2. Tragic History, Lyric Expiation,
and the Gift of Sacrifice
The assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C.E. ushered in a new wave of civil warfare in a Roman state still reeling from the turbulent clashes of the first triumvirate, the perilous and shifting alliances of Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus. The next thirteen years witnessed acts of singular brutality as the puer vindex, “the avenging boy” Octavian, Caesar's great-nephew and adopted heir, set about to avenge his “father” and consolidate his power. For those who doubted the nervy resolve of the freshly bearded adolescent, the ruthless murders of the proscriptions spoke with determined if bloody authority. The hit list created by the second triumvirate, Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian, made examples of their enemies by terror, as they freely employed the extremes of visual symbolism. The fate of Cicero, prominent statesman and orator, sent a persuasive message: apprehended as he made his escape to the sea, Cicero adorned the forum, his decapitated head framed by severed hands. Perhaps, as Plutarch suggests, this eminent victim of the proscriptions owed the final touches of his gruesome end to a vindictive Antony, himself the victim of Cicero's Philippics (Cic. 48–49); but Octavian later displayed his own capacity for unassisted cruelty. When, after the dissolution of the second triumvirate, the forces of the Antonine faction had abandoned the city of Perusia to the besieging Caesarians in 41 B.C.E., Octavian had the entire town council of the renegade city systematically executed (see Syme 1960 [1939], 212, with sources).
It is no coincidence, then, that Horace's famous ode to Pollio, the first poem of the second book of Odes, has been construed as a warning to a man who, having sided with the Antonians at the time of Perusia, later undertook a history of the civil wars.
[1] See André 1949 for a full discussion of Pollio's biography.
Indeed, Horace's ode sheds light on[2] Macrobius 2.4.21: “at ego taceo: non est enim facile in eum scribere qui potest proscribere.”
Though Pollio lived out his life in easy neutrality after the decisive defeat of Antony at Actium in 31 B.C.E., Horace nonetheless poetically associates his person with the hazard of writing about the past, manifest in the poem as the potential for explosive repercussions-whether emotional or actual-inherent in addressing topics of political delicacy. But the nature of violence as vindictive, demanding reciprocity, goes deeper and lies at the very heart of the civil wars—at the heart, at least, of Augustan writers' own conception of the turmoil of the late Republic. It is partly in response to this idea of unceasing violence that Horace assumes the sacred office of lyric priest in many of his political odes.In this chapter I suggest that Horace's adoption of the role of sacerdos (civic priest) in the Roman Odes is implied in the motif of expiation that governs the ode to Pollio. I see Odes 2.1 as establishing a generic paradigm for understanding the persuasive force of the religious rhetoric of the Roman Odes. By constructing the civil wars in ways that invoke the genre of tragedy, Horace draws on the connotations of drama as a mimesis of sacrificial ritual; such generic associations combine with his own lyric as a ritual offering and effect a symbolic purification through tragic catharsis. For a Roman audience familiar with generic conventions, these poems construct history in a way that simultaneously implicates the present generation in a tragic cycle of violence even as it offers citizens the possibility of expiation. At the same time, the revocatio (calling back) at the end of Odes 2.1 signals a deferral of the treatment of political themes, and the civil wars in particular, until the beginning of the third book (Lowrie 1997, 186). However, the political and historical dimension is always woven into Horatian personal narrative: I therefore also discuss Odes 2.13 as a poem whose invocation of ritual devotio (”military self-sacrifice” or “formal curse”) sheds further light on this discourse of tragedy and purification. Finally, given the nature of sacrifice as a form of gift, I consider this symbolic transaction in the context of the exchanges of literary and political patronage. Ultimately, the trope of lyric sacrifice has sociopolitical connotations: though a gift directed at the gods on behalf of the people, the poet's sacrificial expenditure also reciprocates the regime's benefactions through the creation of ideology sympathetic to Augustus.
A persona often adopted by the Augustan poets, the vates is a figure generally conflated with the Horatian sacerdos and understood to combine the
[3] The fullest treatment of this persona is Newman 1967. Callimachus, in the preface to Aet. 23–24, famously compares writing to sacrifices when Apollo admonishes him to fatten calves but keep his lines slender. In his discussion of Propertius 4.6, Cairns (1984, 140–41) understands the poet-priest figure in the context of choral hymn and the ritual setting in which choruses would function. For the topos of writing as sacrifice, see also Menander Rhetor 437.20–52; Falter 1934, 77–78; Wimmel 1960, 299. On priests and their political and ideological function in ancient Rome, see Beard 1990 and North 1990a, 1990b, 1990c.
Though the two terms are necessarily connected, particularly as metaphorical postures assumed by poets, there is a clear distinction between the social roles to which these concepts refer (Lyne 1995, 184–85): a vates constitutes a visionary or prophet, but not in a necessarily official capacity; sacerdotes, on the other hand, are specifically priests, public “high-status” officials of the state whose function was to advise on religious matters and to oversee rituals.[4] See Beard and Crawford 1985, 30–31; Beard and North 1990, 47. For a full discussion of Roman priests, see Wissowa 1902, 410–30.
This is an important distinction, and one to which we shall return in the analysis of Odes 3.1–6; nonetheless, as my reading of 2.1 and other related poems suggests, Horace's posture as a “visionary” in many ways anticipates his public office of the priesthood. Moreover, though it is clear that the Horatian role of sacerdos Musarum (priest of the Muses) fits the larger context of Augustus's renewal of religion and the restoration of temples, critics have not pursued the full implications of this social and religious discourse of ritual in their interpretations of Horace's political poems—most notably the Roman Odes and their relation to other poems of the corpus.[5] For example, Witke (ig83) makes excellent observations about the “sacred space” that the Horatian speaker clears for himself in the first ode but does not comment on the implications of this space for sacrifice and the related ideas of purification or expiation. Lyne (1995), despite his focus on the tension between the public and private in Horace, and his astute appendix on the nature of the sacerdos (184–85), similarly does not discuss the Roman Odes as participating in a discourse of sacrifice. Cf. Syndikus ig73, 14–15, on Horace's ritual language and use of a priestly persona to attain for his poems the sacred dignity that these poetic conventions signified in Pindar and Greek choral lyric. See [nn. 66] and [67] below for further bibliography on the Roman Odes.
Indeed, the preoccupation with locating the aesthetic precedents of the Augustan persona of the lyric visionary or sacerdotal priest reflects what Dennis Feeney has identified as the critical tendency, until recently, to separate the discourses of religion from those of literature. Such a bifurcation is compounded by “the traditional disregard for the cultural power of Roman religion,” which, together with “the long-engrained aestheticising tendency in the study of Roman literature” (Feeney 1998, 7), resists acknowledging the full religious, social, or political impact that the literary invocation of ritual language may in fact have had on the elite readership of Rome.Recent studies of Augustan literature and art have begun to reverse this trend, arguing for the capacity of representations of ritual to invoke experiences or produce effects similar to those elicited by actual participation in religious rites. Andrew Feldherr, for example, analyzes how Livy's use of narrative strategies to reconstruct sacrificial spectacle reveals his text as performing a state-building function (1998, 156). This analysis of Livy's reproduction of the visual elements of sacrificial acts, leading a reader to respond to a representation as he or she might to the performance of an actual rite, draws on John Eisner's “viewer”—oriented interpretation of the Ara Pads (153). Eisner argues that the reliefs on the Ara Pads situate viewers in the same position as a participant of sacrifice: bringing all their cultural associations of previous ritual experiences to an altar whose explicit function was for sacrifice, they in fact temporarily fulfilled the incomplete sacrificial process whose setting was the Ara Pads (1991, 51–52). Eisner might himself take issue with the “state-building” function of Livy's text, for he rejects the interpretation of the strictly ideological effect of Augustan iconography as “too totalizing,” emphasizing instead the viewers' possible subversive and conflictive responses to art as they construct meaning. Nonetheless, such a model, which locates the construction of meaning in the dialogic interaction between an audience's associations and the work of art, allows for the greater impact and cultural power that the literary invocation of religious discourse may have had on a Roman audience. Sacrifice was arguably the most pervasive ancient religious discourse; and, as historical narrative, sculpture, and numismatic evidence affirms, it invariably drew attention to priests as the performers of the ritual killing.
[6] Beard 1990, 11; Gordon 1990c, 204. For a comprehensive discussion of sacrificial ritual in the Roman world, see Wissowa 1902, 344–65.
We must consider, then, this larger cultural practice as a system that the metaphor of the Horatian “priest” invokes in order to produce a particular effect on his readers.One of the most common and important rituals during the Republic was the expiation of prodigies: strange or portentous phenomena such as talking chickens and rain showers of blood, or the more mundane event of statues struck by lightning, would be understood as signs of divine displeasure, a disturbance of the pax dearum (”peace of the gods” or “equilibrium between the human and the divine level”) that must be addressed.
[7] See Handel 1959, 2290–95; Liebeschuetz 1979, 9–11; MacBain 1982; Beard and Crawford 1985, 30, 34; Livy 22.1.8–20. I borrow the phrase “equilibrium between the human and the divine level” from Thome (1992, 86).
The consuls were ultimately responsible for deciding which prodigies required expiation, but the sacrifices that were part of that process were performed by priests. Such sacrificial rituals aimed to purify the people, to[8] Expiation could thus be both compensation for damnum inflicted in the past and a way of buying off disaster in the future. See Scullard 1981, 23.
