"Pulvis et horror", allusion and war
Classic and contemporary in manuscript verse from the English Civil War
Last week I was thinking about Horace, Odes 1.3 and how much it matters (if at all) what a poem was originally “about”. Ezra Pound defined poetry as “news that stays news” and part of what makes any work of art a ‘classic’ — insofar as it is, and for as long as it is, since these things are not set in stone — is that it seems freshly relevant to each generation of readers. In other words, what the work is “about” effectively changes over time. Today I want to look at a few examples of what this looks like in the very lively literary culture of the mid-seventeenth century.
Often we think about the ‘freshness’ of great art primarily in personal and emotional terms: we are struck by how a late antique Buddhist monk, perhaps, writing in an unimaginably different context from our own, describes the beauty of spring in a way that we recognise; or how Catullus or Sappho evoke sexual desire in a way that still rings true. But the constantly-refreshing applicability of certain poems can be political, too. Here is someone reflecting on the mid-seventeenth century English experience of civil war by using the start of Horace Odes 1.2, a poem on the hope that Octavian (that is, the future Augustus1) might bring a lasting end to civil strife:
This is an unusually easy-to-read bit of seventeenth-century script, but a few letter forms might seem strange. This is what it says:
Epigramma votivum pro Pace
Iam satis armorum passim sensêre Britanni;
Sit postliminio Pax rediviva suo.
Mitte, DEUS, caelo ramum florentis olivae,
Sanguine diluvium desinet esse novum.2Epigram — prayer for Peace
The British people have had enough experience now of weaponry everywhere;
May Peace live again as she did before.
Send, God, a branch of blooming olive down from heaven,
Let the flood cease to be fresh with blood.3
Horace’s poem, which is one of the single most-often alluded to ancient poems in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, begins:
Iam satis terris nivis atque dirae
grandinis misit Pater et rubente
dextera sacras iaculatus arces
terruit Urbem,Enough of snow and hail at last
The sire has sent in vengeance down:
His bolts, at his own temple cast,
Appall’d the town4
So ubiquitous is this reference that any ‘iam satis’ probably triggers the thought of Odes 1.2, and any use of this phrase at the start of a poem certainly does so. (If ancient lyric poems were titled at all at this period, they were referred to by their incipit, their first few words — so iam satis terris is the beginning of Odes 1.2 but it’s also, effectively, its title.)
This little poem is an epigram, of course, not a lyric poem: it is a kind of concise distillation of the hope of the ode and the power of its concision relies partly upon the reader’s recollection of the greater length and subtlety of the lyric original. But it’s not only the first line that alludes to Horace. Stanzas 2-5 of Odes 1.2 imagine flooding — first the ancient flood of which Pyrrha and Deucalion were the only survivors (a punishment for human sinfulness) and then an imagined flooding of Rome itself, in vengeance for the assassination of Julius Caesar. There is no flood of blood in Horace, but the threatened flood of Rome (stanzas 4-5) is linked directly with the sinful loss of life in civil war (stanza 6). The epigram responds to this association by combining them.
Generations of readers of Horace have been struck by the way in which Horace’s ode uses the Deucalion flood myth to point to human sinfulness, and the obvious links with the very similar story of Noah’s ark in Genesis. The epigram literalizes this connection, since the third line refers directly to the hopeful end of the Noah story: Noah realises that the flood is finally subsiding when the dove that he has sent out returns with a fresh sprig of olive in its beak, here the ramum florentis olivae (‘branch of flowering (or just ‘flourishing’) olive’).
In the epigram, this reassuring sprig comes not from a tree, however, but caelo, from heaven, sent directly by God. It is surely very likely that olivae is specified here to suggest Oliver [Cromwell], as this play upon his name was very common in the period. This too links back to Odes 1.2, since the second half of that poem asks the question “which god will Jupiter send to save us?” — settling finally, after considering various possibilities, on Mercury in the form of Octavian. Our anonymous Latin epigram suggests that the contemporary answer to this question might be Cromwell.5
Beginning an early modern Latin poem iam satis is conventional almost to the point of being hackneyed, and there are plenty of examples — especially examples of fairly routine panegyric — where the allusion adds little, or even seems tactless. But this little epigram is a good example of how the best known poems, the most familiar “classics”, can spring into new life under the pressure of events.
Odes 1.2 is in sapphics, a metre which has sometimes been described as being associated primarily with personal rather than public poetry. Whether or not that association is generally true in antiquity, it’s obviously not true of this poem — an archetypally public ode, and the first of Horace’s odes in sapphics. It’s also very much not true of early modernity, in which sapphic stanzas were widely used for highly political or even satiric or invective verse, often in poems of vastly greater length than anything in Horace himself.
