All posts tagged Anacreon

The odes of Horace

The gods watch over me; a heart
That’s reverent and the poets art
Please them.
(Horace Book 1, ode 17, in James Michie’s translation)

Come, learn this air
And sing it to delight me.
A good song can repair
The ravages inflicted by black care.
(Book 4, ode 11)

Horace’s works

Scholars broadly agree the following dates for Horace’s body of poetry:

Horace’s odes

Horace published 104 odes. They are divided into 4 books. He published the first 3 books of odes in 23 BC, containing 88 carmina or songs. He prided himself on the skill with which he adapted a wide variety of Greek metres to suit Latin, which is a more concise, pithy and sententious language than Greek.

I shall be renowned
As one who, poor-born, rose and pioneered
A way to fit Greek rhythms to our tongue… (3.30)

Horace aimed to create interest by varying the metre as much as possible, using over a dozen different verse formats. He was particularly indebted to metres associated with two Greek poets, Alcaeus and Sappho. Of the 104 odes, 37 are in Alcaics and 26 in Sapphics i.e. over half.

The precise definition of these forms is highly technical, so I refer you to the Wikipedia articles for Alcaics and Sapphics.

Despite all this skillful adaptation, the odes were not greeted with the acclaim Horace hoped for, which may explain why he seems to have abandoned ode writing and returned to the hexameters in which he had written the satires. Using this he now proceeded to write two books of epistles, ‘elegant and witty reflections on literature and morality,’ according to James Michie, which scholars think were published in 20 and 12 BC, respectively.

In 17 BC Augustus commissioned Horace to write an ode to be sung at the start of the Secular Games which he had reinstated as part of his policy of reviving traditional Roman festivals, customs and religious ceremonies. Soon afterwards, Augustus asked Horace to write odes on the military victories of his grandsons Drusus and Tiberius. Whether these commissions renewed an interest in the form or spurred him to assemble works he’d been writing in the interim we don’t know but in about 11 BC Horace published his fourth, final and shortest book of odes, containing just 15 poems.

What is an ode?

The following is adapted from the Wikipedia definition:

An ode (from Ancient Greek: ᾠδή, romanized: ōdḗ) is a sub-type of lyrical poem. An ode generally praises or glorifies an event or individual. Whereas a pure lyric uses impassioned and emotional language, and a satire uses harsh and demotic language, an ode – insofar as it is an address to a named individual, whether friend, emperor or god – generally has a dignified and sincere tone (although part of Horace’s practice was experimenting with and varying that tone).

Greek odes were originally poetic pieces performed with musical accompaniment. As time passed they gradually became known as personal lyrical compositions whether sung (with or without musical instruments) or merely recited (always with accompaniment). The primary instruments used were the aulos and the lyre. There are three typical forms of odes: the Pindaric, Horatian, and irregular.

  • The typical Pindaric ode was structured into three major parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. However, Horace’s odes do not follow this pattern.
  • Horatian odes do not have the three-part structure of Pindaric odes. They tend to be written as continuous blocks of verse, or, more often, are divided into four-line stanzas. It’s in this division into neat 4-line stanzas that they most imitate Greek lyricists such as Alcaeus and Anacreon.
  • Irregular odes use rhyme but not the three-part form of the Pindaric ode, nor the two- or four-line stanza of the Horatian ode.

An ode is short. I’ve recently read the Eclogues of Virgil which are fairly long and the Georgics which felt very long: Horace’s odes are the opposite. Some are as short as 8 lines, for example book 1 ode 30 and 4.10.

Subject matter

Horace was praised by critics for not just adapting the Greek forms of Alcaeus and Sappho to Latin, but filling them with details of the social life of Rome in the age of Augustus. He broadened the subject matter to cover a much wider range of subjects including love and jealousy, friendship and mourning, hymns to various gods, addresses to the all-powerful emperor Augustus, reflections on mortality, promotion of the golden mean and patriotic criticism of excess luxury and calls for society to return to the sterner, abstemious values of their Roman ancestors. There are several poems consisting entirely of eulogy to Augustus, describing him as a blessing to the nation, the only man who could bring peace and wishing him success in his military campaigns in the East. I enjoy John Dryden’s description of Horace as “a well-mannered court slave”. It doesn’t feel that when you read all his other poems, but when you read the Augustus ones, you immediately get what Dryden was saying. The word ‘poet’ is only one letter away from ‘pet’.

Underlying all the poems, and appearing them as either passing references or the central subject, are two ‘philosophical’ themes: the uncertainty and transience of life, and the need to observe moderation in all things, what Aristotle had defined as ‘the golden mean’ between extremes:

All who love safety make their prize
The golden mean and hate extremes… (2.10)

James Michie

Greek and Latin poets did not use rhyme to structure their poetry, they used the counting of syllables in each line according to a variety of patterns established by various ancient Greek poets and copied and adapted by the Romans.

English poets by contrast, since the Middle Ages, use beats or emphasis instead of counting syllables, and have used rhyme. Not exclusively, witness the reams of blank verse used in the dramas of Shakespeare and his contemporaries or in Milton’s Paradise Lost, but certainly in short lyrics and Horace’s odes are short lyrics. All 104 of Horace’s odes fit onto just 114 pages of English verse.

This explains the decision of James Michie, translator of the 1964 Penguin paperback edition of the complete odes of Horace, to cast them into predominantly rhymed verse.

The Penguin edition is interesting and/or useful because it features the Latin on one page, with Michie’s English translation on the page opposite. I did Latin GCSE and so, with a bit of effort, can correlate the English words to the original Latin phrases, though I don’t have anything like enough Latin to appreciate Horace’s style.

Book 1 is the longest, containing 38 odes. Book 2 has 20. Book 3 has 30, and the final, short one, book 4, has 15.

Themes

Direct address to gods

Any summary of Horace as the poet of friendship and conviviality has to take account that about one in six of the poems are straight religious hymns to named deities. Michie’s (admirably brief) introduction explains that the poems give no evidence about how sincerely Horace felt these religious sentiments. Probably he was religious in the same way most educated Romans of his time were, as Cicero was: viewing religion and the old festivals and ceremonies as important for the social cohesion of Rome.

In this view the correct ceremonies had to be carried out on the correct occasions to the correct deities in order to ensure the state’s security and future. Whether an individual ‘believed’ in the gods or not was irrelevant: correct action was all. The importance of internal, psychological ‘belief’ only became an issue with the slow arrival of Christianity well over a hundred years later. In the meantime, correct invocations of the gods could be seen as part of civic and patriotic duty, especially for Augustus, who in so many ways tried to restore the old ceremonies, rites and festivals of Republican Rome.

1.10 To Mercury

You are the one my poem sings –
The lyre’s inventor; he who brings
Heaven’s messages; the witty
Adventurer who takes delight
In slyly stowing out of sight
Anything he finds pretty.

1.21 To Diana

Virgin maidens, praise Diana.
Young men, sing a like hosanna

1.30 Prayer to Venus

O Queen of Cnidos, Paphos,
Come, leave, though dearly thine,
Cyprus; for here’s thick incense,
And Glycera calls divine
Venus to her new shrine.

1.31 Prayer to Apollo

What boon, Apollo, what does the poet as
He pours the new wine out of the bowl at your
New shrine request?

Incidentally, note the slight complexity of this long sentence. It took me a few readings to realise it is:

What boon, Apollo, what does the poet (as
He pours the new wine out of the bowl at your
New shrine) request?

We’ll come back to this issue, the sometimes grammatically challenging nature of Michie’s translation.

1.35 Hymn to Fortuna

O goddess ruling over favoured Antium,
With power to raise our perishable bodies
From low degree or turn
The pomp of triumph into funeral,

Thee the poor farmer with his worried prayer
Propitiates…

To women

The poems of heterosexual men are often about difficulties with relationships. Horace has poems directly addressing women, lovers, more often ex-lovers; or addressing women who are messing with his friends’ emotions; or poems to male friends offering advice about their relationships with women. I can see how a feminist critic might object to Horace’s basic stance and to much of the detail of what he says. For me the main effect is to create a sense of the extended social circle the poet inhabits.