As expiatory offerings that placated or appeased the anger of the gods, piacula are generally considered as a form of payment in a transaction that releases (lucre) the people from their debt (Thome 1992, 86–87). Nonetheless, as several passages in Livy demonstrate, during the process of expiation both actual sacrifices as well as other offerings made to the gods-money, statues, or sculptures such as a “thunderbolt of gold”—would be referred to in the language of gifts, dona—the term associated with “ostensibly free will offerings.”[9] On dona, see Pascal 1982, 16; Benveniste 1973, 80, notes that donum, as the expression of a “gift” that does not (ostensibly) call for a return, differs from munus, whose etymological origin in the Indo—European root *mei implies exchange. For the language of piacula, see Livy 22.9.7; for the language of the dona of money, statues, and a “golden thunderbolt” for Jove, see Livy 22.1.17–20, 21.62.8. For dona with regard to actual sacrifices, see Livy 22.10.3, where the pontifex maximus advises the Roman people to offer up to Jove the animals of the spring: ratum donum duit populus Romanus Quiritium, quod ver attulerit ex suillo ovillo caprino bovillo grege … lovi fieri.
Public feasts, too, might be held in honor of the gods, a practice in keeping with other forms of civic euergetism, emphasizing that expiation would involve not only “gifts” to the gods but also expenditure that directly benefited the people.[10] On the feast added, originally in connection with expiation, to the ceremony of the Saturnalia, see Livy 22.1.20. Beard, North, and Price (1998, 1:38) note that the remediaof expiatory offerings “might offer an opportunity for holding elaborate ceremonies, sometimes including new festivals or new entertainments, so boosting public morale by civic display.”
During the civil wars the practice of expiation was gradually abandoned-fewer prodigies were reported and when they were, expiation was often not carried out (Liebeschuetz 1979, 57–58; MacBain 1982, 103–4). The last prodigy for which the ancients record official expiation during the first century B.C.E. occurs in 37.
[11] I follow the appendix in MacBain (1982)—based on the prodigy lists of Luterbacher (1967 [1904]), which I have also consulted—and Wülker (1903). Liebeschuetz (1979, 58 n. 2), however, cites later lists according to the prodigies noted in Dio 50.8.1–6; 50.10.2–6; 53.20.
And yet, as the powerful second ode of Horace's first book gives witness, the discourse of prodigies and ritual expiation continued to provide a way of structuring experience: the flooding of the Tiber in 27 B.C.E., reported by Dio as a prodigy, signifies divine anger over the civil wars and leads the Horatian speaker to the question, “to whom will Jupiter assign the role of expiation of our crime?” (cui dabit partis scelus expiandi / luppiter, 29–30). The poem then launches into a roll call of Olympian deities, invoking Apollo, Venus, Mars, and finally Mercury, whose secular incarnation in the form of Augustus Caesar makes him the only[12] The final injunction, that Caesar not let the Medes ride unavenged, draws foreign policy into this discourse of ritual purification and, according to G. Williams (1980, 13, 118, 160), makes Parthian blood the sacrifice that will expiate Roman guilt for the civil wars.
The speaker encourages Caesar, as primus inter pares, to take up the role of expiation, but the poet's own implicit role as a priest here—he observes and interprets the prodigy—suggests that he too will do his part, in keeping with the Roman symbiosis of religion and politics. As the vates who, at the end of Odes 1. 1, strikes his head against the stars and then ushers in the lofty tone of 1.2, the Horatian lyric speaker anticipates his later role as priest of the Muses, in which he offers his poems as symbolic acts of expiatory sacrifice.Such expiation, however, takes place in the context of a tragic view of history and the “purifying” potential of catharsis. I do not intend this interpretation to seamlessly conflate Aristotle's concept of purgation of the emotions with the religious purification implied by expiation; rather, as we shall see, Horace's invocation of tragic motifs, in a religious context of expiation, implicitly assumes the ritual “purifying” sense of catharsis that was included in the complex semantic range of the word in its pre—Aristotelian usage (Halliwell 1986, 186). To be sure, I believe that certain Aristotelian tenets about drama do inform Horace's tragic vision transposed to lyric: in addition to the importance of catharsis, albeit within a specifically religious context, we encounter a form of prohairesis, or tragic “choice,” as well as Aristotelian unity of action. But from a social perspective, the ritual, performative effects of Horace's lyric invocation of drama fulfill the same function as sacrifice—not only purification but also the reinforcement of social cohesion and stratification.
[13] As Habinek (1990a, 213), notes, “In Roman religion, as in Greek and other religions organized around the institution of sacrifice, sacrifice not only defines membership within a group (those who eat of the same sacrifice are bound to one another physically and psychologically) but establishes hierarchy as well, with the most important (Roman princeps) receiving the first and sometimes largest portion of the flesh.”
Thus, before turning to a close analysis of the tragic rhetoric of Odes 2.1, 2.13, and 3.1–6,1 briefly review some concepts of Rene Girard, whose understanding of the social and ritual function of tragedy, as a mimesis of sacrifice, has bearing on my argument.Girard is no stranger to critics of the classics. His notion of the scapegoat and the origins of ritual violence has not only furthered the understanding of Greek tragedy but also provides a compelling lens through which to view narratives of formative periods of Roman imperium, as well as the Romans' sense of their own demise. Livy's accounts of the fall of Alba, for example, or the rape of Lucretia and her subsequent suicide, have both been read
[14] On the role of sacrifice in the fall of Alba, see Feldherr 1998, 112–64 (144–49 for the specific relevance of Girard, and 145 n. 93 for important qualifications). For Girardian readings of the Lucretia episode, see joplin 1990; Calhoon 1997.
In this view, ritual sacrifice constitutes a means of checking the inherently self-propagating and vindictive nature of violence. As a form of deflection it depends on a series of substitutions: the “surrogate victim” provides an initial scapegoat for the violent inclinations of a community, while the victim of a sacrificial rite further substitutes for the human surrogate.[15] Girard 1977, 4–6, 8–10. An important component of Girard's understanding of sacrificial practice and its efficacy is the similarity of the substitute victim to the original object of violence. However, should the substitute resemble the object it replaces too much, then it stimulates the call for reciprocity and vengeance that it was meant to thwart.
As an example from later Roman history, we may consider Carlin Barton's analysis of the ambivalent attitudes toward violence that help constitute the Roman identity under the early Empire. Discussing the monstrous figure of the stupidus as a “sacrificial decoy” required to shore up “Roman” identity, Barton writes: “The perception of the civil wars and the monarchy as permanently transgressing the discrimina ordinum [distinctions of rank] brought into play a ‘physics’ corresponding to Rene Girard's ‘Sacrificial Crisis’: a collapse of the sensus communis, a shared system of categorizing and ordering. It was a loss of a sense of common identity, and a sort of permanent civil war” (1993, 146). Though Girard's view of the dynamics of violence does not answer to all its manifestations in the Horatian corpus, his conception certainly illuminates Horace's treatment of the civil wars. The dissolution of a cultural system of differences and distinctions perfectly describes the state of affairs to which the Horatian speaker claims Rome has fallen.[16] Girard 1977, 49: “The sacrificial crisis can be defined, therefore, as a crisis of distinctions—that is, a crisis affecting the cultural order. This cultural order is nothing more than a regulated system of distinctions in which the differences among individuals are used to establish their ‘identity’ and their mutual relationships.” Such a crisis is illustrated by the myth of Oedipus: having killed his father, he becomes king and husband to his mother, and father to his sisters and brothers. The distinctions between the cultural roles of the family structure have been completely erased. Civil war, often envisioned in terms of fraternal strife (e.g., the rivalry between Eteocles and Polyneices), is the quintessential example of the sacrificial crisis: its reciprocal violence threatens to spread and destroy all cultural differentiation unless a scapegoat can redirect the internal violence outward.
Whether through the symbol of crumbling temples, the soldier who mistakes war for peace, or the adulterous wife who, already engaged in the violation of boundaries, bestows even her illicit favors indiscriminately (Odes 3.6.2–3, 3–5–37–38, 3.6.17–32), Horace presents a society in which images of disintegration and confusion suggest the cultural breakdown that marks Girard's crisis. At the root of this bankruptcy is the insidious nature of the civil wars, a form of mimetic rivalry in which internalAs we shall see, the invocation of tragedy both reenacts the sacrificial crisis and constitutes a mimesis of the sacrifice as antidote.
[17] See Girard 1977, 64–66, 292–93, for the role of tragedy as a mimesis of the sacrificial crisis. Though Girard believes in the ritualistic origins of tragedy, he does not return to the views of the Cambridge Ritualists (95–96).
For the origins of tragedy in sacrificial ritual, though certainly disputed and speculative at best, suggest that the fall of the tragic protagonist reenacts on a mimetic level the slaying of a victim.[18] The tragic fall as an extended “trope” or figure that represents and substitutes for sacrifice arguably reflects the origins of tragedy in sacrificial ritual. See Frye 1957, 213; Girard 1977, 291–91, 95–118; Seaford 1994, 340. Burkert (1966, 87–121) reviews the evidence for such origins in the sacrifice of a goat. The representation of actual human sacrifice in tragedy has been taken up more recently by several scholars; see Pucci 1992, 513 nn. 1–2, for further bibliography.
