If only my powers matched my yearning…
(Epistles Book 2, number 1)
The ancient Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus (universally referred to as ‘Horace’ in the English-speaking world) wrote two books of epistles.
The first one, published in 21 BC, contains 20 shortish poems on a variety of subjects. The second one, published some ten years later in 11 BC, differs in two ways. First, it contains just three poems, but they’re long ones: whereas epistle 1.8 is 17 lines long and 1.9 is just 13 lines, the first two epistles in book 2 are 270 lines and 216 lines long, respectively, and the third one is nearly as long as the two preceding ones put together (476 lines). The second difference is that, whereas the 20 odes in Book 1 are varied in subject matter, the three longer poems in Book 2 are all very much on the same subject – poetry.
Epistle 1 (270 lines)
This poem is addressed personally to Augustus and is a defence of modern poetry.
Horace opens with a panegyric to Augustus and his achievements (bringing peace, re-establishing the rule of law etc) and says that, unlike earlier heroes of Rome, Augustus hasn’t had to wait till he’s dead to be worshipped: the population realises his importance while he’s still alive.
But then it turns out he’s said all this to make the point that when it comes to poetry, the Romans take a very different view from how they regard their leader. Instead of valuing the new for its achievements they obsessively worship the old and fusty, using age alone as a measure of quality. He lists the first Roman writers, from Ennius in epic to Terence in comedy, and says these are the writers the Roman population venerate as if they could never be improved upon. But they’re wrong. Many of those pioneering works are crude and clumsy but people persist in venerating them and rubbishing much better work, purely because it’s new.
It makes me annoyed that a thing should be faulted, not for being
crudely or clumsily made but simply for being recent.
People venerate and defend the old works because it’s what they grew up with and understand, which leads them to frown on new works because they don’t properly understand them.
What if the Greeks had only venerated the old and stifled innovation? We wouldn’t have most of the works we now enjoy and which the Romans can copy so freely.
Then Horace changes tack somewhat and laments the fact that Rome is undergoing a craze for writing poetry; everyone’s at it, even he, who had sworn to pack it in, is up before dawn calling for pen and parchment. But they’re all amateurs! You wouldn’t take medicine from someone who wasn’t a doctor or ask someone who wasn’t an experienced sailor to take the helm of your yacht: so why should you read verses by a complete amateur?
On the upside, one thing that can be said for proper poets is they live very modestly. Horace never cheats, fights, causes social strife –, on the contrary, he is content to sit quietly, reading and scribbling, living off pulses and second-rate bread. Here is how the poet serves his country:
The poet shapes the tender faltering speech of a child,
already turning the ear away from coarse expressions.
Later he moulds the disposition by kindly maxims,
using his voice to correct cruelty, envy and temper.
He recounts noble actions, equips the new generation
with old examples, and brings relief to the poor and sick.
Where would innocent boys and girls who are still unmarried
have learnt their prayers if the Muse had not vouchsafed them a poet?
The choir asks for aid and feels the deities’ presence;
by the poet’s prayers it coaxes heaven to send us showers;
it averts disease and drives away appalling dangers;
it gains the gift of peace and a tear of bumper harvests.
Song is what soothes the gods above and the spirits below.
I’ve quoted this passage at such length for two reasons. One is to refute Horace’s optimistic claim for the poet, that:
He recounts noble actions, equips the new generation
with old examples
Is that true of Catullus, with his spiteful lampoons of helpless victims, with his hate poems against Lesbia after she dumped him? No. It’s not even true of Horace himself, whose 104 odes I have just read and which are about drinking, parties, the joys of the countryside, advice to friends about affairs, poems of longing for beautiful young boys, and so on.
To claim his own poetry is full of noble actions designed to instruct the next generation is ludicrous. A lot of it is just tittle-tattle and gossip, entertaining but hardly educational. In other words, this is the kind of stock, boilerplate excuse poets trot out to justify their profession to the public when the reality of what they write is often wildly different.
But the second reason is sociological. It would be easy to end the quote at the word poet, as if writing poetry were a solitary activity to be enjoyed by solitary readers. It certainly is this, but the final five lines are interesting because they put the act of poetry in a much more public context. Remember that Augustus commissioned Horace to write a hymn to be sung by a choir at the opening of the Secular Games, which Augustus revived in 17 BC. By a choir! Learning his words and learning to sing them to (presumably) an ancient melody.
