19

STEPHEN HARRISON

Style and Poetic Texture

Horace’s carefully crafted poetic style, fundamentally influenced by the

Callimachean aesthetics of brevity, elegance and polish, was already recognised as

such within a century of his death : 1 a character in Petronius’ Satyrica (118.5) refers

to Horati curiosa felicitas, ‘Horace’s painstaking felicity of expression’. Both this

verbal craft and its structural analogue, Horace’s careful construction of his poems,

have been well discussed in recent scholarship; his main contribution to Roman poetic

language has been seen as the art of careful combination of traditional and innovatory

elements, including an admixture of ‘unpoetic’ and colloquial language, 2 while his

brilliant poetic architecture 3 and impressive manipulation of complex Greek lyric

metres in the Odes have been a constant subject of study. 4 Though some have played

down Horace’s use of imagery, it is clear that it is rich and detailed. 5 Careful

scholarly collections of material illuminating Horatian poetic language are readily

available, especially in the great commentaries of recent years; 6 in this chapter I

would like to try to convey something of Horace’s stylistic and poetic virtuosity in a

form accessible to both specialists and non-specialists, by brief close examination of

three relatively short poems from the three main literary kinds in which Horace

worked : iambus, lyric and hexameter sermo. 7

Iambus : Epode 10

1 On Horace and the Callimachean aesthetics of the Hellenistic Greek period see Thomas, Chapter 4 above; on the ancient reception of Horace see Tarrant, Chapter 20 below.2 For the issue of colloquial language in Horace see e.g. Watson (1985) and Bonfante (1994).3 See e.g. Syndikus (1995), Tarrant (1995) and Harrison (2004), all with further references.4 See Barchiesi, Chapter 11 above.5 For playing down see e.g. Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) xxii; for more emphasis see e.g. West (1967).6 See details in Further Reading below.. 7 The translations of the three poems are my own.

Mala soluta navis exit alite

      ferens olentem Maevium.

ut horridis utrumque verberes latus,

      Auster, memento fluctibus;

niger rudentis Eurus inverso mari 5

      fractosque remos differat;

insurgat Aquilo, quantus altis montibus

      frangit trementis ilices;

nec sidus atra nocte amicum appareat,

      qua tristis Orion cadit; 10

quietiore nec feratur aequore

      quam Graia victorum manus,

cum Pallas usto vertit iram ab Ilio

      in inpiam Aiacis ratem.

o quantus instat navitis sudor tuis 15

      tibique pallor luteus

et illa non virilis eiulatio

      preces et aversum ad Iovem,

Ionius udo cum remugiens sinus

      Noto carinam ruperit. 20

opima quodsi praeda curvo litore

      porrecta mergos iuverit,

libidinosus immolabitur caper

      et agna Tempestatibus.

The ship, freed from its moorings, moves out under bad omen

Conveying stinking Maevius.

South Wind, make sure you batter both sides

With bristling waves;

May the black East Wind, as the sea turns over,

Carry away the cables and splintered oars;

May the North Wind rise up, strong as when

It shatters the trembling holm-oaks high on the mountains;

And may no friendly star appear in the darkness of night,

When grim Orion sets.

May he be carried on an ocean as stormy

Than that which met the victorious band of Greeks,

When Pallas turned her wrath from Troy’s burning

To the sinful ship of Ajax.

What a sweat is in store for your crew

What clay-like pallor for you

And that unmanly wailing

And prayers to a heedless Jupiter,

When the Ionian bay, roaring like a bull

Under the soaking storm-wind, smashes your keel !

And if a rich carcass on the curving shore-line

Lies stretched out to pleasure the gulls,

A lustful goat and a lamb

Will be offered to the Storm-Gods.

This poem, based on a preserved archaic Greek iambic text, curses an enemy, possibly

the poet Maevius of Vergil Eclogue 3, perhaps for a sexual offence. 8 As always with

Horatian poems, structure is important, and here it is bipartite; the main curse on

Maevius, a single sentence in seven epodic couplets (1-14), is capped by a section of

imaginative Schadenfreude (15-24) in five further couplets 9. Some ring-composition

is also evident, as so often in Horace’s poetry; 10 the evocation of storms in the

opening line is picked up by the poem’s last word, and the abusive reference to

Maevius as ‘stinking’ in the poem’s second line is picked up in its penultimate line

with the reference to a he-goat, traditionally also high in odour. 11 The names of the

winds are also carefully distributed : the third, fourth and fifth pair of lines each

contain one wind-name, covering three cardinal points of the compass : the missing

fourth is the west wind, which would blow Maevius where he wants to go (the

reference to Ionia shows that this is an eastwards voyage). The proper names referring

to the legendary storms after the fall of Troy are also carefully distributed in the sixth

and seventh pairs of lines : the strategic placing of names is a common decorative

