefield. Horace’s more detached approach to love may also reflect his personal experience in avoiding the ties and potential conflicts of monogamy (see above): love or passion on the part of the poet-narrator is generally temporary and ironised rather than conjugal or committed. There are, however, 144

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occasional glimpses of other possibilities; on at least one occasion, as we shall see, a poem presents a pair of lovers who accept one another for all their foibles and look to a lasting relationship with the realism of an enduring married couple. In general, passionate and intense romantic love is seen in Horace’s work as a problem to manage rather than a mode of self-fulfilment, and viewed as a form of youthful excess that will be duly tempered in time by the moderation of middle-aged wisdom. Love Belongs to Youth Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte nec iam sustineant onus silvae laborantes geluque flumina constiterint acuto? Dissolve frigus ligna super foco 145

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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. Quid sit futurum cras, fuge quaerere, et quem fors dierum cumque dabit, lucro adpone nec dulcis amores sperne, puer, neque tu choreas, donec virenti canities abest morosa. Nunc et Campus et areae lenesque sub noctem susurri composita repetantur hora, nunc et latentis proditor intimo gratus puellae risus ab angulo pignusque dereptum lacertis aut digito male pertinaci.

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Can you see how Soracte stands deep in snow A thing of brightness, and how the woods are in trouble, No longer able to bear their burden, And how the streams have stopped still with the sharp frost? Melt the cold with a generous deposit Of wood on the hearth, and pour The four-year wine more lavishly, Thaliarchus, from its two-eared Sabine jar. Leave the rest to the gods, who have All at once laid low the winds That battled over the seething sea, And neither cypress nor ancient mountain ash is shaken.

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Forbear to ask what will be tomorrow And count as gain any day Fortune grants, And do not, my boy, reject Love’s sweetness or dancing’s measures, While gloomy grey age stays away From your green glow. Now you should seek At the appointed hour the Campus and the squares, The gentle whispers towards nightfall, Now dear to you is the laughter of the hiding girl Which betrays her from the depth of the corner, And the love token wrested from her arm Or her poorly resisting finger. (Odes 1.9, complete) 148

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Here, as often, the poet-narrator takes up the role of an older man who has been through the experiences of love and is addressing a younger person with appropriate advice. The erotic message of the poem does not become clear until its second half: the first half begins with the description of the great isolated limestone ridge Soracte (modern Monte Soratte), which runs laterally for more than three miles and rises to a height of almost 2,300 feet. It dominates the west side of the Tiber valley at a point about thirty miles north of Rome, from some parts of which it is visible on a clear day; the location of Horace’s poem seems indeed to be in the city, even if the view of Soracte is strictly too detailed for the actual distance involved. But this is not just an appreciation of landscape. The impressive hill in fact bears a message about the life of love; its snowy 149

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appearance reminds the poet that the age of grey hair (his own) is not the age for love, which needs to be pursued in the “green” age of the boy Thaliarchus, just as Soracte with its cover of forest (still there and protected as a nature reserve) is pleasant and accessible in the green months but forbidding and hostile in the whiteness of high winter. This personification continues in the trees unable to sustain their burden of snow (like the unsteady limbs of ageing man) and the stream water that freezes (parallel to ancient beliefs about the chilling of the blood in the old). For the poet-narrator himself, the pleasures of the symposium and the consumption of wine, very likely from his own Sabine estate, are here prior to the pleasures of love; he seems to be in the position of the trees of the third stanza, who have survived 150

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unshaken the onslaught of the winds and storms of the past, a common image for human passions. For the boy Thaliarchus, his youth puts him in a different position; he can and should engage in love’s commotions now, but in time he will achieve the mellow and measured perspective of the poet-speaker, who can act as experienced observer and non-playing adviser, not unlike a Ryder Cup captain. Love is presented in this poem as part of the need to live in the moment that we saw as a central Horatian feature in chapter 1; the boy should not wait for tomorrow but follow his passion now, pursuing his beloved in the courtyards and corners of the city. The erotic life is here seen as a game and entertainment; the boy and girl engage in hide and seek, with the hider ensuring that she is found and playfully 151

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yielding a love token to her pursuer. This is no drama of sweeping or suffering sentiment, but rather a due exercise of youthful high spirits that has little significance in the long term; the tempests of love will blow over in time, just as the storm winds blow themselves out over the sea (often visible thirty miles to the west from the hermitage of San Silvestro on Soratte’s summit) without shaking the mountain’s mighty forests. This anti-romantic view might strike some as rather detached, but it has an attractive worldly pragmatism. The Poet as Ironic Lover Integer uitae scelerisque purus non eget Mauris iaculis neque arcu nec uenenatis grauida sagittis, Fusce, pharetra, 152

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siue per Syrtis iter aestuosas siue facturus per inhospitalem Caucasum uel quae loca fabulosus lambit Hydaspes. Namque me silua lupus in Sabina, dum meam canto Lalagem et ultra terminum curis uagor expeditus, fugit inermem, quale portentum neque militaris Daunias latis alit aesculetis nec Iubae tellus generat, leonum arida nutrix. pone me pigris ubi nulla campis arbor aestiua recreatur aura, quod latus mundi nebulae malusque Iuppiter urget; pone sub curru nimium propinqui solis in terra domibus negata: dulce ridentem Lalagen amabo, dulce loquentem. 153

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He who is untainted in life and unsullied with crime Needs no Moorish javelins or bow Or quiver teeming with poisoned arrows, Fuscus, Whether he is about to march through the sultry Syrtes Or the Caucasus hard to strangers, or the domains Lapped by the Hydaspes of story. For a wolf fled from me, all unarmed, in a Sabine wood As I sang of my Lalage and wandered Beyond my boundary stone, freed from cares, Such a monster as the soldierly South does not breed 154

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In its broad oak groves, nor the land Of Juba, that dry nurse of lions. Set me on the sluggish plains where no tree Is refreshed by a summer breeze, on the side of the world Oppressed by mists and a lowering sky, Set me under the chariot of the Sun where it comes too close In the land forbidden to habitations: I will love my Lalage with her sweet laugh, her sweet voice. (Odes 1.22, complete)

This light love poem to Lalage opens as if it were a rather more serious work, pointing to the philosophical idea of the imperturbability and hence invulnerability of the 155

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truly virtuous and wise man (see chapter 1), found for example in an analogous position at the start of Horace’s grand third Roman ode (Odes 3.3). The list in the second stanza of the distant and difficult locations the man of virtue might traverse also strikes a grand note; the picture of crossing the Syrtes, the great deserts of North Africa in modern Libya, recalls a famous desert march in that area by the heroically virtuous Roman general Cato the Younger in 47 BCE during the civil war of Caesar and Pompey, while another great hero, Alexander the Great, is behind the references to the Caucasus and the river Hydaspes (in the modern Punjab); both areas were associated with Alexander’s extraordinary military career, which so fascinated the Romans with their keen cultural interest in war and conquest. As in a Hollywood western, the rugged 156