And what could a public hymn to be sung by a choir in front of an audience of hundreds of thousands of Roman citizens possibly be about but an invocation of the gods and plea for peace and plenty? So I included this latter half of the quote to show the intensely public and social side of the poet’s role in ancient Rome. (I was going to write ‘very unlike our own times’ when I remembered the stunning performance by poet Amanda Gorman at Joe Biden’s inauguration as president in January 2021.)
Horace changes tack again to give a brief history of Roman poetry. The native Roman tradition began with coarse rural songs sung at country festivals of marriage or harvest. These became so wild and often abusive that they eventually had to be reined in and restricted by laws. Only late in their history did the Romans become aware of the centuries-old tradition of Greek poetry, overflowing with sophistication, a wide variety of metres, a number of well worked-out genres and conventions. Only after the final Punic War and crushing of Carthage in 146 BC did educated Romans think of imitating the sophisticated Greeks, and even then moments of ‘farmyard’ vulgarity still came through.
This morphs into contempt for current Roman taste. Horace thinks Plautus’s comedies were feeble with poor characterisation of his various stock types (I genuinely enjoyed Plautus’s comedies). But he is appalled by the modern theatre which doesn’t even stage plays any more so much as pageants and spectacles, featuring bears or boxers – a cross between pantomime and the circus. Nonetheless, Horace is full of admiration for playwrights who write proper plays and evoke genuine deep emotions: that’s something he could never do.
Then he switches tack again and brings Augustus back to the poet who writes not for a fickle audience but for the individual reader. Now it’s true that poets are sometimes their own worst enemies, and he gives an interesting list of the ways they can screw up:
- thrusting a book on Augustus when he is tired or worried with important concerns of state
- being oversensitive to criticism of even a single line
- when, in a reading, they repeat a favourite section without being asked
- when they moan that their excellence goes unrecognised
- when they arrogantly assume that as soon as Augustus hears they’re writing something, he’ll immediately summon them to court and make them a gift to relieve their financial worries
Nonetheless, it is important to choose the right poet, qualified and able poets, to celebrate your successes. A long paragraph tells the story of Alexander who patronised a third rate poet, Choerilus, and so, alas, was never immortalised in verse. Horace then flatters Augustus for his excellent choice of chief poets, namely Virgil and Varius.
Horace draws to a close by wishing that he, too, could write epic poetry about Augustus’s achievements, describing ‘the Parthian foe overawed by your imperial Rome’ but alas, he is not talented enough: ‘If only my powers matched my yearning’. But he would be rash to embark on a task so far beyond his abilities.
I don’t understand the final 11 lines. I think the general idea is that it is better to have no lines at all written about you than to be remembered for being memorialised in hilariously bad verse. It would be embarrassing and might even be fatal!
All this I take to be yet another grovelling apology to Augustus for not writing him some grand, noble and dignified Poem, and instead offering short, ad hoc poems which play to Horace’s talent for moral sermons and gossipy odes.
Epistle 2 (216 lines)
Is addressed to Julius Florus and is a long apology by Horace for not writing lyric poetry.
But I had barely got going before, once again, as so often in Roman literature, I stumbled over the slavery issue. Epistle 2.2 opens with 20 lines describing the imagined sales patter of a slave trader, describing the merits of a young man he’s selling. It’s obviously designed to be comic in the way a modern comedian impersonating the bluster of a second-hand car trader could be done for comic effect. Horace has his slave trader make his sales pitch a bit more plausible by admitting that, ok, the slave for sale isn’t perfect: once or twice he dodged his work and hid under the stairs ‘for fear of the strap on the wall’ i.e. of being whipped (which was the standard punishment for slaves, in Republican Rome in the 20s BC as in European sugar plantations in the 18th and 19th centuries).
The point of this elaborate analogy is that Horace tells Florus that the slave trader of the anecdote was being honest about his merchandise’s flaws – and that, in the same way, he, Horace, was being open and honest when he told Florus, as he was leaving for duty in the army abroad, that he, Horace, is lazy and was unlikely to send letters as often as Florus demanded, and also was unlikely to send him as many poems as he hoped.
He, Horace, was quite frank about this, so why is Florus now upbraiding him? That’s the point of the opening anecdote…But I’m thinking about the slave boy cowering under the stairs, waiting for the master to come after him with the blood-stained whip…
If slavery matters, it matters everywhere, at any time, and to all peoples who have been enslaved.
