Superb, thank you. That feels like a model response to a poem, and makes me, with little Latin, trust the poem is what you say it is,, something of a wonder.
Another facet of the poem that strikes me as characteristic of Horace is how he achieves such depth in what appears superficially quite simple and straightforward. (This is what makes the Odes so hard to teach to high school students and even undergraduates.) One technique I think I see here works quite like the rhetorical device known as *praeteritio*. The narrator tells us that neither X nor Y nor Z resists or is immune to the effects of wine. Not the philosophically minded, not champions of Roman tradition, not the woebegone precariat at Rome. That sounds wonderful until we remind ourselves that 95% of our lives is not lived under the influence. THAT rereading of this ode makes the last line pointed in a way that is pure Horace: the light of dawn returns the *pauper* to a life dominated by anxiety and fear.
Nice point thank you. Reading Horace Odes 3.13 was when I was 13 was actually the reason I carried on with Latin. (I had just given it up at school but was having some classes out of school and I just thought it was the most incredible thing: if this is what Latin could do then I wanted to carry on with it after all!) I was fortunate later on to read a lot of Horace at (a different) school because we did most of Odes 3 + a handful of others for A level, at 15-16, and then I read all of Horace at university. I think actually the best class I ever taught at university was probably the Odes 1 course I taught in 2016-17 at KCL. So I am very keen on teaching Horace but all the same I do know what you mean. It’s a much subtler and more complex style than, say, Ovid or Catullus.
It used to be fashionable (and maybe still is) to say that no-one really appreciates Horace until late middle-age, which always annoyed me because this obviously meant “until you are a middle-aged man” and I loved Horace from the very first encounter as a very young girl. But to be fair, I can think of many, many writers who report reading Horace at school and finding it just a pointlessly complex slog and then discovering that it had sort of lodged in them somehow and they came back to it much later in life. So obviously this is quite a common phenomenon and reason enough perhaps for teaching it even to children and teenagers who don’t really “get” it at the time.
Talking curriculum and pedagogy is my favorite kind of talk, so thank you for this response. To be clear: I noted only the difficulty of teaching Horace's lyrics to teenagers. I didn't assert that we shouldn't. And to say more about why: the degree to which the beauty and import of Horace's lyric poetry emerge from the conversation he is having with his Greek models is special to these odes. I can't prove that the *Odes* is in its own category on this score, but it does feel that way. (Somehow appreciation of Vergil's oeuvre, even the *Eclogues*, seems to depend less on the reader's very close familiarity with his influences.) Yes, it's certainly possible to fall in love with the *Odes* even if one has never even heard the names Alcaeus and Pindar. But the object of that love can only be poetry that Horace might not immediately recognize, if he were to look through the eyes of that reader.
In my experience, it's intertextuality, above all, that mystifies the modern reader of Greek and Latin poetry. I suspect that in the UK, there is much greater tolerance for an approach to education that amounts to this: read it all anyway, even if you've never even heard of Sappho. Soak it all up. And quite probably that is a better approach than wringing all the enjoyment out of reading poetry by treating it as a puzzle to be solved. First, fall in love. Later, begin to learn how fortunate you are that you did.
What an interesting response thank you. Although a large part of my career has been based precisely upon explicating intertextuality -- including very often to and in Horace and across as well as within languages -- I'm not sure if I agree with you about the beauty of the odes depending in particular upon the conversation he is having with Greek models. I don't deny of course that that conversation is a very important part of what he is doing artistically and also of course that the great majority of that conversation must be lost to us since so much of the relevant Greek and earlier Latin no longer exists. I also agree that what an Horatian ode is primarily "doing" must look pretty different to a modern reader who doesn't know Greek lyric vs one of Horace's own contemporaries, but since so much has been lost it's going to look pretty different anyway. I suppose I would make a slightly stronger claim than you might for the accessibility of the beauty of Horatian lyric without that background.
Having said all that, I started Greek only a year or so after Latin, when I was about 12, so even at A level I was reading a great deal of Greek alongside a lot of Latin. So I can't really imagine myself back into a scenario of someone reading Horatian lyric without any sense of what it is like to read Greek, or of the differences between Latin and Greek. I should say also that I had an almost unimaginably excellent sixth form education. We read a huge amount beyond the notional syllabus in both Latin and Greek and indeed only began the "set texts" in the final months of the course.
"I started Greek only a year or so after Latin, when I was about 12, so even at A level I was reading a great deal of Greek alongside a lot of Latin."
