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Cult and Personality in Horace*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2012
Extract
It was the main contention of a book published a few years ago that the material and the attitudes which we find in the works of the Augustan poets are intimately connected with the realities of Roman life. The poems are not to be amputated, as too often happens, from the society in which they were produced and enjoyed. Literature is not a balloon floating in the air, but a plant with its roots firmly fixed in the earth. It was argued there that ‘the same material can be observed at different levels of stylisation in different poetical contexts’, and that we can learn a great deal about the poems and their authors by following the ways in which they employ and vary the same subject matter. That was illustrated in connection with such elements of the life of pleasure as drinking and singing, bathing and nakedness; and also with the topic of death. Those ideas are carried further in this paper, which extends that approach to another area: that of religious cult. It concentrates on the poet Horace and aims to show how he uses and varies the theme of religious festivals and ceremonies, and what contrasts are offered by the work of Propertius and Ovid.
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- Copyright © Jasper Griffin 1997. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies
References
1 Griffin, J., Latin Poets and Roman Life (1985)Google Scholar. The first two chapters appeared in JRS 66 (1976) and 67 (1977).
2 ibid., xi.
3 Horace, Serm. 2.7.4.
4 The theme is central to Sermones 1.4 and 2.1.
5 More might have been made of this contrast, clearly conscious and deliberate, from the metrical variety and more ‘passionate’ subject matter of Odes 1 to the graver and more moderate 2, in the Introduction to Nisbet and Hubbard, Commentary on Odes II. Book Two is also not hospitable to poems which are either very long, like 1.2; 1.12; 3.3; 4; 5; II; 24; 26, or very short, like 1.11; 30; 38; 3.22. No ode of Book Two has less than twenty or more than forty lines; most have twenty-four or twenty-eight. Mediocritas (2.10.5) is being exemplified in this area, too.
6 cf. Deschamps, L., ‘Il tempo in Orazio’, Orpheus 4 (1983), 195–214Google Scholar. Feeney, D. has some suggestive remarks on the subject in Rudd, N. (ed.), Horace 2000: a Celebration (1995), 57Google Scholar: ‘The centuries between himself and his models were intimidating in many ways, but it must have been partly the very sense of that great distance that made Horace a great poet of time … [Horace's] poems on the passage of time are among his most cherished …’ The whole essay repays reading.
7 We find in Three such passing references to time as 3.8.27, ‘Seize the gifts of the present hour’; 3.10.19, ‘I shan't stay on your inhospitable door-step for ever’; 3.14.25–8, ‘As one's hair grows white, one loses one's fighting spirit’; 3.17.9, ‘Tomorrow the leaves will fall’; and, more weightily, 3.29.29, ‘Wisely God conceals from us the future’. None of these has the massiveness of the passages in Book Two.
8 See Solmsen, F., ‘Horace and Propertius’, CP 43 (1948), 105–9 = Kleine Schriften II.316–23Google Scholar; R. O. A. M. Lyne, The Latin Love Poets (1980), 201ff. Horace, Epistles 2.2.99ff. is the (controversial) locus classicus: see the judicious note ad loc. of C. O. Brink. Paul Veyne comments, from a rather different point of view, ‘Le poète Horace avait le même protecteur que Properce, mais son propre lyrisme était aux antipodes du maniérisme; de plus, une simplicité non conformiste et une honnêteté intellectuelle absolue faisaient que la mégalomanie et la complication de Properce avaient le don de l'agacer’: L'élégie érotique romaine (1983), 27.
9 C. 3.38; 3.14.
10 So, rightly, Shackleton Bailey's Teubner text: ‘nutricis extra limina Pulliae’, C. 3.4.10.
11 I cannot share the view of Lyne, R. O. A. M., Horace: Behind the Public Poetry (1995), 169–73Google Scholar, and other scholars there cited, that the reference to Livia as ‘unico gaudens mulier marito’ at l. 5 is ‘a designed ineptness’ and ‘barbed’. So gross an insult is, to me, incredible in a poem of this general tendency. With Horace's enthusiasm contrast the uncommitted attitude and frank hedonism of Propertius at the thought of watching Augustus' victory parade, his arm round his girl: Prop. 3.4.
12 ‘It was the most splendid of Augustus' buildings: cp. Josephus, Bell. Jud. ii.6.1; Vell, ii.81’: Butler, H. E. and Barber, E. A., The Elegies of Propertius (1933), 247Google Scholar. For its special connection with and significance for Augustus, see P. Zanker, The Pouter of Images in the Age of Augustus (Eng. trans., 1988), 49ff., 67ff.: ‘The sanctuary of Apollo still managed to surpass the competition, thanks to its setting and the association with Octavian's residence’(67).
