I was in London for two days at the start of this week attending and speaking at a conference in honour of the Latinist William Fitzgerald, on the occasion of his retirement. William was a colleague for several years when I was working at KCL, and also a near neighbour in London. If you don’t know his work, he has written on an unusually wide range of topics in Latin literature, including a charming book about Latin poetry for those who don’t read Latin. William started out in comparative literature and all his work is informed by his wider knowledge of, and appreciation for art, music and poetry in English, German and French as well as Greek and Latin. This sort of comparative approach to the value of classical literature has become less common, and it’s something I particularly appreciate.
Many senior UK classicists spoke at the event, but I was particularly struck by a passing comment in Philip Hardie’s characteristically profound and suggestive paper on how we could or should apply the idea of the sublime, as derived from Longinus but developed in Kant and Burke, to classical poetry. I’ve heard Philip give many papers and I don’t think I’ve ever done so without being prompted to think afresh about at least one poem, usually — as on this occasion — something he mentioned merely in passing. His scholarship always has this kind of depth and understated range. (But if you felt immediately alarmed by that daunting succession of the words sublime, Longinus, Kant and Burke, don’t panic — I am not going to write today about any of these things.)
On Tuesday, Philip mentioned briefly Horace, Odes 1.3, an enigmatic poem addressed by Horace to the boat that will carry his (so he says) dear friend, Virgil, on the occasion of Virgil’s departure for Greece. Here is the Latin for those of you who want to read it (otherwise skip ahead to an English translation below):
Sic te diva potens Cypri,
sic fratres Helenae, lucida sidera,
ventorumque regat pater
obstrictis aliis praeter Iapyga,
navis, quae tibi creditum 5
debes Vergilium; finibus Atticis
reddas incolumem precor
et serves animae dimidium meae.
Illi robur et aes triplex
circa pectus erat, qui fragilem truci 10
commisit pelago ratem
primus, nec timuit praecipitem Africum
decertantem Aquilonibus
nec tristis Hyadas nec rabiem Noti,
quo non arbiter Hadriae 15
maior, tollere seu ponere volt freta.
Quem mortis timuit gradum
qui siccis oculis monstra natantia,
qui vidit mare turbidum et
infamis scopulos Acroceraunia? 20
Nequicquam deus abscidit
prudens Oceano dissociabili
terras, si tamen impiae
non tangenda rates transiliunt vada.
Audax omnia perpeti 25
gens humana ruit per vetitum nefas;
audax Iapeti genus
ignem fraude mala gentibus intulit;
post ignem aetheria domo
subductum macies et nova febrium 30
terris incubuit cohors
semotique prius tarda necessitas
leti corripuit gradum.
Expertus vacuum Daedalus aera
pennis non homini datis; 35
perrupit Acheronta Herculeus labor.
Nil mortalibus ardui est;
caelum ipsum petimus stultitia neque
per nostrum patimur scelus
iracunda Iovem ponere fulmina. 40
As always with Horace, there is no single satisfactory translation of this poem, but Chris Childers’ version, published some time ago in the online magazine Literary Matters (and also in his new anthology of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse) has many virtues, and is certainly very readable:1
May Venus guide you as you go,
with help and light from Helen’s starry brothers;
may Aeolus send one wind to blow
up from Calabria, and still the others,so that, good ship, you can repay
the debt you owe us all. Release him whole
and hale in Attica, I pray,
and safeguard Virgil, who is half my soul.He had a heart encased in oak
and triple bronze, whoever first set sail
on the fierce sea in a frail bark
with no fear of the hurtling southern galelocked with the northern, wrestling,
or rainy stars, or how the Southwind raves,
the Adriatic’s fitful king,
mighty to calm, mighty to whip the waves.What death could a man fear, who looks
on the churned sea with monsters swimming under
unfazed, or on your shipwreck rocks,
Acroceraunia, o Cliff of Thunder?To no avail the wise god split
the continents with the estranging sea,
since our keels still race over it,
unholy, sailing where they shouldn’t be.Reckless to flout the ban of gods,
humankind plunges further, deeper, higher.
Reckless Prometheus’s frauds
won for the world of men ill-gotten fire.When fire out of heaven’s hearth
was stolen, famine and a new cabal
of fevers infiltrated earth;
once slow and distant, inescapableDeath suddenly sped up the pace.
Daedalus soared the void empyrean
on wings denied the human race,
and toiling Hercules sacked Acheron.For mortals, nothing is too great;
though our absurdity would climb the sky,
our constant crime will never let
Jove lay his anger, or his lightning, by.
