The Complete Odes and Epodes Read online

  THE COMPLETE ODES AND EPODES

  ADVISORY EDITOR: BETTY RADICE

  QUINTUS HORATIUS FLACCUS was born in late 65 B.C. at Venusia in Apulia. His father, though once a slave, had made enough money as an auctioneer to send his son to well-known teachers in Rome and subsequently to the university at Athens. There Horace joined Brutus’s army and served on his staff until the defeat at Philippi in 42 B.C. On returning to Rome, he found that his father was dead and his property had been confiscated, but he succeeded in obtaining a secretarial post in the treasury, which gave him enough to live on. The poetry he wrote in the next few years impressed Virgil, who introduced him to the great patron Maecenas in 38 B.C. This event marked the beginning of a life-long friendship. From now on Horace had no financial worries; he moved freely among the leading poets and statesmen of Rome; his work was admired by Augustus, and indeed after Virgil’s death in 19 B.C. he was virtually Poet Laureate. Horace died in 8 B.C., only a few months after Maecenas.

  W. G. SHEPHERD was born in Kent in 1935. He was educated at Brentwood School and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read the English tripos, graduating in 1958. During National Service he was commissioned in the Royal Artillery. Nowadays he lives at Southgate, in North London, with his wife, daughter and two sons, and in 1991 retired from working as a contracts executive in a major electronics firm. He plays the piano and clavichord a great deal – mainly late baroque and classical music. Four volumes of his poetry have been published: Sun, Oak, Almond, I (1970), Evidences (1980), Self-Love (1982) and The First Zone of the Growth Furnace (1984). His translation of Propertius’s Poems was published in the Penguin Classics series in 1985.

  BETTY RADICE read classics at Oxford, then married and, in the intervals of bringing up a family, tutored in classics, philosophy and English. She became joint editor of the Penguin Classics in 1964. As well as editing the translation of Livy’s The War with Hannibal she translated Livy’s Rome and Italy, the Latin comedies of Terence, Pliny’s Letters, Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and The Letters of Abelard and Heloise for the Penguin Classics. She edited and introduced Edward Gibbon’s Memoirs of My Life for the Penguin English Library, edited and annotated her translation of the younger Pliny’s works for the Loeb Library of Classics, and translated from Italian, Renaissance Latin and Greek for the Officina Bodoni of Verona. She collaborated as a translator in the Collected Works of Erasmus in preparation by the University of Toronto, edited an eight-volume production of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the Folio Society, and compiled the Penguin Reference Book Who’s Who in the Ancient World. Betty Radice, who was an honorary fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and a vice-president of the Classical Association, died in 1985.

  HORACE

  The Complete Odes and Epodes with the Centennial Hymn

  TRANSLATED, WITH NOTES, BY W. G. SHEPHERD

  WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY BETTY RADICE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017 India

  Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196 South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL England

  www.penguin.com

  This translation first published 1983

  24

  Translation copyright © W. G. Shepherd, 1983

  Introduction copyright © Betty Radice, 1983

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 9781101492727

  For Michael Benson and Peter Whigham

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Select Bibliography

  Translator’s Foreword

  Epodes

  Odes, Book I

  Odes, Book II

  Odes, Book III

  Centennial Hymn

  Odes, Book IV

  Appendix: Suetonius, The Life of Horace

  Notes

  Glossary of Proper Names

  Index to Poems

  INTRODUCTION

  It is unfashionable today to look into a poet’s background to gain a better appreciation of his poetry; and yet such places as Rydal Water, Laugharne, the Lincolnshire wolds, and Oxford – still branchy between towers in spite of an increasingly base and brickish skirt – gave something to their poets to carry through life and to influence their writing. The difficulty with the poets of ancient Greece and Rome is that, more often than not, we simply do not know enough about them as individuals to be able to guess at the influences at work on them, possibly because they chose to tell us little or nothing. Sulmo mihi patria est, wrote Ovid, and his statue stands in modern Sulmona; but Rome, not the Abruzzi, was his spiritual home. Juvenal too was evidently quick to leave his native Aquinum in Volscian country for all that Rome could offer him. Mantuan Virgil is, of course, one exception; another is Horace, about whom we know a good deal. Horace enjoyed writing about himself, either quite factually in his longer conversational poems, or in teasing hints in his lyric odes. Three places move in and out of his poetry: the small provincial town in southern Italy where he spent his early childhood; Rome at a time of political upheaval and literary activity; and his refuge from the pressures of urban life – the villa and small farm he owned in the pleasantly wooded Sabine hills not far from modern Tivoli.

