Alexander Pope’s Imitations of Horace are one of those texts which are still much cited — obviously, you can’t really talk about the reception of Horace without mentioning them — but, I suspect, not much read, even by the dwindling band of enthusiasts for eighteenth-century literature. This is a shame because — although not close translations — they are by far the most successful Englishing of the hexameter Horace that we have, and a fine introduction to this part of Horace. That makes them, though, sound a bit dry which is the opposite of the truth. Pope’s extraordinary verse still sings with ferocity and precision; and alongside the satiric force for which Pope is famous, I find the the subtlety of his interpretation of Horace very moving. I thought I’d write today about the beginning of probably my favourite of the imitations, the last Pope wrote: Epistles I.1.
The poem is addressed in the original — like almost all the opening poems of Horatian books — to Maecenas, Horace’s patron, but in Pope’s version to Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Pope’s friend. In March 1738 Bolingbroke was in France, but due back to England shortly. Pope was nearly 50 in 1738 and, suffering throughout his life from poor health, he probably knew that he might not live much longer: in fact he died in 1744. It was Bolingbroke who had originally suggested that Pope should imitate Horace, and he is appropriately enough the dedicatee of this last of the formal imitations:
St John, whose love indulg’d my labours past
Matures my present, and shall bound my last!
Why will you break the Sabbath of my days?
Now sick alike of Envy and of Praise.
Publick too long, ah let me hide my Age! 5
See Modest Cibber now has left the Stage:
Our Gen’rals now, retir’d to their Estates,
Hang their old Trophies o’er the Garden gates,
In Life’s cool Evening satiate of Applause,
Nor fond of bleeding, ev’n in Brunswick’s cause. 10
In the opening lines of Horace’s poem, to which this section corresponds, Horace casts himself as a retired gladiator, now forced back into the arena by his master (that is, Maecenas). The gladiator motif combines both public performance and military achievement; but gladiators were mostly slaves, bound to a master by oath, who faced death for public amusement. This makes for an uneasy opening to Horace’s poem, and one which raises starkly the question of personal freedom in general, and autonomy within patronage in particular: a central theme of the Epistles. Pope is a bit less interested in freedom in this sense, but this late version of Epistles 1 keeps turning our attention to death — as here, in the opening lines, in the wonderful line In life’s cool evening, satiate of applause. The phrase satiate of applause partly echoes spectatum satis (‘sufficiently proven’) in line 2 of the Latin, but otherwise the phrase is Pope’s addition.
Pope is doing various other things, too, in this verse paragraph. Most obviously, he divides the single figure of the retired gladiator, Veianus, to whom Horace compares himself, into two: Colley Cibber (1671-1757) and the Generals returned to their estates, who are not so keen to bleed for ‘Brunswick’s cause’ (George II belonged to the house of Brunswick). Gladiators fought, but they did so for public entertainment — Pope’s expansion into Cibber and the generals neatly suggests both of these elements.
Veianus, the gladiator named by Horace, was famous. Sanadon, in an edition of Horace that Pope probably used, notes that Veianus’ popularity was so great that he was repeatedly forced to make a comeback until he left Rome completely. Cibber, an actor and impresario who had been made Poet Laureate in 1730, had similarly ‘retired’ from the theatre four years earlier, but made intermittent comebacks for another eleven years. Pope repeatedly pokes fun at Cibber in the Imitations, and modest is undoubtedly ironic.
In Horace, Veianus dedicates his arma (weapons, not trophies) by fixing them on the wall of a temple of Hercules. Pope’s retired generals fix them pompously upon their own garden gates, treating their estate as a kind of temple to themselves. The satire is sharpened, in the original edition, by one of Pope’s many footnoted numbers, keying us to the specific line of the Latin, which was printed alongside.