13 Epistles 2.1.47 ff.; cf. J. Griffin, ‘Horace in the Thirties’, in Rudd, op. cit. (n. 6), 1–3.
14 The Meditrinalia are mentioned in the commentaries of Kiessling-Heinze, Quinn, Nisbet-Hubbard. Quinn ad loc. conjures up a sentimental picture: ‘the prayer Horace makes as paterfamilias on his Sabine farm at the Meditrinalia will serve as his prayer to Apollo … it is easy to imagine him presiding over some simple rustic ceremony …’ The actual prayer which we see the poet make in this poem seems remote from what would have been called for on such an occasion and in such company. What we see is a much refined and distanced version, concerned with Horace's poetical personality and its (proudly proclaimed) limitations.
15 Carm. Saec. 17–20:
diva, producas subolem, patrumque
prosperes decreta super iugandis
feminis prolisque novae feraci
lege marita.
Not the laureate's most inspired stanza.
16 Ars 2.155.
17 Syme, R., The Roman Revolution (1939), 277 n. 2.Google Scholar
18 Suetonius, , D. Augustus 62.Google Scholar
19 ‘Custode rerum Caesare’, 4.15.17; cf. 1.12, 1.35, 1.37, 2.1, 2.7, 2.11, 3.29, 4.2, 4.5.
20 Ovid, Fasti 3.523ff. On the Neptunalia, see Latte, K., Römische Religionsgeschichte (1960), 131ff.Google Scholar
21 Prop. 3.10.31.
22 Prop. 2.31; 3.11.
23 Propertius naturally prefers to think of his mistress doing her own hair, rather than having a maid or maids to do it for her: Prop. 1.15.5. Contrast the more ‘realistic’ Ovid, who allows his Corinna the normal basic staff: Amores 1.11, 1.14.13ff.; 2.7.17–24, 2.8.1ff. It is indeed a typical occasion for a woman to take out her temper on her servant as she does her hair: Ovid, Ars 3.235ff.; Juvenal 6.487ff. Propertius, in this too more romantic, airbrushes such peripheral people out of the picture and imagines Cynthia alone in the world, apart, of course, from him.
24 Horace, C. 4.11.
25 I speak for simplicity's sake of ‘patrons’. The position is not so straight-forward in reality with these sophisticated poets. See the essays in B. K. Gold (ed.), Literary and Artistic Patronage in Ancient Rome (1982); P. White, Promised Verse (1993); R. O. A. M. Lyne, Horace: Behind the Public Poetry (1995), esp. 150–7 and 191–2; M. Citroni, Poesia e lettori in Roma antica (1995). I have expressed some of my view of this matter in F. Millar and E. Segal (eds), Caesar Augustus: Seven Aspects (1984), 189–218.
26 C. 1.4; 1.17; 2.17.
27 C. 1.1.29–36. The density of Greek names and words here is especially revealing: Satyri, Euterpe, Polyhymnia, Lesboum barbiton, lyricis. Such language and resonance was vital to the claim to classic status; but it was also important sometimes to get away from it and its associations, and to reclaim a more Italian, and more familiar, character.
28 ‘Nullus fons non sacer’, says Servius, matter-offactly (on Aeneid 7.84).
29 Varro, De lingua Latina 6.22.
30 Anth. Pal. 6.43, 189, 253, 334, 336; 9.257, 313–15, 326–30, 334, 336, 374, 668, 684, 699; 10.12, 13; 16.12, 13, 227, 228, 230, 291.
31 Alexandrian poets liked this motif. Cf. Callimachus, fragments 2, 42, 43.90, 65–6, 109, 546, 740, and the river created by Rhea in Hymn 1.28ff., H. 5.71; Theocr. 7.6ff., with Gow's note on Philetas and Andromachus; Ap. Rhod. 1.1065ff.; 1.1145ff.; 4.1441ff.; Antimachus, fr.84.3W; A.P. 9.255 (Honestus).
32 In Sullivan, J. P. (ed.), Critical Essays in Roman Literature: Elegy and Lyric (1962), 198.Google Scholar
33 e.g. Lucan 2.219–20; 2.713;3.572, and J. Griffin in O. Murray and M. Tecuşan (eds), In Vino Veritas (1995), 292ff.
34 On the Greek background, and Horace's uses of it, cf. Lyne, op. cit. (n. 25), 59–67 with refs.
35 C. 2.19; 325.
36 C. 1.26.6f.; 3.25.3; 3.4.37ff.:
vos Caesarem altum, militia simul
fessas cohortis abdidit oppidis,
finire quaerentem labores
Pierio recreatis antro.
Readers will have taken this passage to refer to the settlement of disbanded soldiers after Actium. That was a business of which Augustus could speak with complacency in his Res Gestae, cap. 16, where he boasts that on that occasion the land given to the veterans was paid for. It is perhaps a question, whether there is a resonance to be caught, in the fourth of the Roman Odes, of that earlier and less urbanely managed settlement of soldiers, ten years earlier, in which so many poets were among the expropriated, with no compensation paid. Horace had been one of them (Epistles 2.2.49ff.).
37 Prop. 1.1; 1.20; 1.17; 1.18.
38 Tibull. 1.7; 2.1.
39 e.g. Serm. 2.6; Epp. 1.10; 1.14.