Come, let’s
Go to the cave of love
And look for music in a jollier key. (2.1)

Horace plays at being jealous, while never achieving the emotional intensity of Catullus. And this is because his ‘love’ poems, such as 1.13, often turn out to be really promoting his philosophy of life, namely moderation in all things, wine, women, politics and poetry.

1.13 To Lydia

Happy are they alone whom affections hold
Inseparable united; those who stay
Friends without quarrels, and who cannot be torn away
From each other’s arms until their dying day.

1.16 is addressed to an unnamed women who he has, apparently, infuriated by writing a witty lampoon about her. Horace apologises unreservedly for upsetting her. But the poem is really about the emotion of anger, how ruinous it is for individuals and nations, how it must be avoided at all costs. Moments like this accumulate to make you suspect that even Horace’s most ‘passionate’ poems are clever artifice. It is hard to imagine the poet who promoted moderation and sensible restraint at every opportunity ever losing his head over anyone, no matter how he poses.

1.19 The Poet’s Love for Glycera

The Mother of the Loves, unkindly
Goddess, and Semele’s son combine
With wild abandon to remind me
That though I had thought desire
Dead, it still burns. The fire

Is Glycera.

1.23 To Chloe

This is such fun I’ll quote it in its entirety. Whether it reflects any real situation, I doubt. It feels more like a witty exercise, in the manner of Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress. To understand it you need to realise the first line means ‘Chloe, why won’t you venture near ME’, but Michie cannot quite say that in order to preserve his tight rhyme scheme. And to know that ‘dam’ is an archaic poetic word for ‘mother’. So that the majority of the poem is treating this young woman, Chloe, as if she is as timorous and scared as Bambi.

Chloe, you will not venture near,
Just like a lost young mountain deer
Seeking her frantic dam; for her each
Gust in the trees is a needless fear.

Whether the spring-announcing breeze
Shudders the light leaves or she sees
The brambles twitched by a green lizard,
Panic sets racing her heart and knees.

Am I a fierce Gaetulian
Lion or some tiger with a plan
To seize and maul you? Come, now, leave your
Mother: you’re ready to know a man.

So, in fact, this middle-aged man is preparing ‘to seize and maul’ this timorous young woman. If we attribute the speaking voice to 40-something Horace, it is inappropriate. But if it is a song to be sung by any young man, less so.

Here he is gently mocking a friend (in fact a fellow poet, Tibullus) because his girlfriend’s dumped him:

Tibullus, give up this extravagant grieving
For a sweetheart turned sour. ‘Why was she deceiving?’
You ask, and then whimper long elegies on
The theme of the older man being outshone… (1.33)

In praise of booze

Horace is surprisingly insistent on the blessings of wine and the vine, with a number of poems recommending it as the appropriate accompaniment to all sorts of situations, from cheering up a doleful lover to consoling a parent for the loss of a child, celebrating an old friend having his citizenship restored or safely returned from a long journey (1.36), or just a way to forget sorrows and anxieties and be sociable (2.11). In ancient Rome wine was never drunk neat, but always diluted with water:

Come, boy, look sharp. Let the healths rip!
To midnight! The new moon! The augurship
Of our Murena! Mix the bowls – diluted
With three or nine parts wine: tastes must be suited.
The poet, who loves the Muses’ number, nine,
Inspired, demands that measure of pure wine. (3.19)

Above all wine was shared. In ancient Rome wine was drunk in social situations, among friends and with slaves to open the bottles and mix them correctly. In Horace’s day, men who got together to hold a convivial evening elected one of their number ‘president’ by rolling dice to see who got the highest score, and the president then selected which wines were to be drunk, in which order, to command the slaves, and institute topics of conversation or games.

Who’ll win the right to be
Lord of the revelry
By dicing highest? (2.7)

In other words, ‘wine’ symbolises not just a drink but a much deeper concept of sociability and conviviality. And importantly, this sociability was the cure for anxiety, depression and grief. So ‘wine’ isn’t at all about seeking intoxication or oblivion; quite the opposite: ‘wine’ symbolises the moderation and sociable common sense which Horace is always promoting. Even when he appears to be promoting booze, it’s really this idea he’s promoting.

Let Damalis, the girl we crown
Champion drinker, be put down
By Bassus at the game of sinking
A whole cup without breath or blinking. (1.36)

And, as with almost all aspects of Roman life, there was a ‘religious’ aspect in the sense that the Romans thanked the gods for all their blessings (just as they attributed all disasters to the malign influence of Fortune). It was ‘fitting’ to thank the gods, and often this was done with ‘libations’ i.e. pouring part of each bottle of wine onto the ground as an offering to the gods, as thanks for blessings received, as hope for blessings continued.

Pay Jove his feast, then. In my laurel’s shade
Stretch out the bones that long campaigns have made
Weary. Your wine’s been waiting
For years: no hesitating! (2.7)

In the following extract the ‘fast-greying tops’ means the greying heads of hair of Horace and his friend, Quinctilius, who he’s trying to persuade to stop being so anxious about life.

Futurity is infinite:
Why tax the brain with plans for it?
Better by this tall plane or pine
To sprawl and while we may, drink wine
And grace with Syrian balsam drops
And roses these fast-greying tops.
Bacchus shoos off the wolves of worry. (2.11)

1.11 carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero

Horace’s attitude overlaps with the modern notion of mindfulness. According to this website, ‘Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us. As he tells Maecenas:

Be a plain citizen for once – you fret
Too much about the people’s sufferings.
Relax. Take what the hour gives, gladly. Let
Others attend the graver side of things. (3.8)

The shame of recent Roman history i.e. the civil wars

This attitude is not bourgeois complacency (‘Hey slave, bring us more booze!’). Well, OK, it is – but it is given more bite by the historical background. Rome had just emerged from about 13 years of civil war (Antony and Octavian against Caesar’s assassins) or a very uneasy peace leading to another civil war (Octavian against Antony). Unlike most bourgeois Horace had led a legion in a major battle (Philippi), seen men hacked to pieces around him, and seen his cause completely crushed. What good had the assassination of Julius Caesar and then Brutus and Cassius’s war against Octavian and Antony achieved? Nothing. Absolutely nothing except tens of thousands of Roman dead and devastation of entire provinces.

And he refers to it repeatedly, the utter pointlessness and futility of war.

Alas, the shameful past – our scars, our crimes, our
Fratricides! This hardened generation
Has winced at nothing, left
No horror unexplored… (1.35)

Our fields are rich with Roman
Dead and not one lacks graves to speak against our
Impious battles. Even
Parthia can hear the ruin of the West. (2.1)

So Horace’s is not the complacent attitude of a pampered aristocrat who has never known trouble, but of a self-made man who has seen a whole lot of trouble and therefore knows the true value of peace. Although he wears it lightly, it is a hard-won philosophy. And he refers to it, repeatedly.

Greek mythology

Horace is so identified in my mind with Rome, with Augustus, with the golden age of Roman literature, that it comes as a shock to see just how much of the subject matter is Greek. Take 1.15 which is a dramatic address to Paris as he abducts Helen by the sea goddess Nereus, foreseeing the long siege and destruction of Troy. 2.4 is about inappropriate love but stuffed with examples from Troy. But all of the poems contain references to Greek mythology and require a good working knowledge of its complex family trees: just who is son of Latona, who is Semele’s son? Who are:

Yet how could mighty Mimas or Typhoeus
Or Rhoetus or Porphyrion for all hid
Colossal rage or fierce
Enceladus who tore up trees for darts

Succeed? (3.4)

Or take the long poem 3.27 which contains a rather moving soliloquy by the maid Europa who, in a fit of madness, let herself be raped by a bull, a sophisticated poem full of unexpected compassion for the miserable young woman who is, of course, Jupiter in disguise. The poem contains a twist in the tail, for Venus has been standing by all through the girl’s frantic speech, enjoying the scene with that detached cruelty typical of the gods and only at the end reveals the bull in question was none other than Jupiter in disguise, hence explaining the girl’s powerlessness to resist.

