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O MATRE PVLCHRA: THE LOGICAL IAMBIST
To the memory of Niall Rudd
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 June 2018
Extract
‘Who wrote the scurrilous iambic poems of the first stanza?’, asks David West at the start of his commentary on the ode. ‘The culprit’, he declares, ‘must be Horace.’ This answer accords with that to be found in other commentaries: ‘my scurrilous verses’ (Page), ‘my scandalous lines’ (Gow), ‘my scurrilous iambics’ (Wickham), ‘my abusive iambics’ (Shorey), ‘miei ingiuriosi giambi’ (Colamarino and Bo), ‘my libellous iambics’ (Nisbet and Hubbard), ‘my libellous iambic verses’ (Quinn), ‘miei giambi ingiuriosi’ (Fedeli). What, then, are these iambic verses? Some earlier scholars suggested that Horace is referring to various of his epodes, such as those addressed to Canidia (5, 17); but our knowledge of Canidia (cf. also Serm. 1.8) indicates that she would scarcely make plausible the accent on beauty in the first line of the ode. Most commentators, at least since the latter half of the nineteenth century, have believed that Horace is referring to some iambics which he had targeted at the ode's addressee but of which we now have no further knowledge: Kiessling and Heinze, for example, refer to ‘the satirical poems which Horace … has levelled at her’, while in the most recent commentary in 2012 Mayer says that Horace ‘assures an unnamed young woman that it rests with her to put an end to his vituperative attacks’.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 2018
Footnotes
For comments and other help I am most grateful to A. Chahoud, E. Courtney, I.M.Le M. Du Quesnay and R.G. Mayer; their agreement should not be assumed. I have a more general debt to Niall Rudd, who many decades ago took a characteristically kind interest in my first attempts at Horatian literary criticism and became a lifelong friend; for some autobiographical reflections see his Pale Green, Light Orange: A Portrait of Bourgeois Ireland, 1930–1950 (Dublin, 1994) and It Seems Like Yesterday (2003).
References
1 Lines 7b–8 are problematic: Corybantas has been advocated by Kovacs, D., ‘Two conjectures in Horace’, CQ 63 (2013), 339–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who translates: ‘nor do high-pitched cymbals so augment the Corybantes’.
2 Nisbet, R.G.M. and Hubbard, M., A Commentary on Horace Odes, Book 1 (Oxford, 1970), 202, 204Google Scholar. [Henceforth ‘N–H’.]
3 West, D., Horace Odes I: Carpe Diem (Oxford, 1995), 78Google Scholar.
4 Page, T.E., Q. Horatii Flacci Carminum Libri IV; Epodon Liber (London, 1883, repr. 1895)Google Scholar; Gow, J., Q. Horati Flacci Carmina; Liber Epodon (Cambridge, 1896)Google Scholar; Wickham, E.C., Q. Horati Flacci Opera Omnia (Oxford, 1896), vol. 1Google Scholar; Shorey, P., Horace Odes and Epodes (Boston, 1898)Google Scholar; Colamarino, T. and Bo, D., Le opere di Q. Orazio Flacco (Turin, 1969)Google Scholar; N–H 201; Quinn, K., Horace The Odes (London, 1980), 156Google Scholar; Fedeli, P., Orazio: Tutte le poesie (Turin, 2009)Google Scholar. Further examples are quoted below.
5 For scholars who referred to Canidia see the edition of Orelli, whose own position is summed up thus: ‘Cum totum argumentum fictum esse videatur, hos quoque iambos contumeliosos nunquam ab Horatio scriptos esse consentaneum est’ (Orelli, J.G., Q. Horatius Flaccus [Zurich, 1850 3], vol. 1, ad loc.Google Scholar). The verses cannot be the collection of Epodes as a whole: it is inconceivable that Horace would wish to advocate, even in jest, the destruction (lines 3–4) or recantation (line 27) of a book which was dedicated to Maecenas and refers to him with such affection (Epodes 1, 3, 9, 14).
6 Kiessling, A. and Heinze, R., Q. Horatius Flaccus: Oden und Epoden (Zurich and Berlin, 1964 11), 81Google Scholar; Mayer, R., Horace Odes Book I (Cambridge, 2012), 144Google Scholar.