Forcing myself back into the ‘civilised’ ‘cultured’ world of Horace’s poetry, the epistle now cuts away from this anecdote to give us another vignette, this time about one of Lucullus’s poor soldiers who’d saved up a nice sum of money. One night someone stole it. Next day, bubbling with rage, the aggrieved soldier flung himself at the enemy and dislodged them from a well-defended position. For this act of bravery he was acclaimed, decorated and given money. At which point he stopped being angry. So that when the general came to him a few days later to ask him to lead a similar assault on another fort, the soldier refused. If you want someone to lead a suicidal attack, the yokel told the general – find someone who’s just been robbed.
Horace then cuts away again, this time to a passage of autobiography: He tells us he was raised in Rome, went for further education in Athens, but was caught up in the civil wars and recruited into Brutus’s army (which was based in Greece) and found himself commanding a legion at the Battle of Philippi, where he saw the line break and be massacred, so flung away his shield and ignominiously legged it (as he had already described in ode 2.7. All this is by way of saying that when he finally fetched up back in Rome, discovering his father was dead and his land confiscated, he wangled a minor job in the Treasury and took to writing verses, inspired by ‘Lady Poverty’.
The point of this digression being that Horace is like the soldier who had his wallet stolen. When he was poor, he was highly motivated and turned out verse at speed. But now he is successful and well enough off to suit his needs, like the soldier once he’d made his pile, he doesn’t need to return to the fray.
He takes another tack at justifying the same thing, saying his slowing down in writing poems is due to age. Age strips away all our pleasures, fun, sex, parties and sport. Now it’s denuding him of his ability to write poems.
The poem is turning into a litany of excuses. His next excuse is that, even if Horace did write some new verse, it’s impossible to please everyone: take three guys and the chances are one will like lyric poetry, one iambics and one ‘the tangy wit of Bion’s homilies’. So, what kind of poem should Horace write or avoid?
He then changes tack to make another excuse: How can Florus expect him to write poems while living amid ‘the storms of city life’ in Rome? There are two types of distraction: people, who endlessly demand attention, want him to be their patron, do business with him or are ill and demand visits. The second is the sheer racket: building works, wailing funeral processions, lumbering carts, mad dog barking, how can a man concentrate on writing verse?
He changes the subject again to mock the literary world, full of writers lavishing extravagant praise on each other, and in particular of poets, ‘that hypersensitive species’. He recalls putting up with recitals from terrible poets and replying tactfully. But now he breathes a sigh of relief that that period is over, his work is done, and he doesn’t have to listen to another word.
Too many modern poets praise their own work, regarding each line as sacred. Horace, by contrast, says the true poet is as stern as a censor, cutting any word ‘deficient in lustre or lacking solidity’ or which he deems unworthy of honour. He will revive worthy old words from the time of Cato, which have fallen into disuse and he will adapt new ones, where needed. Thus his work will flow strong and clear like an unpolluted river, enriching the land with his wit and the wealth of his language.
But then, it’s best to abandon verse altogether. It’s a children’s activity. Instead seek the good life:
instead of hunting for words to set to the lyre’s music
to practice setting one’s life to the tune and rhythms of truth.
I don’t fully understand the next 30 lines or so but I think they are a version of Horace’s core moral message, which is that we should be content with what we need and not be greedy, not hanker after unnecessary wealth or luxury.
I shall enjoy what I have and draw on my modest supplies
as needed…
We shouldn’t waste our lives scheming to make money and then splashing it around wastefully. Instead we should:
make the most of the short and beautiful time
What started in a tone of abject apology to Florus for not having kept up his side of the correspondence or sent the poems he promised, has somehow turned right around to become quite a harsh criticism of his friend. Quite rudely, he says possessing a thicker wallet doesn’t appear to have made Florus any the wiser. Florus claims he isn’t a miser, but Horace rather accusingly asks whether he’s banished the other vices, related to miserliness. Is his heart no longer obsessed with futile ambition, or with fear of death? Does he treat dreams and prophecies as the jokes they are, or live in superstitious fear of them? Florus should be improving his mind and morals, living sensibly. In a brutal last few lines, Horace concludes:
If you can’t live as you ought, give way to those that can.
Epistle 3 – The Art of Poetry
Epistle 3 has a special place in literary history as it is clearly quite different in length and ambition from the other epistles and quite early on was extracted and published by itself with the title Ars Poetica or The Art of Poetry.
The epistle is addressed to Horace’s friend Lucius Calpurnius Piso (a Roman senator and consul) and his two sons and forms a long and wide-ranging meditation on the rules and conventions applying not only to the kind of lyric poetry Horace himself wrote, but, above all, to plays.