There’s a fantastic example of this kind of politico-satiric sapphic, which as far as I know has also never been published, in another of the Ashmole manuscripts, linked to this one, which contains material dating from around the same time.6 This poem, titled Querelae Britanniae (‘Britain’s Lament’), runs to a full 50 stanzas and 200 lines. It is prefixed with an epigraph from Ovid, Ex Ponto 4.3.35-6: Omnia sunt hominum tenui pendentia filo / et subito casu quae valuere ruunt (‘All the affairs of men are hanging by a slender thread / and all at once by chance those which were strong fall to ruin’) and begins:
Errat in terris homo: sperat, optat
Quaerit, explorat, stupet, ardet, alget
Nil videt rectum, queritur malorum
Omnia plena.Nascimur flentes vitio, dolentes
Viuimus paenis, movimur gementes,
Cui Deo vel quo, latet: ante portum
Nemo quiescit.Man strays on earth: he hopes, desires,
Seeks, explores, wonders, burns and freezes —
He sees nothing right, complains how everything
Is full of evils.We are born weeping for our fault, suffering
Punishment we live, groaning we move,
For or by which God, is unknown: until the harbour
No-one rests.
This poem, too, depicts a world ‘turned upside down’:
Clamor in rostris, scelus in theatris
In domo lites, in agris latrones,
Fucus in templis, dolor aut dolendus
Error ubique est.Nec thronus iusto nec opus valenti.
Nec fides vati, nec amor fideli,
Nec quies lasso, nec opes benigno
Nec satis vlli.[. . .]
Qui fuit seruus modo, nunc gubernat
Qui fuit princeps modo, nunc ministrat
Qui fuit fortis modo, nunc putrescit
Puluis et horror.Uproar in the assembly, wickedness in the theatres,
Disputes in the home, bandits in the fields,
Hypocrisy in the temples, pain or error
That causes pain is everywhere.The just man has no throne, nor the strong man work.
There’s no faith in the prophet, nor love for the faithful,
No rest for the weary, or wealth for the generous —
Not enough for anyone.[. . . ]
He who was recently a servant, now governs
He who was recently a ruler, now serves
He who was recently strong, now rots
Dust and horror.
This is a very striking poem, and though it contains no specific historical references, the probable date and context of this copy, plus the way it is titled, strongly suggest a political application. All the same, I suspect this is an example of a much more general (and, probably, significantly older) poem feeling relevant at a moment of particular social upheaval. There are two main reasons for this, the first of which is stylistic. The writing of very long political sapphic odes of this type is more typical of the sixteenth than the seventeenth century, and this particular example has clear links to medieval tradition as well. The poem uses simple sentence structures and a great deal of parataxis (where ideas are set alongside one another, rather than subordinated to one another in a more complex sentence), and there are quite a few end-rhymes. People continued to write rhyming Latin verse with enthusiasm well into the eighteenth century, but serious (rather than humourous) use of rhyme becomes much less common in the seventeenth century. In addition, the treatment of the sapphic stanza itself has an old-fashioned feel: each stanza is self-contained, with no running over from one verse to another, and the final short line to each stanza, the adonean, often feels almost ‘separable’, like a motto or tag (error ubique; nemo quiescit). These are all features that are typical of sixteenth century sapphics.
The second reason for thinking that this poem is probably not a strictly contemporary composition, and perhaps not originally about Britain at all, is because I’m aware of two other copies. A somewhat shorter version (though still 28 verses, or 112 lines), with some different stanzas, is found in BL Add MS 23229, ff. 162r-4v, a roughly contemporary (early to mid-seventeenth-century) manuscript, but a collection with a much less political feel, and in this case the poem has no title at all. Secondly, a version of the first stanza only was entered in a German albus amicorum, a book of inscriptions, quotations and well-wishes from friends and acquaintances, in March 1628.7 Given how difficult it is to trace the circulation of Latin poetry of this period, the fact that I’m aware of three copies or partial copies suggests the poem was quite popular at some point, as does the geographical diffusion and the differences in the body of the poem between the two roughly contemporary English copies. My guess would be that this is a sixteenth-century poem, possibly with roots in an earlier late medieval text.