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and mysterious character of the landscape reflects the toughness and determination of the pioneering heroes who conquer it: the Syrtes are “sultry,” making men sweat; the Caucasus is “inhospitable,” unwelcoming to those who come to it; and the river Hydaspes is so distant it is known only from stories. This elevated opening is then characteristically deflated in stanzas 3 and 4 by Horace’s anecdote about himself, the first surprise of the poem. The scene shifts from exotic foreign locations to Horace’s Sabine estate, an intimate and domestic Italian location, and to a much less heroic scenario: Horace is singing of his latest girlfriend, Lalage, and consequently wanders absentmindedly beyond the boundaries of his own small property. This accidental local expedition of Horace clearly parallels and 157

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parodies the great pioneering marches of the poem’s opening; the poet’s mind is focused on the frivolous topic of love, not the serious business of military action and world conquest. The main idea linking the first two sections of the poem is that of travel free from worry: the philosophical and military hero marches purposefully to the ends of the earth without fear owing to his great courage and virtue, but Horace’s unintended mini-march is also fearless. This situation is owed not to his outstanding personal qualities (after all, he is only mooning around), but to the convention that all lovers have the protection of the gods wherever they go, an idea found in the contemporary Latin love elegy of Propertius and Tibullus. That all is far from serious here is confirmed by the story about the wolf, frightened off 158

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by Horace’s singing of Lalage (we may recall the unmelodious bard Cacophonix of the Asterix stories); though there were (and still are) wolves in the hillier regions of Italy, the point of this episode is not to log a zoological encounter but to make a symbolic point. The incident asserts that the poet is special, to be miraculously respected even by the fiercest creatures. But the wolf, like the fish who gets away from the angler, is built up into the most extraordinary creature, bigger than any creature in the forests of Daunias, the area of Apulia in Italy where Horace grew up, and larger even than the proverbially large and ferocious lions of North Africa (the land of Juba, its contemporary king). This is surely protesting too much. And of course there is no actual confrontation with this fabulous creature, 159

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which flees the poet’s advance. The world of Horace’s erotic odes is not the world of virtue and heroism, though that is what the first two stanzas led us to expect. Having compared his local ambling with famous military expeditions, Horace now does propose foreign journeys of his own, to equally tough landscapes that in their different ways differ dramatically from the temperate climate naturally preferred by the Mediterranean Greeks and Romans: the vast and misty steppes where summer never comes, perhaps evoking central Asia, and the sun-baked lands where summer never stops, perhaps evoking Africa. But these travels are purely hypothetical: the poet has not the least intention of changing location. He is not a Cato or an Alexander, merely a poet amusingly describing his supposed lovesickness. 160

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And it is with love and the beloved Lalage, mentioned for the second time, that the poem closes. But the poet’s promise to love her is interestingly empty: Lalage, with whom the poet is here apparently so smitten, reappears in no other poem, and even here she seems a sketchily described character. The only personal trait she is allocated is that of a pleasant voice and laugh, a characteristic mirrored in her name, which in Greek suggests “chatterer.” Lalage is simply yet another in the catalogue of different erotic partners that the poet of the Odes presents: the erotic world of these poems is a world of many loves, an explicit and obvious contrast with the contemporary world of Roman love elegy, mentioned above, where the poet presents himself as having a single, obsessive, passionate love affair. In this poem we find a brief, almost flippant 161

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characterisation of a girl who appears only once in Horace for this cameo role. This poem thus sets out a highly ironic view of love, undermining with its wit both ideas of philosophical virtue and notions of intense erotic passion. Though the poet presents himself as the dedicated lover, the poem’s fantastic elements, unlikely scenarios, and casual treatment of the beloved suggest that love is a frivolous and light-hearted activity, not to be taken as seriously as the philosophy and conquest set out at the poem’s beginning. Lalage is in fact a momentary dalliance, who takes her place alongside the many other figures for whom the poet of the Odes claims as objects of his passion, and is conjured up for the purposes of writing a well-crafted and amusing poem. Overall, this ode suggests that the truly wise man will in fact make 162

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light of passion and avoid erotic excess in the cultivation of calm and equanimity, which are the preferred goals of life. This may not be bad advice. Managing Jealousy 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. Uror, seu tibi candidos turparunt umeros inmodicae mero rixae, sive puer furens inpressit memorem dente labris notam. Non, si me satis audias, 163

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speres perpetuum dulcia barbare laedentem oscula, quae Venus quinta parte sui nectaris imbuit. Felices ter et amplius quos inrupta tenet copula nec malis divolsus querimoniis suprema citius solvet amor die.

When you, Lydia, praise Telephus’s rose-pink neck, Telephus’s wax-white arms, My bowels seethe and swell With a bile that’s indigestible; Then my mind and complexion Start from their steady state, and moisture Spreads secretly over my cheeks, Proving how slow is the fire that steeps me far within.

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I am all aflame, whether brawls wild with wine Have stained your snowy shoulders, Or whether the boy mad with desire Has left the toothmark of memory on your lips. But, if you hear my words aright, You should not expect that the hurt of his sweet uncouth kisses Will be forever, those kisses That Venus has drenched in a fraction of her nectar: Three times blest and more Are those who are held together by an unbroken bond And whose love is not loosened, Torn apart by distressing complaints, before their last day. (Odes 1.13, complete)

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The destructive passion of jealousy is a key theme for the elegiac love poets of Horace’s time, such as Tibullus, fitting their presentation of the life of love as a series of intense emotional dramas; in love elegy the threat of the successful erotic rival is consistently raised and lamented. This Horatian poem, by contrast, looks to a more moderate and pragmatic approach: though the poet-narrator is currently afflicted by pressing pangs of jealousy expressed in a forcibly physical mode, the fundamental message is again concerned with a longer perspective that looks beyond the passing agony of the moment. That agony is perhaps more playful than at first appears. To begin with, the catalogue of the symptoms of jealousy alludes to two previous famous poems of erotic envy, Catullus 51 and its model 166

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Sappho 31; for the well-informed reader, the poetic memory subtracts somewhat from the emotional immediacy. And as commentators have pointed out, Horace’s version of these symptoms is less elevated than in either poetic predecessor, making a little fun of Catullan and Sapphic romantic agony. Where they talk of the loss of speech, vision, and hearing, Horace’s poem in the Latin locates the emotional reaction in the organ of the liver (iecur), traditionally a home of passionate feeling in ancient physiology and here translated accordingly with “bowels,” which perform the same function in the King James Bible (e.g. Jeremiah 4:19). But even in Roman terms this has a bodily and undignified quality, and one scholar has even suggested that the poem evokes a piece of liver boiling in a cooking pot. 167

