Waiting for the Barbarians (22 page)

We know him simply as Horace.

The poem that was sung on that long-ago evening—a Greek lyric expression of Roman civic virtues and imperial ambitions; a patriotic anthem set to the lilting poetic rhythms of erotic yearning; a grand celebration of official and communal values given definitive shape by a private individual, a solitary bard—suggests the strange tensions and seeming contradictions that characterize not only Horace’s life and work but also our awkward attitude toward him. He is, on the one hand, the august Augustan: during his lifetime, the emperor’s friend as well as Virgil’s, moving in the highest social, political, and literary circles, acknowledged as the “performer on Rome’s lyre,” as he himself boasts; after his death, a figure absolutely central to the Western poetic tradition, having had a particular influence in the Renaissance, after languishing in comparative neglect during the Middle Ages. (He has always been more popular when reason is in vogue.) The sixteenth century in France—Ronsard (who in more than one poem rhymes “grâce” with “Horace”), Du Bellay, Montaigne, “the French Horace”—and the seventeenth and particularly the early eighteenth in England (Addison, Steele, Prior, Pope) would be unthinkable without him.

On the other hand, he is—well, the august Augustan: all that avuncular philosophizing about the fleeting nature of pleasure and the inevitable passage of time, from someone comfortably ensconced in the nests of privilege, comes off, today, as complacent and not terribly original, as even his admirers admit. “Heaven knows,” the
American critic Brooks Otis wrote a generation ago, in an essay called, significantly enough, “The Relevance of Horace,”

Indeed, Horace’s lyric output has been reduced in the mind of the general public to a pair of clichés. One, which everyone knows even without knowing its author, concerns the poetry’s content: carpe diem. The other concerns its form—the rigorous structures of which their creator was so proud, those formidably dense verse patterns with the funny names that sound like constellations (“Greater Asclepiad”), which have notoriously been the bane of schoolboys both real and imaginary from Shakespeare’s Chiron in
Titus Andronicus
(“O, ’tis a verse in Horace, I know it well, / I read it in a grammar long ago”) to the pathetic student in Kipling’s short story “Regulus,” victimized by a sadistic teacher when called upon to translate Horace’s paean to the Punic War hero Regulus in one of the six great “Roman Odes” with which Book III of the
Odes
begins.

Neither the charm nor the felicity, the armchair Epicureanism nor the impregnable formality, suits the current taste. When we think of lyricists, it is Sappho who comes to mind, not Horace, who merely used her seamless meters while leaving the messy erotic stuff alone; we like our exaltation in the content, not the form, of our poetry. And yet Horace’s steadfast refusal to provide such exaltation, his stubborn artisanal focus on refinements in technique rather than rawness of emotion, is the key to both the beauties and the difficulties
in his greatest work, the
Odes
—to the subtle and fragile emotional textures that are so famously hard to convey, and to the elusive tonal artistry that makes it so famously difficult to translate.

Horace was born to a freedman, a former slave, on December 8, 65 BC, in Venusia, a small military colony at the heel of Italy. (In the witty and caustic
Satires
with which, at thirty, he first announced his talent to the world—the Latin title,
Sermones
, means something more like “conversations,” or perhaps better “
causeries
”—the poet amusingly recounts his schooldays with the “burly sons of burly centurions.”) When he died, on November 27, 8 BC, in Rome, he was buried in a tomb on the Esquiline Hill next to his beloved patron, the fabulously wealthy litterateur and bon vivant Maecenas, the emperor’s longtime friend; the emperor himself was his heir.

What happened between Venusia and Rome, between centurions’ sons and Augustus himself, explains a great deal. The poet’s childhood and early manhood witnessed some of the most traumatic years Europe has ever seen: the death throes of the Roman Republic, with its political and social instabilities, and the proscriptions, executions, and confiscations that attended them. (His shrewd, self-made father was an auctioneer’s agent, responsible among other things for the disposition of confiscated properties: it’s entirely possible that Horace saw firsthand the emotional trauma inflicted by the era’s political violence.) As a university student in Athens, where he wrote quantities of verse in Greek—the education that made his later achievement possible—Horace became involved in the upheavals of his era, joining the cause of the “liberators” Brutus and Cassius after their assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. From the disaster at Philippi, he tells us, he barely escaped with his life. He slunk back to Italy to find
his father’s property confiscated for veterans of the winning side: an ironic twist of fate for the auctioneer’s son. Still, he must have had some wherewithal, for he soon after bought himself a clerical post at the treasury—becoming, into the bargain, the model for many distinguished poets (Housman, his great admirer and translator, and also Cavafy) whose stultifying day jobs seem not to have extinguished the lyric impulse.

Insulated from the decade’s volatile politics, he began to move in literary circles. By his late twenties he’d joined the circle of Virgil, which suggests he was already circulating poems by that point; and soon after met Maecenas, who remained an intimate for life. Two books of satires, along with a volume of epodes, scathing iambic verses modeled on the invective poetry of Archaic Greek, were published between 35 and 29 BC. It was around this time that Maecenas presented him with the gift of the Sabine farm about which he would write so lovingly—in fact a quite substantial property that allowed the poet to live henceforth as a kind of country gentleman.