40 Serm. 2.6.16ff.; Epp. 1.14.17ff.; 1.10.1–25; Epp. 2.2.65ff. ‘Perditur haec inter misero lux … ', Serm. 2.6.59. H. P. Syndikus well says of Horace's gods that they are ‘Vorstellungen, die den Menschen damals über den Alltag erheben, die das Leben geistiger und bedeutender zu machen vermochten’: Die Lyrik des Horaz (1972–3), 2.243Google Scholar.
41 See particularly La Penna, A., Orazio e l' ideologia del principato (1963), 129ffGoogle Scholar. On the connection of 3.8 and 3.14 cf. Santirocco, M., Unity and Design in Horace's Odes (1986), 129Google Scholar. On 3.14 see Nisbet, R. G. M., ‘Some problems of text and interpretation in Horace Odes 3, 14 (Herculis ritu)’, in Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar 4 (1983), 105–19Google Scholar.
42 Aeneid 8.698ff., cf. Propertius 3.11.41: Cleopatra's presumption, ‘ausa Iovi nostro latrantem opponere Anubim’.
43 2.7.4; 4.15.6.
44 CS 65, 68; C. 3.30.8.
45 This purpose can be seen in many places in Horace's poetic output. For a few examples: C. 1.21, a lyric prayer ends up with Augustus and the Empire; 1.8, a flirtatious and arch poem to a femme fatale turns out to support the military and social programme of the Princeps (and of olden Rome); 1.12, an echo of Pindar leads into praise of Roman virtues, ancient and modern. And so on.
46 2.15.13–20; 3.24.45; 1.31.1–8; 3.23.9–20.
47 1.20, cf. Epp. 1.5; C. 2.16.33–40, cf. 3.16.18–44.
48 e.g. 1.6; 2.12. Cf. Sermones 2.1. 10ff.
49 Except indeed in the very high-flying and unspecific passage 3.4.37–40: cf. n. 36 above.
50 3.16.21f., cf. 2.18.10, ‘nil supra/ deos lacesso nec potentem amicum’.
51 Res Gestae 20.4; Livy 4.20.
52 e.g. 1.13.17–20, to Lydia, followed by 1.17, to Tyndaris, and 1.19, to Glycera, and 1.23, to Chloe.
53 For choral I think it generally was, with some exceptions prompted by the need for economy or other special circumstances: see Carey, C., ‘Who sang Pindar's Victory Odes?’ AJP 110 (1989), 545–65Google Scholar, against Lefkowitz, M. R., ‘Who sang Pindar's Victory Odes?’ AJP 109 (1988), 1–11Google Scholar = First-Person Fictions: Pindar's Poetic “I” (1991), 191–202; and Heath, M., ‘Receiving the Κῶμος: the context and performance of Epinician’, AJP 109 (1988), 180£95Google Scholar.
54 ‘Spiritum Phoebus mihi, Phoebus artem/ carminis nomenque dedit poetae’, 4.6.29. Cf. (Apollo) 1.31; 1.32; 4.15; (Muses) 1.26; 2.1.37; 3.4; 4.3. ‘Musarum sacerdos’: 3.1.3.
55 Venus: 1.3; 1.18.6; 1.19; 1.30; 3.26; 4.1. Bacchus: especially 2.19, 3.25. Mercury: 1.10, 3.11.
56 1.2; 1.12.49ff.; 3.1–6.
57 ‘Cum domino pax ista venit’: Lucan 1.670. The whole passage reads like a bitter reply to what Horace says here.
58 cf. Nisbet, op. cit. (n. 41).
59 Compare his dexterous handling of the same material at Epistles 2.2.46ff.: the difficult times, and the flood tide (aestus) ‘moved him from Athens’ and ‘carried him’ into war against Augustus; without, apparently, any act of will or decision on his part. Again, no question of political considerations being important. The particular beauty of this passage is that Horace shows his freedom of speech — ‘I can of course mention the fact that I fought against Augustus at Philippi; we are not living in fear, or under a tyranny’ — but at the same time deprives the matter of any political substance. No more effective way, perhaps, could be devised to put the Republic and its awkward questions finally to rest. All that not only is over: it never had any significance, in any case. See on the events Lyne, op. cit. (n. 25), 1–8.
60 C. 1.2.41ff; 3.3.9ff;3.4.41ff.
61 ‘This season mink stoles are everywhere’: the fashion writers can parallel this sort of expression. Not much sympathy here for that numerous class of Roman citizens to whom, a century earlier, Scipio Aemilianus shouted ‘Vos, quorum noverca est Italia’ (Velleius 2.4.4; Val. Max. 6.2.3); Catiline and the Caesar of the early popular legislation had no successors in Augustan Rome.
62 I am not convinced by the argument that 4.5 was originally meant as the first poem of Book Four, as argued again recently by O. Murray in Rudd, op. cit. (n. 6), 92–3.