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Likewise, though the thought of the beloved’s body marked by her erotic struggles with the rival indignantly inflames (and perhaps arouses) the poet-speaker for the moment, the key idea emerges in the next stanza: this heightened state of affairs is only temporary and will not last for ever. In time Lydia’s passion for Telephus will cool and they too will quarrel, and the cycle of attraction and repulsion will begin again; maybe, too, the poet’s own passion for Lydia will pass, and these intense moments will be forgotten. This extended temporal perspective is brought out by the final stanza, which provides a kind of moral for the poem. As in 1.9, the poet-narrator takes up the role of experienced erotic adviser, even when his own feelings are apparently at

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stake. Here we find a double solution to the problem of love based on the idea of time: the suffering of extreme passion can be defused by the consciousness that the typical youthful love affair is brief and temporary, and it can also be avoided by a long-term monogamous and affectionate relationship, which is proof against such emotional storms. The cool and mature emphasis here on the long game is both consoling and practical as a solution to a moment of apparent crisis. Reconciliation “Donec gratus eram tibi nec quisquam potior bracchia candidae cervici iuvenis dabat, Persarum vigui rege beatior.”

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“Donec non alia magis arsisti neque erat Lydia post Chloen, multi Lydia nominis Romana vigui clarior Ilia.” “Me nunc Thressa Chloe regit, dulcis docta modos et citharae sciens, pro qua non metuam mori, si parcent animae fata superstiti.” “Me torret face mutua Thurini Calais filius Ornyti, pro quo bis patiar mori, si parcent puero fata superstiti.” “Quid si prisca redit Venus diductosque iugo cogit aeneo, si flava excutitur Chloe reiectaeque patet ianua Lydiae?” “Quamquam sidere pulchrior ille est, tu levior cortice et inprobo iracundior Hadria, tecum vivere amem, tecum obeam libens.” 170

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“When I was pleasing to you And no other youth was preferred to pass his arms About your white neck, I lived happier than the king of the Persians.” “When you were not aflame for another And Lydia was not second to Chloe, I, Lydia, was of great renown And lived in brighter fame than Ilia of Rome.” “Now Thracian Chloe controls me, Skilled in sweet song and expert in the lyre, For whom I would not fear to die, Should the fates spare her soul to survive.” “I am burnt with a mutual flame By Calais, son of Ornytus of Thurii: For whom I would bear death twice, 171

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Should the fates spare the boy to survive.” “What if our love of old returned And brought us now severed together with bronze yoke, If blonde Chloe were thrown over And the door were opened to Lydia the spurned?” “Though he is more stunning than a star, You more capricious than a cork, more fractious Than the furious Adriatic, With you I would love to live, with you I would freely die.” (Odes 3.9, complete)

This poem is in the same metre as 1.13, and in many ways is a pendant to it. Where that poem set out the scenario of an erotic triangle, this one presents an erotic square, 172

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with both lovers currently attached to other partners but clearly still interested in each other: the symmetrical structure of the poem, with the male speaker each time answered and outdone by the female speaker, suggests their continuing mutual fascination as well as their lively and competitive interaction. Both poems begin from a scenario of the current male rival and end with the prospect of lifelong union: in 1.13 this is proffered as a desirable though currently unattainable prospect, while in 3.9 it is presented as a realistic if ironised outcome. The clever rhetoric of the pair’s exchange is an index of the spark between them, and their verbal battle here has something of the smart repartee of the male-female confrontation typical of cinematic screwball comedy. The unnamed male’s selfcomparison to the paradigmatically happy 173

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king of the Persians is capped by Lydia’s Roman (and therefore better) self-likening to Ilia, mother of Rome’s great founder Romulus, while his alternative lover Thracian Chloe from the barbarian north of Greece is surpassed by her Calais from the sophisticated south of Italy, bearing the name of a mythical Argonaut and complete with respectable ancestry; he would die for Chloe, but she would die twice for Calais, an absurd but effective hyperbole. The “bronze yoke” of love introduces a key idea of the poem, that those who are indelibly erotically attracted are better off admitting the fact; this is the nearest Horace gets to a romantic presentation of lovers as made for each other. This is especially clear in the last stanza, where Lydia admits that though the male speaker is far from ideal and Calais is gorgeous, she would like to 174

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spend the rest of her life with her earlier partner. This future seems to be presented for the reader’s approval, even if it is as overblown as her previous protestations. The suggestion here is that lovers should accept the force of real passion as it is, a form of being content with one’s lot that we saw as a key Horatian principle in chapter 1; the search for a more glamorous erotic alternative in the end provides no real escape. This poem thus follows Odes 1.13 in suggesting that a lifelong bond informed by resignation and pragmatism is to be preferred to high-octane but passing infatuations. The mini-drama of this poem is both timelessly realistic (one can easily imagine this scene being played out in a modern youth environment), and a persuasive advocacy of a measured and rational approach to love while recognising its involuntary element. 175

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Love’s Contrariness Albi, ne doleas plus nimio memor immitis Glycerae neu miserabilis decantes elegos, cur tibi iunior laesa praeniteat fide. Insignem tenui fronte Lycorida Cyri torret amor, Cyrus in asperam declinat Pholoen: sed prius Apulis iungentur capreae lupis quam in turpi Pholoe peccet adultero. Sic visum Veneri, cui placet imparis formas atque animos sub iuga aenea saevo mittere cum ioco. Ipsum me melior cum peteret Venus, grata detinuit compede Myrtale libertina, fretis acrior Hadriae curuantis Calabros sinus.

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Albius, do not grieve to excess as you recall Glycera the harsh, and do not sing without end Your pitiable elegies, which tell how a younger rival Outshines you when fidelity is breached. Lycoris, conspicuous for her narrow forehead, Is roasted by love for Cyrus, while Cyrus turns To severe Pholoe: but she-goats will mate With Apulian goats before Pholoe Will stray with a shameful paramour. Such is Venus’s decision; she is pleased to set

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Ill-matched shapes and souls Under her bronze yoke in cruel amusement. When I was being pursued by a betterclass love The freedwoman Myrtale kept me fast in congenial fetters, She, fiercer than the floods of the Adriatic That rounds the shores of Calabria. (Odes 1.33, complete)

This poem is addressed to the loveelegist Albius Tibullus, with whom we saw Horace discussing the good life in Epistles 1.4 in chapter 1. As already noted above, Horace and Tibullus present fundamentally different views of the life of love in their poetry, and here Horace does not lose the opportunity to tease his friend about what 178

