Bold—“No poet has contributed as much as Horace to Europe’s definition of itself” (2), insightful—“this was a culture which believed that verbal formulations, if expertly designed, had the power even to persuade the highest beings, or as magic to reshape the world” (75), and innovative—using the memorial cross in Durham Cathedral to muse on dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (110), Morgan’s delightful introduction to Horace evokes the impressions that Horace’s own corpus might bestow on the reader. Much like the copy of Horace’s work that Leigh Fermor carried across Europe, Morgan’s libellus accompanied me on my (less glamorous) travels for the last week, and I found his work to be a strong introduction to Horace with moments of inspired exegesis and surprising connections.
The work opens not in Rome or Horace’s Sabine estate, but in Chinese Turkestan in 1900, where Aurel Stein (an explorer and archaeologist) would read Horace during breaks in the weather or as consolation during difficult times. Morgan shows how Stein encapsulates European views of Horace as an embodiment of Western cultural values and muses on his sway as a kindred spirit, “Horace has exerted a more tangible influence on lives lived than any other pagan writer from antiquity” (3). This leads to the more expected biographical information about Horace, fitting for a chapter entitled, “Who was Horace?”, and Morgan details his early life, involvement in the civil war, and relationship with Maecenas and Augustus. Genre may influence self-representation, and Morgan helpfully points out how the trajectory of Horace’s poetry follows a suitable blueprint, “the combative forms of satire and iambus in his (comparative) youth; the more placid genre of lyric in his middle age; and the poetic letter, with its implication of retirement, after that” (9). Horace’s patronage by Maecenas and Augustus, always a topic my students find difficult to understand (“How can Horace sell out like that?!”), is explained as a mixture of amicable gift-exchange and veiled economic reciprocation (11-12).[1] Horace’s ability to charm the reader (or individuals such as Maecenas) has often come through selective reading; Morgan addresses the fact that a number of Horace’s poems contain offensive material (e.g. the sexism of Epod. 8 and 12) and makes a plea for separating the aesthetic from the ethical in approaching his works.
The Satires contain some of that offensive material (e.g. Sat. 1.2), but Chapter 2 offers a suggestive overview of Horace’s two satirical books with a strong sense of its interplay with Lucilius and the common themes and tropes that flavor this genre. A reading of Sat. 1.7 acts as the basis for many of Morgan’s insights about the libertas of satiric expression, the conversational nature of these sermones, and Lucilian antecedents. Morgan is sensitive to the ways in which Horace has innovated Lucilius, however, and he nicely points out the Callimachean refinement of Horace’s collection as well as poetic touches such as the word order in 1.5 or the manner in which “the speed of his metre as he stops and starts in his efforts to shake off his irritating companion in 1.9 is delicately varied” (26). The second book of Satires has slightly divergent concerns, with food being the primary subject matter, and the analysis of Catius’ culinary precepts in 2.4 and the banquets of 2.3 and 2.8 are found to be representative of the genre’s dramatic interest in human vice and its expression (with its correction suggested).
The same time-period in which Horace was honing his musa pedestris, he was also engaging in an iambic project, the Epodes, whose range of topics and tones has often stymied reader appreciation. Aggressiveness and varietas, however, defined the works of Archilochus and Hipponax, Horace’s primary iambic predecessors,[2] so his updated expression of the genre resonates in this pessimistic civil-war period. While amicitia may alleviate some of the gloom, dissimulation, and depression, Morgan suggests that this book, with its conflicted Horatian speaker, depicts “a culture in crisis” (44). Poems that feature the witch Canidia help create this mood of despair, as do Epodes 8 and 12 with their crass vocabulary. Morgan stresses how certain explicit lines, such as ore allaborandum est tibi (8.20) would be pronounced ōr’allabōranduwst tibi and the line “makes the reader’s mouth do things it might not choose to” (46). Horace is capable of reaching sublime heights in the Epodes (e.g. 13, 16), but the depths are the proper stomping ground for such iambic poetry.