Philip remarked that this poem is now generally considered by classicists to be about Virgil’s poetry as much (or more) than about his person: the dangerous voyage for which Horace urges caution is understood as his embarking upon the aesthetically and perhaps also politically risky project of the Aeneid itself. Philip pointed particularly to several aspects of the description of the storm and stress in Odes 1.3 which have links to ancient descriptions of the sublime. Longinus’ influential description of two types of sublime style — that of Demosthenes and that of Cicero — links the first, Demosthenian type with the drama and urgency of the lightning bolt.2 As Philip noted, this motif structures the poem about Virgil’s voyage — in the first part, the poet is afraid of a storm that might engulf the boat carrying Virgil, and the first half of the poem ends with the striking long Greek proper name Acroceraunia. Chris Childers, like several other translations of this poem, sensibly incorporates a gloss of the Greek into his translation as ‘Cliff of Thunder’.
The second half of the poem moves from a consideration of the dangers of sailing to the related theme of impious human daring more generally — the invention of sailing, of fire (by Prometheus), Daedalus’ attempt to fly, Hercules’ breaching of the underworld. As a result of relentless human scelus (wickedness, we might say ‘sin’), Jove never gets a chance to set down his iracunda . . . fulmina, the bolts of lightning that express his anger. What seems in the first half of the poem like wary praise for human courage and daring, albeit cut with concern for a friend, gives way in the second half to something much more ambiguous. This raises some obvious questions: if this is in fact a poem about the Aeneid, it’s not a very positive one, and might even be taken as warning against any such enterprise. It is a difficult poem to interpret, being typically both evasive and also structured with satisfying care — as well as the motif of the storm, note how the gradum, the step of death, returns in lines 17 and 33, linking the two halves of the poem, as does perpeti (25) and patimur (39), two forms of the same verb. Like so many of Horace’s odes, it seems to end somewhere quite different from where it began, resisting summary.
But what struck me about Philip’s remark, in the moment, was that although I know the scholarship on Odes I pretty well and have read and taught these poems in Latin over and over again, when I think of Odes 1.3 I don’t think about the Aeneid at all. For me, this poem is linked to a series of other poems in the first book of odes which include prominent storms and descriptions of the vagaries of fate — especially the immediately preceding Odes 1.2 (which begins with a great storm, conflated partly with civil war, and ends with the appearance of Augustus), 1.7, 1.12, 1.14 (often called the “ship of state” poem), 1.34 (on Horace’s own change of heart in religious matters as a result of a dramatic experience) and 1.35, the ode to Fortuna, which is also a prayer for safe passage, though this time for Augustus.3 That is, for me this poem belongs to a series of odes in Book 1 which are about the relationship between impiety and human agency, returning in particular to how and why we act both as individuals and as groups at moments of personal, social and political crisis — discovery, innovation, rebellion, civil war.
Horace arranged his poetry books with care, and the question of the relationship between Odes 1.2 and 1.3 is a particularly pressing one. Odes 1.2 begins with a storm and it is also concerned with, as it were, ‘original’ sin: not in this case the relentless human desire to challenge the gods, but the political ‘original’ sin of civil war. Odes 1-3 was published in 23 BC, in the immediate aftermath of the Roman civil war, culminating in the battle of Actium in 31 BC, at which Octavian (who would become Augustus) decisively defeated Antony and Cleopatra.4 Unlike 1.3, in which the second half of the poem is more negative than the first, 1.2 works the other way around: after a very worrying first half, the second part of the poem asks to which god Jupiter will entrust the task of scelus expiandi, of expiating the Roman sin. After cycling through a series of possibilities, it settles on Mercury, who merges with the figure of Augustus.
Roman (and wider human) sinfulness, then, is at the heart of both 1.2 and 1.3. On this kind of theme, early modern commentators are often much more helpful than modern ones, and all the early commentaries, taking their cue from Heinsius, are indeed much concerned with how to gloss line 25: Audax omnia perpeti / Gens humana ruit per vetitum nefas (literally, ‘Bold to endure everything, the human race rushes through forbidden crime’).5 I think they are right to see this as the nub of the poem, as well as its rich Pindaric-style nugget of gnomic wisdom. What might it mean to say that humans are “bold to suffer”? Audax is paradigmatically active; perpeti (the infinitive of perpetior, to endure, bear steadfastly, suffer) seems almost as paradigmatically passive.