What struck me most was the structurelessness of it. There’s no introduction or explanation or laying out of the themes. Instead Horace launches right in, in the conversational tone, and rather haphazard structure, of the epistles rather than the academic tone of a treatise.
Horace kicks off by explaining the importance of unity and simplicity by imagining the case of a painter who painted a human head on a horse’s body, a body which was itself covered in feathers and ended in a fish’s tail. How absurd everyone would find that. Well, that’s because an artist should observe decorum and restraint. Don’t just tack beautiful passages about temples or rainbows onto a work if it’s about something else.
Make what you like, provided the thing is a unified whole.
Horace himself tries to be brief and smooth, though he admits often failing at both.
Writers must give thought to what subject and format suits their powers, rather than attempt something they’re incapable of. If you choose a theme within your scope, the rest should follow. It should become obvious what to leave in and what to leave out.
Do not be afraid of simple and obvious words. Often they are best. Invent new words reluctantly. New terms imported from Greek are acceptable if kept to a minimum. Language is like trees. The old leaves (words) wither and fall, to be replaced by new ones. In the long run, our entire civilisation will crumble and fall, so how can we keep our language from changing and evolving?
Usage is king. Usage determines the meaning and validity of words. Use the language the men of your time use.
Horace briefly explains the advent of different metres for the various kinds of poetry: epic, elegiac, dramatic, and lyric.
Everything has its appropriate place and ought to stay there.
So the first job of the poet is to learn about the different genres, their histories, the appropriate subject matter for each, their format in terms of metres, their diction.
But correctness is only the beginning. A poem must be attractive, it must evoke the listener’s emotions. It must match the words to the emotion being portrayed or the audience will burst out laughing.
Follow the tradition regarding well known characters, for example the heroes of the Trojan war or the gods. If you dare to innovate a character, making him or her consistent. ‘You’d be well advised to spin your plays from the songs of Troy’ i.e. rely on tried and trusted characters from legend.
My Roman friends, I urge you:
get hold of your Greek models and study them day and night.
The good writer doesn’t start with bombastic invocations and promises. Chances are you won’t be able to live up to it. The mountains will labour and give birth to a mouse! The good writer hurries the reader into the middle of things (in media res) as though they are quite familiar.
Horace gives an entertaining review of the ages of man, entertaining in that classical sense of pleasingly reiterating obvious clichés and stereotypes. The old man is:
morose and a grumbler, he is always praising the years gone by
when he was a boy, scolding and blaming ‘the youth of today’…
So attribute behaviour and views to characters which are appropriate for their stage and situation in life.
Some actions should be presented onstage, for things seen make much more of an impression than things merely described. However, there are events which shouldn’t be described but must take place offstage and be reported, for example Medea killing her own children or Atreus killing, cooking and serving up his brother’s sons to him at dinner. (Hannibal Lecter has been on my mind and this line reminds me of how modern American culture deliberately, consciously, drives a coach and horses through norms of restraint and decorum.)
He then gives very strict rules about plays. All plays should contain exactly five acts. Do not let a god intervene. You can have a fourth character but they should not speak (thus following very strictly the convention of ancient Greek theatre.) The chorus should take the place of an actor, sing between the acts, but only of subjects which are tightly relevant to the plot. The chorus should side with the good and give them advice, and try to restrain the bad.
Horace gives in to his own stereotype of the ‘grumpy old man’ and laments the good old days and simplicity of Greek drama. Back then the ‘pipe’ then was a simple instrument which performed simple ditties because the theatre was relatively small and not packed, and the audience had ‘honest hearts, decent and modest.’
But victories brought wealth which encouraged (presumably he’s talking solely about Athens here) the Athenians to allow drinking in daytime, allowing greater liberty in tunes and tempos, encouraged actors to dress up in more and more sumptuous costumes and ‘mince’ across the stage, the tunes of the lyre became more complex and the delivery of moral homilies became more complex and obscure.
Horace attributes the word ‘tragedy’ to the Greek tragos, meaning goat, and ‘satire’ to the mythical figure of the half-goat satyr.
In Greek theatre three tragedies were performed in succession, and were followed by a comic to lighten the mood and lead into festival and celebration. This satyric drama was not the same as comedy and had its rules and restraints. Horace warns against having gods or heroes who feature in the tragedies dragged onstage and mocked in the satyr play.
If he ever wrote a satyr drama, it would mix high and low, blending ‘familiar ingredients’. The artifice would be in creating seamless joins, ‘such is the power of linkage and joinery’. But don’t be crude: cultured ‘knights’ i.e. semi-aristocracy, are repelled by jokes from the streets and back alleys.