8 For these issues and much else on this poem see Watson (2003) 338-57.9 For the metres of the Epodes see e.g. Watson (2003) 45-7.10 See Tarrant (1995). 11 See Odes 1.17.7.

effect in Horace’s poetic texture, and the effect here as often is to convey much in

little, rapidly keying the reader into a familiar mythological episode.

Careful word order is a key feature of Horace’s style at all levels. The third

and fourth lines are almost enclosed by the noun/adjective pair meaning ‘bristling

waves’, perhaps mirroring the prospective swamping of the ship by the water but

certainly wholly inverting normal Latin word-order which would place the two words

together. The verb at the end of line 6 is followed immediately by another verb in the

same mood at the beginning of a new clause in line 7 (differat; / insurgat), again a

spectacularly unprosaic word-order, both the sixth and the eight lines begin with

words related to breaking (fractosque, frangit) : the wind’s shattering of holm-oaks is

clearly mirrored in the splintering of oars – the mighty trees and the slender wooden

oars are both to be broken by storms. Note too how the rising of the North Wind

(insurgat) matches the fall of Orion (cadit), with the two opposite verbs at opposite

ends of successive clauses : in both cases the movement of the cosmos is hostile to

Maevius, whether upwards or downwards. This hostility of the landscape is repeated

in the metaphor of remugiens, which brilliantly turns the bull-identity often used of

the sea-god Poseidon/Neptune to personify the Ionian shore as violently opposed to

Maevius and his ship.

Epic tone is a particular feature in this poem. The evocation of the storms

associated with the returns of the Greeks from Troy recall the (lost) Greek cyclic epic

of the Nostoi in which those returns were narrated, and the phrase Graia victorum

manus strikes a lofty tone with the poetic Graia and the enallage (transfer of epithet)

with manus (it is the victors and not the band who are primarily Greek). 12 The ‘clay-

like’ pallor of Maevius’ fear picks up a well-known Homeric phrase (chloron deos), 13

while the ‘unmanly wailing’ perhaps presents an ironic version of the song of the

Sirens : Maevius, who has none of Odysseus’ aplomb under pressure, succumbs

where Homer’s hero had famously resisted female utterance at sea, indeed actively

mimics the Sirens himself as an effeminate coward. The prospect of the corpse

feeding the birds is also a familiar idea from Homer, used several times in battlefield

threats from which these lines gain some menacing tones, though the specification of

somewhat unpoetic sea-gulls is a nice local twist. 14. Commentators have noted this

12 See Watson (2003) 351; on enallage as an epic feature see conveniently Conte (2002) 5-64.13 See Watson (2003) 350.14 On the Iliadic echoes see Watson (2003) 352. The mergus is found elsewhere in Horace only at Satires 2.2.51.

cluster of epic material around the figure of Maevius; it might be worth suggesting

that it can be connected with Eclogue 3.90, where the poetry of a Maevius is

condemned, to argue that Maevius is a bad epic poet. Perhaps violence metaphorically

done by Maevius to the tradition of epic poetry is here literally turned against him.

Lyric : Odes 1.22

Integer uitae scelerisque purus

non eget Mauris iaculis neque arcu

nec uenenatis grauida sagittis,

     Fusce, pharetra,

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.

He that 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, all freed from cares,

Such a monster as the soldierly South does not breed

In its wide 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 an evil 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.

Once again structure is crucial : here we have three pairs of stanzas, and ring-

composition between the first and last pairs, which both deal with journeys to distant

parts of the world, while the central pair of stanzas is located much nearer to home on

Horace’s Sabine estate. This over-arching structure is underlined at the verbal level by

the echo of aestuosas (5) and aestiva (18), sharing the root aest-, ‘heat’, and also

reinforced by clear intertextual echoes of two famous poems of Catullus, the only two

extant Catullan poems in this same metre of the Sapphic stanza, near the opening and

at the close of Horace’s ode. 15 The alternative exotic locations of the second stanza