In addition to this “symbolic” fall—sometimes quite literal, as in the case of Agamemnon or Pentheus—are the numerous sacrifices integral to tragic plots that do not entail the protagonist's demise. In Girard's view, tragedy fulfills a function similar to that of ritual sacrifice (itself a substitute for an originary act of mob violence), but on a level that has evolved from actual killing. Combining mythic narrative with the mimesis of ritual, tragedy serves to purge a community of its own impulses toward reciprocal violence. To be sure, we cannot ascribe Girardian theory to Horatian intention; all the same, I see Horace's construction of Roman history in terms of a “tragic fall” that draws on the genre's associations with ritual sacrifice as a means of both thwarting the impulse to vengeance and purifying those stained with past bloodshed.Horace's creative amalgam of the motifs of Greek tragedy and Roman religious ritual causes the discourse of sacrifice to shape the rhetoric of the Roman Odes in different ways. On the one hand, constructing the fall of the Republic as the demise of a tragic protagonist invokes the trope of mimesis, insofar as tragedy constitutes an imitation (evolved into mythic form) of the ritual of sacrifice. On the other hand, the posture of the sacerdos, or lyric priest, invokes the trope of metaphor, insofar as the activity of the poet-priest turns or “tropes” his poems into metaphorical sacrifices. These two intersecting sacrificial discourses, as tropes expressive of tragedy and lyric respectively, further intersect in their “ideal” effects: just as tragedy produces catharsis in its audience, so sacrifice constitutes an act of expiation or “purification”—the original sense of “catharsis”—in a religious context. And so, though poets may not have been “concerned to elucidate the meaning of sacrifice exactly, but to put it to work in a system of meanings
Ultimately, it is the restoration of a system of differences, the stratified hierarchy of the discrimina ordinum and the social cohesion such hierarchy grounds, that the Roman Odes seek to effect by invoking a discourse of sacrifice. Let us then turn to the ode to Pollio as our paradigm, a poem that dramatizes the danger of contamination, and thus the propagatory nature of bad violence, even as it provides the ritual framework for symbolic sacrifice, or Girard's notion of “good violence.”
POLLIO'S HISTORY AND THE PURIFICATION
OF RITUAL VIOLENCE: ODES 2.1
Motum ex Metello consule civicum bellique causas et vitia et modos ludumque Fortunae gravisque principum amicitias et arma
5 nondum expiatis uncta cruoribus, periculosae plenum opus aleae, tractas et incedis per ignis suppositos cineri doloso.
paulum severae Musa tragoediae 10 desit theatris: mox, ubi publicas res ordinaris, grande munus Cecropio repetes cothurno,
insigne maestis praesidium reis et consulenti, Pollio, Curiae, 15 cui laurus aeternos honores Delmatico peperit triumpho.
iam nunc minaci murmure cornuum perstringis auris, iam litui strepunt, iam fulgor armorum fugacis 20 terret equos equitumque vultus.
audire magnos iam videor duces [19] With the Oxford Classical Text I read audire … videar in line 21 rather than Shackleton Bailey's videre … videor.
non indecoro pulvere sordidos, et cuncta terrarum subacta praeter atrocem animum Catonis. ― 73 ―
25 luno et deorum quisquis amicior Afris inulta cesserat impotens tellure victorum nepotes rettulit inferias lugurthae.
quis non Latino sanguine pinguior 30 campus sepulcris impia proelia testatur auditumque Medis Hesperiae sonitum ruinae?
qui gurges aut quae flumina lugubris ignara belli? quod mare Dauniae 35 non decoloravere caedes? quae caret ora cruore nostro?
sed ne relictis, Musa procax, iocis Ceae retractes munera neniae, mecum Dionaeo sub antro 40 quaere modos leviore plectro. You handle the civil conflict that began with Metellus's consulship, the causes of war, its evils, and its patterns, Fortune's game and the grievous alliances of leaders, and arms stained with blood still to be expiated, a work full of perilous hazard, and you advance through fires concealed beneath treacherous ash. For a brief time may your Muse of grim tragedy be absent from the stage; soon, when you have set in order affairs of state, you will resume your lofty calling in the Cecropian buskin, Pollio, distinguished defense for worried clients and the Senate taking counsel, you, for whom, too, the laurel gave birth to lasting glory in your Dalmatian triumph. Already, now, you strike my ear with the threatening roar of horns, now the trumpets sound, now the flash of weapons terrifies the horses and the faces of the horsemen. Now I seem to hear the great commanders, soiled with no dishonorable dust, and the whole world overcome except Cato's fierce soul. Juno and whoever of the gods more friendly to Africa had withdrawn, powerless, from the unavenged land have borne back as sacrificial offerings to Jugurtha the grandsons of his conquerors. What plain, made fertile with Latin blood, does not give witness with its tombs to our sacrilegious wars and to the sound of Hesperia's crashing fall, heard even by the Medes? What pool or what river is unaware of our mournful war? What sea has Italian slaughter not discolored? What shore lacks our gore? But lest, wanton Muse, you set aside light themes and handle anew the office of the Cean dirge, seek with me measures of a lighter strain deep within the Dionaean grove.
A poem that characterizes the project of writing about the civil wars as a “work full of perilous hazard,” the ode to Pollio addresses the difficulties faced by an author who takes recent history as a subject. Richard Heinze,
[20] See Kiessling and Heinze 1960, ad Odes 2.1, and Sallman 1987, 82 n. 48, for further literature that inclines to the interpretation that Pollio courts a specifically political hazard. See, too, the characterization of Pollio as fiercely Republican in Syme 1960 [1939], 291, 320.
As I observed above, the danger of reprisal certainly shaped the quip with which Pollio supposedly answered Octavian's taunts at the time of Perusia; but it is quite possible that Pollio's wit, as recorded by Macrobius, has encouraged earlier scholars to interpret the hazard to which Horace refers in exclusively political terms. For if one dates the ode to the years immediately following Actium, a reference to the dangers of partisanship would be indelicate on Horace's part.[21] Nisbet and Hubbard 1991 [1978] (hereafter referred to as N-H), 9–10, 14–15. N-H interprets the reference to danger in political terms, as the smoldering animosities of Republican principes, with the qualification that Horace's lines, exaggerating the peril, must have echoed Pollio's own captatw benevolentiae.
The terrors of the recent past were ones that Octavian, soon to cast aside the role of avenger to become Augustus the merciful, wished to put behind him.Indeed, that Pollio remained neutral after Actium leads other scholars to interpret the grave tone of the beginning, and the reference to danger, as a comment on the difficulty of historiography and thus as a decorous compliment to Pollio's literary talents.
[22] See Syndikus 1972, 347. Fraenkel (1957, 235) understands the danger as the hazard attendant on great undertakings of divine inspiration, a motif he charts throughout the Odes.
Though such a reading certainly accords with the conventions of a dedication poem and offers a connotation of “perilous hazard” that should not be excluded, it ignores how the more concrete images of the stanza govern the rhetorical development of the poem: the fire still smoldering under a layer of ashes (ignis / suppositos cineri doloso) and the arms smeared with yet unexpiated gore (arma / nondum expiatis uncta cruoribus) suggest both a danger in the still fresh and ensnaring memories that could be inflamed in an audience and the criminality of civil war, a sacrilegious condition that continues to contaminate the present state. The idea of writing as potentially hazardous—the civil wars as a topic perhaps too hot to handle—contributes to the poem's thematic and imagistic coherence.At first, the opening lines of this ode present the subject of Pollio's history in a stately, distanced, and analytical tone. The objective tone, coupled with the deferral of the verb until the seventh line, tends to deflect attention from Pollio as the author of this history. Not until the verbs tractas (you handle) and incedis (you proceed, you advance) do we understand that if the civil wars are the subject of Pollio's work, then the treatment of those wars and the political and emotional risks of writing about contemporary history are Horace's main concern here. Indeed, the poem acknowledges
[23] For libertas in the Republic, see Brunt 1988, 281–350, and Wirszubski 1968.
While I do not believe that Pollio courted any actual danger of reprisal from Octavian by writing of the civil wars, and such a political risk is not meant as the primary “perilous hazard,” the theme of libertas is nonetheless suggested by a series of topographical images. Pollio as a figure walking upright through the buried fires looks ahead to the image of Cato fiercely unvanquished while the rest of the world has been overcome (et cuncta terrarum subacta / praeter atrocem animum Catonis). The prefix sub- (under, beneath) here recalls the earlier ignis suppositos (fires beneath the ash) and suggests at least a rhetoric of suppression that these figures defy. Like Cato's spirit, Pollio's undertaking symbolizes a courageous assertion of libertas. The risk, however, does not derive from Pollio's specific subject, the conflicts of the first triumvirate or the war between Pompey and Caesar. Rather, the poem's rhetorical development demonstrates that the topic is dangerous because of the recent conflicts of the second triumvirate and the insidiously contaminatory nature of civil war in general.What makes the topic particularly inflammatory is the potential response from a contemporary audience—that is, the context in which a work is read or performed. For the image of embers smoldering beneath ash suggests suppressed material that could easily erupt again. The ode develops this metaphor of fire when the speaker, as Pollio's audience, has the visionary experience of being in the midst of battle. It is with this stanza that the speaker abruptly abandons his advisory and panegyric stance toward Pollio, and the poem evolves into a personal dirge for the blood spilled in the civil wars. The speaker's sentiments are inflamed when he imagines a public reading of the history:
[24] That Pollio introduced recitations at Rome lends a specific historical backdrop to the poem's dynamic between the speaker as audience and Pollio as an addressee whose performance of his history provokes a song of lamentation.
as a fire might spread, the explosiveness of the material first arouses the speaker's senses—“Already, now, you strike my ear with the threatening roar of horns, now the trumpets sound”—only to stir the latent fires into a full-blown song of sorrow. In a sense, the poem itself catches on fire, as the objective tone of the first half modulates into passionate threnody.[25] Sallman (1987, 82) stands out among critics of this poem in recognizing that the speaker's inflamed passions reveal the periculosae … aleae of line 6 to be the danger of inciting a strong emotional reaction.