False modesty

That said, there is another repeated trope which, as it were, modifies the Hellenic influence and this is Horace’s stock protestations that his muse and lyre and skill aren’t up to epic or serious verse, are instead designed for more homely, lowly subject matter. He turns this into a joke on a couple of occasions when he’s getting carried away invoking the Mighty Warriors of the Trojan War and suddenly realises what he’s doing, back pedals and dials it down.

Where are you rambling, Muse? This theme’s beyond your
Light-hearted lyre. End now. Absurd presumption
To tell tales of the gods
And mar high matters with your reedy voice! (3.3)

Maybe 1.6 is the best expression of this repeated trope of inadequacy. To understand it you need to know that Varius is a rival Roman poet, famous for his high-flown tragedies, and that the poem is directly addressed to Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the Roman general who Augustus relied on to win his battles.

That eagle of Homeric wing,
Varius, will in due course sing
Your courage and your conquests, every deed
Of daring that our forces,
Riding on ships or horses
Accomplish with Agrippa in the lead.

But I’m not strong enough to try
Such epic flights. For themes as high
As iron Achilles in his savage pique,
Crafty Ulysses homing
After long ocean-roaming,
Or Pelops’ house of blood, my wings feel weak.

And both my modesty and my Muse,
Who tunes her lyre to peace, refuse
To let her tarnish in the laureate’s part
Our glorious Augustus’
Or your own battle-lustres
With my imperfect and unpolished art…

Feasts, and the war where girls’ trimmed nails
Scratch fiercely at besieging males –
These are the subjects that appeal to me,
Flippant, as is my fashion,
Whether the flame of passion
Has scorched me or has left me fancy-free.

As usual, the translation is fluent and clever, but I stumbled over the grammar of ‘Augustus” and it took me a few goes to realise he’s saying ‘my muse refuses to tarnish either Augustus’s, or your, battle-lustres’. Maybe you got it first time, but at quite a few places, Michie’s ingenuity in rhyming results in phrases which made me stumble. Anyway, here is Horace again, protesting the modesty of his poetic aims and means:

The history of the long Numantian war;
Iron Hannibal; the sea incarnadined
Off Sicily with Carthaginian gore;
Wild Lapiths fighting blind-

Drunk Centaurs; or the Giants who made the bright
Halls of old Saturn reel till Hercules
Tame them – you’d find my gentle lyre too slight
An instrument for these

Magnificent themes, Maecenas… (2.12)

Friends

The majority of the poems address a named individual, buttonholing and badgering them, and the number of these addressed poems, added to the variety of subject matter, creates a sense of great sociability, of a buzzing circle of friends. Horace comes over as a very sociable man with a word of advice for all his many friends, something which really struck me in the run of poems at the start of book 2:

Sallustius Crispus, you’re no friend of metal
Unless it’s made to gleam with healthy motion… (2.2)

Maintain and unmoved poise in adversity;
Likewise in luck, one free of extravagant
Joy. Bear in mind my admonition,
Dellius… (2.3)

Dear Phocian Xanthias, don’t feel ashamed
Of loving a servant… (2.4)

Septimius, my beloved friend,
Who’d go with me to the world’s end… (2.6)

Pompeius, chief of all my friends, with whom
I often ventured to the edge of doom
When Brutus led our line… (2.7)

Barine, if for perjured truth
Some punishment had ever hurt you –
One blemished nail or blackened tooth –
I might believe this show of virtue… (2.7)

The clouds disgorge a flood
Of rain; fields are churned mud;
The Caspian seas
Are persecuted by the pouncing blasts;
But, Valgius, my friend, no weather lasts
For ever… (2.9)

Licinius, to live wisely shun
The deep sea; on the other hand,
Straining to dodge the storm don’t run
Too close in to the jagged land… (2.10)

‘Is warlike Spain hatching a plot?’
You ask me anxiously. ‘And what
Of Scythia?’ My dear Quinctius
There’s a whole ocean guarding us.
Stop fretting… (2.11)

Male friends he addresses poems to include: Maecenas his patron and ‘inseperable friend’ (2.17), Virgil, Sestius, Plancus, Thaliarchus, Leuconoe, Tyndaris, Aristius Fuscus, Megilla of Opus, Iccius, Tibullus, Plotius Numida, Asinius Pollio, Sallustius Crispus, Quintus Dellius, Xanthias Phoceus, Septimius, Pompeius Varus, C. Valgius Rufus, Lucius Licinius Murena, Quinctius Hirpinus, Postumus, Aelius Lama, Telephus, Phidyle, Ligurinus, Julus, Torquatus, Caius Marcius Censorinus and Lollius.

The women he addresses include: Pyrrha, Lydia (who appears in 4 poems 1.8, 1.13, 1.25, 3.9), the unnamed lady of 1.16, Glycera (twice 1.19, 1.30, 1.33), Chloe, Barine, Asterie, Lyce, Chloris, Galatea and Phyllis.

All go to create the sense of a thriving active social life, an extended circle of friends and acquaintances which is very…urbane. Civilised, indulgent, luxurious:

Boy, fetch me wreaths, bring perfume, pour
Wine from a jar that can recall
Memories of the Marsian war… (3.14)

The predominant tone is of friendship and fondness and frank advice:

Then go, my Galatea, and, wherever
You choose, live happily… (3.27)

But the reader is left to wonder whether any of these people (apart from Maecenas and Virgil, and maybe one or two others) ever actually existed, or whether they are characters in the play of his imaginarium.

The simple life

Again and again Horace contrasts the anxious life of high officials in Rome with the simplicity of life on his farm out in the country, and the even simpler pleasures of life the peasants who live on it. The theme is elaborated at greatest length in one of the longest poems, 3.29, where Horace invites careworn Maecenas to come and stay on his farm, yet another excuse to repeat his injunction to Live in the Present, for nobody knows what the future holds.

Call him happy
And master of his own soul who every evening
Can say, ‘Today I have lived…’

Homosexuality

As long as a Roman citizen of the upper class married, sired male children and performed his religious and family duties, the details of his sexuality weren’t important, or might have prompted waspish gossip, but weren’t illegal. Homosexuality isn’t as prominent in Horace’s poetry as it is in Virgil’s, but it’s here as part of his urbane mockery of his own love life and one poem in particular, 4.1, is a passionate and surprisingly moving poem of unrequited love for a youth named Ligurinus.

Why then,
My Ligurinus, why
Should the reluctant-flowing tears surprise these dry
Cheeks, and my fluent tongue
Stumble in unbecoming silences among
Syllable? In dreams at night
I hold you in my arms, or toil behind your flight
Across the Martian Field,
Or chase through yielding waves the boy who will not yield.

This Ligurinus is (apparently) a pre-pubescent boy because another entire poem, 4.10, is devoted to him, pointing out that one day soon he’ll sprout a beard, his peaches and cream complexion will roughen, and he’ll no longer be the hairless beauty he is now.

It is very striking indeed that earlier in book 4 Horace writes a series of poems lamenting the decline and fall in Roman social standards, singling out greed and luxury, and also adultery which, of course, makes it difficult to determine the real father of a child – and yet this flagrantly homosexual and, possibly, if the boy is under 16 which seems pretty certain, pederastic poem, passes without comment and presents no obstacle to the poet’s earlier harsh moralising.