  Horace fixes the date of his birth himself in addressing his faithful wine-jar ‘that was born like me when Manlius was consul’ (III.21). Lucius Manlius Torquatus and Lucius Cotta were consuls in 66–65 B.C. The Life of Horace which Suetonius included in his biographies of the poets adds the day: 8 December.1 His father was a freed slave who had worked as a coactor, an auctioneer’s broker or assistant, and retired to Venusia (Venosa), a small settlement of ex-soldiers in Apulia down near the heel of Italy. Like many of us lucky enough to be born in a region of character, Horace never lost the feeling that this was where he belonged. He is ‘a son ofLucania – or is it Apulia? For the settler at Venusia ploughs on the border of both’ (Satires II. 1.34–5).2 There the ‘familiar hills’ of Apulia are ‘scorched as usual by the Scirocco’, which Horace calls by its regional name, Atabulus (Satires I.5.77–8); there he was ‘born by sounding Aufidus’ (IV.9.2), the river Ofanto, which provides the powerful simile of Odes IV. 14.25–8:

  As bullish Aufidus rolls on,

  flowing by the realms of Apulian Daunus,

  and rages and threatens the cultivated fields

  with horrifying floods…

  One of his grand Pindaric odes (111.4) moves straight from an invocation of the Muse Calliope to the poet’s childhood in the Muses’ special care:

  On pathless Vultur, beyond the threshold

  of my nurse Apulia, when I was exhausted

  with play and oppressed with sleep,

  legendary wood-doves once wove for me

  new-fallen leaves, to be

  a marvel to
all who lodge in lofty

  Acherontia’s eyrie and Bantia’s woodlands

  and the rich valley farms of Forentum…

  As Fraenkel remarks (Horace, p. 274), the three townlets named were ‘presumably unknown to anyone who had not lived in that far-off part of Italy’. And in the coda to Odes III his confidence in his ‘monument more lasting than bronze’ shows him as a prophet expecting honour in his own country:

  Where churning Aufidus resounds, where Daunus

  poor in water governed his rustic people,

  I shall be spoken of as one who was princely

  though of humble birth, the first to have brought

  Greek song into Latin numbers.

  Horace mentions no other relative, not even his mother, but in Satires 1.6 he pays tribute, in terms both affectionate and unsentimental, to his father, who thought the local school not good enough for his gifted son, and evidently wanted to remove him from the snobbery of the freeborn centurions’ sons:

  He was a poor man with a few scraggy acres, yet he wouldn’t send me to Flavius’ school where the important boys, the sons of important sergeant-majors, used to go, with satchel and slate swinging from the left arm, clutching their tenpenny fee on the Ides of every month. Instead he courageously took his boy to Rome…

  Horace writes with feeling; here perhaps is a childhood humiliation remembered over the years.

  In Rome he had the best teachers, including Orbilius, who thrashed Livius Andronicus’ Latin version of the Odyssey into his pupils, unaware that he would be immortalized as plagosus (Epistles II.1.70). He would also study rhetoric and Greek, which as a southern Italian he must have known to some extent already. Again he writes affectionately of the father who escorted him through the streets as his paedagogus, taking the opportunity to point out as warnings or examples the persons they met. ‘And so he would talk my young character into shape’ (Satires 1.4.120), and awake the boy’s interest in the quirks of human nature that he retained for life. After school came a university education, which for young Romans meant Athens:

  I had the luck to be raised in Rome, where I learned from my teacher

  how much harm was done to the Greeks by the wrath of Achilles.

  A little more was added in the way of a liberal training

  by Athens; there I was keen to distinguish straight from crooked

  and to go in search of truth among the Academy’s trees.

  (Epistles II.2.41–5)

  All this ended after Julius Caesar was murdered in March 44 B.C. At the end of August Brutus arrived in Athens. There, says Plutarch (Brutus, 24), he attended lectures at the Academy, discussed philosophy, ‘and appeared to be completely engrossed in literary pursuits. But all this while, without anyone suspecting it, he was making preparations for war… and at the same time he rallied to his cause all the young Romans who were studying in Athens.’ One of them was Horace, aged not quite twenty-one, and for the first time not under the watchful eye of his father. There is no suggestion that, like Cicero’s son, he had any strong political feeling against tyranny; he is more likely to have joined Brutus on romantic impulse or simply to go along with his fellow-students. He followed his hero to Asia Minor, and by the time of the fighting at Philippi he had been made a military tribune – one of six young officers in temporary command of a legion, as an emergency measure in the battle – despite his humble origins and lack of experience. At the second battle, in November 42 B.C., Brutus was defeated and killed himself, and Horace fled with the remnants of the army. He says nothing of how he escaped, only that he threw away his shield. If that is literally meant it would be practical, for a shield could only slow down a man running for his life; but it would be recognized by any educated audience of his poetry as a familiar motif. The Greek lyric poet’s, Archilochus, Alcaeus and possibly Anacreon, had all said the same of themselves.

  The shield discarded is a symbol of cowardice, and it marks something which Horace might well have put aside as part of a youthful episode in his life which was best forgotten. Instead, his failure on the losing side and his loyalty to the leaders (who were defeated but held to the ideals they fought for) keeps recurring; for instance, he never loses his admiration for Cato. The defeat at Philippi in a sense marks the end of Horace’s youth; the army of Brutus and Cassius was the last to fight with liberty as its cause. It is touched on like a raw nerve in a brief mention in line 25 of III.4 (‘the broken line at Philippi’), and prompts one of the most delicately tactful of the Odes (II.7), the welcome to an unknown friend who had not fled from the battlefield but retained his loyalty to the lost republican cause and gone on to fight for Pompey’s nephew, Sextus Pompeius:

  O my friend and oldest comrade…

  … so often led with me

  into extremity by our general

  Brutus; who has restored you

  to citizenship, your native

  Gods and Italian skies? With you I knew

  the rout at Philippi and my shield,

  to my shame, left behind

  where manhood failed and words

  were eaten. Luckily Mercury

  bore me away, in my fright, in a cloud:

  but the undertow sucked you back

  to the weltering straits of war.