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he sees as the emotional and literary excess of elegy. Tibullus is presented as grieving too much and writing too much (his elegies are indeed considerably more mournful and much longer than this poem), and the topics of the first stanza are typical melodramatic features of the elegiac world: the cruel beloved, the laments of the lover, the successful rival, and the mistress’s infidelity. The remainder of the poem sets out Horace’s alternative response to the emotional power of erotic passion; patient tolerance is to be preferred to petulant protest, and it is better for the ultimate goal of peace of mind to go with the flow. The power of love that brings unsuitable couples together is irrational and irresistible (the bronze yoke of Venus reappears as its symbol, as in Odes 3.9), and we need to accept love as it is, even if the resultant pairings are imperfect 179

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(note that, as in 3.9, even a bad-tempered partner can emerge as preferable). In this poem to Tibullus, this advocacy of erotic pacifism presents a specific counter to the elegiac idea that love is a matter of waging war; on the other hand, Horace concedes something to elegiac rhetoric when he suggests that he was kept in fetters by Myrtale, adopting the metaphor of the slavery of love. Typically of Horace, the idea is amusingly ironised by the detail that Myrtale herself is a freedwoman and had therefore been a slave in real life, a neat contrast with the elite male Tibullus, who can adopt a servile role only as a literary conceit. Unlike 1.13 and 3.9, this poem does not suggest that a long-term relationship is a solution to the problem of love. Here, rather, we are faced with the other possible 180

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strategy, to accept passions as they come and go, without the suffering and grandstanding of the agonised monogamy of elegy. The suggestion is perhaps that Tibullus should not worry about the cruelty of Glycera, as the bronze yoke of Venus will soon move on and create further temporary and unsuitable pairings; even the fetters of Myrtale seem to be in the past, so the poet’s own erotic career seems to support this proposition. Again, we find a voice of moderation, realism, and worldly experience that is no bad guide to the life of love. The Voice of Experience Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa perfusus liquidis urget odoribus grato, Pyrrha, sub antro? cui flavam religas comam, 181

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simplex munditiis? Heu quotiens fidem mutatosque deos flebit et aspera nigris aequora ventis emirabitur insolens, qui nunc te fruitur credulus aurea, qui semper vacuam, semper amabilem sperat, nescius aurae fallacis. Miseri, quibus intemptata nites. Me tabula sacer votiva paries indicat uvida suspendisse potenti vestimenta maris deo.

Who is the slender boy, Pyrrha, soaked With flowing fragrances, who presses you In a mass of roses in an agreeable grotto? Who is it you tie up your blonde hair for, 182

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Simple in elegance? Alas, how often will he bewail Your infidelity and the changing of his gods, And wonder in inexperience at the seas Roughened by dark winds, He who now enjoys you as his golden girl, Who hopes you will always be available, always lovable, Ignorant of your breeze that deceives. Miserable are those on whom you shine Before they launch. For me, a temple’s wall Records with an offered inscription That I have hung up my dripping garments To the mighty god of the ocean. (Odes 1.5, complete) 183

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This brief but much-admired poem has been frequently translated; half a century ago a distinguished retired British diplomat and friend of Lawrence of Arabia (Sir Ronald Storrs) published an anthology of well over one hundred versions of this one poem in twenty-five languages, from the Renaissance to the present. Part of its attraction is its brilliant encapsulation of several key features of Horace’s outlook on love, which we have already observed, and it forms an appropriate conclusion to this chapter. The poet-narrator presents himself (again) as a wry and experienced observer of others’ passions, and falling in love (again) as a species of youthful folly, here on the part of the unnamed and naïve boy who is the latest lover of the practised and ruthless Pyrrha. Her name (meaning 184

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“flame-haired” in Greek, but brilliantly rendered “Piranha” by the modern translator Antony Hecht) suggests she is a professional erotic operator at Rome, and the poem implies that the poet-narrator is one of her former lovers; this allows him a particular expertise in predicting to the boy that all will not turn out well. The central image of the poem is that of the sea, which like Pyrrha looks inviting and attractive at a distance but can in a moment turn hostile and threatening. The unnamed boy is about to engage in an erotic sea voyage, but the experienced poet-narrator has completed his emotional excursion and escaped without damage. Like a Roman sailor preserved from the dangers of the ocean, he has dedicated his clothes to the god of the sea; as commentators have discussed, this god here is just as 185

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likely to be the sea-born Venus, goddess of love, as the tradition marine deity Neptune. The mature and experienced poetnarrator can here look with amusement on the agonies the boy is going to experience, which parallel his own previous sufferings, but this is not mere Schadenfreude; it is also a kind of consolation, as the boy too will pass through this tempestuous phase and then, like the poet-narrator, learn from his mistakes and reach the haven of years of sense and discretion. Intense love is a storm that can be weathered, though this is hard to see when one is caught up in its midst; this is a beneficial way of thinking about the keen throes of desire and the insistent problem of passion.

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The prospect of death was always closer in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds than now: acute rates of perinatal and child mortality, rampant epidemics, and the lack of most modern medicines and therapies made the end of life a much more real and immediate prospect for mass and elite alike. Even those who survived to adulthood could not expect to live to old age: it has recently been suggested that for Roman males who reached the age of twenty-two, only half or so then made it to fifty-two, while for women, exposed to the dangers 187

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of repeated childbirth, the figure was not much over a third. As a consequence, the major ancient philosophies dealt head-on with the issue of the termination of human existence. In Plato’s Phaedo, the dialogue where Socrates, under sentence of death from the Athenian state, discusses the end of life with his friends, Socrates himself states (64a) that those who study philosophy are in fact preparing for death throughout life by generating the right mentality with which to face their own demise. Epicurus, for his part, proclaimed that “death is nothing to us,” suggesting that oblivion is no disaster for humans since it is the end of sensation and anxiety, while the Stoic Epictetus held that “death is nothing terrible.” Plato and the Stoics believed in a form of afterlife, but Horace is likely to have shared Epicurus’s 188

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view that there is no further existence after the dissolution of the body, even if (as we shall see) he frequently invokes traditional poetic presentations of the Underworld. Accordingly, it is not surprising that Horace’s poetry often emphasises the need to exploit life while it lasts, since for him that is the only existence we have and death may come at any time. This emerges prominently in the sympotic odes, which we have already seen as urging their readers to live in the moment, in the manner of mindfulness; we recall from chapter 1 the injunction carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero, “harvest the present day, trust minimally in the next.” Live for the Day Soluitur acris hiems grata vice veris et Favoni 189

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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; nunc et in umbrosis Fauno decet immolare lucis, seu poscat agna sive malit haedo. Pallida Mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas regumque turris. O beate Sesti,

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vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam. Iam te premet nox fabulaeque Manes et domus exilis Plutonia, quo simul mearis, nec regna vini sortiere talis nec tenerum Lycidan mirabere, quo calet iuventus nunc omnis et mox virgines tepebunt.

The sharp winter melts with the welcome shift to spring and the west wind, And the winches drag down the driedout keels, And now the herd does not delight in its fold or the ploughman in his fire, Nor are the meadows bright with white frost.

