Horace, Homer and Rome: "Epistles" I.

2
Author(s): M. J. Edwards
Source: Mnemosyne, Fourth Series, Vol. 45, Fasc. 1 (1992), pp. 83-88
Published by: BRILL
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4432112
Accessed: 23-04-2015 04:54 UTC

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MISCELLANEA

83

18) See Gilmartin. Cf. Menander, Perikeiromene467 ff. (where the battle also
comes to nothing) and Lucilius 773 ff. with the commentaries of Marx and
Charpin.
19) See E. Fantham, ComparativeStudies in Republican Latin Imagery (Toronto
1972) 73 ff., 107 ff. and E. Segal, Roman Laughter: The Comedyof Plautus2 (Oxford
1987), 128 ff.
20) It is true that characters such as Dordalus at the conclusion of Persa and
Pyrgopolynices himself at the end of Miles Gloriosusare physically assailed, but not
in strictly military terms.
21) Hanson, 61 ff.; Leach, 192.
22) For variants on the reading of the fragment see Clift, 56 f. This particular
vituperative vocabulary is not found in S. Lilja, Terms of Abuse in Roman Comedy
(Helsinki 1965).
23) Nonius 134, Laverna dea cui supplicantfures. See G. Wissowa, Religion and
Kultus der R?mer (Munich 1912, repr. 1971), 236, and K. Latte, R?mische Religionsgeschichte(Munich 1967), 139. On coqui in Roman comedy, their preparations and
thievish nature, see J. C. B. Lowe, Cooks in Plautus, CA 4 (1985) 76, 86-90. See
also H. Dohm, Mageiros: Die Rolle des Kochs in der griechisch-r?mischenKom?die
(Munich 1964), esp. 243-275.
24) See Festus 313. As Lowe 76 notes, agnina is found also at Aul. 374, Cap. 819
and 849.

HORACE,

HOMER

AND

ROME:

EPISTLES

1.2

The second in Horace's first book of Epistles begins as an encomium of

Homer; it then goes on to illustrate the didactic powers of epic by comtask to
to Maximus
Lollius the virtues which it is Homer's
mending
impart. Since Odes IV.9 resembles it in structure, subjoining the praises
of an older Lollius to a proof that it is the poet who makes men great by
it is reasonable to surmise, with certain scholars, that
commemoration,
these Lollii are related as father and son1). The Ode may also furnish an
illuminating
analogue to the Epistle, since in praising the office of Homer
as a vates the Roman vates makes himself as immortal as his subjects; in
the same way, I shall argue, the commendation
of Homer in the Epistle
is a means of commending
the genre and the culture to which the Epistle
itself belongs.
This poem is most often treated in modern criticism as a philosophical
manifesto for Homer; I shall hope to show, however, that it represents:
and perhaps innovative choice between two allegorical
(1) a consistent,
distorts
readings; (2) an infusion of Roman sentiment which tendentiously
the plot and tone of Homer's poems; (3) an apology for satire as a genre
which is important enough to provide the means of evaluating epic?an
of the Roman recusatio and tacitly
apology which reverses the conventions
affirms the superiority of Horace and of Rome.
1. Horace expects his reader to know both the poetry of Homer and its
critics, as is evident from the following citation:
Mnemosyne, Vol. XLV, Fase. 1 (1992)