  The mock-heroic reference to his rescue by Mercury, in the style of a Homeric hero, is wholly characteristic of Horace’s ironic self-depreciation; but it does not mask the sense of personal inadequacy revived by thoughts of Philippi.

  Once back in Italy, with his wings clipped, as he says himself (Epistles 11.2.50), his father apparently dead, and his modest patrimony of house and farmland in Venusia confiscated, Horace took to writing verse to make a living, or rather to invite a patron to support him. More solid remuneration came from the post he obtained after the amnesty of 39 B.C. From the Suetonian Life we know that he became a clerk to the quaestors in the Treasury, which was also a record office, where State documents were copied and stored. The work may not have been arduous and could have been delegated; he seems still to have been holding it several years later, when Satires II.6 was written.

  His position was radically changed when Maecenas, a wealthy, cultivated eques and personal adviser to the emperor, offered him patronage on the recommendation of the poets Virgil and Varius, and presented him with an estate and farm in the Sabine hills, in the valley of the Digentia (now Licenza), some fourteen miles beyond Tibur (Tivoli) 3 :

  This is what I prayed for. A piece of land – not so very big, with a garden and, near the house, a spring that never fails, and a bit of wood to round it off. All this and more the gods have granted.

  (Satires II.6.1–4)

  In about 35 B.C. he published his first book often Satires, saturae or miscellanies, for which the model was the Roman Gaius Lucilius, the metre that of the standard Latin hexameter, and the subject the faults and follies of man. Horace himself refers to them as sermones – a term which aptly describes their easy conversational flow. All ten poems are dedicated to Maecenas, and are presumably the ones chosen for publication out of a wider range of sermones which had been made known by public readings; Satires 1.4 is written in self-defence against accusations of personal malice and suggests that Horace was already known for this kind of verse.

  At the same time he must have been working on the early Epodes; a collection of seventeen was published in 31 B.C. The name is Greek, derived from epōdos stichos, the shorter line of an iambic couplet. Horace always calls them his iambi.

  I was the first to show

  the iambics of Paros to Latium, keeping Archilochus’ rhythms and fire, but not his themes or the words which hunted Lycambes.

  (Epistles I.19.23–5)

  Here Horace is claiming (as he is later to claim for the greater metrical variety of the Odes) that he is introducing something quite new into Latin verse, namely the iambic metre of Archilochus of Paros. There is too little surviving of Archilochus’ poetry for us to make a fair comparison: Fraenkel (p.27 ff.) qu
otes a passage as a source for the tenth epode only to show the difference between its fierce invective and Horace’s literary adaptation, which was not directed against any unfortunate Lycambes. This is not unlike his extended use of Lucilius as a model for the Satires. Possibly Horace’s debt is no greater than that of Virgil to Theocritus in his pastoral poems; the tone can often be more like that of Hellenistic epigram.

  The ten years between Philippi and Actium had been politically disturbed; first by the proscriptions of republicans, the last fling of the army at Utica, and the continued resistance of Sextus Pompeius, who was not finally defeated until 36 B.C.; and then by the growing tension between Octavian and Mark Antony which culminated in open rupture in 32 and declaration of war on Egypt, and ended with the victory at Actium (in 31 B.C.) and the capture of Alexandria. Some of the Epodes reflect these troubled times. Epode 7, on the suicidal civil wars in Rome, was probably written between 38 and 36; 1 6, perhaps Horace’s first wholly serious poem, was inspired either by, the Perusine War of 41 or, more probably, by a renewed outbreak of war with Sextus Pompeius in 38; for the first time Horace speaks of himself as an inspired prophet, a vates haranguing an imagined assembly of the Roman people and urging them to escape to the mythical Islands of the Blest. His vision owes something to Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, already published in 40, and the description of the toil-free bounty of nature is rich in loving detail:

  where every year the earth, untilled, yields corn;

  and the vines, unpruned, forever bloom;

  and the never failing sprigs of olive bud;

  and dusky figs adorn their trees;

  and honey drips from the hollow oak; and the stream

  with plashing feet leaps lightly down from the lofty crag…

  Epodes 1 and 9 are both addressed to Maecenas, the first reflecting Horace’s anxiety and devotion to his friend about to take part in the engagement at Actium, the other evidently written when reports of the sea-battle and Cleopatra’s defeat were encouraging but victory was not yet certain. It is interesting here to see Horace ignoring possible criticism. By the time the Epodes were published it was common knowledge that Maecenas did not, after all, join Octavian on this historic occasion.