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Now Venus of Cythera leads her dancing bands under the looming moon, And the fair Graces, joined with the Nymphs, Pound the ground with alternating foot, as burning Vulcan visits The heavy workshops of the Cyclopes. Now it is fitting to bind one’s shining head with green myrtle Or with the flowers that the freed-up earth produces; Now it is fitting to sacrifice to Faunus in the groves of shadow, Whether he demands a lamb or prefers a kid. Pale Death kicks with equal foot at the hovels of the humble And the towers of kings. Sestius the blessed, 192

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Life’s small sum forbids us to start up long hopes: Soon you will be oppressed by night and the ghosts of story, And the meagre mansion of Pluto; once you pass there, You will no longer cast with lots for the rule of wine, Or admire the luscious Lycidas, for whom all the youth Now burns, soon all the girls will grow warm. (Odes 1.4, complete)

The addressee of this ode is Lucius Sestius, who is likely to have been elected consul at the time of writing (23 BCE); as often in Horace, the poem’s message appears to be nicely tailored to its addressee. At the 193

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very moment when Sestius has reached the much-desiderated highest annual office in the state, he is reminded of the brevity of human existence and its frail felicity; this is especially relevant for him as he was elected suffect consul, the type that filled in only part of the year, so that his moment of supreme success was especially limited. This is on a par with the practice at the Roman triumph of including in the chariot of the victorious commander a slave whose function was to whisper memento mori, “remember you must die.” The poem begins far from death with the return of spring to the Italian landscape, then as now a moment of generative transformation; on the human level agriculture moves back outdoors and sea trade can begin again (relevant to Sestius, whose family manufactured the large earthenware 194

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jars used for transporting wine), while on the divine level Venus, the Nymphs, and the Graces resume their dancing (an image that ultimately inspired Botticelli’s Primavera) and the smith-god goes to supervise the Giant Cyclopes as they work at his forges (another hint at Sestius’s industrial concerns). The fresh flowers of spring can be used in sympotic garlands, and the new young of animals can be sacrificed in thanksgiving to the gods. Then we find a dramatic sudden change, prepared for a little by the idea of sacrifice; as in Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life (1983), Death comes knocking at the door (or kicking it, in the Roman way) of both mansion and shack (for the Pythons, hilariously interrupting a genteel country dinner party, where he is politely presented to the guests: “Mr Death is a reaper”). The key 195

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point here is that death does not discriminate between rich and poor and may come at any time, even for someone as fortunate as Sestius; humans should not foster longterm desires, memorably expressed here in a pithy aphorism, vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam, “life’s small sum forbids us to start up long hopes.” As for the Pythons, Death’s entrance disrupts the sympotic celebration suggested by the earlier garlands, and forces a departure from the world of sensual pleasure, here encapsulated in wine and a good-looking youth. The no doubt luxurious habitation of Sestius is to be exchanged for the “meagre mansion” of Pluto in the Underworld, and the careless casting of lots to be master of the feast will be transformed into the sombre sorting of souls in the world below. As Horace puts it pithily elsewhere (Odes 3.1.16), 196

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omne capax movet urna nomen, “the capacious infernal sorting urn shakes every name.” Though the traditional apparatus of the mythological afterlife is here strikingly evoked, it is for literary colour rather than from deep belief or conviction. This is a vivid representation of the insecurity of life’s pleasures in the face of a transient existence; just as spring follows winter each year, so for every human life death provides the inevitable end, and not in the regular cycle of the seasons but unpredictably, at any time. Like the philosophers for Socrates, Sestius needs to be able to face the prospect of death with equanimity, and to be resigned to leaving the good things of life behind when he has to. This is made easier for him since the poem celebrates some of his successes; the implicit message that we should count our achieved 197

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blessings, and be grateful for the past rather than anxious about future mortality, is an excellent lesson for human life. Death Comes to All Aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem, non secus in bonis ab insolenti temperatam laetitia, moriture Delli, seu maestus omni tempore vixeris seu te in remoto gramine per dies festos reclinatum bearis interiore nota Falerni. Quo pinus ingens albaque populus umbram hospitalem consociare amant ramis? Quid obliquo laborat lympha fugax trepidare rivo? Huc vina et unguenta et nimium brevis flores amoenae ferre iube rosae, 198

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dum res et aetas et Sororum fila trium patiuntur atra. Cedes coemptis saltibus et domo villaque, flauvs quam Tiberis lavit, cedes, et exstructis in altum divitiis potietur heres. Divesne prisco natus ab Inacho nil interest an pauper et infima de gente sub divo moreris, victima nil miserantis Orci; omnes eodem cogimur, omnium versatur urna serius ocius sors exitura et nos in aeternum exilium impositura cumbae.

Be sure to keep a level mind in steep times And likewise one that is restrained From excessive joy in good times, Dellius, doomed to die, 199

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Whether you spend your whole life in sadness Or regale yourself, reclined to feast In a secluded grassy spot on festival days, With a vintage Falernian from deep in the cellar. Why do the mighty pine and the pale poplar Love to produce hospitable shade by alliance With their branches? Why does the running stream Labour to quiver in its winding course? Order wine and perfume and the too-brief Flower of the rose to be brought, While circumstances, time of life And the dark threads of the three sisters allow it. 200

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You will have to leave the pasture you purchased, Your town house and your villa lapped by the Tiber, And your heir will take possession of the wealth You have built to such a height. It makes no odds if you are rich and spring From Inachus of old, or whether you are poor And of humble family in your stay under the sky, You victim of Hades who has no pity: We are all herded the same way, for all of us Our lot is shaken in the urn, destined to leap out 201

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Sooner or later, and to load us On the boat to eternal exile. (Odes 2.3, complete)

Much of the same message given to Sestius is presented in this poem to Quintus Dellius, a professional political survivor who changed sides in the previous generation’s Roman civil conflicts so often that he was known as the desultor bellorum civilium, “the switchback rider of the civil wars.” The injunction of the first stanza to remain calm whatever happens nicely reflects his variegated career, in which he began as an adherent of Antony and wrote a history of his Eastern campaigns, but finally ended up as a trusted friend of Augustus. Once again, the symposium is chosen as emblematic of life’s pleasures; it seems to take place in the open, with the traditional 202

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park-like features of the locus amoenus, or paradisiacal place—shade, grass, and running water—and with the indispensable elements of the Roman drinking party, perfume, wine, and garlands. Dellius seems to be imagined relaxing in a smart villa beside the Tiber, a realistic contemporary detail that strikes a persuasive chord with the Roman reader. The key thought (again) is that such opportunities, like the brief flowering of the rose, are time-limited; the three sisters (the Fates) included one who used shears to sever an individual’s life-thread at any moment. Like the ode to Sestius, the poem’s final emphasis is on the darker side; rather than being exhorted to “harvest the day,” readers are assured that both rich and poor must make the one-way journey to the Underworld. 203