It was in the comfort and security afforded by this munificent gift that Horace undertook an enormous project of a character radically different from that of the spicy, scintillating, gossipy
Sermones
and the often outrageous
Epodes
: the three books of odes, comprising eighty-eight poems, in Greek meters on a wide range of subjects. Their publication in 23 BC made his name. (It was the
Odes
, certainly, and not the
Satires
, that earned him the
Carmen saeculare
commission.) There followed some verse epistles; an additional, fourth book of odes, which Augustus himself “compelled” Horace to write, according to Suetonius; and another epistle on the writing of poetry, which has been enshrined separately as the
Ars poetica
, the “Art of Poetry.” His last decade was darkened by the losses of friends and other poets: Virgil, Tibullus, Propertius. In the year 8 BC, Maecenas died, admonishing Augustus on his deathbed to treat Horace
as “a second me.” He needn’t have bothered: a few months later, Horace himself was dead.

Even this brief biography should help to account for much about Horace that irritates today: his ostensible embrace of the Augustan regime, his status as a poet of the establishment, his studied avoidance of ecstasy in favor of a measured appreciation of modest beauties and pleasures. For he had seen, firsthand, the worst that his century had to offer; whatever his reservations about Augustus may have been—and given his youthful politics, he must have had some—the new imperial stability was clearly to be preferred to the kind of violent upheavals he had witnessed. Who could blame him for wanting to spend the rest of the life that he had nearly lost celebrating the virtues of solid pleasures sensibly enjoyed—pleasures that are, in the
Odes
more than anywhere else in his work, both shadowed and heightened by an awareness of the violent energies always threatening to destroy them?

Yet it was not the temperate content but rather the artful form of the
Odes
that was their great distinction—or so at least Horace declared. In the final entry to his third book of odes (the last lyric he ever planned to write, before Augustus asked him to whip up some more), he asserts that his claim to poetic fame would rest on the fact that he was the “first to adapt Aeolian [that is, Greek, the verse forms used by Sappho and Alcaeus] verse to the Italian measure”—the very grafting of Roman onto Greek that would be replicated in the great public hymn that Augustus commissioned to celebrate the new Rome.

Why would an achievement that was, at least superficially, a technical one matter so much—and make Horace’s influence on later literature so profound? Roman authors during the last two centuries of the Republic—years marked, among other things, by the annexation of much of the Hellenistic Greek world—were acutely aware of the
dominance and authority of the Greek cultural inheritance, which proved at once to be a superb model and an irritating burden. Poetry in particular was a vexed subject. The Greeks had an ancient poetic tradition, rich in its own special diction and forms; by comparison, the Roman tradition was both young and relatively impoverished. Roman poets found it was proving difficult to make Latin sound “poetic” (which is to say, Greek). Latin as a language feels heavier than Greek: unlike Greek it has no articles, a phenomenon that lends Latin a certain chunkiness; unlike Greek, it does not have a number of monosyllabic “particles” that can be sprinkled through lines or sentences to give subtle extra flavor—or to help meet the requirements of meter.

As a result, it was difficult to adapt Latin (so ideal for grave prose utterances) to the fluttery and complex stanzaic meters of Greek lyric verse. Horace dealt with this by altering certain conventions of the Greek models used by Sappho and her peers in ways that made them more suitable vehicles for the gravity of Latin words and rhythms (substituting spondees, for instance, where the Greek called for trochees or iambs, and placing regular caesuras, or breaks, within lines to allow for the greater stateliness of Latin speech). By eliminating the hiccupping effect of Greek meters, he achieved verse forms that for the first time sounded natural in Latin—and indeed exploited the monumental quality of the Latin tongue. It was Nietzsche who most famously put his finger on the special quality of Horatian verse, which took the stone blocks that were Latin words, ungainly and difficult to maneuver, and for the first time made them genuinely beautiful and artful: reading Horace, he said, was like encountering a “mosaic of words, in which every word by sound, by position and by meaning, diffuses its influence to right and left and over the whole.”

This lapidary quality is the supreme Horatian achievement, the
hallmark of his poetry. He ends his famous Mount Soracte ode (“See how deep stands the gleaming snow on / Soracte”) with a description of how a flirtatious girl’s lovely laughter betrays her hiding place in the corner of a Roman piazza:

Literally, the words mean this:

Any translation into syntactically correct English will shatter the cunning effect of the (syntactically correct) Latin, which is capable of a far more elastic word order. To the Roman eye and ear, the first line creates a terrific anticipation, consisting as it does of a series of adjectives describing nouns we don’t encounter until the second line. When we do get there, we realize that the correct relationship between each adjective and its noun is meticulously vertical: hiding / girl, betraying / laughter, intimate / corner. So the lines in fact produce the very phenomenon they describe: a sound, a mysterious sound that you cannot at first identify because its source is deeply hidden (as is the word
angulo
, “corner”) in a corner. Every line of every ode by Horace is this dense, this complex.

The problem remained of how to give poems composed in those newly useful meters the kind of intellectual heft that suited Roman sensibilities, molded as they were by immersion in the study of rhetoric, focused as they were on the concrete, on the useful, and expressed in the rolling periods, the long, balanced, complex sentences, that so
brilliantly distinguish Latin oratory. Horace’s second great technical achievement was to learn to thread complicated and extended ideas through one after the other of the four-line stanzas perfected by Sappho and her peers; in so doing he hit upon an unmistakably poetic way to think like a Roman—and he provided, into the bargain, a tautness, variety, and sinew to lyric utterances that had never been achieved before. The energizing tension between the static “mosaic” quality of his diction, which invites you to pause and admire every word, every stanza individually, and the forward-moving pull of his long arcs of thought is what gives Horatian verse its great distinction.