The Odes features such sublime moments more than any other collection of Latin poetry. Morgan situates his discussion of the Odes with an initial consideration of the ‘Cleopatra Ode’ (1.37), which allows him to also investigate the importance of the symposium (and drinking—nunc est bibendum!) and Alcaeus to Horace’s lyric project. Morgan recognizes how difficult it can be to sum up the verve and variety of Horace’s carmina, but his close reading of Odes 2.7 gives a strong impression of the ways politics, friendship, ethics, allusion, and poetic brevitas impact interpretation. The philosophical undertones that bolster Horatian lyric are examined with an excerpt of Odes 3.29, where the linguistic and metrical effects of that poem help its messaging, as Morgan explains, “the Latin words mea / virtute me involvo, ‘I wrap myself in my virtue’, are set in such a way that m’involvo (the words coalesce very effectively as he wraps himself tightly), describing the action of wrapping a cloak around himself, gains special emphasis from placement in the middle of the third line” (66).[3] Horace’s ‘Roman Odes’ and Carmen Saeculare indicate how Horace can inform Augustan ideology, whereas his love poetry paints a picture of Horace as a rather weary and blinkered participant. Morgan concludes with an evocative survey of the fourth book of Odes, indicating how Horace revisits, in an intensified form, topics and themes of the previous odes and how his political connections have influenced his worldview, “Lyric has found its ideal subject in a city and empire at peace. Or to turn that around, Augustan Rome has become what Horace’s Odes have striven to make it, by the power of his poetry: a lyric space” (80). This chapter will be very useful for students or teachers, and I can imagine assigning it in my Latin literature courses.
Horace’s Epistles are often understudied, but Morgan makes a strong case for (re)examining these intricate and original verse letters. Self-scrutiny, the philosophical idea of recte vivere, and Horace’s own libertas are major topics of the first collection of Epistles, and Morgan points out how the epistolary frame works to highlight these topics as quasi-conversations with absent friends. Horace’s advice and aphorisms (e.g. caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt, 1.11.27) are shown to come from an imperfect source, which increases their sincerity, “He also understood that a message of self-improvement was more palatable when it came from someone with his own flaws, and Horace never comes across as anything but a human addressing other humans” (89). Morgan’s close attention to Horace’s language is on display in his reading of the second book of Epistles and Ars Poetica, which concludes the chapter.
The final chapter offers a quick overview of Horatian reception with particularly astute comments about translations of the ‘Pyrrha Ode’, appropriations of the Carmen Saeculare in 1930s Fascist Italy, Kipling’s engagement with Horace in his later life, and Statius’ Silvae. Morgan details how Horace’s varied corpus can speak to different nationalities, “if Horace was an Englishman, he was also just as surely a German, a Frenchman, a Pole and a Hungarian, embodying a male ethos that was pan-European” (108), and how his poems continue to influence authors today.
This is a fine introduction, however, as the title states, it is very short, and some readers may be disappointed that favorite poems such as Sat. 1.1, Odes 2.3, and Odes 3.25 are missing from discussion. That being said, the poems that Morgan chooses are approached with refreshing clarity and concision – much like Horace himself, Morgan says a great deal with few words. This work will be very useful for students or general readers, but, as I have suggested, even scholars of Horace will benefit from this study.
Notes
[1] The implicit tension behind such writing is a topic Horace himself addressed at Epist. 1.17, 1.18, and the conclusion of Epist. 2.1, and can be found more explicitly in Suetonius’ biography of Horace. I appreciate Morgan’s comic conclusion about Horace’s independence and poetic sensibility, “Horace wrote what and how he, and no one else, chose to write, and a glance at what survives of Maecenas’ verse or Augustus’ prose should make us heartily grateful for that” (12).
[2] Morgan is careful to also delineate how Callimachus’ Iamboi also influenced formal elements of Horace’s book (e.g. the number of poems), but Horace’s iambic persona seems to more fully replicate his Archaic Greek forefathers.
[3] Morgan will go on to point out that such a cloak evokes a Cynic philosopher, whose idea of virtue was following nature so strictly that they only owned a staff, bowl, and a single cloak (67).