Sucking up to Augustus

As is fitting, the first poem in book 1 addresses his patron (and friend) Augustus’s minister for the arts, Maecenas. And the second poem addresses the boss man himself, Augustus, unquestioned supreme ruler of Rome and its empire, who is subsequently addressed at regular intervals throughout the series of poems. Here is Horace, addressing Jupiter king of the gods but describing Augustus (referred to here by the name of his adoptive great-uncle, Caesar, by which he was widely known, before the title ‘Augustus’ was bestowed in 27 BC):

Thou son of Saturn, father and protector
Of humankind, to thee Fate has entrusted
Care of great Caesar; govern, then, while Caesar
Holds the lieutenancy.

He, whether leading in entitled triumph
The Parthians now darkening Rome’s horizon,
The Indian or the Chinese peoples huddled
Close to the rising sun,

Shall, as thy right hand, deal the broad earth justice. (1.12)

Here Horace is asking the fickle goddess Fortune to protect Augustus and the Roman armies engaged in battle:

Guard Caesar bound for Britain at the world’s end,
Guard our young swarm of warriors on the wing now
To spread the fear of Rome
Into Arabia and the Red Sea coasts. (1.35)

1.37 includes a brief description of Octavian’s historic victory over the fleets of Antony and Cleopatra at the naval Battle of Actium in 31 BC.

Thunder in heaven confirms our faith – Jove rules there;
But here on earth Augustus shall be hailed as
God also, when he makes
New subjects of the Briton and the dour

Parthian. (3.5)

Incidentally, I don’t know why there are so many references to conquering Britain. In his long reign Augustus never sent armies to invade Britain, that was left to his great-nephew, the emperor Claudius, in 43 AD.

Book 4 contains noticeably more praise of Augustus (‘O shield of Italy and her imperial metropolis’) than the previous books: was it clearer than ever that the new regime was here to stay? Had Horace got closer to Augustus? Was it a shrewd political move to butter up the big man?

We know that Horace had been personally commissioned to write the two odes in praise of Drusus (4.4) and Tiberius (4.14) which overflow with slavish praise of their stepfather, Augustus, and the book includes a poem calling on Apollo to help him write the Centennial Hymn which Augustus commissioned (4.6). So this book contains more lickspittle emperor-worship than the previous 3 books combined.

How shall a zealous parliament or people
With due emolument and ample honours
Immortalise thy name
By inscription and commemorative page,

Augustus, O pre-eminent of princes
Wherever sunlight makes inhabitable
The earth? (4.14)

And the final ode in the entire series, 4.15, is another extended hymn of praise to Augustus’s peerless achievements.

Book 4

In his edition of Horace’s satires, Professor Nial Rudd points out that book 4, published about 12 years after books 1 to 3, has a definite autumnal feeling. Virgil is dead (19 BC) and Horace’s patron, Maecenas, no longer plays the central role he had done a decade earlier. The odes to Tiberius and Drusus highlight that a new young generation is coming up, and Horace refers to his own grey hair and age. Had Maecenas previously formed a buffer between him and the emperor, and, with his declining influence, has the emperor become more demanding of direct praise?

Famous phrases

It’s difficult for a non-Latinist to really be sure of but all the scholars and translators assure us that Horace had a way with a phrase and that this meant he coined numerous quotations used by later generations.

Probably the three most famous are ‘carpe diem’ and ‘nunc est bibendum’ and ‘dulce et decorum est’, from 1.11, 1.37 and 3.2, respectively. Here’s the source Latin and Michie’s translations of each instance:

Carmen 1.11 (complete)

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 5
Tyrrhenum, sapias, vina liques et spatio brevi
spem longam reseces. Dum loquimur, fugerit invida
aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

Don’t ask (we may not know), Leuconie,
What the gods plan for you and me.
Leave the Chaldees to parse
The sentence of the stars.

Better to bear the outcome, good or bad,
Whether Jove purposes to add
Fresh winters to the past
Or to make this the last

Which now tires out the Tuscan sea and mocks
Its strength with barricades of rocks.
Be wise, strain clear the wine
And prune the rambling vine

Of expectation. Life’s short. Even while
We talk, Time, hateful, runs a mile.
Don’t trust tomorrow’s bough
For fruit. Pluck this, here, now.

Carmen 1.37 (opening stanza)

Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero
pulsanda tellus, nunc Saliaribus
ornare pulvinar deorum
tempus erat dapibus, sodales…

Today is the day to drink and dance on. Dance, then,
Merrily, friends, till the earth shakes. Now let us
Rival the priests of Mars
With feasts to deck the couches of the gods…

3.2 comes from the series of 6 poems which open book 3, which are longer than usual and adopt quite a strict scolding tone, instructing Romans of his day to abandon luxury and return to the noble warrior values of their ancestors. It needs to be read in that context:

Carmen 3.2 (Opening only)

Angustam amice pauperiem pati
robustus acri militia puer
condiscat et Parthos ferocis
vexet eques metuendus hasta

vitamque sub divo et trepidis agat
in rebus. Illum ex moenibus hosticis
matrona bellantis tyranni
prospiciens et adulta virgo

suspiret, eheu, ne rudis agminum
sponsus lacessat regius asperum
tactu leonem, quem cruenta
per medias rapit ira caedes.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori:
mors et fugacem persequitur virum
nec parcit inbellis iuventae
poplitibus timidove tergo…

Disciplined in the school of hard campaigning,
Let the young Roman study how to bear
Rigorous difficulties without complaining,
And camp with danger in the open air,

And with his horse and lance become the scourge of
Wild Parthians. From the ramparts of the town
Of the warring king, the princess on the verge of
Womanhood with her mother shall look down

And sigh, ‘Ah, royal lover, still a stranger
To battle, do not recklessly excite
That lion, savage to touch, whom murderous anger
Drives headlong through the thickest of the fight.’

The glorious and the decent way of dying
Is for one’s country. Run, and death will seize
You no less surely. The young coward, flying,
Gets his quietus in his back and knees…

Two points. One, quite obviously ancient Rome was an extremely militarised society with all its politicians expected to have served in the army or, as consuls, be sent off in command of armies in umpteen foreign campaigns. Two, with this in mind it’s worth pointing out that the poem goes on to contrast the glory won by death in battle with the vulgar world of democratic politics and elections.

Unconscious of mere loss of votes and shining
With honours that the mob’s breath cannot dim,
True worth is not found raising or resigning
The fasces at the wind of popular whim…

The fasces being the bundle of wooden rods, sometimes bound around an axe with its blade emerging, which was carried by the lictors who accompanied a consul everywhere during his term of office and which symbolised a magistrate’s power and jurisdiction.

Summary

Michie is very proficient indeed at rhyming. More than that, he enjoys showing off his skill:

Boys, give Tempe praise meanwhile and
Delos, the god’s birthday island. (1.21)

A cheap hag haunting alley places
On moonless nights when the wind from Thrace is
Rising and raging… (1.25)

When the brigade of Giants
In impious defiance… (2.19)

But I think the cumulative effect of so much dazzling ingenuity is that sometimes  the poems reek more of cleverness for its own sake than the kind of dignified tone which the Latinists describe as having. At times the cleverness of his rhyming overshadows the sense.

Boy, I detest the Persian style
Of elaboration. Garlands bore me
Laced up with lime-bark. Don’t run a mile
To find the last rose of summer for me. (1.38)

Throughout the book, in pretty much every poem, although I could read the words, I struggled to understand what the poem was about. I had to read most of them 2 or 3 times to understand what was going on. Half way through, I stumbled upon the one-sentence summaries of each ode given on the Wikipedia page about the Odes. This was a lifesaver, a game changer. From that point on, I read the one-sentence summary of each poem to find out who it was addressed to and what it was about – and so was freed to enjoy how it was constructed, and the slickness of Michie’s translations.

Bless this life

Above all, be happy. Life is short. Count each day as a blessing.

Try not to guess what lies in the future, but,
As Fortune deals days, enter them into your
Life’s book as windfalls, credit items,
Gratefully… (1.9)

You can see why all the translators, scholars and commentators on Horace describe him as a friendly, reassuring presence. A poet to take down off your shelves and read whenever you need to feel sensible and grounded.