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Another important element here is the idea that “you can’t take it with you”: the wealth that Dellius has built up, especially land and houses, has to be left behind to his heir. But instead of urging Dellius to enjoy it all now, the poem suggests that riches cannot prevent death, and are in the long term a matter of indifference. Here we find a hint at the desirability of the modest material lifestyle that was discussed in chapter 1. This sombre presentation of the inevitability of death, and of the need to prepare mentally for it as for the vicissitudes of life, suggests that the qualities that can see us through a changeable existence are particularly valuable when face to face with death. These are equanimity and imperturbability, which we saw in chapter 1 as key features in Horace’s conception of the good life, and 204

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are still admirable attitudes when confronting our own mortality. One-Way Travel Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, labuntur anni nec pietas moram rugis et instanti senectae adferet indomitaeque morti, non, si trecenis quotquot eunt dies, amice, places inlacrimabilem Plutona tauris, qui ter amplum Geryonen Tityonque tristi compescit unda, scilicet omnibus quicumque terrae munere vescimur enaviganda, sive reges sive inopes erimus coloni. Frustra cruento Marte carebimus fractisque rauci fluctibus Hadriae, frustra per autumnos nocentem 205

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corporibus metuemus Austrum: visendus ater flumine languido Cocytos errans et Danai genus infame damnatusque longi Sisyphus Aeolides laboris. Linquenda tellus et domus et placens uxor, neque harum quas colis arborum te praeter invisas cupressos ulla brevem dominum sequetur; absumet heres Caecuba dignior servata centum clavibus et mero tinguet pavimentum superbo, pontificum potiore cenis.

Alas, Postumus, Postumus, the years Flow away, and devotion will bring No stay to wrinkles and the press of age Or to death the indomitable,

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Not even if on all the days that pass, my friend, You placate Pluto that knows no tears With three hundred bulls, he who confines Triple-massive Geryon and Tityos With his grim waters, that must be sailed By all of us who eat the gifts of the earth, Whether we are monarchs Or destitute farm labourers. In vain will we avoid bloody war And the smashed swells of the raucous Adriatic, In vain will we fear the south wind That harms our health in autumn; We must go to visit black Cocytos Wandering with its sluggish stream,

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And the infamous race of the Danaids, And Sisyphus doomed to everlasting labour. We must leave behind earth, house, and pleasing wife, And none of these trees that you cultivate Will follow their short-lived owner Except the hateful cypresses: A worthier heir will use up your Caecuban That you have locked up with a hundred keys And stain the floor with its proud vintage, Outstripping the feasts of the priests. (Odes 2.14, complete)

This ode on death is suitably addressed to an otherwise unidentified Postumus, 208

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a name that means “after burial” and was generally given to sons born after the demise of their fathers. The whole emphasis of the poem is on the brevity and insecurity of life and the proximity and inevitability of death, and as in 2.3 little is made of the need to enjoy life’s pleasures while they are available. As in both 1.4 and 2.3, the point is firmly made that wealth and status are no barriers to death. The opening metaphor is that of human life as a fast-flowing river that no devotion to the gods can stem; this is perhaps picked up in Isaac Watts’s Anglican hymn from the eighteenth century “O God our help in ages past,” which declares, “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, / Bears all its sons away.” Water imagery and water references run through the poem (time’s stream, the restraining waters of the underworld, the 209

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stormy waves of the Adriatic, and the infernal river of Cocytos), and the final image of precious wine flowing over a mosaic floor adds an ironic climax to this series of liquid elements. Once again, Horace unrolls the poetic panoply of the traditional mythological underworld, even if it probably means nothing to him as a realistic statement of what happens after death. The mention of the torments of the violent Geryon and the lustful Tityos, alongside the punishments of the husband-murdering Danaids and the treacherous Sisyphus, might imply that the reader would be unwise to follow their monstrous behaviour, but this moralising element is only a subtext here. The reference to the “pleasing wife” is unusual for the non-conjugal Horace, and surely looks to Postumus’s own family. It 210

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may be that this is the faithful spouse Galla who is celebrated by Horace’s contemporary the elegist Propertius (3.12), the very opposite of the devious Danaids; the passage is certainly an echo of some famous lines of Lucretius (3.894–901) that similarly see a wife as one of the pleasing elements of earthly existence that the wise man should nevertheless be content to leave behind in death. The element of “you can’t take it with you” is especially strong here. Like Dellius, Postumus is clearly a man of means, with his own arboretum and impressive wine cellar. The implicit anti-materialism here, along with the message that death is inevitable, still makes fit food for thought; worldly goods have limited value in the long term, and should therefore not dominate life in the short term. 211

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No Way Back Diffugere nives, redeunt iam gramina campis arboribusque comae; mutat terra vices et decrescentia ripas flumina praetereunt; Gratia cum Nymphis geminisque sororibus audet ducere nuda choros. 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 212

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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; infernis neque enim tenebris Diana pudicum liberat Hippolytum, nec Lethaea valet Theseus abrumpere caro vincula Pirithoo. 213

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The snows have fled away, the grass now returns to the plains, Their coiffure to the trees: The earth changes its stages, and the streams grow less As they flow past their banks; A Grace with her Nymphs and twin sisters dares To lead off dance measures unclothed. The changing year and the season that speeds away the day Warns you not to hope for anything everlasting; The cold softens under the Zephyrs, summer treads on the heels of spring, Itself destined to die as soon as Fruit-bearing Autumn lavishes its produce, and next in turn Winter’s inactivity returns.

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The losses in heaven are made good by the swift moons: When we drop down Going to where father Aeneas is, Tullus the rich and Ancus, We are mere dust and shadow. Who knows whether the gods will add the time of tomorrow To the sum of today? Everything that you give to your soul as your friend Will escape the greedy hands of your heir. When you have perished and Minos has made His brilliant judgement of your case, Not your family, Torquatus, not your eloquence, Not your piety will restore your rights:

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For Diana cannot free Hippolytus the chaste From the darkness of Hades, And Theseus has not the strength to break The chains of Lethe from his dear Pirithous. (Odes 4.7, complete)

This poem, clearly a pendant to 1.4 to Sestius (above), similarly begins with the advent of spring and turns rapidly from the theme of the cycle of the seasons to that of death. Two metaphors run through it: that of falling leaves, a symbol of human mortality from the time of Homer, and that of accounting, neatly befitting the idea of numbering the years of life. The leaves that return to the anthropomorphic trees at the poem’s start are echoed in the human souls 216