7 It would be different if he had said ‘In my youth too I wrote iambics’, but this is not what he has said.
8 imitatus Stesichorum, poetam Siculum, qui uituperationem scribens Helenae caecatus est et postea responso Apollinis laudem eius scripsit et oculorum aspectum recepit (ed. F. Hauthal [Berlin, 1864], 1.62).
9 Syndikus, H.P., ‘Some structures in Horace's Odes’, in Harrison, S.J. (ed.), Homage to Horace (Oxford, 1995), 28Google Scholar; cf. e.g. Plessis, F., Œuvres d'Horace: Odes, Épodes et Chant Séculaire (Paris, 1924; repr. Hildesheim, 1966), 52Google Scholar: ‘Horace s'excuse auprès d'une jeune femme d'avoir écrit contre elle des ïambes injurieux’; Tescari, O., Orazio: I carmi e gli epodi (Turin, 1943 3), 67Google Scholar: ‘Il poeta vuole ritirare le parole ingiuriose lanciate un tempo contro una donna’. Some scholars (e.g. Jenkyns, R., ‘O matre pulchra’, Latomus 41 [1982], 146–51)Google Scholar have suggested that the object of Horace's attack was not the addressee of the ode but her mother: although I regard this hypothesis as intrinsically implausible, it has no relevance to my overall argument.
10 N–H 202–3. That the poem does indeed belong to the genre palinode is stated by Syndikus, H.P., Die Lyrik des Horaz (Darmstadt, 2001 3), 1.178Google Scholar, and West (n. 3), ad loc. (81, ‘it is a palinode’), and argued by F. Cairns, ‘The genre Palinode and three Horatian examples: Epode, 17; Odes, I, 16; Odes, I, 34’, Ant. Class. 47 (1978), 546–52, at 546–7, 549–50 (= Roman Lyric [Berlin, 2012], 158–9, 162). Mayer (n. 6), 148 refers to N–H and West (n. 3), but does not make his own view clear; Günther, H.-C., ‘The first collection of Odes: Carmina I–III’, in id. (ed.), Brill's Companion to Horace (Leiden and Boston, 2013), 211–406, at 338Google Scholar describes the poem as ‘a palinode’, but three sentences later denies that Horace is ‘offering a recantatio’: his summary analysis of the ode is similarly confused.
11 This is the view of MacKay, L.A., ‘Odes, I, 16 and 17’, AJPh 83 (1962), 298–300Google Scholar, and Dyson, M., ‘Horace: Odes I 16’, AUMLA 30 (1968), 169–79Google Scholar. The former is dismissed by Syndikus (n. 10), 178 n. 9, both of them by Santirocco, M.S., Unity and Design in Horace's Odes (Chapel Hill, 1986), 195 n. 26Google Scholar, calling their view a ‘strange theory’. Davis, G., ‘Carmina/Iambi’, in Anderson, W.S. (ed.), Why Horace? (Wauconda, 1999), 51–62, at 61 n. 23Google Scholar is non-committal.
12 Lyne, R.O.A.M., Collected Papers on Latin Poetry (Oxford, 2007), 343–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar, referring to Stevenson, J., Women Latin Poets (New York, 2005), 29–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Dyson (n. 11), 174 adds Sallust's Sempronia (Cat. 25).
13 Their grounds are that Stesichorus, whom they say Horace is imitating in the ode, wrote about Helen, and Helen was the daughter of Tyndareus, i.e. a Tyndaris. Mayer infers from her ‘musical skill and her chosen repertoire’ that Tyndaris ‘is a cultivated prostitute’.
14 N–H 203.
15 For Sappho as the author of iambic poems (though evidently not in the iambic metre), see Woodman, A.J., From Poetry to History (Oxford, 2012), 109CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for her characteristic comparative expressions, see Demetr. Eloc. 127, 161, Greg. Cor. in Rhet. Graec. 7.1236 Walz (all quoted in Campbell, D.A., Greek Lyric [Cambridge, MA and London, 1982], 1.164–5Google Scholar).
16 See frr. 98 and 102; Campbell (n. 15), 2–3. There is much discussion of Sappho's mother in Bierl, A. and Lardinois, A. (edd.), The Newest Sappho (Leiden and Boston, 2016)Google Scholar.