The last stanza points up this shift in the poem'sOn one level, the adjective procax depicts the Muse as a “wanton” or “forward” mistress, impudently stealing Pollio's fire when she should more appropriately retire with the speaker for a tryst in Venus's cave. But her boldness has other implications: like Pollio, who bravely walks through the still-smoldering ashes, Horace's Muse brazenly takes up the office of funereal song, drawing attention to the excessive slaughter of the wars.
[26] Nadeau (1980, 181) comments that the enargeia of these stanzas suggests Horace's own involvement in the civil wars.
Again, a topographical register of images comes into play with the implied concealment of sub antro (deep within the cave) set against the openness of the Cean dirge. The speaker's Muse, stirred by Pollio's “advance” through the ignes suppositos, must be called back sub antro. The repetition—sub-ponere followed by sub antro- underscores that the “high” emotion of the lament, having flared up from the cave, is a response to the fiery material of Pollio's subject. This spatial register extends the affinity between Pollio, walking with stately majesty, and Cato, alone unvanquished while the rest of the world is subacta (subdued), to Horace's Muse, boldly singing a dirge before withdrawing to lighter, and thus “lower,” themes.The echo in the verb retractes (to handle anew, to refinger) of the form tractas in line 7, where Pollio is said “to handle” the subject of the wars, furthers this identification of the speaker's Muse with Pollio.
[27] N-H, ad loc., considers the imputation that Pollio also wrote a nenia to be uncomplimentary, interpreting retractes in terms of the speaker's own vain rhetorical repetition in his dirge.
But this verb also reminds the reader of how and why the Muse takes up the dirge. Added to the metaphor of a natural catastrophe whose power spreads unchecked, which the motif of fire brings to the speaker's inflamed sentiments, is another image of contagion and contamination: when Pollio is said to handle a work full of dangerous hazard (periculosae plenum opus aleae) the noun summarizes a lengthy series of other objects that are the specific focus of his history. The final element in this series, startling in its abrupt concreteness after a list of abstract nouns, is the “weapons smeared with gore not yet expiated” (arma / nondum expiatis uncta cruoribus). This image emphasizes the tactile and sensuous connotation of tractas, particularly as the verb tractare may refer to the touching and handling of wounds.[28] Oxford Latin Dictionary (hereafter OLD), s.v. “tractare,” 2d. Cf. N-H on both tractasund retractes, ad loc.
By treating the topic of the civil wars, Pollio metaphorically handles these weapons andThe taboo and impure nature of this blood derives in particular from its having been shed in acts of civil warfare. The murder of kin was an especially heinous crime for the ancients; as the Oresteia dramatizes, it initiates cycles of vengeance that do not end until an act of purification takes place. When the speaker claims that he “rehandles” the subject that Pollio “handles,” one implication is that the pollution of civil bloodshed has metaphorically spread from the historian to the lyric poet. This poetic enactment of the dangers of pollution by bloodguilt occurs through the trope of a performance, or recitation, in which the focus moves from the objective content of Pollio's history to the subjective pathos of the speaker's lyric lament. That Pollio writes of the blood crimes of the first triumvirate, whereas the speaker presumably evokes the effects of the civil wars of more recent history as well, only underscores the ancient idea that blood pollution spreads in generational cycles of vengeance. This erasure of distinctions, here temporal and generic, suggests the state of cultural dissolution that characterizes Girard's “sacrificial crisis.”
In Violence and the Sacred, Girard describes such a period as a cultural disorder, when the dissolution of distinctions lends itself to images of infection, contagion, and contamination. At the heart of this crisis is a violence whose force multiplies “like a raging fire that feeds on the very objects intended to smother its flames. The metaphor of fire could well give way to metaphors of tempest, flood, earthquake … [and] the plague.” It is the spilling of blood that most threatens to erase cultural distinctions: “When violence is unloosed, however, blood appears everywhere—on the ground, underfoot, forming great pools. Its very fluidity gives form to the contagious nature of violence. … Its very appearance seems, as the saying goes, to cry out for vengeance” (Girard 1977, 31, 34). Indeed, the ode's motif of fire is related to that of an unchecked bloodletting: the image of blood, still wet and criminal (nondum expiatis uncta cruoribus), spreads—in keeping with Horace's metaphor of a fire that might be stirred to life—to dominate the eighth and ninth stanzas (29–36). Slaughter and civil bloodshed (sanguine, caedes, cruore) permeate these lines much as they do the geography that the speaker, in his series of rhetorical questions, declares the witness to this indiscriminate violence. The interrogative pronouns and adjectives—quis, qui, quae, quod, and quae, repeating in polyptoton—evoke a pervasive contamination that erodes even the identity of place. And as the complex assonance and consonance of decoloravere … / … ora cruore suggest, even the distinction between human and nature has dissolved, as human gore mixes with the shore.
It is often argued that when Horace uses the phrase “bloodshed not yet
[29] G. Williams 1980, 117–18; for a similar argument, although not in reference to 2.1, see Thome 1992, 89. Kiessling and Heinze (1960, ad loc.) quote the passage in Tac. Ann. 1.49 where Germanicus sends his army against the enemy as a piaculum for Roman rage and impiety: truces etiam turn animos cupido involat eundi in hostem, piaculum furoris, nee aliter posse placari commilitonum manes, quam si pectoribus impiis honesta vulnera accepissent.
Such an interpretation attends to the literal, denotative suggestions made by Odes 1.2 and 1.35; but the failure of the ode to Pollio to make a specific foreign policy proposal encourages a different, self-reflexive reading that involves the public function of Horace's verse.For even if civil violence is seen as inflaming the speaker's song and causing images of bloodshed to spread, “contaminating” the eighth and ninth stanzas, the lament could also be said to serve the opposite function. In Girard's analysis, only the sacred act of ritual violence can contain the impulse toward vengeance and cycles of retribution.
[30] As Girard (1977, 58) claims, the slim boundary between pure and impure violence allows the latter to be transformed, given the right conditions, into a form of sacred violence.
Tragedy, as a mimesis of sacrifice, constitutes a form of “ritual mimicry whose cathartic effects are believed to ward off the impending crisis it imitates so faithfully” (Girard 1977, 4, 63). Because the civil wars present a society already in the throes of what Girard labels a sacrificial crisis, there is no question of “warding” off such a catastrophe. However, as I emphasize later in this chapter in my discussion of the Roman Odes, poems prefigured by the ode to Pollio, Horace as a sacred priest intends his poems to stem the tide of cultural dissolution. And in the poetic frame of this ode, the speaker's emotional vision of the war is conveyed in diction and rhetoric suggesting that purification and an end to generational violence must be sought through the cathartic effects of a tragic view of history.[31] For Girard (1977, 4), “There is no question of ‘expiation’”; the ritual sacrifice that tragedy imitates at a later stage of evolution is intended to direct the violent impulses of a group onto a substitute victim, not to expiate for previous crimes of violence. However, expiation and a conscious sense of criminality are clearly issues in Horace's ode. For the development of a Roman consciousness of personal guilt in the late Republic, a phenomenon that can be linguistically charted, see Thome 1992. See Commager 1962, 160–225, foran overview of the cycle of sin and “redemption” as a theme in Horace's political poems.
When Pollio is said to handle (tractas) the hazardous subject of history, the verb calls to mind the Cleopatra ode (the last poem of the first book,
[32] Syndikus (1972, 349) points out that the abrupt change in Odes 2.1 from a dedicatory emphasis at the beginning to the subjective experience of the war resembles the sudden shifts of focus in Odes 1.37 and Odes 2.13, where the mock curse against the planter of a tree evolves into a vision of the underworld.
