For many years Stephen Harrison has worked on Horace’s poetic monument. Horatian Readings now allows Harrison to look back on his own edifice, a distinguished career in Latin literature: the book collects eighteen of his essays on Horace (two of them published here for the first time). But in some sense the book is not the whole monument so much as a building block: it is restricted to Harrison’s work from the last twenty years, and to papers originally published in edited volumes rather than journals. The selection principle is defensible, and in many respects sensible. As Harrison notes, in times of JSTOR and the like, older journal articles are easily accessible in their original form of publication, whereas edited volumes might not always be. Yet the decision comes at a cost; for instance, Harrison’s seminal article on Odes 4.2 and Pindar, the Dircean swan, is left out.[1] And it would be a difficult ask for all chapters in the present volume to soar to the interpretative heights of this or some other missing papers. Still, the chapters gathered here offer much important material. In what follows, I will highlight some of the main themes that run through the book.
Harrison has been one of the finest close readers of Latin poetry in the last decades, and unsurprisingly the papers gathered here include illuminating discussions of numerous passages from Horace. At his best, Harrison moves subtly through an entire ode with numerous original touches in his close readings, until we see the ode in a new light. Chapter 15, for instance, offers what is in my view the definitive interpretation of Odes 2.19 on Bacchus. In a similar vein, Chapter 6 tackles head-on a characteristic of Horace’s poems that must have felt central to many readers: regularly odes take surprising turns, end at a different point from where they started, tempt over-zealous textual critics to speak of separate poems. While this characteristic is easy to feel, it is not always straightforward to explain or categorise, but Harrison’s close readings subtly tease out such internal movements. I am however less convinced that these turns have much to do with their central position in the ode, as Harrison claims. The issue is not just that Harrison’s definition of centre as +/- one ‘stanza’ is mathematically hazardous since, on this definition, 12 lines of a 28-line poem would qualify as ‘centre’, but also that one can just as easily encounter such turns towards the end of an ode (e.g., the Ich-Schluss at C. 1.5.13, 1.6.18 and 2.1.37, or the turn at 4.1.33).[2] Still, the poet is for turning, and Harrison can explain these turns like few others. Yet not all chapters succeed equally in making us see the greater whole of the close readings: Chapter 9 on the religious architecture of Rome in Horace’s Odes takes us on a stroll through Odes and Rome, and while it is pleasant to revisit these places with Harrison as Cicerone, the chapter ultimately offers a sequence of fine local readings rather than a larger rethinking of Horace’s engagement with Roman material culture. One practical strength of the volume, however, is its index, which allows readers easily to check which passages of Horace Harrison has discussed; scholars will find it a consistently rewarding point of entry into his close readings.[3]
Good sense is another characteristic evident on virtually every page of the book. Harrison avoids extremes of interpretation, aiming appropriately for Horatian mediocritas, and often it is golden. Thus he argues that some arrangements of Horace’s poems within their collections are meaningful, while avoiding the excessive diagramming that characterised some American criticism of the 1980s. He pays due attention to Suetonius’ biography of Horace, but always with healthy scepticism. He argues that the Roman Odes can be read as a unit, but not as a single poem. And when Harrison tackles the thorny issue of the dating of Odes 3.6, his solution displays such common sense and is so convincing, that one wonders why this ever was a problem. Yet for all this sense, I missed at times sensibility. A chapter on homoerotics in the Odes opens up an important topic: there are a number of notable instances of male–male desire in Horace’s love poetry (though probably much less than in Alcaeus). Harrison adduces numerous passages, convincingly including passages in which the description of an attractive male in a male-female relationship may hint at the male poet’s desire. But Harrison arguably plays it too straight: the chapter ultimately reads more as a careful stock-taking of passages than as an attempt to theorise what male–male desire might mean within Horace’s lyric programme.
Inter- and intratextuality have perhaps been the dominant critical tools in Latin studies over the last decades, and Harrison has been one of their most influential proponents.[4] For many readers trained on Harrison and his contemporaries, such intertextual sensitivity now feels second nature. Many of the chapters gathered here are a reminder of the enduring appeal of this methodology, which more recently has spurred innovation in studies on Latin prose and classical reception (the latter again involving Harrison). One perennial question raised by this approach concerns the threshold of what counts as an allusion. Harrison presents the evidence with exemplary fairness in each case, but in one instance—Chapter 8 on the possible influence of the Homeric Hymns on the Odes—I was not fully persuaded that the evidence suffices to establish a deliberate engagement. More broadly, the prominence of intertextual explanation can at times mean that other kinds of inquiry—material, medial, affective or gendered—recede into the background. There is, for instance, relatively little sustained dialogue with deconstructivist approaches of the kind developed by Michèle Lowrie:[5] while her close readings are duly cited, their theoretical implications are not pursued. Harrison offers a compelling account of what Horace’s poetry is, whereas deconstructivist critics have drawn attention to the strain involved in sustaining that account, and to what the poetry resists becoming.