Related links

Roman reviews

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by Simon on September 30, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 30, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/09/30/the-odes-of-horace/

Some problems with Isaac Asimov’s science fiction

Americocentric

It is Americocentric. There are no other countries worth troubling with on earth. Whether ‘man’ reaches out to colonise the planets, to settle on Mars or Mercury, invents hyperspace and travels to colonise distant planets, or stays at home to create the megacities of Caves of Steel – it’s Americans who do it, with American technology, and American culture.

And the home city of every city is always New York: in the final story of I, Robot, it is New York which becomes seat of the new World Government and the World Co-Ordinator is, of course, American, as are the inventors of robots, and the hyper-drive, and anything else worthwhile that mankind comes up with. 3,000 years later, after billions of people have left earth to colonise the Outer Worlds, detective Elijah Baley lives in New York.

Everyone speaks English

With the result that everyone speaks English. It is one of the many ludicrous elements you have to overcome in order to read the Foundation trilogy, that 12,000 years in the future, and inhabiting planets scattered right across the inconceivable distances of the Galaxy – everyone speaks English. There’s a slight gesture towards reality, in that some of the humans on the more remote planets have an accent which is a bit hard for others to understand. But it’s always, everywhere, basically English that is spoken.

Planets become provinces

I can’t quite define it, but it’s the way all his (and other golden age writers’) universes consist of planets which just do one thing and are treated, in effect, like real-world people treat regions of their countries.

Thus a planet in the Foundation books is a ‘holiday planet’, as if one whole planet were made of beaches and cocktail bars. Another planet just supplies raw materials, in The Naked Sun Solaria is the planet with most advanced robotics. And that’s it. That’s all it does.

Planets – entire planets – are conceived of as one-trick ponies, which do just the one thing. Completely ignoring the evidence we have about the only planet where we know life exists – our own one – that planets are astonishingly diverse, in climates, life forms and so on.

It is a profoundly dumb way of thinking about planets. As if each one is a toy in a childish game. It is an example of the way Asimov and other Golden Age writers dismiss or ignore the mind-boggling diversity of life on our own planet. In Asimov’s science fiction the teeming diversity of planet earth is over and over again reduced to American men arguing in rooms. It follows that his view of the entire galaxy is the same, just many more Americans arguing in many more rooms.

It is this reductive gesture which makes so many of the planets in the Foundation stories end up sounding the same. They may be given a paragraph or so of cursory description – but they all have earth-type gravity and air, no radiation or dangerous environmental elements of any kind. They’re just variations of the same kind of futuristic room where Elijah Baley ends up meeting and arguing with people, or the protagonists of the Foundation stories end up meeting and arguing with people. In American.

A human-only universe

This imaginative reductionism is related to the way that there appears to be no other life in the galaxy.

Humans colonise all the other planets, and then hypertravel off to other star systems, and end up colonising pretty much every other planet in the galaxy and yet – encounter no other significant life forms.

It’s not only that this is unlikely (although it’s all completely unlikely). More to the point, it is extravagantly boring. It means that all Asimov’s fiction is about people, the same kind of people, a certain type of calculating adult, calculating the same kinds of odds and trying to figure out whodunnit.

They’re all detective stories

All the Foundation stories and the Elijah Baley stories are, in a sense, whodunnits. The Baley ones, obviously since he is a detective investigating murders. The Foundation ones in a more roundabout sense. In every Foundation story there is a dilemma or threat. Individual or group X think the best way to solve the problem is by doing Y. But the hero (or heroine) of each story knows better and all the stories end the same way: the secret of what really happened is revealed right at the end. So although they’re not overtly detective stories, they have a similar structure: dilemma – fake leads and red herrings – revelation of the true solution or meaning of events.

Simplistic politics

Having painted a childishly simplistic vision of a galaxy in which each planet does just one thing, in which there are no aliens to disrupt his whodunnits, Asimov only incorporates the most simplistic and child’s-eye version of ‘politics’ as is required to drive the stories.

If there are ‘political’ movements, they are a) perfectly understandable and b) perfectly rational and c) childishly simple.

Thus in The Caves of Steel there is a ‘party’ – the ‘Medievalists’ – which wishes to return humans to a simpler, earlier time. That’s it. There don’t appear to be any other political parties in America, there’s no mention of elections, with the vast amount of corruption and bullshit they usually throw up, let alone of the notion that there are different countries who might be economic or military rivals (as we know there have been throughout all human history).

No – magically, the entire world of national and international politics disappears with a wave of the magic wand, leaving behind just enough of a child’s cartoon version of ‘politics’ (a secret society who want to turn the clock back – about as sophisticated as the League of Red-Haired Men in Sherlock Holmes) as is required for make the hokey storyline.

Pretty much the same ‘party’ – really a conspiracy – appears in the final story if I, Robot where it is the Society for Humanity which opposes the rise of the robots.

Any other notion that people might disagree about fundamental principles of how to run the economy, how to redistribute wealth, whether to allow unchecked capitalism or moderate it or try and implement some kind of state economy, the usual nationalist, xenophobic and populist motivations for politics which we all know from the real world – has gone, vanished, evaporated, cleansed – just like all the other nations apart from America or other languages apart from English.

Economics

Similarly, Asimov’s take on economics is raw materials are needed for factories on earth. That’s about it. The earth of The Caves of Steel is rigidly hierarchical but we don’t really get to see anyone at work except the police (we do meet a worker in a nuclear plant and the staff of a shop where an anti-robot riot nearly breaks out) and these police could come out of a Raymond Chandler novel or any of the thousands of other contemporary cop thrillers.

Real economics involves the continuously evolving exploitation of raw materials, and siting and building of factories, and the training of workforces to supply technologies which are constantly being invented solely to make money. America has been the world’s leading capitalist economy and society for at least a century. It is extraordinary that Asimov, for all his supposed intelligence, is blind to the disruptive energies of capitalism which always lead, everywhere, to the provision of a high standard of living for many, maybe a majority of a capitalist population, but also always involve low wages, unemployment and – a cardinal fact of untrammeled capitalism – the cycle of boom and bust, with periodic crashes leading to deep depressions every ten years or so.

In the real world it is difficult even to organise the workers in a particular industry to join together to take industrial action or bargain for better pay. In Asimov’s world entire planets truck along quite happily producing raw materials or being vacation planets or whatever, with no sense of struggle or exploitation or grievance or class or racial conflict.

All the problems and complexities which we know perplex the actual world are systematically excluded from his childishly simplistic stories.

Wars

Similarly, real world wars break out for complex reasons and, once started, tend to develop a dynamic of their own and become very difficult to end.

As you might expect by now, wars in Asimov’s fiction are the opposite, as simply motivated and easily ended as his paper-thin notion of politics. Some of the Foundation wars do start for the time-honoured motivation that strong planets see an opportunity to conquer weak ones – but they are nearly always started by specific named individuals who, when we meet them, are portrayed as pantomime baddies.

I’m thinking of the story, The Mayors, in which the planet Anacreon is ruled by Prince Regent Wienis, who rubs his hand and cackles like a pantomime villain or Ming the Merciless, while bullying his whiney teenaged nephew, King Lepold I. It only takes Salvor Hardin to pull off a few tricks (he’s bugged the Anacreon fleet and also manages to turn off all power in Anacreon’s capital city) to overcome Wienis and the threatened war to end as quickly as it began.

My point is that, in the real world, wars are often supported by entire populations which have been whipped up top expect them – as all Europe expected World War One, as the Nazis whipped up the Germans or the Japanese military leaders organised their entire society for war. In Asimov’s fairy tales, the goody only has to eliminate the cackling baddy and the rest of the population instantly returns to being reasonable and peace-loving. Exactly the opposite of reality.