15 On Horace and Catullus see further Tarrant, Chapter 5 above.

(sive … sive .. vel) clearly recall the equally distant destinations evoked for the

potential journey of Furius and Aurelius at Catullus 11.1-8 (sive …sive… sive…seu, in

a similar Eastern travelogue of India, Arabia, Parthia and Egypt), while the ‘sweet

laughter’ of Lalage in the poem’s penultimate line recalls the same phrase of Lesbia at

Catullus 51.5. This encapsulation of the only two poems of Catullus in a Lesbian

stanzaic metre 16 represents both homage to a formal predecessor and an implicit

assertion that Horace’s own Odes outdo Catullus’ lyric poems in their thoroughgoing

use of the complex Aeolic lyric metres only occasionally ventured by his

predecessor : where Horace claims to be the first to produce Lesbian lyric in Latin,

what he means is that he is the first to do it consistently in a whole collection. 17

The first stanza shows typically Horatian density of poetic texture. The two

phrases of the first line balance each other not just in their elegant and poetic genitives

but also in chiastic ABBA word-order; 18 the semantically similar terms integer and

purus (expressing purity by negative and positive means respectively) thus frame the

poem’s opening line. The negative list of what the virtuous man does not need is

carefully varied with three different terms (non… neque … nec); all the words for

weapons are located at the ends of metrical lines, increasing in length and phonetic

weight (arcu … sagittis … pharetra); and the African location implied by Mauris

perhaps puns on the name of the addressee Fuscus, a cognomen which can mean

‘dark-skinned’. 19 Gravida shows a brilliantly ironical use of the metaphor of live-

giving pregnancy for a quiver teeming with death-dealing poisoned arrows. Once

again, word-placing is a vital effect : in the second stanza the location of the long

adjectives aestuosas, inhospitalem and fabulosus at the ends of the three successively

metrically identical lines of the Sapphic stanza is a clear effect of co-ordination of

colourful epithets which all point in the same direction of hostile and mysterious

landscapes, while the proper names are again careful distributed – one more or less at

the beginning of the stanza, one at the end and one near the middle (Syrtis, Caucasum,

Hydaspes).

The grandeur of expression in this first stanza fits its historical resonances.

16 For the metres of Horace’s odes in general see Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) xxxvii-xlvi.17 See Hutchinson, Chapter 3 above.18 See Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) 264 for these details (and much else on this poem).19 See Satires 2.8.14 fuscus Hydaspes, a dark-skinned slave with an Eastern name (a name indeed found in Odes 1.22).

The Moorish javelins, bow and poisoned arrows are hard to place in a specific context

other than that of barbarian enemies of Rome, but the journeys of the second stanza

evoke memories of great historic marches by Cato Uticensis and Alexander 20, suiting

the military expression iter facere. 21 Horace’s much more domestic escapade in

stanzas three and four is marked by ironic use of the military and expeditionary

terminology of the first two stanzas : he marches not to the ends of the earth but only

just over the borders of his estate and his close encounter is comic, momentary and

unhazardous. The term expeditus perhaps recalls the use of this adjective for light-

armed troops, 22 while inermem and militaris are clearly military. The mention of the

‘land of Juba’ is another safe containment of the perilous landscape of the opening

stanza : Juba II was the safe and loyal client-king of Mauretania, and his mention

suggests that the Moorish spears of line 2 have been tamed in Rome’s interest, though

the opening out to a more distant location also looks forward to the renewed far places

of the final pair of stanzas, and the sequence of proper names Sabina … Daunias

(Horace’s native region of southern Italy) … Iubae tellus draws us southwards from

the metropolis to the periphery of the Roman empire. As commentators note, the

mention of lions here recalls Juba’s prose work on that topic, while the phrase arida

nutrix neatly frames a typically Horatian oxymoron in the compact metrical unit of

the adonaean (the last, short line of the Sapphic stanza); the nurturing metaphor of

nutrix applied to exotic lions neatly picks up the perverse use of the imagery of

pregnancy earlier in gravida (line 3).

The last pair of stanzas is held together with the same initial phrase,

underlining like the initial word-pair sive … sive in lines 5-6 the idea of alternative

destinations. Sluggish plains and relieving winds are neatly contrasted with each other

in word-order as in sense by the balanced noun-adjective pairs pigris … campis /

aestiva … aura, again separated against natural Latin order. This symmetry is

continued in the last stanza, not just with the obvious balance of dulce ridentem …

dulce loquentem (the last phrase again exposed in the adonean to stress its

etymological play on the name of Lalage, ‘chatterer’), but also with the pair nimium

propinqui and domibus negata : these adjectival phrases (as often in Latin poetic

language) look like translations of Greek compound adjectives : nimium propinqui

20 See Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) 265-7.21 Caesar Gall.1.7.3, Livy 27.13.4.22 Caesar Civ.1.42.1, Livy 5.16.3. I here adopt Bentley’s conjecture for the transmitted expeditis.

suggests a rendering of a Greek adjective beginning with hyper-, ‘excessively’, 23

while domibus negata seems to pick up Herodotus’ similarly ethnographic aoiketos

(2.34), ‘uninhabited’ (literally ‘with no houses’).

