Crowned with clusters of the vine,
Let us sit, and quaff our wine.
Call on Bacchus, chant his praise;
Shake the thyrse, and bite the bays:Rouse Anacreon from the dead,
And return him drunk to bed:
Sing o’er Horace, for ere long
Death will come and mar the song:Robert Herrick, A Lyric to Mirth, ll. 5–12
That Horace’s lyric and Anacreontic poetry have much in common is an insight which traditionally has been more keenly felt by poets than carefully discussed by scholars. And while not every poet has cited his sources as diligently as Herrick, many Anacreontic poems by Pierre de Ronsard, Abraham Cowley, Christoph Martin Wieland and others blend Horace’s mellow Sabine wine with Anacreon’s stronger mixture as they sing of Wein, Weib und Gesang. Veronika Lütkenhaus lets sober scholarship have a word on the topic, as her book analyses “the reception of Anacreon and the Carmina Anacreontea in Horace’s lyric and iambic poetry”, as the subheading puts it.
Based on Lütkenhaus’s doctoral dissertation, written under the joint supervision of Hans Bernsdorff at Frankfurt and Patricia Rosenmeyer at UNC, the book identifies all instances in the Odes and Epodes that may allude to the Greek lyric poet Anacreon or the Anacreontea, a collection of later poems which imitate certain features of Anacreon’s work. Indeed one strength of the book is that it can take full account of Bernsdorff’s monumental Anacreon commentary, which was not available to earlier commentators of Horace.[1] By analysing Horatian allusions to Anacreon, Lütkenhaus “sets out to prove the hitherto unexplored depth of Anacreon’s presence in Horace’s Odes and Epodes” (p. 20). More specifically, Lütkenhaus argues that Anacreon’s influence on Horace is of chief importance because it uniquely covers both lyric and iambs. While Horace is commonly described as raging in Archilochus’ angry voice in the Epodes and picking up Alcaeus’ lyre in the Odes, Lütkenhaus argues that it is Anacreon who provides a model in both poetic spheres. The other major argument of the book concerns the anonymous Anacreontea: Lütkenhaus makes the case that the Odes consciously allude to the Anacreontea rather than just share common themes with them.
Allusion, reception and anonymity, then, are three big fields in the background of this study. Lütkenhaus finds fault with three influential scholars in each of these fields for committing the sin of doing away with the author’s intention: Stephen Hinds, Charles Martindale and Tom Geue (to various degree: Hinds gets off more lightly than Martindale, let alone Geue). Lütkenhaus rejects such heresy and casts out theory. The mission of her monograph is clear: “my work will naturally focus on ‘fundamental’ philology where I treat Horace as an author whose intentional allusions and conscious intertextuality in relation to Anacreon I am trying to detect and describe” (p. 38, original emphasis).
Reports of the author’s death have been greatly exaggerated ever since Roland Barthes wrote his obituary, and authorial intention and Quellenkritik will probably always be part of Classical research. Yet particularly in Lütkenhaus’s first section, dealing with Anacreon’s influence on wine and intoxication in Horace, the focus on authorial intention frequently results in a zero-sum game: Lütkenhaus has to downplay the influence of Alcaeus in Epodes 13 and of Callimachus in Odes 1.36 in order to score the point that Anacreon is the prime influence in each case. Egypt’s sand has not dealt out great cards for such a game. Thus Lütkenhaus argues that a simple call to drinks at Odes 3.19.9–11 is an allusion to two poems of Anacreon, PMG 356a and 396 (pp. 64–6). “But there is nothing more common in sympotic poetry than the drink exhortation”, as Renaud Gagné says.[2] Examples are numerous (note esp. Alcaeus fr. 346.4–6 Voigt, Aristophanes Knights 120, 123, Anaxandrides fr. 33 Kassel-Austin, PMG 906, Plautus Persa 771, Catullus 27.1, AP 5.136 (Meleager)). My point is not that Odes 3.19 alludes to any of these passages in particular. Rather, the call to drinks in Horace’s poem is so common that “intentional allusion” does not get us very far. Or consider Odes 1.36, in which Horace celebrates the return of Numida with heavy drinking. One phrase in Horace’s poem is as close to Callimachus as can be. Compare lines 13–14, neu multi Damalis meri | Bassum Threicia vincat amystide (“Damalis, that drinker of much neat wine, must not be allowed to beat Bassus at downing the Thracian cup”) with Callimachus fr. 178.11–12 Harder, Θρηικίην […] χανδὸν ἄμυστιν ζωροποτεῖν (“to down neat wine with his mouth wide open, as the Thracians do”). Conversely, Lütkenhaus calls the line “utterly Anacreontic”, adducing PMG 356a (p. 74): ἄγε δὴ φέρ᾿ ἡμὶν ὦ παῖ | κελέβην, ὅκως ἄμυστιν | προπίω (“come, boy, bring me a cup so that I may down it”). A single footnote mentions the common argument in favour of Callimachus’ influence (p. 74 n. 244). But Horace scholars who think in categories of “authorial intention” or “primary intertext” will arguably still put their money on Callimachus. It might have been more fruitful if Lütkenhaus had expanded on her point, briefly mentioned in the same footnote, that the poem gives us a “window reference” in which we look through Callimachus at Anacreon.