Women

It’s to Asimov’s credit that he gives leading roles to women:

  • to Bayta Darell, who grasps what is going on quicker than her husband in The Mule
  • to her grand-daughter, 14-year-old Arcadia Darell, in Search By the Foundation
  • that Elijah Baley’s wife, Jessie, plays some role in The Caves of Steel
  • and that Gladia Delmarre plays the lead, a somewhat stereotyped romantic lead, in The Naked Sun
  • not forgetting the way he places Dr Susan Calvin centre stage for the linked stories that make up I, Robot

Still, Asimov’s failure to anticipate women’s lib and feminism is a good example of the way that, while he and his fans had their eyes fixed on the stars, real and profound social changes were transforming human relationships here on earth (in the West, at any rate) in a matter of just a few decades.

I’m not blaming him for failing to anticipate specific social changes: I’m pointing out that his fictions envisage basically unchanged social relationships stretching for thousands of years into the future and how profoundly misleading a view of human nature that is.

Race

Ditto race. In The Naked Sun the humans refer to the fleets of robots which do all the hard work as ‘boy’. Now this is the offensive, abusive term which white Americans used to blacks from the Reconstruction period onwards, and reached horrible aggressiveness as a backlash to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Asimov couldn’t anticipate that only a decade or so after he was writing, America was to be seriously divided by the rise of the Civil Rights Movement and then the assassination of Martin Luther King, of Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and so on.

But that’s the point. While Asimov was extrapolating his neat and tidy Three Laws of Robotics, and anticipated them being carried 100, 3,000 and 12,000 years into the future by white English-speaking, Americans – meanwhile, around him, through the 1950s into the 1960s, the real world descended into a messy chaos.

Summary

This is why so many adult readers, writers and critics were and are able to dismiss and ignore most science fiction – it’s because science fiction itself simply excludes and ignores almost everything which makes up the actual world we live in, fails to acknowledge or engage with all its difficulties and complexities and challenges and, by extension, its rewards and interest.

Isaac Asimov reviews

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny.

1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire.

1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces down attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’.

1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire.

1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery.

1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria.

Science fiction reviews

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by Simon on December 16, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Literary criticism, Novel, Science Fiction
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Posted by Simon on December 16, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/12/16/some-problems-with-isaac-asimovs-science-fiction/

Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1951)

Asimov

Born in Russia of Jewish descent, Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) was taken by his parents to New York while still a toddler and raised in Brooklyn, New York.

He was a prodigy. He sold his first science fiction story at 18, and by his early 20s was selling SF short stories to John Campbell, the legendary editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine.

One of the most prolific authors of all time, Asimov wrote or edited over 500 books, plus hundreds of articles for magazines, encyclopedias and so on. That fact alone should prepare you for his superficial and slapdash prose style.

Out of this vast output, probably his most famous works are two groups of short stories and novels, one clustered around the Robot idea – I, Robot, the Caves of Steel and so on – the other, the seven novels of the Foundation and Empire series.

The story behind Foundation

Late in life Asimov himself gave a detailed account of the origin of the original Foundation stories which he wrote in the 1940s, and then of the various sequels and prequels he was persuaded to write in the 1980s.

For me, the key facts are that the first eight stories were:

  1. written as short stories
  2. for a popular sci fi magazine
  3. when Asimov had only just turned 21

They were never intended for book publication, they were certainly never intended to be considered ‘novels’, they were hacked out for the transient existence of a gee-whizz sci-fi magazine.

But, apparently, the start of the 1950s saw a big transformation of the SF market in America: for the first time proper book publishers became interested in it. No longer was it the preserve of fans and collectors of luridly illustrated magazines. And, as they started publishing SF books, publishers discovered there was an untapped audience for it in the broader book-buying public.

So, where to get the material to satisfy this market? They could approach tried and tested SF writers with book contracts. Bit slow. And they could also trawl back through the vast pulp magazine content produced over the previous decades, cherry picking popular stories which could be reversioned for book publication.

Thus it was that in 1951 – three years after Asimov had had the final Foundation story published in Astounding Science-Fiction – that a small publisher (Gnome Books) suggested republishing all the stories in book format. When Asimov agreed, Gnome went on to suggest that the series, as it stood, started too abruptly and that Asimov should write an introductory story setting the scene and explaining the backstory. Which he promptly did.

Taken together these facts explain the Foundation series’ pulpy worldview, the uneven and often very bad prose style, the errors in grammar and spelling, the very poor proofreading in all versions of the stories, and the looseness with which they hang together.

Foundation and its two sequels were not conceived or written as novels. In fact at just this time, in 1950, the expression ‘fix-up novel’ was coined to describe a ‘novel’ created by just such a glueing together of pre-existing short stories that had been previously published and may, or may not, have had much in common. The stories’ plots could be tweaked to make for consistency, have new connecting material written for the novelisation, or – a popular device – have a new frame narrative and narrator created who could introduce and contextualise each story or ‘episode’.

In the rush to capitalise on the new popularity of SF, ‘fix-up’ became a very apposite description, first applied to a classic SF author, A.E. van Vogt. Loads of the old hacks who’d been churning out sci-fi stories by the bucket load and flogging them to the steaming jungle of pulp sci-fi magazines, suddenly had a cash incentive to cobble the stories together and present them as ‘novels’.

Asimov’s Foundation and Robot series, as well as Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, are classic examples of ‘fix-ups’.

The afterlife of the Foundation stories

So all this explains why the book titled Foundation and published in 1951 in fact consists of the following linked short stories:

  1. The Psychohistorians – the introductory story to the series written at Gnome’s request (1951)
  2. The Encyclopedists – originally published in the May, 1942 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction under the title of Foundation
  3. The Mayors – originally published in the June 1942 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction as Bridle and Saddle
  4. The Traders – originally published in the October 1944 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction as The Wedge
  5. The Merchant Princes – first published in the August 1944 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction as The Big and the Little

The stories got longer as Asimov wrote them, and the second volume – Foundation and Empire – contains just two long stories, or a short story and a novella, The General and The Mule (published in November and December 1945).

Similarly, the third and final volume of the original trilogy – Second Foundation – also contains a short story and a novella:

  1. Search by the Mule was originally published in the January 1948 issue of Astounding Science Fiction under the title Now You See It…
  2. Search by the Foundation was originally published in the November and December 1949 and January 1950 issues of Astounding Science Fiction under the title … And Now You Don’t

So, in total, there were eight original Foundation stories, written over a period of eight years, 1940 to 1948, plus the introductory one commissioned by Gnome in 1951. Nine.

As it turned out Goblin Publishers weren’t great at promoting the books, which hardly sold. It was only in 1961, when Asimov had cemented a good book deal with Doubleday, the major American publishers, that they discovered this item from his back catalogue was underperforming. They promptly bought it off Goblin and undertook a big marketing campaign and, slightly to everyone’s surprise, the Foundation trilogy was, for the first time, a bestseller, becoming a phenomenon.

By 1966 a special category of the SF Hugo Awards was created to honour trilogies of novels and the Foundation trilogy promptly won.

By the time I was getting into SF in the early 1970s, the trilogy, alongside Asimov’s Robot books, and numerous volumes of short stories and other novels, thronged the shelves in shiny paperback editions with wonderful covers designed by Chris Foss, and I took them to be among the defining works of the genre.

Foundation cover art by Chris Foss

Foundation cover art by Chris Foss

Posthumous Foundations

Then, twenty years after their first appearance in book form, in 1981, Doubleday asked Asimov to write a sequel to the trilogy. Initially reluctant, Asimov reread the series and realised he had more to say, much more.

He quickly wrote and published Foundation’s Edge (1982), then a follow-up to that, Foundation and Earth (1986). These were followed, after Asimov’s death, by Foundation and Chaos, published in 1998, written by Greg Bear with the permission of the Asimov estate and, in 1999 Foundation’s Triumph, written by David Brin, incorporating ideas from Asimov short stories.

Before his death Asimov also went back before the events covered in Foundation, to describe them in two prequels – Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation, published posthumously in 1993. These have been complemented by Foundation’s Fear (1997) by Gregory Benford.