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that “drop down” to the underworld, while the language of “losses” “made good,” “add” and “sum” looks to a form of higher balance sheet that cannot be influenced by human enterprise, a supreme divine ecology which (like Old Man River) continues to run serenely on. As in both 1.4 and 2.14, the idea of the rapid passage of time is strongly emphasised; the swift flow of the river, the quick succession of summer to spring and autumn to summer, and the accelerated lunar cycle all point to this key element. Prominent too is the idea that even the most outstanding humans have had to yield to mortality, a notion frequently found in Roman contexts of consolation (the great have died, why not you?). Aeneas, the heroic founder of the Roman race, and Tullus and Ancus, two of Rome’s greatest early kings, have 217

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suffered the annihilation of death; the same will come to Torquatus and Horace (note how the first-person plural is used to link the fates of the two friends, common to all humanity). The interests of the addressee are again significant in the poem. The Torquatus of this poem, also addressed by Horace in Epistles 1.5, was a member of a great family whose father may have been a friend of Cicero and Catullus, and he himself clearly had a career as an advocate; his lineage and professional skills will be no good to him in the Underworld, and the infernal judge Minos will inevitably condemn him to permanent death and loss of property rights like that of an exile. Here there is a brief gesture towards the theme of enjoying yourself before the eternal night of death. “Everything that 218

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you give to your soul as your friend / Will escape the greedy hands of your heir” introduces again (as in 2.14) the figure of the heir who will spend your wealth when you are dead, and suggests that self-indulgence is licensed by the thought that “you can’t take it with you.” This may also be relevant to Torquatus’s character as someone interested in pleasure: in Epistles 1.5 he is invited to a symposium in a way that implies he has high standards of dining, and if he is the son of Cicero’s friend, his father appears as an Epicurean advocate in Cicero’s dialogue De Finibus, defending the view that virtue is pleasure. The pair of mythological vignettes drawn from the legendary royal family of Athens (the son and father Hippolytus and Theseus) with which the poem concludes provide an evocative ending: in the poetic 219

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tradition, even the gods cannot rescue their favourites (this glances at the end of Euripides’s Hippolytus, where Artemis/Diana cannot save the eponymous hero), and even Hippolytus’s father, Theseus, the great founder of Athens, is unable to rescue his dear comrade Pirithous when he is left behind in Hades. This final detail perhaps looks to the friendship of the poet and the addressee, linking up with another key Horatian theme (see chapter 2): though they might wish to, neither can aid the other against the mighty power of death. Making an Exit Suicide was an issue that split the ancient philosophies: Plato and Epicurus were against it, while the Stoics regarded it as a rational and virtuous decision in the right 220

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circumstances. The modern debate on self-killing is equally lively, now usually in the context of physician-assisted death: in the United States assisted suicide/assisted death is currently legal only in Washington, DC, and the states of California, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, and Hawaii, while in Europe, seven of the twenty-seven EU countries presently allow physicianassisted death. Here for once Horace’s poems do not present an Epicurean approach, but rather show some sympathy for the Stoic perspective; this is in tune with the general Roman culture of his own time, which admired the suicides of Cato and of Horace’s own former commander Brutus after major defeats in the recent civil wars of the 40s BCE. The strongly communitarian Roman culture placed a high value on self-sacrifice for the common cause: 221

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an example is the early Roman practice of devotio, where a commander vowed to the gods to give his own life in battle in return for the success of his army. This Roman self-sacrifice for the public good is honoured in the Regulus ode (Odes 3.5). There, in effect, the great general Regulus from the middle Roman Republic chooses death over life; in opting to return to Carthage under the terms of his parole as captive, he knows that he will suffer a terrible end, but deems this to be in the greater national interest: fertur pudicae coniugis osculum parvosque natos ut capitis minor ab se removisse et virilem toruus humi posuisse vultum, donec labantis consilio patres firmaret auctor nunquam alias dato 222

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interque maerentis amicos egregius properaret exul. 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.

They say he pushed away the kiss Of his chaste wife, and his small sons, As one condemned, and grimly pressed His manly brow against the ground, Until he was able to confirm the wavering senators By his opinion, such as never given before, 223

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And, surrounded by his grieving friends, To hasten away as an outstanding exile. And yet he knew what the barbarian torturer Was readying for him; but still, he moved aside His relatives that stood in his path And the people who sought to delay his return, Just as if he were leaving behind a long business Of clients once the suit had been settled, Heading for the fields of Venafrum Or for Spartan Tarentum. (Odes 3.5.41–56)

This wonderful close of the ode packages and praises Regulus’s self-destructive 224

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decision to return to Carthage as a patriotic Roman suicide. This is accomplished through an echo of the similar choice of Socrates in Plato’s Crito and Phaedo to go through with his execution despite the opportunity of escape, so that his death too becomes a form of principled suicide. Like the Platonic Socrates at the end, Regulus sends away his family and friends, and quits this life as if simply leaving for a break at a country house; this is a version of Socrates’s serene characterisation of death as metoikesis, or literally moving home, in his final speech (Phaedo 117c), and analogous to Shakespeare’s funeral song “thou thy worldly task hast done, / Home art gone and ta’en thy wages” in Cymbeline (Act 4, Scene 2). The details of the last stanza are particularly telling. Regulus has finished his 225

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speech to the Senate, in which he has in effect signed his own death warrant, but he leaves as if he has made a speech in court to wrap up a private legal case for clients, a very different kind of ending; this minor act of service to others is a moving comparison for the supreme sacrifice of his own life for Rome. The simile is persuasively specific for a contemporary Roman readership: Regulus leaves for a painful death at Carthage (gruesomely documented elsewhere by historians), but adopts the air of a Roman elite member knocking off after normal business and heading for pleasant places in the Italian south. The poem’s last phrase is especially pointed and provides a brilliant closure. The advocate of the simile departs for Tarentum, the sunny resort that was a preferred retirement location for Horace (see chapter 2), but 226

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“Spartan” reminds us not just of the city’s foundation history as a Spartan colony, but also of the Spartans’ tradition of self-sacrifice for their city’s good. As the early Spartan poet Tyrtaeus had said, “It is a fine thing for a good man to die having fallen / in the front rank fighting for his homeland.” Similar philosophical elements (surprisingly) are found in Horace’s account of the death of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, who famously chose to commit suicide in 30 BCE by snake bite rather than make a humiliating appearance in a triumphal procession at Rome. Though Horace was a strong supporter of the young Caesar (the later Augustus) in the civil war against Cleopatra and Mark Antony, and engages in bitter invective against Cleopatra in other poems, when he comes to narrate her end the tone changes: 227

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Quae generosius perire quaerens nec muliebriter expavit ensem nec latentis classe cita reparavit oras, ausa at iacentem visere regiam vultu sereno, fortis et asperas tractare serpentes, ut atrum corpore conbiberet venenum, deliberata morte ferocior: saevis Liburnis scilicet invidens privata deduci superbo, non humilis mulier, triumpho.