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84

MISCELLANEA
Nos numerus

sumus et fruges consumere nati,

Sponsi Penelopae nebulones,
Alcinoique
In cute curanda plus aequo operata iuventus (1.2.28-30).
Horace is making sport when he glosses fruges consumere nati as an allusion to the gluttony of Penelope's
Ithacan suitors. The phrase itself is
taken from the challenge addressed to Glaucus by Diomedes in the Iliad
(VI. 142-3), but numerus is used in Homeric poetry to designate both the
and the concupiscent
animals who are shepherded by Proteus (IV.451)
rabble whom Odysseus and his son conspire to slay (XVI. 246)2).
Thus Horace knew Homer well, and at line 30 the simile from the
Odyssey which supervenes upon the echo of the Iliad shows he was also well
acquainted with the uses to which philosophers put Homer in their quarrels. The Epicureans
are represented
by Plutarch {Moralia 1087c) as
in
the
lines
which
the
Phaeacians
confess their addiction to
appropriating
leisure {Odyssey VIII.246,
248) but Horace, who can mock his diurnal self
in these Epistles as 'a pig from the Epicurean herd', ingenuously
sleek in
his bene curata cute {Epistles 1.4.15-16),
is here espousing the claim in the
pejorative sense in which Heraclitus used the word Phaeacian of Epicurus
Horace is not in either case professing
his
{Homeric Allegories 79.2.).
adherence to a dogma, but smiling candidly at his enslavement to the sensuous propensities
of the ordinary man3).
In this Horace is conventional;
but differences appear when from the
of
Horace
selects
the
voyages
Ulysses
examples of sagacity and fortitude
which had made that captain a hero for the Cynics and the Stoics:
Sirenum voces et Circae pocula nosti
see below).
quae si cum sociis etc. (1.2.23-4;
For philosophic
it seems that while the Sirens' song and
allegory,
Circe's chalice are temptations
they are temptations for the virtuous and
wise. Odysseus
was admired for his duplicity by Hippias {Hipp. Min.
the Cynic he is primarily a speaker "of
364c), and even for Antisthenes
many tropes' (Fr. 51 Caizzi). If Arist?n fathered a different school, ascribno trace remains before Horace
ing only practical virtues to Odysseus,
himself of any extended specimen of this criticism4). Horace, a student in
Athens and a contemporary
of Cicero, would know that the Old Academy
had almost praised the Sirens for their proffer of a wisdom so delightful
that it threatened to turn Odysseus from his patriotic quest5):
Vidit Homerus probari fabulam non posse si canticulis tantus irretitus
vir teneretur;
scientiam pollicentur,
quam non erat mirum sapientiae
cupido patria esse cariorem (Cicero, De Finibus V.49).
The song is therefore not an assault upon the mariner's resolution, but
a compliment
to his wisdom. The speaker is a pupil of Antiochus and
reckons Crantor among his many ancient predecessors (V.7). His reading
of the Odyssey is in keeping with the practice of philosophers:
Heraclitus

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MISCELLANEA

85

writes as though the wisdom of

Stoic, like Chrysippus)
(an intellectual
Odysseus were as manifest in his hearing of the Sirens as in his shunning
them: 'His sagacity descended to Hades, that not even the lower world
and who is the man who heard the Sirens,
might remain unexplored;
in all ages?' {Homeric
learning the many things that had been experienced
Allegories 70. 8-9).
Even when he interprets Circe's goblet as a snare of vice, Heraclitus
makes his hero conquer through the exercise of reason, and (unlike
Horace) insists that the cup was drunk (70.7, 73.12). The Ulysses of our
Epistle, whose virtue it is to be proof against all enervating pleasures (312), who entertained no object but to bring his vessels home (21), could not
be described as sapientiae cupidus, and nosti is addressed to the reader
alone6). Providus ousts the Greek p?????t?? at 1.2.19, and Horace's would
appear to be the first long account of Homer which praises Odysseus, not
for any acquisition of wisdom, but for his resolute prosecution of one goal.
2. Like patriotism,
tenacity is a Roman virtue (cf. Odes III.3.1); and
The following
in this poem Horace is a custodian of Roman sentiments.
lines are perhaps the most tendentious
sketch of the Iliad ever written:
Fabula, qua Paridis propter narratur amorem
Graecia barbariae lento collisa duello,
Stultorum regum et populorum
continet aestum.
Antenor censet belli praecidere causam:
Quid Paris? ut salvus regnet vivatque beatus
Cogi posse negat; Nestor componere lites
Inter Peliden festinat et inter Atriden:
Hunc amor, ira quidem communiter
urit utrumque.
d?lirant reges, plectuntur Achivi (1.2.6-14).
Quidquid
It is Horace's accusation that the Greek kings were demented,
and a
typically Roman diagnosis that imputes Achilles' rebellion to love (cf.
Odes II.4.3-4,
Homer wastes no poetry on the mob
Propertius II.8.35).
which fills the space between his heroes; if a Thersites rises to upbraid an
he is put down with a blow and a word. Nor is it Homer's
Agamemnon
manner to make distinctions between the men and those who lead them,
It is Horace (cf. Odes
reserving for the former the name of 'Greeks'.
III.9.4, Epistles 1.10.33) who gives the word rex those pejorative connotations which it was said to have acquired in Rome at a time when the kings
were foreign to the people; the torments of the people at the hands of its
noble rulers even after the expulsion of the Tarquins are, for a Roman
and a contemporary
of Livy, the leading theme of history, and in contrast
to Paris, Achilles and Agamemnon,
Horace makes Antenor wear the
aspect of a senator and Nestor that of a judge.
The Odyssey is a theatre of courage and the Iliad (not the Odyssey, as in
a school of rhetoric; one is fraught with unsuccessful
blanAntisthenes)
the other with conspicuous
crimes conspicuously
dishments,
requited.