The use of the verb in the Pollio ode and the image of treacherous ash (cineri dolosd) suggestively evoke this serpentine imagery: a slippery subject, the history of the wars could backfire and undermine Pollio's intention to “order” public affairs (publicas / res ordinaris). From one perspective, as we have seen, the way in which the poem catches fire confirms this danger. And yet all the words serving as temporal adverbs in the first five stanzas imply that the violence of the speaker's vision, his inflamed emotions, are the proper response to Pollio's historiography, and thus to a successful “ordering” or disposition of the events of the past.Taken in isolation, the first adverb of the poem, nondum (not yet), connotes the continuation of war, a civil conflict that multiplies and propagates because there has been no expiatory ritual. The adverbs and conjunctions of the next stanza, paulum, max, and ubi (a little while; soon; when, after), denote stages in Pollio's career; but, specifying further points of time in a continuum, they also create a context for the moment anticipated by nondum—the time of purification. This moment, in turn, depends on the tragic inspiration of Pollio's histories. For a little while only (paulum) let the Muse of tragedy be away from the stage (Musa tragoediae / desit theatris); soon (max), after (ubi) Pollio has put public affairs in order (that is, after he has written his history), he will once again take up the distinguished office of the tragic buskin; in keeping with the verb incedis (you proceed, you advance, 7), diction connoting a stately carriage, the stanza implies that Pollio's tragic Muse—no longer in the buskin—is with him and that she, too, absent from Rome, walks through the ashes of history.
[33] Ullman (1942, 50) takes these lines to indicate that Pollio writes in the vein of tragic historiography; against his position, see N-H, 9. For discussions of the degree to which Horace's poem imitates Pollio's work, see Seeck 1902; Kornemann 1903; Sonnenburg 1904.
And though the poem explicitly draws attention to Pollio's temporary leave from writing tragedy, and thus makes a clear distinction between the genres of drama and history, the semantic interplay of the temporal adverbs throughout the poem suggests that his tragic Muse inspires Pollio's present work, that it is she who sets public affairs in order (publicas res ordinaris).[34] Note that Aristotle (Poet. 1450b22), when referring to the plot, uses the phrase τὴνσύστασɩν … τῶν πραγμάτων (the order of things), forwhich the cognate verb would be σῳνίστηɩ. The Greek equivalent of ordinare, however, is σῳντάττεɩν.
Just as the speaker's Muse is seen at the end of the poem to have temporarily abandoned her appointed role of light, erotic song, so Pollio's Muse leaves her[35] Whether or not such a genre was specifically practiced in distinction from other forms of historiography is debated. See Walbank 1960; Feldherr 1998, 166–69; and [n. 33] above.
The result, Pollio's history, displays the civil wars of Caesar and Pompey as retributory vengeance exacted for Rome's wars with Carthage and Jugurtha—that is, as violence that displays generational cycles of tragic reciprocity. The idea that the transgressions of a later generation are both violations in their own right and a form of divine punishment for the crimes of forebears underlies much Greek tragedy (Liebeschuetz 1979, 92–95). Thus Juno's wrath, presenting historical events in the mythic light of divine anger, may be understood not only as an epic motif but also as a component of the tragic vision informing Pollio's work. It appears in the central stanza of those describing the speaker's imagined response to Pollio's recitation. As the most “objective” of these five, the stanza seems to divide the speaker's response into the Aristotelian categories of pity and fear: the rhetorical questions of the lament for the dead exhibit an almost redundant pity (29–36), while the first two stanzas (17–24) describe a battle whose startling and fearsome drama appears in the threatening sound of horns (minaci murmure cornuum), the horses terrified by armor (iam fulgor armorum fugaces / ferret equos), or the fierce soul of Cato (atrocem animum Catonis).
Although the speaker's vision of this scene suggests a fear more akin to awe than to the apprehension of individual disaster, the latter, more conventional understanding of tragic fear is perhaps implied:
[36] See Heath 1987, 11–17, for a cogent discussion of the tragic emotions; on tragic fear, in particular, he writes that “‘fear’ in the formula ‘fear and pity’ must be understood to cover a wide range of related emotional responses. It includes the species of fear described rather too narrowly in Rhet. 1382a21 ff: the emotional disturbance felt when someone for whom our emotions are closely engaged is threatened by impending harm; also, presumably, our response to tension, suspense and excitement in narrative is to be included. But no less important is the instinctive shuddering recoil from what is made horrific by tabu, superstition, numinous awe, physical grisliness or unpleasantness” (13).
a tragic representation of the fall of the Republic conceives of Rome as an individual, and the speaker's choral lament suggests as much. For the speaker's fear soon turns to pity for the fallen hero/victim, and the profusion of blood (sanguine, caedes, cruore) in these ornate and austere lines specifically recalls passages of the Oresteia and, more generally, invokes the sacrificial falls of many characters of tragedy.[37] One is reminded of the exchange between the Chorus and Cassandra, Aesch. Ag. 1072–330, where the seer's visions repeatedly emphasize the slaughter of the past, the present as it is happening, and the future retaliation of the Furies.
But as in tragedy, violence is here represented in a ritual frame. The pity and fear of catharsis, originating in the speaker as an audience, evolve into a lyric dirge similar to the odes ofCritics often refer to the tragic vision that informs the Augustan writers' view of the civil wars, but they do not draw the logical conclusion from Horace's lyric enactment of the trope—that the speaker's emotional response to Pollio constitutes a form of cathartic purification.
[38] Syndikus (1973, 347) claims that in the second half of the ode, “Im Bürgerkrieg sieht Horaz selbst eine ungeheuere Tragödie, die Tragödie Roms”; Lyne (1995, 93) writes of Horace's representation of Rome's “tragic guilt”; Lowrie (1997, 181) notes that “Although history and tragedy are first differentiated as the two sides of Pollio's literary career, they collapse when it comes to Horace's self-definition.” See [n. 33] above.
Yet the phrase publicas res ordinaris (you will have set public affairs in chronological order) also connotes the arrangement of a subject, the parts of a literary work, and thus suggests the “particular configuration of events” that produces tragic catharsis.[39] For definitions of ordinare, see OLD, s.v., 1c, 1d. On catharsis in relation to plot, see Halliwell 1986, 170–71, 179; Arist. Poet. 1449524–28, 1450520–36.
It is the structure of a plot, the sequence of actions or external states constituting the vicissitudes of fortune, that evokes emotions in the audience of Aristotelian tragedy. The speaker's response to Pollio's historiography therefore proceeds from the way in which the historian's Muse orders the events of the recent past in a tragic light. Such “ordering,” in turn, brings about a form of expiation through the stimulation of tragic catharsis:[40] Since the pollution of bloodguilt is one of the contexts that calls for purification, an element of religious catharsis must be at play in the speaker's emotional—e.g., cathartic-response to Pollio's history. See Halliwell 1986, 186, for the pre—Aristotelian, “religious” connotations of catharsis.
the juxtaposition of max (soon) and ubi (when) in line 10 looks back to the nondum expiatis (not yet expiated) of the first stanza, and the two words create a narrative sequence of their own. Pollio, writing a history, handles material that has not been atoned for; not yet, but soon, when those issues have been ordered in writing, expiation will be possible. When? “Now” (iam … iam … iam … iam), the fifth and sixth stanzas seem to announce with the urgency of an epiphany. These two stanzas refer literally to the immediacy of the speaker's imagined experience of Pollio's recitation and the powerful enargeia of his writing: the historian has brought the battle of Pharsalus and the consequences of Thapsus—Cato's noble suicide and Caesar's ultimate supremacy—vividly to life in the speaker's mind. But the repetition of iam four times in these two stanzas cannot but refer asIn addition, the emphasis on the present moment in time (iam) as the subjective experience of the speaker when he “seems to hear” (videor … audire) suggests attributes particular to lyric as a genre.
[41] Frye (1957, 250) addresses this relationship between lyric and vision or dream. For the historical origins of the critical view that lyric is associated with “pure subjectivity,” see Arac 1985, 353–55, and his reference to Hegel 1975, 2:1133.
Horace uses this exact phrase in Odes 3.4 to evoke the heady enthusiasm of inspiration by the Muses: after calling on Calliope to descend from heaven and make her presence known through voice, lyre, or flute, the speaker addresses his audience: “Do you hear [her], or does a delightful madness deceive me? I seem to hear and to wander through holy groves where pleasant waters and breezes steal” (Auditis? an me ludit amabilis / insania? Audire et videor pios / errareper lucos, amoenae / quos et aquae subeunt et aurae, 3.4.5–8). In Odes 2.1, it is Pollio's historiography—or the tragic Muse inhabiting Pollio's history—that unleashes this lyric experience. And the complex connotations of iam, referring here both to the immediacy of a lyric epiphany and to the time of expiation, establish a relationship between the two.[42] In fact, the most immediate reference for iam is to the time of its own linguistic context, the time of Horace's lyric verse as a poetic utterance. In Benveniste's essay “The Nature of Pronouns” (1971, 217–22), temporal adverbs such as “now,” belonging to a class of what he calls “indicators,” share with the first- and second-person pronouns the characteristic of referring before all else to the present instance of discourse in which they are uttered.