In stark contrast, I attended a public high school in a rural, poverty-stricken region of the American South. If my class had 120 students at our graduation, fewer than a dozen of us ended up with a baccalaureate. I first began studying Latin and classics in a first-rate program at my Ivy League university. Greek I began as a sideline during a master's program in education, supplemented with a summer intensive course, and only really began learning in earnest during a doctoral program in classics, which is insane.
What drew me to the discipline wasn't New Criticism-style close readings of, say, Catullus's Lesbia poems, as much fun as it is to frolic in that playground. It was precisely this awareness of how each artifact (poem, temple, whatever) comes to us ripped, as it were, from its context, recovery of which is essential to a full understanding. The more I could learn and the better my imagination, I realized, the closer I could come to restoring that artifact to itself. In that endeavor, I suspect my background gave me the zeal of the convert.
My failure to make much sense of ode 3.7 in an interview coming up for 15 years ago initially left me cold, even after the Pyrrha ode at GCSE, but with maturity I have come to appreciate the beauty and brilliance of Horace. Your essay analysed the deceiving simplicity of his language in a lucid, fascinating way. I am curious as to why the final line has 'fugat'. Is it permissible to have an indicative after 'dum' ('until') if the consequence is certain and not contingent? Or does Horace humorously invite us to imagine the partygoers refusing to put the lamps out and wine away "while returning Phoebus is putting the stars to flight", a domestic event inconceivably holding up a god's plans; or an impatient god irritated by his fellow Olympian revellers, like a sensible older sibling clearing up the mess in the kitchen, if we take Liber, Gratiae and Venus as more than mere poetic personifications, as I think you correctly do. In any case, 'dum' offers a juxtaposition to echo the one you alluded to: Horace's ambivalence between pleasure and piety, passion and reason.
Great question! Yes, in Latin up to around this time it is normal to see the indicative after ‘dum’ when it’s a purely temporal sort of ‘until’ — where there’s no hint of purpose/conditionality. After that point you start to see the subjunctive even in those instances. Unseen Horace in an interview sounds quite tough!
Such a lovely act of interpretation that seems to reenact before our eyes something of the lyrical magic of Horace and Pindar. A pleasure to read. There is so much lovely subtlety buried by the standard or maybe any English translation, and you help us glimpse beyond our limits. What else could one ask or hope for?
Superb, thank you. That feels like a model response to a poem, and makes me, with little Latin, trust the poem is what you say it is,, something of a wonder.
I love it so much that you dreamed about the poem!
Thanks Marian. I wish I could reconstruct the fake dream-Latin!
I really like your essay on Odes 3.21. Well done!
Another facet of the poem that strikes me as characteristic of Horace is how he achieves such depth in what appears superficially quite simple and straightforward. (This is what makes the Odes so hard to teach to high school students and even undergraduates.) One technique I think I see here works quite like the rhetorical device known as *praeteritio*. The narrator tells us that neither X nor Y nor Z resists or is immune to the effects of wine. Not the philosophically minded, not champions of Roman tradition, not the woebegone precariat at Rome. That sounds wonderful until we remind ourselves that 95% of our lives is not lived under the influence. THAT rereading of this ode makes the last line pointed in a way that is pure Horace: the light of dawn returns the *pauper* to a life dominated by anxiety and fear.
Nice point thank you. Reading Horace Odes 3.13 was when I was 13 was actually the reason I carried on with Latin. (I had just given it up at school but was having some classes out of school and I just thought it was the most incredible thing: if this is what Latin could do then I wanted to carry on with it after all!) I was fortunate later on to read a lot of Horace at (a different) school because we did most of Odes 3 + a handful of others for A level, at 15-16, and then I read all of Horace at university. I think actually the best class I ever taught at university was probably the Odes 1 course I taught in 2016-17 at KCL. So I am very keen on teaching Horace but all the same I do know what you mean. It’s a much subtler and more complex style than, say, Ovid or Catullus.
It used to be fashionable (and maybe still is) to say that no-one really appreciates Horace until late middle-age, which always annoyed me because this obviously meant “until you are a middle-aged man” and I loved Horace from the very first encounter as a very young girl. But to be fair, I can think of many, many writers who report reading Horace at school and finding it just a pointlessly complex slog and then discovering that it had sort of lodged in them somehow and they came back to it much later in life. So obviously this is quite a common phenomenon and reason enough perhaps for teaching it even to children and teenagers who don’t really “get” it at the time.