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MISCELLANEA

86

the vices of patricians,

Acjiilles and Agamemnon
exemplify
Odysseus displays the invincible rectitude for which the same patricians
were remembered,
shunning Circe as though she were not so much a goddomina of the elegists:
dess and a sorceress as the meretricious

Where

bibisset
Quae [sc. pocula] si cum sociis stultus cupidusque
sub domina meretrice fuisset turpis et excors
vel amica luto sus (1.2.24-6).
vixisset canis immundus
And so the poet goes on to number himself with the foolish socii, who
are born to live on truffles (1.2.27).
Perhaps it was already a platitude
among the allegorists to vilify the siren as a prostitute7); but it lay with
the Roman poet to choose his words. Such notes of the erotic style as
cupidus, domina, meretrix and arnica were suffering daily attrition in the
elegiac poetry which Horace professed to disdain (Cf. Odes 1.33, Satires
1.4.1). It is to make her a Roman temptress that Circe is called by a term
which does not express her character in Homer.
3. It does not occur to Horace to take a lesson from the Stoics, who,
striving to make a pedagogic weapon of the Iliad, were forced to treat
not as victims of their ^passions, but as the
Achilles and Agamemnon,
types of passion itself8):
'For when Achilles, filled with excessive anger, rushed to his sword, the
by the passions of the
reasoning faculty in the head being overshadowed
breast, his mind soon brought him back from the intoxication of anger to
a better, sober state. It is quite right that repentance under the influence
Homeric
of wisdom should be styled in the poems Athene' (Heraclitus,
Allegories 19.6-7).
Aristotle
but always in the concrete?as
Poetry seeks the universal,
says, attaching names {Poetics 1451bl0). Where Heraclitus dissolves a ragto a motion of the
reducing a theophany
ing hero into his faculties,
and
it
is
deeds
for
Horace
characters,
intellect,
passions in their vivid
singularity that convey the most fruitful lesson (Cf. Ars Poetics 119f).
but for poetry. But what
Horace's cry is therefore not for philosophy,
to whom at first the
And
what
of
becomes
of
Homer,
poetry?
species
author seemed inclined to award a place among the Greek philosophers?
Qui, quid sit pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non
Plenius et melius Chrysippo et Crantore dicit (1.2.3-4).
We have already seen that the Stoics and Academics are to make way
for the poets. If any form of poetry was more Roman than any other, and
more devoted to the study of human types, it was the one of which Horace
himself had made an elegant profession. 'Horace's Epistles', said Eduard
of his Satires'9), and, though the
Fraenkel, 'are an organic continuation
and adopt a more
to a single correspondent
Epistles address themselves
to
virtue
and a life corexhortation
the
more
amicable
and
tone,
revealing
rectly ordered is the putative aim of both. The parallel most usually cited

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MISCELLANEA
for the quoted
philosophers10):

lines

is from

Cicero,

the most

87
eminent

of latter-day

Nee enim solum utrum honestum an turpe sit deliberari solet, sed
etiam duobus propositis honestis utrum honestius,
itemque duobus
propositis utilibus utrum utilius {De Ojficiis 1.3.10).
of utile, whereas
But Cicero has only turpe and the comparative
as the
Lucilius11), an author who wrote in verse and was acknowledged
of
Horace's
us
the
Satires, gives
utile, turpe,
precursor
anaphoric quid and
antithesis to match Horace's quid non:
virtus scire homini rectum utile quid sit honestum,
quae bona quae mala item, quid inutile, turpe, inhonestum
Div. Inst. VI.5.2).
(quoted at Lactantius,
is
The morality which Homer teaches better than the philosophers
therefore one that the satirist professes to describe. It is not a critic of
every school who would think to credit Homer with the utility of this
young and humble genre. A Roman author who cultivates some other
form than epic will either excuse himself from the higher calling with the
plea that his powers are inadequate (cf. Virgil, Eclogues VI.6-7) or deny
after all that epic is entitled to a monopoly of praise (cf. Virgil, Georgics
III. 1-9; Propertius 1.9.11, Juvenal, Satires 1.1-2). For epic, as the oldest
and most bellicose of genres, was a formidable ancestor to be deprecated
requiring a defence.
(cf. Epistles II. 1.250-9), never a contemporary
Horace is recommending,
not so much the Iliad and the Odyssey, as a
certain reading of them, a reading which makes the epic poems a precedent for the satirists. Odes IV.9 may flatter Homer and the reader, but the
ostensible aim of satire is to edify. Only in this Epistle is epic the genre
that is subject to valuation; only here is satire the source of evalutive prinas his aims are those of
ciples. Homer is a laudable philosopher?insofar
we impress upon him
didactic poetry; an excellent guide in morals?once
a form unknown to the Greeks.
the politics of a Roman; the master?in
Oxford,

New College

MJ.