Like the novels about James Bond or Jason Bourne which were written after their creators died, there’s no reason why new Foundation novels shouldn’t roll off the production line for the foreseeable future.

Foundation and Robot

Not only this but as early as the 1960s Asimov began to link the Foundation stories and their ‘universe’ with the ever-growing world of the Robot stories, by writing stories which feature characters, or issues, or planets, common to both – thus creating an enormously complicated fictional universe.

As you might expect from this huge ‘fix-up’ approach, the resulting ‘universe’ contains plenty of plot holes and inconsistencies for fans and fellow authors to happily crawl over and debate forever.

Now comes news that the Foundation stories are about to be made into a major TV series by HBO, home of Band of Brothers and Game of Thrones. I’d be surprised if they don’t tweak, edit, and amend the original texts to make the content more suitable for TV and the plots fit into one-hour episodes. Plus catering to modern sensibilities by having more female and black leads.

All of which will lead to an even greater ferment of comment and critique online. Thus the endless proliferation and unstoppable afterlife of American cultural products.

The premise of the Foundation stories

It’s a struggle to clamber free of this jungle of backstories, overlapping universes, and real-world developments in order to get back to the primal experience of reading the stories as they were first conceived nearly 80 years ago.

Asimov tells us the original idea was inspired by his reading (not once, but twice!) of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. What, he thought, if he wrote about the decline of a Galactic Empire – from the vantage point of the Second Empire which eventually rose to replace it, after a prolonged dark age? A vast epic history looking back over the decline and collapse of a space empire…

Back in 1940 this appears to have been (surprisingly) a fairly original story. One of the classic early SF tales – H.G. Wells’s Time Machine gives the reader a poignant sense of the passage of vast periods of time, but doesn’t give a detailed chronicle.

Similarly, Olaf Stapledon’s epic SF classic, Last and First Men, deals with the rise and fall of countless human civilisations on a mind-boggling scale, but again it doesn’t go into detail to describe the nitty-gritty events or characters of any of them.

But it’s still a trope – the collapse of empire – familiar to artists and poets for centuries. The twist, the gimmick, the unique selling point which gives the Foundation series its distinctive quality, is the idea that, amid the teeming trillions of the Empire, spread across all the habitable planets of the entire galaxy, a scientific discipline has arisen, known as Psychohistory.

Psychohistorians try and predict human history, based on the vast amount of data by that point amassed about human and social behaviour. And it is this idea which underpins the entire Foundation universe.

Hari Seldon’s role in the Foundation stories

For one of these psychohistorians is the extremely brilliant Hari Seldon, who has used the discipline to map out a precise vision of events which will unfold over thousands of years into the future.

The fundamental premise of the original series is that Seldon can see that the Empire’s fall is inevitable and that, other things being equal, it will be followed by a thirty thousand year-long dark age, until civilisation rises again.

But Seldon thinks he was worked out a plan whereby this thirty thousand year period can be abbreviated to just a thousand years. His plan is to create a ‘Foundation’ of committed men and women who will create a Galactic Encyclopedia which will preserve all the knowledge of the Empire through the dark age and hasten the rise of the Second Empire.

Thus, in the first story Seldon gathers round him enthusiastic devotees of the plan and confronts the sceptical powers-that-be. Then each of the following five stories describes a crisis moment facing the Foundation over the ensuing hundreds of years.

But – and here’s where the psychohistory thing really comes into its own – at each of these crises, Seldon turns out to have already seen and anticipated the outcome. In fact, he turns out to have stage-managed things in order to secure the outcome he wanted.

The technique is exemplified in the first story. This describes young, naive Gaal Dornick arriving on the planet Trantor, magnificent capital of the 12,000-year-old Galactic Empire to meet the famous psychohistorian. Dornick has barely arrived and met the legendary Seldon than the latter is arrested and Dornick attends his trial.

Seldon is accused of treason by the aristocratic members of the Committee of Public Safety who, nowadays, rule the Empire (the actual emperor being a puppet figure). He outrages the committee by explaining that in just 500 years the empire will collapse and enter its 30,000 year dark age.

The committee find him guilty of treason but, not wanting to create a martyr, offers Seldon exile to a remote world, Terminus, accompanied by the others who wish to help him create the Encyclopedia. And he accepts.

But here’s the kicker, which is revealed to an adoring Dornick right at the end of the first story: Seldon knew that’s what the Committee would do.

He knew they would offer exile (to hedge their bets – to get rid of him but keep him alive, just in case what he says is true) and he was almost certain that he’d be sent as far away as possible, with the result – as he explains to an awed Dornick – that he has already prepared his community of 100,000 to travel to Terminus! Ta-dah!

Each of the four following stories zeroes in on a similar crisis moment in the Foundation’s history, 30, 50 or 100 years apart. In each one we are introduced to new characters, who face a plight or challenge to the Foundation. And in each story it turns out – right at the end – that Seldon had foreseen the challenge… and secretly planned, or created the conditions, for the challenge to be overcome!

Or, in the words of the hero of the fifth story, the trader Hober Mallow (who overcomes the challenge of his day and, in doing so, becomes the first of the Merchant Princes of Foundation):

‘When the Galactic Empire began to die at the edges, and when the ends of the Galaxy reverted to barbarism and dropped away, Hari Seldon and his band of psychologists planted a colony, the Foundation, out here in the middle of the mess, so that we could incubate art, science, and technology, and form the nucleus of the Second Empire.’
‘Oh, yes, yes – ‘
‘I’m not finished,’ said the trader, coldly. ‘The future course of the Foundation was plotted according to the science of psychohistory, then highly developed, and conditions arranged so as to bring about a series of crises that will force us most rapidly along the route to future Empire. Each crisis, each Seldon crisis, marks an epoch in our history. We’re approaching one now – our third.’

So each story occurs in a new period – features entirely new characters – and presents them with a challenge thrown up by the ongoing collapse of the Empire, and the survival of the Foundation. Each of the characters in question beats the challenge and then, they either see a hologram of Seldon (which, we are told, are scheduled to return at regular intervals into the future) which confirms that nature of the challenge and how they’ve overcome it. Or is made to realise (by Asimov’s guiding hand) the nature of the crisis they’ve just passed through and how it adhered to Seldon’s Laws of Psychohistory.

Either way, the characters (and the reader) come to reverence the memory and extraordinary foresight of Hari Seldon even more.

So the Foundation stories are more than just ‘chronicles of the future’: each one contains a trick in the tail reminiscent of a classic detective story, the kind which reveals whodunnit at the end.

You read partly to find out what happens in each story – but also to find out how Asimov will reconcile each new crisis with Seldon’s omniscient prophecies.

1. The Psychohistorians

12,000 years into the history of the Galactic Empire psychohistorian Hari Seldon realises it is doomed to collapse and manipulates the Committee of Public Safety into sending him and 100,000 followers to the remote planet of Terminus to create a Galactic Encyclopedia.

2. The Encyclopedists

Fifty years later, the Foundation is well-established on planet Terminus. The creation of Seldon’s Encyclopedia is proceeding under the control of a board of scientists known as Encyclopedists. The nominal figurehead of the state, Salvor Hardin, realises Terminus is under threat from the four neighbouring prefects of the Empire, which have declared independence from the Empire. By skillful diplomacy Hardin defuses a demand from the Kingdom of Anacreon to establish military bases on Terminus, and also overthrows the Encyclopedists in a coup. To his surprise, when Seldon makes his next scheduled appearance by hologram recording, it turns out Seldon had anticipated the coup and approves of it as the inevitable next stage in the Foundation’s evolution. He also reveals – shockingly – that the Encyclopedia Galactica was always a pretext to allow the creation of the Foundation. It was just a way of getting everyone focused and unified while the real structural consolidation of Foundation society proceeded alongside it.