Let’s skip forward a few lines to Pope’s handling of a very famous Horatian passage, in which the poet announces a change of direction:
Farewell then Verse, and Love, and ev’ry Toy,
The Rhymes and Rattles of the Man or Boy:
What right, what true, what fit we justly call,
Let this be all my care—for this is All: 20
To lay this harvest up, and hoard with haste
What ev’ry day will want, and most, the last.
The Latin lines that stands behind the opening of this paragraph are very well-known. They were widely quoted at the time including by Pope himself. In a letter dated July 1714 he had remarked: “My poetical affairs drawing toward a fair period, I hope the day will shortly come when I may honestly say
Nunc versus et caetera ludicra pono,
Quid verum atque decens, curo et rogo et omnis in hoc sum.
Most modern interpretations of Horace take versus et caetera ludicra (‘verses and other trifles’) to refer specifically to the lyric poetry of the Odes. But Desprez, whose edition of Horace Pope owned and certainly referred to, includes satirica in his gloss, taking the transition to be one not primarily of form or metre — from lyric to hexameter — but of tone and philosophical seriousness: Horace’s Satires were, like the Epistles, written in hexameter, but the Epistles are concerned more directly with philosophy.
At the end of this passage, Pope expands significantly. Horace has simply condo et compono quae mox depromere possim: ‘I store and arrange things so that I may soon drawn upon them’. Pope’s version, To lay this harvest up, and hoard with haste / What ev’ry day will want [i.e. need], and most, the last adds an explicit mindfulness of death — the last [day] — that is quite typical of Horace in general, but isn’t in these lines.
Horace then tackles the question of his lack of philosophical allegiance, his tendency to take what he likes from various ancient schools:
But ask not, to what Doctors I apply?
Sworn to no Master, of no Sect am I:
As drives the storm, at any door I knock, 25
And house with Montagne now, or now with Locke.
Sometimes a Patriot, active in debate,
Mix with the World, and battle for the State,
Free as young Lyttelton, her Cause pursue,
Still true to Virtue, and as warm as true: 30
Sometimes, with Aristippus, or St. Paul,
Indulge my candor, and grow all to all;
Back to my native Moderation slide,
And win my way by yielding to the tyde.
Pope’s Sect does not have the modern connotation of a fringe or extreme religious group: it just means a specific school of philosophy.1 In this passage, too, Pope has expanded considerably the vivid but general sketch in Horace of two approaches to life: active flexibility or intransigent probity. Horace includes only one name — Aristippus, who taught that pleasure was the chief aim in life. Pope includes many names: Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), representing a relatively relaxed and pragmatic attitude, is opposed to John Locke (1632-1704), the founder of English empiricism and here standing for unbending integrity.
Several other references require some glossing. The Patriots were those actively opposing Robert Walpole (1676-1745), a Whig politican and the de facto Prime Minister for 20 years until 1742; Lyttelton refers to George, first Baron Lyttleton (1709-93), MP for Okehampton, a friend of Pope’s and a Whig opponent of Walople. The most striking feature of Pope’s version, though, is his conjunction of Aristippus and St Paul. Aristippus’ focus on pleasure — which implies that the appropriate conduct depends on the context of the moment — seems to have reminded Pope of 1 Corinthians 10. 33: ‘Even as I please all men in all things, not seeking mine own profit, but the profit of many, that they may be saved’.2 Probably linked to this is his addition of the line ‘Back to my native Moderation slide’. Horace is well-known for advocating for the ‘golden mean’, a position of moderation in all things, but he does not articulate this here. St Paul, however, recommends: ‘Let your moderation be known unto all men’ (Philippians 4: 5).
The language of the New Testament continues to resonate in the next, remarkable verse paragraph, which is the last I’ll discuss in this piece:
Long, as to him who works for debt, the Day; 35
Long as the Night to her whose Love’s away,
Long as the Year’s dull circle seems to run,
When the brisk Minor pants for twenty-one;
So slow th’unprofitable moments roll,
That lock up all the Functions of my soul; 40
That keep me from myself; and still delay
Life’s instant business to a future day:
That task, which as we follow, or despise,
The eldest is a fool, the youngest wise;
Which done, the poorest can no wants endure, 45
And which not done, the richest must be poor.