Edwards

1) Cf. the commentary of A.S. Wilkins (London 1958), 99. But note the reserve
of E. Fraenkel, Horace (Oxford 1957), 315 n. 2. The Epistles are the latest genre
to be essayed by Horace; cf. I.xx, which refers to the consulship of the elder
Lollius, datable to 21 B.C.
2) The density of allusion, and the use of bestial similes, suggest the Homeric
context, but cf. also Euripides, Heracles 997 and Aristophanes, Clouds 1203. Also
for the Latin usage CIL xiii 10017.53.
3) On the 'Epicurean' epistles of Horace see R.S. Kilpatrick, The Poetry of
Friendship (Edmonton 1986), xviii-xxi, where the author remarks that the
Academic philosophy is in many ways more congenial to the poet. Epicurean

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MISCELLANEA

88

maxims will often support the poet's counsels, as C.W. MacLeod shows in 'The
Poetryof Ethics: Horace, Epistles I, JRS 69 (1979), 16-27; but most Greek ethical doctrines are held in common, and the use of Homer for didactic purposes is less congenial to this sect than to any other.
4) Cf. F. Buffi?re, Les Mythes d'Hom?re (Paris 1956), 367-86.
5) On Horace at the Academy see Epistles II.2.43-5. On his knowledge of
Cicero and other contemporary philosophers see e.g. S J. Harrison, Philosophyand
Imagery in Horace's Odes, CQ 36 (1986), 502-7. For a circumspect account of
Antiochus and his importance see J. Barnes, Antiochus of Ascalon in J. Barnes and
M. Griffin (eds) Philosophia Togata (Oxford 1989), 51-96.
6) So Kiessling ad. loc. Quae si... bibisset implies at least the temporary abstention was more fruitful than the drinking of the potion. On the 'inadequacy' of providus see Wilkins (1958), 100.
7) Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 1.10.48 and Buffi?re (1956), 385-6.
Buffi?re (1956), 236 quotes the exegesis of Palaiphatos, an author of uncertain
date, but certainly no philosopher. Heraclitus (70.7, 73.12) states that Circe was
overthrown by the superior intelligence of Odysseus. On the oddity of calling
Circe a meretrixsee Wilkins (1958), 100.
8) On Heraclitus and the Stoics see the edition of the former by F. Buffi?re
(Paris 1962), xxxviii-ix, where, though the editor concludes that Heraclitus 'n'est
pas vraiment sto?cien, ou ne l'est que par accident', it appears that the exaltation
of the reason is distinctive ofthat sect. For the Stoic personification of the intellect
as Athena see Philodemus, De Pietate 1.16 = H. Diels, Doxographi Graeci (Berlin
1879), 549-50.
9) Fraenkel (1957), 310; Kilpatrick (1986), xiv-xvi on the 'close relationship'
of the Satires and Epistles. Kilpatrick cites Lucilius V.186-9W as a token that
Lucilius himself adopted the epistolary form; cf. the commentary of Kiessling,
Heinze and Buick (repr. 1977), 368-9.
10) Cf. the commentary on the Epistles by Orelli and Mewes (Berlin 1892), ad
loc.
11) Thus G.C. Fiske, Lucilius and Horace (Madison 1920), 427 passes too
quickly over this poem. It is, of cource, true that Satires 1.4 and 1.10 attest a
qualified admiration for Lucilius, but he is Horace's master nonetheless.

THE

FERTILE

FIELDS

OF UMBRIA:

PROP.

1.22.10

Qualis et unde genus, qui sint mihi, Tulle, Penates,

quaeris pro nostra semper amicitia.
si Perusina tibi patriae sunt nota sepulcra,
Italiae duris fu?era temporibus,
cum Romana suos egit discordia civis,
(sic mihi praecipue, pulvis Etrusca, dolor:
tu proiecta mei perpessa es membra propinqui,
tu nullo miseri contegis ossa solo),
Umbria campo
pr?xima supposito contingens
me genuit terris fertilis uberibus.

10

Mnemosyne, Vol. XLV, Fase. 1 (1992)

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