Sermo : Epistles 1.12

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               5

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               10

uel quia cuncta putas una uirtute minora.

Miramur, si Democriti pecus edit agellos

cultaque, dum peregre est animus sine corpore uelox,

cum tu inter scabiem tantam et contagia lucri

nil paruum sapias et adhuc sublimia cures;               15

quae mare compescant causae, quid temperet annum,

stellae sponte sua iussaene uagentur et errent,

quid premat obscurum lunae, quid proferat orbem,

quid uelit et possit rerum concordia discors,

Empedocles an Stertinium deliret acumen?               20

Verum, seu piscis seu porrum et caepe trucidas,

utere Pompeio Grospho et, siquid petet, ultro

defer; nil Grosphus nisi uerum orabit et aequum.

Vilis amicorum est annona, bonis ubi quid dest.

Ne tamen ignores quo sit Romana loco res,               

Cantaber Agrippae, Claudi uirtute Neronis

Armenius cecidit; ius imperiumque Prahates

23 Though I cannot find an exactly matching Greek word : cf. e.g. hypermekes, ‘too long’.

Caesaris accepit genibus minor; aurea fruges

Italiae pleno defundit Copia cornu.

Iccius, if you have proper enjoyment

Of the Sicilian yields you collect for Agrippa

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.

Do we wonder that Democritus’ flocks ate up his poor fields and crops

While his mind was in flight away from his body,

When you, surrounded by such itching and contagion of wealth

Show no small wisdom and still care for elevated things :

The causes which keep down the sea, what controls the year,

Whether the stars orbit and wander by themselves or under orders,

What presses the moon’s sphere down to darkness, what brings it out,

What the discordant harmony of things means and can accomplish,

Whether Empedocles is raving – or the sharp mind of Stertinius ?

Buth whether it’s fish, or leeks and onions that you slaughter,

Make use of Pompeius Grosphus, and if he asks for anything, give it freely;

Grosphus will beg for nothing that is not true and fair.

The price of friends is cheap when a good man has a need.

To let you know how the Roman state is faring,

The Cantabrian lies low through the might of Agrippa,

The Armenian through that of Claudius Nero;

Phraates has accepted on his knees the laws and power of Caesar:

Golden Abundance pours forth the corn of Italy from a full horn.

Verbal ring-composition is once more important here, not only tying the poem

together but also identifying a key theme : fructibus and copia in the opening two

lines (with the additional wordplay of frueris in line 2) 24 are echoed with brilliant

effect in fruges and copia in the closing two lines, pointing to the idea of production

and plenty as the central idea of the poem, while the mention of Iccius’ patron

Agrippa in the poem’s opening is picked up with the notice of his victory in Spain at

the close. Iccius’ philosophical credentials would already be known to readers of

Odes 1.29, where his ethical interests are subordinated to the financial lure of an

Eastern expeditiion; this poem reprises the same dilemma of wisdom against

materialism for Iccius when surrounded by the wealth of Sicily. The concatenation of

proper names in the opening line rapidly establishes the identity and location of the

addressee and his affiliation to Agrippa, a technique often used at the beginning of

Horace’s epistolary poems (cf. e.g. 1.11, 1.15); the implicit comparison between

Jupiter and Agrippa as sources of gifts for Iccius, brought out by the use of the two

names in balance, is light and amusing and helps to set the tone of the poem..

Horace’s deployment of the flexible hexameter of sermo is much more relaxed

than his engagement with the tight lyric metres of the Odes, and this is clear from

such features as syntactical breaks near the end of metrical units, such as the comma

one syllable before the end of line 5 or the sentence-end close to the end of line 3,

something generally avoided by loftier hexameter technique (e.g. in Virgil). 25 But the

longer line can be used equally artistically to interact with the sense : line 4 presents a

self-contained sententious one-line summary of a moral idea, an effect repeated at line

24 and often used in the Epistles for pithily highlighting precepts. 26 Likewise,

repetition can still be used for literary point : beginning both line 10 and line 11 with

vel quia not only points up a debt to Lucretian didactic technique 27 but also nicely

balances two equipollent explanations, with the key contrasting terms pecunia and

virtute set against each other in approximately similar position in successive lines.