Heinsius solves the conundrum by pointing out that the Greek verb πάσχειν can mean both ‘experience’ (or suffer) something and ‘act’ or ‘do’, and argues that Horace is using perpeti in a Greek sense here.6 Many subsequent early modern commentators repeat his point, some saying straightforwardly that the verb must therefore be understood here with an active meaning.7 But the same verb returns in a similar context — also associated with human sinfulness — at the end of the poem: neque / Per nostrum patimur scelus / Iracunda Jovem ponere fulmina (‘because of our wickedness, we do not allow Jove to set down the lightning-bolts of his anger’). Here the meaning of the verb is clearly, I think, right in the middle: Jove’s lightning bolts are hurled by him, not us; but it is our wickedness which, in this odd circumlocution, does not allow him to stop. It is a shame that the dual meaning of English ‘suffer’, as both ‘allow’ and ‘endure something painful’, has fallen out of use, because this is exactly the sense here.8 Audax omnia perpeti surely also oscillates between meanings: for its effect, the line needs to retain the primary meaning of perpeti as to suffer, as well as its secondary, Greek-style meaning of ‘act’. The point is that in human affairs the two are inseparable.
If you risk your life by sailing to Greece, and get caught in a storm, are you the agent or the victim of events? Why does innovation and ambition always also cause unforeseen suffering? And if you find yourself caught in a tempest of political upheaval, fraught with the essential wrongness of a people set against themselves, how should one act or allow oneself to be acted upon? (Not an entirely irrelevant question this week, in France.)
All readers, I think, agree that political crisis is part of the backdrop of the whole of Odes 1, and that something great is in play in its third poem. The Aeneid is, for sure, a great poem, one of the very greatest, and Virgil’s enormous talent and literary daring are surely relevant to the ode. But all the same I feel that if we make this a poem about the Aeneid, we risk losing sight of the ethical and religious questions that Horace himself places at its heart. Most people don’t need to decide what they think about the politics or the sublimity (or otherwise) of the Aeneid. But everyone (even President Macron) has to grapple with the fallibility and the unintended consequences of human action.
While the Ciceronian type is smoother and more graceful. We might recall here various other influential ancient stylistic contrasts, such as between epic grandeur and Callimachean smallscale perfection; and between Horatian and Pindaric style, as sketched by Horace himself in Odes 4.2 and very often echoed in later poets, right down to Thom Gunn’s poem to Robert Duncan.
I’ve written a version of Odes 1.14 myself (you can read it here, with some notes that pop up if you click on the ‘translator’s note’), though my favourite version is probably that by one John Polwhele, written in the immediate aftermath of the execution of Charles I in 1649. The epigraph to this essay is taken from the end of that translation. I have written a bit about Odes 1.35, including Seamus Heaney’s translation of it as a response to 9/11, here.
Childers’ translation is tellingly at its most impressionistic at this point: ‘Reckless to flout the ban of gods, / humankind plunges further, deeper, higher.’ Conington is a a bit more literal, offering: ‘Daring all, their goal to win, / Men tread forbidden ground, and rush on sin.’
Heinsius: Graeci consuetudine loquendi usitata, passionem cum actione confundunt. Πάσχειν enim saepe est quod τὸ ποῖειν [cites Aristophanes and a commentary on Aristophanes] Id est: perpeti non tantum de iis qui patiuntur, sed & de iis qui agunt usurpatur. My edition of Heinsius’ notes on Horace was printed in Leiden in 1629.
Dacier for instance remarks, Les Interpretes se sont trompez ici, pour n’avoir pas pris garde que ce perpeti ne veut pas dire soufrir, mais agir, entreprendre, à l’imitation du πάσχειν des Grecs. Car comme le savant Heinsius l’a remarqué, les Grecs confondent souvent la passion avec l’action, & mettent πάσχειν pour ποῖειν, patir pour faire. [Cites same bit of Aristophanes and its commentary.] Desprez hedges his bets by glossing the phrase: Quaelibet agendo patiendoque moliri, ut nihil grave aut arduum videatur, ‘to strive for anything by doing and by enduring, so that nothing seems difficult or serious’. My edition of the commentaries of Dacier and Sanadon was printed in Amsterdam in 1735. My edition of Desprez (a 17th century commentator) was printed in London in 1823.
Suffer meaning allow as in, for instance, the scriptural verse ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 19: 14).
From your free-wheeling baby buggy in the boulangerie last week, to today’s voyage through the seas of Horatian translation, your explorations always lift the heart!
I like this reading very much! At a glance in LSJ I couldn't find evidence for Heinsius's active sense of πάσχειν, tho I very much want to believe him. Another potential Grecism in the context: audax with a complementary infinitive perpeti, a construction Horace is the first to use with this adjective (I'm not sure the free use of the infinitive really did sound Greeky, but it is often described so by earlier commentators).