She, seeking To die more nobly, did not, as a woman might, Tremble before the sword or attain Hidden shores in her swift fleet,

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But endured to see her palace laid low With face serene, and to grasp serpents Rough to touch, so as to drink deep The dark venom with her body, More ferocious through her meditated death: No doubt she grudged the cruel Liburnian ships The chance to lead her deposed in a proud triumph— This woman who was far from humble. (Odes 1.37.21–32)

Cleopatra does not panic or run away to a secret refuge, but returns to Alexandria to face her fate; she endures the sight of the destruction of her palace with equanimity, and plans her death carefully. All this recalls

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Socrates’s choice not to escape but to go through with drinking the hemlock prescribed by Athens for executions: according to Plato, Socrates “very cheerfully and peacefully drained” the deadly cup (Phaedo 117c). Cleopatra’s famously exotic choice of the lethal bite of an asp for her suicide is here framed as a courageous and resolute act worthy of the last of the Ptolemaic dynasty, grasping the scaly snakes in the manner of the young Hercules from whom her family claimed descent; her “drinking deep” of the venom is another evocation of the end of Socrates. This dignified depiction of the death of an enemy demonstrates a generous spirit, but also fits the Caesarian party perspective. Horace has chosen not to mention Antony in this poem, partly to stress that the war against Cleopatra was a foreign war and 230

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not a civil one, as the young Caesar insisted. In his absence, the leader of the opposition needs to be an impressive figure whose defeat and death are in some way glorious. Nevertheless, the poem shows a clear admiration for the queen’s resourcefulness and courage in the face of death, and presents a just commendation of those qualities. Cleopatra’s suicide fits the Stoic ideas that self-killing is a rational choice in extreme circumstances, and the ultimate form of human freedom. This is more conventionally presented in my last example, from Epistles 1: Vir bonus et sapiens audebit dicere: “Pentheu, rector Thebarum, quid me perferre patique indignum coges?” “Adimam bona.” “Nempe pecus, rem, 231

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lectos, argentum; tollas licet.” “In manicis et compedibus saeuo te sub custode tenebo.” “Ipse deus, simul atque uolam, me soluet.” Opinor, hoc sentit: “Moriar”. Mors ultima linea rerum est. The man who is virtuous and wise will be bold to say: “Pentheus, King of Thebes, what will you compel me to brave and bear All undeserving as I am?” “I will take away your property.” “You mean My flocks, my cash, my furniture, my silver; you can take them.” “I will hold you in handcuffs and fetters under a cruel guard.” “The god himself will release me whenever I want.” I think

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He means this, “I shall die.” Death is the last boundary for everything. (Epistles 1.16.72–79)

Here Horace reruns the scene from Euripides’s tragedy Bacchae in which the tyrant Pentheus threatens the disguised god Dionysus; when the latter talks about “the god” he is talking about effecting his own escape from confinement (as duly happens in the play), but Horace reinterprets this as divine approval for escape from life in the form of suicide. Under the post-Augustan Roman emperors, suicide becomes a standard mode of resisting imperial oppression: it is the one decision that an autocrat cannot control. This extreme mode of selfliberation from persecution remains in the modern armoury of protest.

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These poems that confront death are amongst the most memorable of Horace’s works, and present some of his most persuasive precepts. In our modern society of increasing life expectancy, death is still an indelible fact, and Horace’s poetry, with its stress on life’s insecurity and brevity and the consequent need for equanimity and resolution in the face of mortality, can help us generate an appropriate frame of mind to contemplate the inevitable prospect of our own end.

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INDEX

Agrippa (M. Vipsanius Agrippa), 76

Caesar, Julius (C. Iulius Caesar), 4

Alexander the Great, 156

Calais, 174

Antony, Mark

Carthage, 222

(M. Antonius), 4, 166,

Cato, M. Porcius, 156

230

Catullus, C. Valerius, 166

Apulia, 159

Chios, 73

Arabia, 66

Chloe, 174

Astrology, 37

Cleopatra (Cleopatra VII

Auchinleck House, 76 Augustus (Imperator Caesar divi filius), 4, 6–7, 11, 102, 104, 116

of Egypt), 15, 227–31 Clientela, 87 Cocceius (M. Cocceius Nerva), 120 Colophon, 73

Botticelli, 195 Brutus, Marcus (M. Junius Brutus), 4 Bullatius, 67

Dacia, 103 Dead Poets Society, 1989 film, 38 235

INDEX

Dellius, Q., 202

Kensington, 57

elegiac poetry, Latin,

Lalage, 161

143–4, 158, 166, 179

Lebedos, 74

Epictetus, 188

Lesbos, 73

Epicureans/Epicureanism,

Locus amoenus, 203

39, 41, 84, 86–7, 141, 188, 219 Euripides, 220, 233

Lollius (possibly son of M. Lollius), 48, 130 Lollius, M., 127–32 Lucretius (T. Lucretius

Fuscus, 41 Glycera, 181

Carus), 74, 141, 211 Maecenas (C. Maecenas), 5, 47, 88–108, 116

Herodotus, 73

Malibu, 57

Hippolytus, 220

Matronalia (festival), 101

Homer, 15–22, 216

Mempsimoiria, 31

Hydaspes, 156

Mindfulness, 39 Monty Python’s

Iccius, 76 India, 66

Meaning of Life, 1983 film, 195 Myrtale, 180

Jesus Christ, 114 Juba, 159 236

Naples, 57

INDEX

O Brother, Where Art Thou?, 2000 film, 22

Sardis, 73 Scythia, 103

Odysseus, 20–21

Septimius, 133

Orbilius, 3

Sermon on the Mount, 36 Sestius, L., 193

Parthia, 103

Smyrna, 73

Phillippi, battle of

Social War, 3

(42 BCE), 4

Socrates, 182, 225, 230

Pirithous, 220

Soracte/Soratte, 149

Plancus, L. Munatius,

Spain, 103

121–6 Plato, 182, 225 Plotius Tucca, 119 Postumus, 208 Pyrrha, 184–5

Stoics/Stoicism, 32, 41, 62, 188, 231 Suetonius (C. Suetonius Tranquillus), 2 Suicide, 221 Sygambri, 131

Regulus (M. Atilius Regulus), 222–26

Tarentum, 139, 226 Teucer, 124

Sabine estate, Horace’s, 5,

Thackeray, W. M., 58

52, 53, 74, 88, 95, 150,

Theseus, 220

157

Tibullus (Albius Tibullus),

Samos, 73 Sappho, 73, 96, 167

80, 166, 178 Tivoli (Tibur), 6, 121, 137 237

INDEX

Torquatus, Manlius, 218

Varius Rufus, L., 119

Triumvirate, 125

Venusia (Venosa), 2

Troy, 2004 film, 22

Vergil (P. Vergilius Maro),

Turkey, 61

5, 115, 119

Tyrtaeus, 227

Via Appia, 116

Ulubrae, 75

Watts, Isaac, 209

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