Harrison is generous in his praise of other scholars, including ones who have published in languages other than English. At times, however, I wondered whether his intratextual references went a little far: this is no doubt partly an artefact of the collected-papers format, but I noted that almost two out of the eleven pages in the bibliography consist of his own entries. Harrison’s preface states that he prints the Oxford text of Wickham, who, as one textual critic recently put it, has ‘a relish for the uncouth and is not dismayed by the hideous’;[6] but readers need not be alarmed: Harrison merely uses Wickham as a vulgate and notes the frequent places in which he departs from this text.[7] The publisher may take note that cross-references are incomplete (i.e. some chapters are exclusively cited by their original publication venue and date) and that some typos I found were not present in the original publications, even in cases where these too were published by De Gruyter.
A career spent on Latin poetry—it is perhaps unsurprising that Harrison has found Horace’s career a particular field of interest. As he surveys Horace’s career across satire, lyric and epistles, and tracks how Horace negotiates these career moves, he repeatedly draws attention to the way in which Horace’s light humour tempers what might otherwise verge on pomposity. When Horace looks ahead to his lyric achievements and imagines striking the stars with his head (C. 1.1), Harrison suggests that this fantasy may also imply a rather less sublime outcome—a nasty headache (pp. 14–15). Or when Horace celebrates his poetic immortality and prophesies his transformation into a swan, Harrison alerts us to the gently absurd quality of the image.[8] Similar moments recur in the Epistles, where self-assertion is repeatedly undercut by self-deflation (pp. 13–15, 20 on Epist. 1.19, 1.20, 2.1.267–70, 2.2.213–6; Ars 470–6). One of Harrison’s greatest strengths is his ear for this quiet, pervasive irony. It is therefore fitting that he should linger on Horace’s vision of the underworld in Odes 2.13, an impressive statement of poetic immortality—but again not without humorous touches: here the shades are first beguiled by Greek lyric poets and then almost joined by Horace himself—but also by Cerberus who humorously drops his hundred sets of ears as he listens to Greek lyric (pp. 231–2). Throughout Horace’s career, as Harrison aptly puts it (p. 21), we encounter a poetics of “self-elevation […] self-inscription […] with a beguiling touch of self-deprecation”. This makes for a career that is as humane as it is impressive.
Notes
[1] Harrison, S.J. 1995. ‘Horace, Pindar, Iullus Antonius, and Augustus. Odes 4.2’. In Harrison, S.J., ed. Homage to Horace. A bimillenary celebration, 108–27. Oxford.
[2] See Esser, D. 1976. Untersuchungen zu den Odenschlüssen bei Horaz. Meisenheim am Glan. Esser’s study is cited elsewhere by Harrison, though not in the present chapter.
[3] A few further points might be added: on the metapoetics of C. 1.38 (p. 72), compare Alessandro Barchiesi’s suggestion that Horace’s coronae may also function as a kind of coronis; at p. 62, Denis Feeney’s proposal that Maecenas may lie behind Mercury’s metrically equivalent appellation (Maia nate) as giver of the Sabine farm at S. 2.6.5 would have made a natural point of comparison; and at pp. 141–3, brief reference to the Sapphic stanza of C. 1.12 might have strengthened the connection with Marcellus, wedding poetry and Sapphic colour.
[4] See Harrison, S.J. 2007. Generic enrichment in Vergil and Horace. Oxford.
[5] Lowrie, M. 1997. Horace’s narrative Odes. Oxford. For a theoretical treatment of Horace and politics, also see Fowler, D.P. 1995. ‘Horace and the aesthetics of politics’. In Harrison, S.J., ed. Homage to Horace. A bimillenary celebration, 248–66. Oxford. Harrison discusses Horace’s politics in this book, but does not engage with the more destabilising implications of Fowler’s framework.
[6] Thus Richard Tarrant, who is currently preparing the new Oxford text of Horace, and here applies to Wickham the trenchant criticism of A.E. Housman on an editor of Manilius (‘A new critical edition of Horace’. In Hunter, R.L., Oakley S.P., eds. 2015. Latin literature and its transmission, 293. Cambridge).
[7] We are thus spared the hideous Ligurinum at C. 4.10.5, though I would have been content to retain faciem in the same line where Harrison prints Thomas’ fruticem. Harrison also athetizes l. 17 of C. 4.8 (p. 135); if all lines were retained, as in Wickham’s text, the poem would violate Meineke’s law that all odes consist of a number of lines divisible by four. Elsewhere Harrison prints his own conjecture (es at 4.9.39, p. 150) and his own text of C. 2.1 (p. 176), with a noteworthy defence of audire in l. 21.
[8] See Harrison, S.J. 2017. Horace. Odes Book II. Cambridge, pp. 237–8, and see p. 224 in the commentary for this ‘mixture of entertainment and more important material’ in C. 2.19.