Such sacrificial connotations of the lyric epiphany conform to the discourse of sacred ritual implicit in the Horatian posture of a “seer” (vates) or “priest” (sacerdos). For as the language of the fifth and sixth stanzas suggests a visionary experience, so the lament that evolves from such a state corresponds to a sacrificial offering:
[43] As N-H, ad loc., claim, the language of stanzas 5 and 6 suggests the vision of a seer—for example, the Sibyl's predictions of bella, horrida bella in Verg. Aen. 6.86.
the “lamentations” or “office of the Cean dirge” (Ceae … munera neniae) explicitly acknowledge the eighth and ninth stanzas as a form of rite for the dead. In a funerary context munera can refer to verbal lamentation as well as to concrete offerings, and often there is no clear distinction between the two (N-H, ad loc.). When Catullus, for example, addresses his brother's grave, his poem becomes the very funereal gift offered to his brother's ashes: “I come, brother, to these wretched last rites, so that I might present you with the final offering paid to death, and address your mute ash in vain” (advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias, / ut te postremo donarem munere mortis / et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem, i o 1. 2–4). In Oete 2. 1, the similar idea of offering or “gift” in munera looks back to the seventh stanza, where Juno is said to bear back RomanThe idea that the Cean dirge provides ritual purification may, in fact, connect the image of fire with the symbolic sacrifice of the poem. For the emotions unleashed by Pollio's recitation, as we recall, constitute the “fire beneath the ash” of line 8. When this fire spreads and transforms the objective focus of the first four stanzas into the subjective experience of the speaker, we might claim—on the level of metaphor—that the flames contained within the context of sacred ritual, the munera of the dirge, symbolize a purification of the very bloodguilt whose potential to contaminate they initially enact. That is, the poem in flames, as a symbol of purification, thwarts the tendency to reciprocal violence that it imitates. Perhaps it is no coincidence that with the phrase Ceae neniae Horace invokes Simonides, native of Ceos and the lyric poet whose most famous elegy was written for the dead of Plataea, a battle whose aftermath also witnessed elaborate purification ceremonies relying on fire.
[44] For an argument that connects the lustrum, as a ritual of purification, to the use of fire, see Ogilvie 1961.
Finally, given the prominent position of this ode, we should consider its implications in the context of patronage. As the dedicatee of Odes 2, Pollio here occupies a “patronal” position, following Maecenas as the primary dedicatee of Odes 1 and anticipating the addressees in the dedicatory position of 3.1, the young men and women of Rome. For though 2.1 begins as a dedication poem in a context of patronage, focusing on the achievements of Pollio, it evolves into a choral lyric that assumes the civic office of tragedy, the very munus from which the historian has turned. Thus, the rhetorical development of the poem dramatizes the way in which “praise” poetry for a “patron”—at least a patron by virtue of poetic position—is not consumed in the act of exchange but becomes a gift passed on to a wider public.
The ode to Pollio offers a paradigm of how certain Horatian poems effect a sacrificial function—with their perlocutionary force, they strive to act
[45] For a discussion of the trope of sacrifice as a form of persuasion, see Pucci 1992. Invoking de Man (1979a) and Culler (1978), Pucci (1992, 515) points out that in the Oresteia, the “persuasive act imprints on the construct of the sacrifice the undecidability of a trope, and this trope in turn becomes the resource of persuasion.”
In this regard, the rhetorical trope of “lyric as sacrifice” maintains the potency of the realm of religious ritual from which it is drawn. I see the Pollio ode as paradigmatic because for all that the speaker appropriates Pollio's role and offers lyric as a substitute for the civic munus of tragedy, he initially represents himself as an audience to the tragic construction of history—as though to suggest the effects that he intends to produce in his readers through his own later role of priest, with his lyric sacrifices. Before turning to the Roman Odes to test this paradigm, exploring the implications of those poems in the context of sacrifice and tragic mimesis, let us examine one other overt instance of the lyric impulse as a ritual response to violence.RITUAL DEVOTIO AND THE LYRIC CURSE: ODES 2.13
Ille et nefasto te posuit die, quicumque, primum et sacrilega manu produxit, arbos, in nepotum perniciem opprobriumque pagi;
5 ilium et parentis crediderim sui fregisse cervicem et penetralia sparsisse nocturne cruore hospitis; ille venena Colcha
et quidquid usquam concipitur nefas 10 tractavit, agro qui statuit meo te, triste lignum, te, caducum in domini caput immerentis.
quid quisque vitet numquam homini satis cautum est in horas. navita Bosphorum 15 Poenus perhorrescit neque ultra caeca timet aliunde fata;
miles sagittas et celerem fugam Parthi, catenas Parthus et Italum robur: sed improvisa leti 20 vis rapuit rapietque gentis.
quam paene furvae regna Proserpinae et iudicantem vidimus Aeacum sedesque descriptas [discretas/discriptas] piorum et Aeoliis fidibus querentem
25 Sappho puellis de popularibus, et te sonantem plenius aureo, Alcaee, plectro dura navis, dura fugae mala, dura belli!
utrumque sacro digna silentio 30 mirantur umbrae dicere, sed magis pugnas et exactos tyrannos densum umeris bibit aure vulgus.
quid mirum, ubi illis carminibus stupens demittit atras belua centiceps 35 auris et intorti capillis Eumenidum recreantur angues?
quin et Prometheus et Pelopis parens dulci laborem decipitur sono, nec curat Orion leones 40 aut timidos agitare lyncas. That man, whoever first planted you, did it on an inauspicious day, and raised you with a sacrilegious hand, O tree, for the destruction of future generations and the shame of the countryside. I could believe that he broke the neck of his own parent and scattered the inmost hearth with the blood of a guest murdered at night; that one has handled Colchian poisons and whatever crime, anywhere, is conceived, who placed you, baneful tree, to fall on the head of your innocent master. Never, from hour to hour, does any man sufficiently beware what he should avoid: the Punic sailor shudders before the Bosphorus, but does not fear the unsurmised fates beyond, from elsewhere; the soldier fears the Parthian's arrows, loosed in swift flight; the Parthian fears chains and a dungeon's death in Italy; but an unforeseen violence has snatched and will snatch away the races of men to their destruction. How I almost saw the realms of dark Proserpina, and Aeacus dispensing judgment, and the fabled seats of the pious [or seats reserved for the pious], and Sappho lamenting, on Aeolian lyre, of girls from her native land, and you, Alcaeus, with golden plectrum, resounding more fully the sailor's hardships, the cruel duress of exile, the hard life of war. The shades are amazed at both as they sing themes worthy of sacred silence; but the crowd, pressed shoulder to shoulder, is more intoxicated by battles and tyrants driven out. What wonder, when bewitched by those songs, the hundred-headed beast relaxes his black ears, and twisting in their hair, the snakes of the Eumenides are refreshed, born anew? Why, even Prometheus and the father of Pelops, enchanted by the sweet sound, forget their trials, nor does Orion care to provoke the lions or the fearful lynxes.
The unleashing of lyrical energy as a ritualized response to brute force appears in Odes 2.13, the poem in which Horace indulges comic imprecations against a tree whose fall almost causes his death. While the speaker's poem testifies to his survival, the near accident sparks a meditation on blind fate, violent chance, and the prospect of the underworld. During the heyday of biographical criticism, scholars predictably focused on this ode as a description of a real event, charmed by the contrast between the poet's “lived” experience and his fanciful imagination of the world of the dead.
[46] Kiessling and Heinze 1960, 209–10; see Klingner 1964b [1952], 325–27, for a good summary of the scholarship.
More recently, the poem has been remarked for its use of autobiographical event as a trope that serves to authenticate the lyric calling of the poet (Davis 1991, 78–89; Lowrie 1997, 202). The descent to the underworld—the poet's version of epic katabasis—and the vision of Sappho and Alcaeus charming the dead place Horace in the company of the great lyric poets while suggestively evoking the figure of Orpheus as a mythic prototype (Klingner 1964, 326; Syndikus 1972, 425). For the purposes of my argument, I focus on the ways in which the poem's evolution from the rhetoric of curse to a vision of lyric potency conforms to the ideology of sacrifice. Echoes of diction and recurring imagery establish a relationship between this poem, the ode to Pollio, and the Roman Odes; ultimately, in keeping with my analysis of Odes 2.1, I emphasize that this network of associations figures Horace's public poetry as a civic munus: a voluntary expenditure that seeks, like sacrifice and its ritual reenactment in tragedy, to bind and thwart the propagation of cycles of civil violence.On a basic level, the poem arises from the speaker's near extinction, making the scrape with death a source of lyric creation. Such lyric, in turn, retrospectively ascribes the tree's fall to its evil planter, whose actions precipitated the seeming “accident” and its nefarious consequences. The contagion of the tree's violence, spreading from its antisocial origins to its potential effects, resembles the way in which images of blood permeate the ode to Pollio. Such a comparison between the comic exaggeration of the one poem and the tragic motifs of the other may appear far-fetched; however, as we shall see, within its humorous and personal context, Odes 2.13 has a serious historical dimension that connects it to the Pollio ode. Whereas 2.1 performs an expiatory function, this poem might be said to transform the explosive violence of the tree's fall into beneficent cultural energy. To be sure, there is no overt ritual here, but the poem as curse enables what Girard describes as the conversion of “bad” violence into “good”: “Any phenomenon linked to impure violence is capable of being inverted and rendered beneficent; but this can take place only within the immutable and rigorous framework of ritual practice” (1977, 58).
In a number of ways, the poem suggests a ritual utterance in its own right. To begin with, the first three stanzas comically invert the tradition of a blessing, the makarismos that might accompany the planting of a tree.
[47] N-H, 202; see Klingner 1964b [1952], 327, for arguments against viewing the exaggerated tones of the opening as comic.