17 Dyson (n. 11), 172 makes this point.
18 See N–H on line 3 for a list of passages; also Howell, P., Martial. The Epigrams Book V (Warminster, 1995)Google Scholar, on Mart. 5.53. Since in real life many poems will have existed in a plurality of copies, mostly untraceable, it seems clear that the wish for destruction is more symbolic than anything else.
19 See e.g. Hardie, A., ‘Sappho, the Muses, and life after death’, ZPE 154 (2005), 13–32Google Scholar.
20 See Brink on Hor. Ars P. 79; N–H on line 3 of the ode.
21 ‘The sudden “compesce mentem” surprises—the reader, encouraged to assume that the rhetoric of 5–21 is offered as an apology for the anger which produced H.’s criminosi iambi, finds an unexpected reassessment imposed on him, in order to build a fresh, viable consistency. The denunciation of anger has now to be read as a warning to the girl to keep her anger within reasonable limits’ (Quinn [n. 4], on 22–8). It is this problem with which N–H are principally concerned in their introduction to the ode (202–3).
22 For Iambi as the title of the Epodes, see Horsfall, N., ‘Some problems of titulature in Roman literary history’, BICS 28 (1981), 103–14, at 109Google Scholar. Although furentem (25) suggests that Horace was capitalizing on the association between anger and iambics, he cannot mean that his Epodes as a whole were caused by anger, which is plainly not the case; he is referring only to those epodes of which it may plausibly be said that they were so caused.
23 For the swift nature of the iambic verse, see Ars P. 252 and Brink ad loc.; Wickham (n. 4) thinks ‘hasty’ the primary meaning. The notion that his ‘madness’ led him to write iambics (in … Iambos | misit furentem) perhaps constitutes an allusion to Catullus, where Ravidus’ madness drove Catullus to write iambics (40.1–2 te mala mens … | agit … in meos iambos; cf. 15.14 mala mens furorque uecors); some commentators aptly quote the emperor Hadrian (Anth. Pal. 7.674 Ἀρχιλόχου τόδε σῆμα, τὸν ἐς λυσσῶντας ἰάμβους | ἤγαγε Μαιονίδῃ Μοῦσα χαριζομένη).
24 For dulci iuuenta some commentators quote a fragment attributed to Maecenas (ap. Serv. Aen. 8.310 dulcis iuuentae reducit [sc. uinum] bona), evidently from his lost dialogue Symposium (see Nisbet, R.G.M., ‘A wine-jar for Messalla: Carmina 3.21’, in Woodman, A.J. and Feeney, D. [edd.], Traditions and Contexts in the Poetry of Horace [Cambridge, 2002], 80–92, at 86–7Google Scholar).
25 For the sequence past–present–future in lines 22–8, see Schrijvers, P.H., ‘Comment terminer une ode? Étude sur les façons différentes dont Horace termine ses courts poèmes’, Mnemosyne 26 (1973), 140–59, at 151 n. 3Google Scholar.
26 It seems very possible that Horace's ancient commentator—predisposed to noting the poet's Greek ‘models’, realizing that recantare reproduces the Greek παλινῳδεῖν, and aware that ‘the most famous palinode … in classical poetry’ (West) was written by Stesichorus (fr. 192)—drew the mistaken conclusion that the ‘subject’ of recantatis was Horace rather than the girl (above, n. 8). (Horace mentions Stesichorus at Epod. 17.44: see Watson, L.C., A Commentary on Horace's Epodes [Oxford, 2003], on 17.39–44Google Scholar.) recantare is recognized as ‘a new coinage of Horace's’ (N–H); for discussion of its meaning, see Daube, D., ‘Withdrawal: five verbs’, CSCA 7 (1974), 93–112, at 93–6Google Scholar.
27 The various possibilities are discussed at some length by Wimmel, W., ‘Doppelsinnige Formulierung des Horaz?’, Glotta 40 (1962), 119–24Google Scholar.
28 To confuse matters still further, TLL lists Ter. Andr. 333, Hor. Carm. 1.16.28 and 1.19.4 under the same general definition (respectively 11.2.480.41–2, 481.14–15 and 481.34–5), without, however, offering any clear view of the meaning(s).
29 I think that finitis animum reddere amoribus at 1.19.4 has a similar meaning (‘bring my dead affairs back to life’); cf. also [Quint.] Decl. 15.7 redditus mihi est animus.