This effect is continued in lines 14 and 15, where the opposing words contagia and

sublimia are again placed in clear contradistinction in the same metrical position,

stressing the same contrast between the corruption of wealth and wholesome

philosophical pursuits; the metaphor of disease in scabies and contagia look as often

24 The so-called figura etymologica, where a noun and verb in partnership share the same root.25 On the hexameter of Horatian sermo see conveniently Mayer (1994) 13-32.26 See Harrison (1995b) 51-3.27 See Mayer (1994) 197

in the Epistles to the image of philosophy as healer of the soul’s sickness caused by

excessive material consideration. 28

Humour and familiar tone are important characterising features of the Epistles,

and come across in this poem partly through lexical choice: the amusing listing of

body parts in line 5 begins with the venter, stomach, too vulgar to be named in the

Odes, while the allusion to nettles, urtica, in line 8, picks out this humble plant for the

only time in Horace’s output. The entertaining anecdote of Democritus’ disastrous

attempt at farming is another natural locus for lexical lightness : the diminutive

agellos in line 12 (a usage limited to hexameter sermo ) might suggest both non-

extensive holdings and sympathy for the ravaged fields, while peregre est animus

characterises the lofty philosophical idea of the flight of the mind with an amusingly

colloquial turn of phrase (his mind is ‘out to lunch’). 29. Similarly, the speculations on

Iccius’ diet – luxurious fish or ascetic leeks and onions– is entertainly coloured by the

hyperbolic trucidas, ‘slaughter’, picking up the Pythagorean idea that eating other

creatures is tantamount to murder but using a melodramatic word found elsewhere in

Horace only of Medea’s infanticide (Ars Poetica 184).

Style again works closely with content in another way in lines 16-20, where

the listing of topics in indirect questions follows a traditional model for summarising

the contents of a poetic work : the repetition of quid (varied once by quae) gives

headings within a programme of study for Iccius in his philosophical investigations of

the natural world., and symmetry is again an important effect : quid begins two

successive lines (18-19), qui temperet annum (16) is exactly balanced in placing and

phrasing by quid proferat orbem (18), and the neat paradox concordia discors

summarises Empedoclean cosmic theory in another Horatian oxymoron.

The list of philosophical topics is nicely balanced by another list in the poem’s

concluding lines, this time of Roman victories. This epistolary news report cleverly

manipulates proper names once again : two defeated parties, Cantaber and Armenius,

are placed at the beginning of successive lines, and line 27 both begins and ends with

the names of conquered Roman enemies (Armenius … Phraates), while the break

between line 27 and line 28 is also the break between the Parthian king and his

Roman conqueror (Phraates/Caesar). Word-order can even express political

diplomacy here : line 26 shows a nice equipollence between the two main candidates

28 See Harrison (1995b) 54-7.29 For the colloquial tone of peregre est see Plautus Stich.739, Trin.149, Seneca Contr.7.4.5.

for the imperial succession at the time of writing (c.20 B.C.) : Agrippa, Augustus’

deputy, and his stepson Tiberius (Claudius Nero). In addition the list-structure which

knits this final section together is the unifying metaphor of corn and productivity, with

which as we have seen the poem began : annona in line 24, the technical term for the

price of corn, is echoed in fruges in 28. 30

These brief and superficial analyses show, I hope, something of the density of

Horatian poetic texture, and of the detailed way in which poetic effects are achieved

through the manipulation of vocabulary, verbal design and symmetry, metrical effects

and imagery.

FURTHER READING

West (1967) offers the liveliest introduction to Horace’s use of verbal style and poetic

effect; two older books written under the influence of the New Criticism, Collinge

(1961) and Commager (1962), also contain much important analysis of the Odes,

especially in terms of structure and imagery, as do several pieces in Harrison (1995).

For a more recent overview and useful scholarly bibliography on Horatian poetic style

see Muecke (1997), and the rest of the major section of which it forms the chief part

in the Enciclopedia Oraziana. But most useful are the detailed Horatian commentaries

of the last generation : see Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) and (1978), Nisbet and Rudd

(2004), Watson (2003), Brink (1971) and (1982), and Mayer (1994).

30 See Mayer (1994) 201.