The epigram with which we began relies for its force on a series of links and allusions to one of the best-known Horatian odes. The second poem is in an Horatian form, but a version of that form associated in particular with Latin poetry of the sixteenth century; in its context it appears a topical and original response to political disruption in England in the 1640s, but it is probably actually older. And finally, here’s a nice example, also from Ashmole 36/37, of a “classic” work you’ve probably never heard of, in this case a translated excerpt from Mantuan’s Parthenice, an epic poem praised particularly highly by Erasmus. This passage is set at the time of the birth of Christ, when Augustus — the subject of the latter part of Horace Odes 1.2 — was still emperor of Rome. This kind of impassioned but slightly ropey verse translation is common in seventeenth-century manuscripts, and I often find them very moving. What moves someone to attempt a translation of this sort? In this case, it’s hard to believe that the choice of this particular passage did not also have some political force:
Augustus with the Senate, people, Alle
fitting themselves for holy misteryes,
Shee hast’s from Tiburs Towre, comes to the Hall
or Court of Caesar, poynting to the skyes
Where in a most cleere ayre shee them did show
A mother and her babe, wrapt round about
In a bright Iris, or most fulgent Bow
Upward her face, & both her hands stretcht out
(viewing the child, and poynting with her hand)
who is that boy? (sayes shee) O Caesar peace
worship thou him. The Heavens he doth command
The Altars & the Temples now must cease.
Leaue them to him, He rules the firmament
Th’immortall heauens he orders, & doth guide
The fatall starrs under his Gouvernment
Are all subjected in the World beside.
Augustus Caesar let thy Hautinesse
be layd aside, What though thou rul’st the earth.
Thou must remember that thou art much Lesse
And art his Vassall, bragg not of thy birth
His power is infinite, & rules on high
[All] things are under his Authority.8
Octavian became Augustus in January of 27 BC. Although the three books of Odes 1-3 were published together in 23 BC, this poem is generally considered to date from before the title was conferred, probably to around 28 BC. For an old (1910) but free-to-view brief summary of the probably political context of this poem, click on the ‘Notes’ panel at the top right on this page.
This epigram is very neatly copied on a leaf of paper which has been inserted between the third and fourth tracts in Bodleian MS Ashmole 568, a bundle of material bound together, dating mostly from the first half of the seventeenth century. It is in the same hand as a series of political epigrams found in Bodleian MS Ashmole 36/37.
The final line of the epigram has some oddities. Literally, we have ‘by/in/with blood the flood may it cease to be new/fresh’. I think the essential meaning is clear but the Latin is unusual — novus (the adjective meaning ‘new’ or ‘fresh’) doesn’t usually an ablative as it seems almost to do here with sanguine. (It can be found with a noun in the dative, see Lewis & Short novus B. 2. β, but sanguine here is unambiguously ablative.) Any thoughts on this, do comment or email and I’ll edit accordingly.
This translation by Conington is an old one, but I think effective in this case. You can read the whole poem in this translation here.
Existing scholarship quite often repeats the claim that the imitation of Horace in the mid-seventeenth century was primarily a royalist affair. Perhaps this is (on average) true of English translations of the Odes (though there are plenty of counterexamples). It is certainly not true of Horatian texts in Latin, which were by far the most common way of engaging with Horace directly at the time. Despite what some classicists like to think, a sensitivity to Horace’s political pragmatism is not new.
The manuscript, Bodleian Ashmole MS 36/37 is described by the catalogue as a very large collection of English poetry of the seventeenth century, consisting of a great variety of papers, 348 leaves, bound together in the time of Elias Ashmole (1617-1692), some items in his hand. Though described as a collection of English poetry, the folio also contains, according to my records, more than 25 post-medieval Latin poems.
Albus amicorum of Eberhard Twestreng, entry from March 1628 by one Ulrich Winckel (1575-1675), a Bürgermeister in Hamburg. The manuscript has been digitised here.
Ashmole MS 36/37 fol. 185v. Latin followed by English translation. The bottom left corner of the page is damaged, removing almost all of the first word of the last line. I have conjectured that it probably said ‘All’. Described in the catalogue as a ‘translation of fifteen classical lines’, this is actually two extracts from Mantuan (1447-1516), Parthenice Mariana 3.176-85 followed by 3.206-209 (the end of the same speech), first published in 1481. You can read the Latin here, but I am not aware of an English translation of this work. The omitted section contains references to Roman mythology and to Augustus’ conquests. Omitting this section makes the passage more generally applicable. Mantuan was praised highly by Erasmus, and his Adulescentia was one of the best-known Latin works of early modernity, due to its ubiquitous use in schools. Shakespeare refers or alludes to the Adulescentia on several occasions.
Thank you for this thought-provoking essay. I can make no contribution to the subject matter, so I cannot disagree with you or even discuss it with you. The “hook” was the proposition that what a poem is ‘about’ can change over time. And that is what I am thinking about, as I attempt my own translations.