Roman agricultural practices were often marked by these sorts of rituals, which manifested the conservative piety of the rustic farmer. We see such a positive ritual context in Odes 3.22, where the poem serves to consecrate a pine tree on Horace's estate to Diana and promises a yearly sacrifice at the informal “shrine” in her honor. In contrast, Odes 2.13 begins as a kind of imprecation, suggesting not only an inversion of the makarismos but also the poetic genre of arai, or “curses.” Francis Cairns has suggested that arai, originally a Greek genre, were grafted by Roman writers onto the indigenous legal concept of the flagitatio, a form of “extra-legal or pro-legal self-help” by which a person could attempt to regain stolen property or force a debtor to pay through incessant demand and verbal insult (1972, 93–95). Cairns proposes similar generic hybridization for Odes 1.30, where the poet grafts the Roman institution of the evocatio, a military leader's ritual summoning of his enemy's gods to abandon a besieged city, onto the Greek kletic hymn (1971, 446). In keeping with such generic hybrids, the specifically Roman concept of the devotio informs the background of the “curse” of Odes 2.13.For the Roman imagination, Livy's description of Decius's ritual “devotion” of himself and his enemies to the infernal gods, followed by the general's active pursuit of death in battle, constitutes the paradigmatic instance of the military devotio. But scholars suggest that in this famous instance, the voluntary self-sacrifice of a general who symbolically assumes the impurities of his own people actually combines two related forms of more commonly practiced devotiones/consecrationes: on the one hand, devotio was a punishment by which criminals were consecrated to the gods of the underworld; on the other, a devotiowas simply a form of makficium, or curse, that handed over the enemy to the infernal gods as a kind of substitute or “sacrifice,” enabling the salvation of the speaker.
[48] For the ritual devotiones of the Decii, see Livy 8.6.9–11, 8.9.1–13, 8.10.11–14, 8.11.1, 10.28.12–17, and the analysis of Feldherr 1998, 85–92. See Pascal 1990, 258–65, and Thome 1992, 85–87, for a lucid discussion of the evidence of the Roman ritual and the semantic range of the concept. Barton (1993, 42–45) discusses the devotio in relation to the figure of the gladiator. I am indebted to her summary of the concept, and to her further references to Bouché-LeClercq 1892, 113–14, and to Macrob. Sat. 3.9–13.
While Odes 2.13 presents no overt consecration of an enemy to the powers below—indeed, it is the poet who imaginatively experiences the realm of Dis even as he eludes it—the informal curse of the beginning suggests a kind of retrospective devotio or maleficium offered for the very grace of that escape.There is further and varied support for this generic or conceptual influence. On a strictly linguistic basis, the speaker refers to the tree in Odes 3.4.27 as the devota … arbor (damned tree) that would have destroyed him had the Muses not been his protector. While devota here has its more general sense of “accursed,” its use nonetheless implies that the more specific references of the devotio may be at play in Odes 2.13. The poem's own stanzaic progression supports the idea that the malefidum directed at the planter serves as a kind of consecration in exchange for the speaker's safety: the curse precedes and appears to evolve into the gnomic reflections of the miraculously “saved” man, which turn to a lyric vision of the underworld, with all its intimations of immortality; thus, not only is the speaker spared in this particular “biographical” incident, but the episode also suggests the only form of salvation or immortality known to the ancient world—a place in cultural memory.
Moreover, the sacrificial substitution that characterizes the devotio of an enemy accords with the literary convention of the katabasis as requiring that the person wishing to journey to the underworld make some kind of sacrifice. Particularly in epic, the katabasis provides the hero with a renewed sense of purpose and destiny: Odysseus gets his sense of direction from Tiresias; Aeneas, having reached the Elysian fields, is given his mission to lay the foundations of Roman imperium by his father. But in order to guarantee that these men return from the world of the dead, the narrative convention demands a “sacrifice,” a life in exchange for the one who returns to the realm of the living. Elpenor tumbles to his death from Circe's roof before Odysseus sets out to meet Tiresias (Horn. Od. 10.552–59); and both Palinurus, who is the famous “one for many” demanded by Neptune at the end of Aeneid 5, and Misenus, who is killed for his impiety while Aeneas is visiting the Sibyl, constitute the human sacrifices that the convention demands (Verg. Aen. 5.815, 840–71; 6.162–82). To be sure, Horace's poem as lyric cannot function in the same way as epic narrative, but the speaker does arguably acquire a renewed sense of his destiny as a poet of public, civic issues. Hence, I suggest that the informal curse serves symbolically to consecrate the tree's planter in exchange for the speaker's “experience” of the underworld as a living man. As though to represent this consecration, the figures who are punished in the underworld do penance for the same type of crimes as the infamous ille (that man) of the opening.
The concept of devotio as consecration in the form of legal punishment may also lurk behind the curse. As Nisbet and Hubbard point out, the curse functions as a diatribe against first inventors—those “originators” (like the first shipbuilder) whose discoveries have had some negative consequences for humanity (1991 [1978], ad loc.). And by treating the planter as the ἀρΧὴ χαχῶν (source of evils), the speaker presents him as a criminal, a
It is important to register this echo of the ode to Pollio, because it reinforces the overall similarity between the poems as linguistic imitations, or symbolic enactments, of rituals involving forms of sacrifice. Both poems forcefully exhibit an abrupt turn or shift in direction—the violent Horatian Abbruch that recalls Pindar. As I have been suggesting, in these poems the violence of this lyric shift of focus or direction invokes the discourse of sacrifice as a ritualistic response to uncontrolled, contaminatory, and vindictive bloodshed.
[49] Syndikus (1972, 349) notes that Odes 1.37, 2.1, and 2.13 each exhibits a sudden, unexpected shift of direction.
Odes 2.13 does not explicitly present such images of transgressive violence in the context of the civil wars; nonetheless, the reminiscence of the ode to Pollio, combined with other patterns of diction, hints at the historical backdrop constituting one frame of reference for the rhetorical treatment of “autobiographical” event in this poem.[50] Lowrie (1997, 216–17) offers a list of words that figure in “personal narrative” poems like 2.13 and then reappear in Odes 3.4, the ultimate poem of “Personal Myth” that evolves into the Gigantomachia as allegory for the civil war. Scholars often see 2.13 as preparation for the Roman Odes: see Nicoll 1986; Porter 1987, 244; Lowrie 1997, 202–5.
Indeed,[51] See Syndikus 1972, 323, and Witke 1983, 7–18, for the various relationships between 1.35 and the Roman Odes.
Moreover, it is this language of impiety, with all its implications of contagiousness through touch and guilt down the generations, that characterizes the planter in the speaker's curse in 2.13.In this light, the hypothetical planter functions as a kind of ritual victim that, in Girard's terms, “draws to itself all the violence infecting the original victim and through its own death transforms this baneful violence into beneficial violence, into harmony and abundance” (1977, 95). Girard is here discussing the function of the pharmakos, but such a scapegoat performs much the same function as the consecrated person in a devotio.
[52] For the element of a “scapegoat” in ritual devotio, see Thome 1992, 87.
Insofar as the fall of the tree evokes the phenomenon of unpredictable and dangerous violence, it metaphorically calls for the same sacrificial discourse as the brutalities of civil warfare. Given the verbal allusions remarked above,[53] I am grateful to my colleague Mary Jaeger for emphasizing the fall as a metaphor.
Odes 3.4.25–28 correlates the Horatian theme of danger narrowly averted on both these public and private levels when the speaker ascribes his salvation from the rout at Philippi, as well as from the devota arbor (cursed tree), to the protection of the Muses. Moreover, the central stanza of 2.13, where the speaker generalizes the theme of death's unpredictability, also alludes to the poet's involvement with the Republican cause and Brutus's army: the arrows and celerem fugam (swift flight) of the Parthian, vainly feared by the soldier who does not in fact know when death will strike, echo the poet's “autobiographical” (and Alcaic) flight when he abandoned his shield at Philippi (celerem fugam / sensi relicta non bene parmula, 2.7.9–10) (Nadeau 1980, 205). Finally, the adjective inmerentis (innocent), which is applied to the speaker as not deserving to be crushed by a tree, appears in the same genitive form in Epode 7, where Horace describes the civil wars as Rome's fate “ever since the blood of innocent Remus flowed across the ground, a curse for generations to come” (ut immerentis fluxit in terram Remi / sacer nepotibus cruor, 7.19–20). Thus, if the tree's fall is metaphorical, then Horace can be metaphorically an “original victim” for whom the planter as pharmakos is substituted in the speaker's curse in 2.13, consonant with the function of the ritual victim to draw to itself the impulse toward self-propagating civil violence. And so, as a lyric ritual, the poem serves to “devote” or sacrifice the planter, who embodies the threat of civil violence, to the underworld.Through this maleficium—the symbolic devotio—the spread of violence is checked, and the speaker transforms the explosive, potentially negative energy of the incident into a procreative, cultural force. The poet's lyric vision stresses its ontological status as a poetic construct—the seats of the pious are characterized as descriptas
[54] N-H, ad loc., citing Tac. Ann. 2.19.1, read descriptas as “marked out,” “assigned,” or “allocated.” Their interpretation is, however, more in keeping with the manuscript variant discriptas, which suggests the “allotted” or “distributed” seats of the dead. The third manuscript variant, discretas, “set apart,” is favored by Kiessling and Heinze (1960),Quinn (1992 [1980]), and Shackleton Bailey (1985). The variants, as I discuss below, are highly suggestive in the context of the Roman theater and public performance. Scribal errors notwithstanding, I find it plausible that Horace himself may have entertained more than one of these manuscript variants; if poems were shared privately before the author's “final” relinquishing of them in a poetry book, it is possible that different versions entered the manuscript tradition at the start.