Horace turns to (briefly) consider specific metres, considering ‘feet’ such as the iamb (da-dum) and the spondee (dum-dum).
Not for long, though because he moves on to give a brisk history of the origin of the dramatic genres. Thespis invented tragedy and was followed by Aeschylus who elaborated it. This was followed by Old Comedy which became, however, too abusive and violent and so had to be reined in by law.
Roman playwrights have copied the Greeks and left nothing untried; they have often been at their best when they’ve departed from Greek models. But their weakness is carelessness. A good work should be like fingernails, trimmed and filed to a perfect shape. Some writings have encouraged writers to believe that the true poet is mad and so they’ve cultivated eccentricity instead of studying.
Horace sees himself as a grindstone which sharpens the steel but takes no part in its creation. Hence this epistle of advice. At bottom, the fundamental basis for writing is Good Moral Sense.
Moral sense is the fountain and source of proper writing.
The Greeks had this. Study Socrates. Be clear on what is due to your country and friends; what is involved in loving a parent, brother or guest; what is the conduct required of a judge or senator; what are the duties of a general. This way you will know the correct sentiments and speech to give to these kinds of characters when you present them. The playwright should look to real life for examples of behaviour and speech.
A play with attractive moral comments and credible characters may work onstage even if it lacks finish and polish and style. The basic subject matter wins assent.
One problem is that, unlike the Greeks, the Romans are a money-grubbing nation, and he gives a little vignette of children being taught their fractions.
The aim of the poet should be to instruct and delight. To do so: keep it brief. Old people in the audience want morals; young dandies appreciate style. To please both, make your work useful and sweet (utile et dulce), blending help and delight.
That said everyone makes mistakes, and he can forgive blots of style in an otherwise good-hearted work. Even Homer nods.
The raison d’etre for a poem is to please the mind. It’s alright to have average lawyers or generals. But a poem, in order to justify its existence, should be as excellent as possible. Therefore, read your works to good critics, to Horace himself if you can, but then…sit on it for 9 years. Then take it out and reread it and edit and trim it coming it to cold and mature.
You can always delete what hasn’t been published; a word let loose is gone forever.
A brisk summary of the founding of civilisation by Orpheus, Amphitryon and so on. The establishment of laws and boundaries. Homer inspired to battle. Song was the medium for oracles. Poems sought a king’s favour, or celebrated the end of a season’s work. Therefore, don’t be ashamed to study the tradition.
Is it a gift or craft which makes good poetry? Both. Olympic athletes train hard for their supremacy. So do musicians. Why is it only poetry where any amateur can put forward shoddy offerings and claim himself to be a genius?
Quite a funny passage describing the rich man surrounded by flatterers who announces he has written some verses, does anyone want to hear them? Of course the flatters jump to attention and turn pale with emotion, weep, or laugh and cheer, as required by the verse. Doesn’t mean it’s any good. Beware of flatterers.
He remembers how honest his friend Quinctilius was. If you read him your verses he’d honestly tell you which bits to amend. If you swore you’d tried already, he’d recommend you go back to the drawing board and try to express it some other way. An honest friend honestly points out your errors and so saves you from being laughed at if you publish rubbish.
After all this description of sense and hard work and clarity of thought, Horace ends, very incongruously, with 20 or so lines describing the ‘madness’ of the poet, who wanders the fields, head in the air, reciting his lines, and if he happens to fall into a deep well, who’s to say he didn’t do so on purpose! Consider Empedocles, so irrational he threw himself into the volcano of Mount Etna.
So why is a wretched poet condemned to write poetry? Is it punishment for some gross act of sacrilege like ‘pissing on his father’s ashes’. Did he profane a holy place?
All this seemed very out of place with Horace’s usual calm, even tone, and I began to suspect it was comic hyperbole, when, in the last few lines, he claims that a poet is like a wild bear which has smashed the bars of its cage and scattered everyone, cultured or not, by the threat of reciting. The wild poet threatens to grab anyone who comes within reach, in a fatal bear hug, and then read them to death!
Yes. I think this entire final passage is intended to be ironic, a satire on the popular stereotype of the poet – which is completely unlike the careful, studious, hard-working figure the preceding 450 lines had gone to such lengths to describe.
Credit
Niall Rudd’s translation of the Epistles of Horace was published by Penguin books in 1979. All references are to the 2005 Penguin paperback edition.
Books & Boots 