3. The Mayors

It is 80 years into the history of the Foundation – in other words we are in Year 80 of the Federation Era or F.E. Having preserved its technological knowledge while other imperial star systems are losing theirs, the Federation is well placed to exert power over the four neighbouring kingdoms, but has developed a policy of doing this under cover of a Religion of Science.

Salvor Hardin is now the well-established ruler of the Foundation, but, as the story opens, is threatened by a new political movement led by city councillor Sef Sermak, the ‘Actionist Party’, which wants to attack and conquer the Four Kingdoms.

The kingdom which gives most concern is Anacreon, ruled by Prince Regent Wienis and his nephew, the teenage King Lepold I. (This gives rise to scenes between regent and pimply king which kept reminding me of black and white movies of The Prisoner of Zenda in their camp cheesiness.)

When Wienis launches a direct attack against Terminus, using an abandoned Imperial space cruiser redesigned by Foundation experts, he discovers that the Foundation have installed devices in the ship to prevent it firing. Wienis had planned the attack for the night of his nephew’s coronation as king. Hardin attends this ceremony, out of diplomatic courtesy, but is arrested while the arch-fiend Wienis rubs his hands and cackles like Ming the Merciless,

Little does he know that Hardin has a cunning plan. 1. He has agreed with Anacreonian High Priest Poly Verisof to create a popular uprising against Wienis. 2. The Imperial space cruiser’s weapons turn out to have been neutralised so that they can’t attack Terminus. 3. Instead, the leader of the fleet is forced to make an Anacreon-wide broadcast that he has been compelled to lead a treacherous and ‘blasphemous’ attack against the Federation by the wicked Wienis – which crystallises the popular rebellion against the regent. And then – all technology on Anacreon shuts down. the Foundation maintain it; they have planned for it all to close down. Anacreon is plunged into darkness.

Wienis turns in fury on Hardin and tries to zap him with a ray gun, but the latter is protected by Foundation tech i.e. a personal force field. In fury, Wienis turns the gun on himself and commits suicide.

Thus Hardin is vindicated: the narrator had given the impression that the Actionist Party was gaining the upper hand in the Foundation and threatening his rule. But the calm, clever way he handles the crisis entirely restores his power.

This is confirmed by another scheduled appearance of Hari Seldon by hologram, who confirms his expectation that the Foundation’s immediate neighbours, the Four Kingdoms, will now be virtually powerless and incapable of resisting the Religion of Scientism’s advance.

4. The Traders

It is 135 F.E. If the religion of ‘Scientism’ was the focus of the previous story, this one reveals how trading will be the next stage in the Foundation’s expansion.

The story demonstrates this through a complicated plot involving the imprisonment of one the Foundation’s lead traders (and spies) Eskel Gorov by the authorities on a planet in a nearby system, Askone.

He is rescued by a fellow Foundation trader, Linmar Ponyets, who conspires with an ambitious and rebellious Askonian councilor, Pherl, to overthrown Askone’s council.

Ponyets makes Pherl a device which can transmute any metal into gold – enough to corrupt anyone – but has also plants a video recorder in it. Now, meddling with this kind of old tech is regarded by the Askone council as blasphemous. When Pherl tries to renege on his deal to set Gorov free, Ponyets shows him the tape he’s made recording Pherl committing the blasphemy of using Foundation tech.

Thus (the Foundation’s) Ponyets He can blackmail (Askone’s) Pherl. He promptly gets him to have Gorov released, and to hand over a load of metal ore which the Foundation needs.

On the spaceship back to Terminus, Pherl explains his success to Gorov. Not only has Pherl a) released Gorov b) bartered a big supply of tin out of him but c) since Pherl is likely to become the next Grand Master of Askone, he has also neutralised it as an enemy.

When Gorov criticizes his techniques, Ponyets quotes one of Salvor Hardin’s alleged sayings: ‘Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right!’

5. The Merchant Princes

Twenty years late i.e. about 155 F.E., the Foundation has expanded to subjugate the neighbouring Four Kingdoms and is expanding. But there is resistance. Three Foundation vessels have vanished near the planets of the Republic of Korell. Master Trader Hober Mallow is sent to find out why and assess Korell’s state of technological development.

A long complicated plot ensues in which the Foundation’s Foreign Secretary Publis Manlio and Mayoral Secretary Jorane Sutt are both out to incriminate Mallow, but he a) handles a diplomatic crisis with Korell b) establishes relations with Korell’s authoritarian ruler, Commdor Asper Argo.

Noticing the atomic handguns carried by the Commdors’ bodyguards – a technology mostly lost on the Periphery of the Empire – Mallow suspects the Empire of reaching out to the Korellians. Mallow travels to the planet Siwenna, which he believes may be the capital of an Imperial province, and where he finds the impoverished former patrician Onum Barr, amid the ruins of the planet’s former glories.

Barr explains that a previous viceroy to Siwenna rebelled against the Emperor, and that Barr took part in a revolution which overthrew him. The Imperial fleet despatched to put down the rebellion ended up massacring the population, including killing all but one of Barr’s children. The new viceroy of Siwenna is now planning his own rebellion against the Empire.

(This idea of the permanent rebellion of the provinces under a succession of rulers, each of them aspiring to become emperor, quite obviously copies the pattern of the later years of the Roman Empire.)

Mallow goes spying at a Siwellian power plant, noting that it is atomically powered (atomic power is the benchmark of technical civilisation in the Empire) but that the technicians – the tech-men – don’t actually know how to maintain it.

With this and other information Mallow becomes convinced that the ‘religious’ phase of the Foundation’s expansion is over. Henceforward its power must rest on its ability to trade goods which nobody out here on the Periphery has or can fix.

Mallow is elected Mayor of Terminus, and has his opponents, Manlio and Sutt, who were planning a coup against him, are arrested.

But then there follows a real Seldon Crisis – namely that Korell declares war on the Foundation, using its powerful Imperial flotilla to attack Foundation ships. Oh dear. But instead of counterattacking, to everyone’s surprise, Mallow takes no military action at all – he just ceases trading with Korell.

In his Seldonian wisdom he has realised that almost all Korell’s society – including its battle fleet – runs on technology which only the Foundation understands and can repair. Sure enough, without Foundation input, Korell’s economy collapses, and its attack is called off.

Wisdom and understanding – not main force – win the day.

Comments

The stories – and the way they hang together to create a history of the future – generate a sense of scale and vastness which thrills the adolescent mind.

The cleverness of the way Seldon is revealed – at every major turning point of the future – to have anticipated the future, creates the exciting sense of an omniscient hero, comparable to the pleasure the reader gets from identifying with Sherlock Holmes – except on a galactic scale!

BUT the actual plots of the stories themselves – and especially the style, the prose style, and the phrasing of the dialogue – are often execrable. Sometimes Asimov’s jumping between scenes, and the obscurity of characterisation and dialogue, make it hard to understand what is going on – to grasp which moments or details are important or not important.

I only really understood what happened in any of these stories when I read the Wikipedia summaries. Reading about the Foundation stories is quite a lot clearer and more compelling than actually wading through the texts themselves.

Asimov was only just into his twenties when he began the series, writing fast against the clock to flog the stories to a pulp SF magazine.

The scale and ambition of the series are still impressive, and the idea of a master historian able to use advanced maths and sociology to predict the future, and the way each crisis confirms the often unexpected aspects of his thinking – all these are great ideas.

But Asimov’s youth, the hasty writing, and the way so many scenes are straight out of Dan Dare or Flash Gordon or cannibalise other boys adventure clichés – the ragged prose, the derivativeness of so many actual scenes, and the paper-thinness of all of the characters – make reading the book really hard work.

Hari Seldon depicted by Michael Whelan

Hari Seldon depicted by Michael Whelan

Related links

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same London of the future described in the Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love, then descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces down attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – in an England of the future which has been invaded and conquered by the Russians, a hopeless attempt to overthrow the occupiers is easily crushed
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s

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by Simon on December 4, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 4, 2018

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