The next section on “love and domination” strikes me as more successful. Thus Lütkenhaus follows Bernsdorff’s Anacreon commentary and rightly notes the debt of Odes 4.10 to Anacreon, which goes unmentioned in Horace commentaries. Particularly rewarding is the detailed reading of Odes 4.1: Lütkenhaus readily admits the model of Sappho but goes on to show that the idea of “love in old age” also brings echoes of Anacreon. The successful interpretation notably involves some backtracking on the stated methodology of authorial intention (p. 111: “I do not claim that Horace […] must have had precisely these […] poems by Anacreon in mind, and these alone”; “more or less consciously interwoven intertextual allusions”; and cf. similar qualifications on pp. 125, 142, 143). I also enjoyed Lütkenhaus’s interpretation of Odes 2.5. Scholars have long been puzzled who is addressed in the ode: an unnamed friend? Horace himself? Either choice would be unusual for Horace. Lütkenhaus makes a new and attractive suggestion: Horace addresses his lyric predecessor Anacreon, who had suffered a similar fate in love. The address is part of an allusive game.
The third and final section on Anacreon treats “satire and seniority”. “Satire” is here understood in a non-technical sense: not Latin verse satire, but aggressive humour. It is very welcome that Lütkenhaus moves beyond the often one-dimensional image of Anacreon in his future reception, and tackles themes where one might not immediately have suspected Anacreon’s influence. Thus Lütkenhaus makes the interesting point that Anacreon might be added as an influence to Epodes 12, which deals with Horace’s sexual encounter with an older woman, described in repulsive terms. It is rather less convincing to assume that Horace’s love interests Lyde and Lalage are the same person, on the grounds that they share certain traits, among which it is mentioned that they are both identified with the passing of time—but who isn’t in the Odes? After three pages of arguing the case for identification, doubts seem to have grown on Lütkenhaus, who finally backtracks and says that “the identification of Lyce and Lalage must remain open” (p. 147).
After Lütkenhaus has discussed references to Anacreon in Horace, she turns to the Anacreontea. This, in my view, is the most important and original section of the book. While Nisbet and Hubbard have stated that Horace would have regarded the Anacreontea as authentic poems of Anacreon, Lütkenhaus disagrees: Horace would have worked with the authoritative Alexandrian edition of Anacreon (as he demonstrably did with Sappho). And an Alexandrian edition of Anacreon would not have included the Anacreontea; rather, it might have been this very edition that was one factor in inspiring the fashion of Anacreontic poems. Students of Horace as well as of the Anacreontea will take note of Lütkenhaus’s argument. After Lütkenhaus has stated that Horace would have noted the difference between Anacreon and the Anacreontea, she analyses several allusions and makes interesting points on poetic frenzy and outdoor banquets. One issue that is highlighted is that Horace apparently employs “window references” as he alludes to Anacreon through the intermediary of the Anacreontea. Yet here too Lütkenhaus reaches in some cases the “limits of intertextualism”, as someone once called it: it is not always possible to draw a sharp line between those motifs and phrases that appear in the Anacreontea and those that already Anacreon used.
If the limits of reference are one point of criticism in this review, then limited references are another one. The book’s ten-page bibliography seems short, and a number of well-known Horace scholars are entirely absent, though they have all discussed aspects of Horace’s work in which Lütkenhaus is interested: Paolo Fedeli, Viktor Pöschl, Jürgen Paul Schwindt and A. J. Woodman. Steele Commager and Ellen Oliensis are mentioned, but not with their Horace monographs. One also misses a reference to Oswyn Murray’s work on banquets. But the most surprising omission is Gregson Davis. Davis’ Horace monograph Polyhymnia includes one of the most important interpretations of Horace’s banquet poems, which are of particular interest to Lütkenhaus, and Davis argues that Archilochus influenced Horace’s lyric as much as he influenced his Epodes (again, this should be of interest to Lütkenhaus, who makes a similar argument about Anacreon). Davis even wrote an article on Anacreon’s role in Horace, which is not cited.[3] As it is, Lütkenhaus’s book feels somewhat detached from recent arguments in Horace scholarship.
Lütkenhaus prints Shackleton Bailey’s text of Horace but notes that she does not always follow his more radical readings. Unfortunately, readers are given no indication where exactly the book departs from Shackleton Bailey’s text (e.g., on p. 64 where the manuscript reading miscentur is printed at Odes 3.19.12, though Shackleton-Bailey prints the conjecture miscentor). The book includes an index locorum but no general index.
Despite my reservations about some aspects of the book, scholars of Horace and of the reception of Anacreon will want to consult it and will profit from the detailed account of references to Anacreon and the noteworthy argument on the reception of the Anacreontea.
Notes
[1] H. Bernsdorff. 2020. Anacreon of Teos. Testimonia and Fragments. 2 vols. Oxford.
[2] R. Gagné. 2016. “The world in a cup.” In V. Cazzato, D. Obbink, and E. E. Prodi,
eds. The cup of song. Studies on poetry and the symposion, 226, Oxford.
[3] G. Davis. 1996. “The Figure of Anacreon in Horatian Lyric.” Hellas 7: 63-74.