There’s a marked shift of tone here, from an apparently detached survey of the options in the previous section to a strongly-worded and emotional commitment to the task of self-examination. That transition is in Horace, too, but it is emphasised much more strongly in Pope’s version, which begins by translating quite closely (lines 35-8, corresponding to lines 20-23 in the Latin), but then expands and raises the register significantly. Lock up all the Functions of my soul, for instance, translates quae spem / Consiliumque morantur agendi gnaviter id . . . (‘that impede my hope and aim of doing keenly that which . . .’). The idea expressed by keep me from myself is not in Horace here, though as so often it is found elsewhere in Horace.3 The same is true of the following clause: and still delay / Life’s instant business to a future day. Though elements of this phrase (morantur, agendi) have parallels in the Latin, it is not a close translation of Epistles 1. Horace does elsewhere, however, often warn against placing trust in the future rather than taking the opportunity of the present moment.
Finally, Pope expands again in lines 43-6. Horace states simply that the wisdom of self-knowledge is beneficial for the rich and poor alike, and that its neglect harms young and old equally. Pope goes a step further by suggesting that wisdom makes the poor wealth and the rich poor — Which done, the poorest can no wants [needs] endure, / And which not done, the richest must be poor. This has a paradoxical boldness more reminiscent of the New Testament than of Horace himself: ‘the first will be last and the last will be first’ (Matthew 19: 30).4
The Imitations have been particularly poorly served by recent scholarship.5 The standard discussion remains Frank Stack’s Pope and Horace, published back in 1985. It’s an excellent, sensitive interpretation, with a detailed chapter on each major poem, but as far as I’m aware, there’s no easily available edition of Pope’s text itself that really helps you read these poems as they were intended: that is, alongside the Latin.6 (But do add a comment for the benefit of readers if you have any suggestions.)
This is a real loss for lots of potential readers: not only anyone who would like to appreciate fully one of the greatest English classical imitations, but also anyone who would like to know Horace better, or to get a feel for what Horace has meant for English readers. Pope’s version is not a literal translation, but it is steeped in his love and knowledge of Horace as a whole, and his versions also draw frequently on a very rich early modern commentary tradition from which we can still learn.7 If you don’t have any Latin, but would like to read Horace’s hexameter verse, for my money Pope is still the best place to start.
Two of the commentaries Pope used also use this word to gloss this passage. Dacier has French secte, and Desprez quam sectam.
See also 1 Corinthians 9.22 ‘I am made all things to all men’.
Compare e.g. Epistles 1.14.1 Vilice silvarum et mihi me reddenti agelli, ‘Bailiff of my woods and of the little farm which returns me to myself’).
We might think also of Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16.19-31) and James 2:1-7.
I think you’d have very little chance of securing an academic position as an expert on Pope these days, and anything involving Latin would certainly not help your case, so it’s perhaps not surprising that there has not been much recent work.
Unfortunately the readily available one-volume edition of Pope’s poetry by John Butt, based on the Twickenham edition, is almost useless for these purposes. It does not print the Latin and the commentary makes almost no reference to Horace’s text. For a proper parallel text, you can refer back to Volume IV of the proper Twickenham edition (see image), if you can somehow get hold of it. This makes the relationship to the Latin immediately clear, but the commentary has almost nothing to say about what Pope is doing with it.
This is one area in which Stack is weaker, as he largely ignores Pope’s use of Latin commentaries in particular.
"Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed," said Samuel Johnson. Poets who make it their business to remind us of home truths have fallen into disrepute and are eyed with suspicion, if they're eyed at all, these days; but I don't think it's because our memories have gotten better.
Thank you for this! I've been thinking for a while, "I really need to read Horace: I wonder if my Latin is up to it?" ... and knowing that it's not, really, I haven't known where to turn.
A privilege to read that! Thank you.