Talking curriculum and pedagogy is my favorite kind of talk, so thank you for this response. To be clear: I noted only the difficulty of teaching Horace's lyrics to teenagers. I didn't assert that we shouldn't. And to say more about why: the degree to which the beauty and import of Horace's lyric poetry emerge from the conversation he is having with his Greek models is special to these odes. I can't prove that the *Odes* is in its own category on this score, but it does feel that way. (Somehow appreciation of Vergil's oeuvre, even the *Eclogues*, seems to depend less on the reader's very close familiarity with his influences.) Yes, it's certainly possible to fall in love with the *Odes* even if one has never even heard the names Alcaeus and Pindar. But the object of that love can only be poetry that Horace might not immediately recognize, if he were to look through the eyes of that reader.
In my experience, it's intertextuality, above all, that mystifies the modern reader of Greek and Latin poetry. I suspect that in the UK, there is much greater tolerance for an approach to education that amounts to this: read it all anyway, even if you've never even heard of Sappho. Soak it all up. And quite probably that is a better approach than wringing all the enjoyment out of reading poetry by treating it as a puzzle to be solved. First, fall in love. Later, begin to learn how fortunate you are that you did.
What an interesting response thank you. Although a large part of my career has been based precisely upon explicating intertextuality -- including very often to and in Horace and across as well as within languages -- I'm not sure if I agree with you about the beauty of the odes depending in particular upon the conversation he is having with Greek models. I don't deny of course that that conversation is a very important part of what he is doing artistically and also of course that the great majority of that conversation must be lost to us since so much of the relevant Greek and earlier Latin no longer exists. I also agree that what an Horatian ode is primarily "doing" must look pretty different to a modern reader who doesn't know Greek lyric vs one of Horace's own contemporaries, but since so much has been lost it's going to look pretty different anyway. I suppose I would make a slightly stronger claim than you might for the accessibility of the beauty of Horatian lyric without that background.
Having said all that, I started Greek only a year or so after Latin, when I was about 12, so even at A level I was reading a great deal of Greek alongside a lot of Latin. So I can't really imagine myself back into a scenario of someone reading Horatian lyric without any sense of what it is like to read Greek, or of the differences between Latin and Greek. I should say also that I had an almost unimaginably excellent sixth form education. We read a huge amount beyond the notional syllabus in both Latin and Greek and indeed only began the "set texts" in the final months of the course.
"I started Greek only a year or so after Latin, when I was about 12, so even at A level I was reading a great deal of Greek alongside a lot of Latin."
In stark contrast, I attended a public high school in a rural, poverty-stricken region of the American South. If my class had 120 students at our graduation, fewer than a dozen of us ended up with a baccalaureate. I first began studying Latin and classics in a first-rate program at my Ivy League university. Greek I began as a sideline during a master's program in education, supplemented with a summer intensive course, and only really began learning in earnest during a doctoral program in classics, which is insane.
What drew me to the discipline wasn't New Criticism-style close readings of, say, Catullus's Lesbia poems, as much fun as it is to frolic in that playground. It was precisely this awareness of how each artifact (poem, temple, whatever) comes to us ripped, as it were, from its context, recovery of which is essential to a full understanding. The more I could learn and the better my imagination, I realized, the closer I could come to restoring that artifact to itself. In that endeavor, I suspect my background gave me the zeal of the convert.
My failure to make much sense of ode 3.7 in an interview coming up for 15 years ago initially left me cold, even after the Pyrrha ode at GCSE, but with maturity I have come to appreciate the beauty and brilliance of Horace. Your essay analysed the deceiving simplicity of his language in a lucid, fascinating way. I am curious as to why the final line has 'fugat'. Is it permissible to have an indicative after 'dum' ('until') if the consequence is certain and not contingent? Or does Horace humorously invite us to imagine the partygoers refusing to put the lamps out and wine away "while returning Phoebus is putting the stars to flight", a domestic event inconceivably holding up a god's plans; or an impatient god irritated by his fellow Olympian revellers, like a sensible older sibling clearing up the mess in the kitchen, if we take Liber, Gratiae and Venus as more than mere poetic personifications, as I think you correctly do. In any case, 'dum' offers a juxtaposition to echo the one you alluded to: Horace's ambivalence between pleasure and piety, passion and reason.
*contingent
Great question! Yes, in Latin up to around this time it is normal to see the indicative after ‘dum’ when it’s a purely temporal sort of ‘until’ — where there’s no hint of purpose/conditionality. After that point you start to see the subjunctive even in those instances. Unseen Horace in an interview sounds quite tough!
An amazing bit of criticism and explanation, thank you.
Thank you!
Such a lovely act of interpretation that seems to reenact before our eyes something of the lyrical magic of Horace and Pindar. A pleasure to read. There is so much lovely subtlety buried by the standard or maybe any English translation, and you help us glimpse beyond our limits. What else could one ask or hope for?
Thank you Robert.