—and this aesthetic realm of the dead reproduces song as Sappho and Alcaeus are found to charm the shades with their own carmina. The fall precipitates a chain of culture, sparking the speaker's poetic vision, which in turn contains poets in the act of song.The ritual effects of the poem in terms of restraint and containment-binding the energy of cyclical violence—are mirrored in this vision of poetry
[55] For the relationship between song and charm (as a form of magic) in the Greek poetic tradition, see Walsh 1984.
The representation of the crowd as densely packed, shoulder to shoulder, metonymically slides into the next image of Cerberus and acquires a suggestion of unpredictable passions subdued.[56] Lowrie (1997, 203) notes the relationship between the charming of Cerberus and the “eagle snoozing on the scepter of Zeus in Pythian\ [6],” a poem that, as Fraenkel (1957, 273–85) emphasizes, significantly informs Odes 3.4, the allegorical Gigantomachia.
This metonymic identification finds further support in Horace's description of the vulgus elsewhere: in Epistles 1.1.76 the crowd, or populus Romanus, is labeled specifically as a beast of many heads (belua multorum es capitum). Thus, Horace's implicit conflation of Cerberus's heads with such a vulgus evokes the brutish and inconstant passions of a Roman crowd.[57] Nicoll (1986, 608) similarly observes these Horatian echoes in his argument that the crowd, unlike Horace, is still seduced by cliched slogans represented in pugnas etexactos tymnnos (31), phrases that evoke the Republican catchwords of the tyrannicides.
Mob violence returns us to the bloodshed of the civil wars, Girard's sacrificial crisis, and the bad violence that initiates a cycle of tragic vengeance.The mythic monsters populating the speaker's underworld perfectly symbolize this aspect of tragedy: whereas Cerberus represents the monstrous factionalism of the crowd, the Eumenides recall their earlier identity as the Furies, spirits of vengeance for bloodguilt and the curse of the house of Atreus in the Oresteia. The reference to Tantalus as the Pelopisparens (the father of Pelops) underscores the generational aspect of this tragic cyclicity even as it echoes the characterization of the planter, at the poem's outset, as capable of kin murder. The recurring violence threatened by the tree's fall finds its complement in the images of crowding multiplicity in the underworld—the dense throng, the hundred heads, the nest of snakes all suggest a monstrous fertility, a reproduction of the same.
[58] Girard (1977, 143–68) discusses the effects of a cycle of reciprocal violence. Rooted in mimetic desire, such violence causes the participants to become mimetic doubles of each other. The erasure of difference and distinction propagates more of the same. This procreation of “doubles” constitutes something monstrous, and Girard contends that “monsters,” of some form or other, are always present in texts that reflect “the sacrificial crisis.” See Lowrie 1997, 144–64, for a discussion of Cleopatra as the monstrous embodiment of civil war, the divisions of which have been transferred onto her as a form of scapegoat who provides for expiation.
But first the speaker and then his precursors Sappho and Alcaeus contain that violence, stilling and stopping its contagion, transforming it from bad to good, and making it into something new, like the serpentine locks of the Furies affected by song (Eumenidum recreantur angues). The reference to these spirits[59] That Horace had Aeschylus specifically in mind may be further suggested by the figure of Prometheus, though here he is placed in Tartarus rather than on the Caucasus.
This reading of recreantur, within an overall interpretation of the social cohesion and beneficence that results from sacrifice (here invoked by the planter as pharmakos, or scapegoat), is more compelling than understanding the word as signifying the arousal of the snakes.[60] For recreantur as “aroused,” see N-H, ad loc., followed by Nicoll 1986, 608. Given the general cessation of activity in the still lyricism of the moment—the two hundred ears of Cerberus comically drooping, Orion no longer caring to drive the lions and lynxes through hell in banal and eternal repetition—the passage overall suggests that passions are being tamed, not provoked: the twisting circuitous tangle of serpents—free-floating violence—becomes momentarily fastened in place as the tragic cycle ceases.
Tragedy in a lyric context returns us to the public function of Horace's poems as a civic munus (public show, offering). As Nisbet and Hubbard note, the vulgus or “mob” of the dead, pressed shoulder to shoulder, suggests the standing-room-only crowd of a Roman contio, a public meeting or assembly at which speeches were given. Similarly suggestive of a Roman context of performance are the alternate manuscript readings in line 23: sedesque discriptas piorum (assigned) and discretas (appointed) seats for the pious. The image calls to mind the lex lulia theatralis, Augustus's legislation decreeing separate areas for different social orders in the theater. Though this particular law may very well have postdated the composition of Horace's ode, the practice of such divisions was firmly in place before its passage: Elizabeth Rawson claims that Augustus's legislation served to tighten the provisions of preexisting laws such as the lex Roscia of 67 B.C.E., which established fourteen rows of the theater for the equites.
[61] Rawson (1987) gives 26–17 B.C.E. as the termini post quern and ante quern for the lex lulia theatralis. See Zanker 1988, 147–56, for the importance of the theater to Roman identity and the discrimina ordinum. For the manuscript variants, see [n. 54] above.
Hence, whether or not Augustus's concern with maintaining social stratification in audiences at public events had yet taken the form of law, these Horatian images of performance, with allusions to Roman public venues, lend an Augustan topicality to the figures of Sappho and Alcaeus as poets of orally performed lyric. Because the Greek poets serve not only as models for Horatian meter and themes alternately private and civic but also as emblems of this poem's thematic exploration of the relationship between song and violence, their mastery and command of the underworld “mob” appear similarly analogous to the poet's own dynamic with his Roman audience.In the Roman Odes, poems prefigured by the figure of Alcaeus here,
[62] More generally, see Quinn 1982, 140–65, for analysis of the evidence concerning public performance during the late Republic and early Empire. Quinn concludes that poetry was heard in three other contexts in addition to the private readings enjoyed by the Augustan circle: in a competitive format before an appointed judge; at a formal reatatio—the noncompetitive type of reading, supposedly introduced by Asinius Pollio, to which a wide public was invited; and in performances by professional cantores at which mimetic spectacle became a mode of interpretation. See Cairns 1984, 149–54, for speculation about the performance of Propertius 4.6, a poem that, like the Roman Odes, invokes the trope of public ritual.
And while reading practices and literacy rates are difficult to ascertain,[63] On ancient literacy, see the introduction, [n. 11], and the essays in Humphrey 1991.
there is a general consensus that poetry was regularly performed in the Augustan period and that the literate public became acquainted with new work through some form of recitation rather than by the silent reading of a papyrus scroll. Indeed, the possible allusion to seating division in the theater in Odes 2.13 may very well accord with the “distance” at which the poet keeps the vulgus in 3.1. But whether or not the more public Horatian odes were performed for audiences larger than the select few of the Augustan circle—and I believe that they must have been—it is the rhetoric of spectacle, ritual, and civic poetry that concerns us here.As in the Pollio ode, Horace in 2.13 anticipates the Roman Odes as a form of civic munus, fulfilling a public function not altogether different, in both its strategic mechanisms and its desired effects, from the role traditionally accorded to tragedy.
[64] I am not returning to Mommsen's idea that the Roman Odes were conceived as a unit explicitly to celebrate ideas connected with the princeps in 27 B.C.E. when he adopted the name Augustus. Essentially I agree with Heinze (1960, 190–204), who argues that the Roman Odes were not initially conceived as a self-contained cycle but that their present order is nonetheless intended to suggest a certain unity.
We have evidence that Varius's Thyestes was specifically commissioned for the ludi (games) with which Octavian celebrated his victory at Actium; another possibility is that the play was performed at the dedication of the Temple to Apollo on the Palatine in 28 B.C.E.[65] See Jocelyn 1980, 391 n. 24, for sources and the suggestion that the dedication of the Temple to Apollo was the more likely occasion.
It seems that the educated elite had a heightened awareness of the relevance of tragedy and its emphasis on kin murder, and in particular theTHE ROMAN ODES AND TRAGIC SACRIFICE
The symbolic context of ritual clearly informs the rhetorical posture of the speaker in the opening image of the Roman Odes, where the call for silence echoes the sacrum silentium of the crowd enthralled by the music of Sappho and Alcaeus:
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo; favete linguis: carmina non prius audita Musarum sacerdos virginibus puerisque canto. I hate the sacrilegious mob and keep it at a distance; hold your tongues in pious silence; I, priest of the Muses, sing for youths and pure maidens songs previously unheard. (3.1.1–4)
Claiming that he “sings” for the new generation, the speaker appears to disdain the vulgus that his lyric predecessors charmed, fearing its sacrilegious interruption. In the sixth Roman ode, however, when the speaker asserts that the present generation of Romans, though “guiltless,” will pay for or “expiate” the sins of their fathers until they reform their irreligious ways, the distinctions between the “pure” and the “impure” invoked at the cycle's opening have dissolved and the audience becomes the general Romanus. Yet the audience has not radically altered, nor are the youths and maidens of the opening now inexplicably corrupt. Rather, the cycle of poems has dramatized their full implication in the generational decline that the Roman Odes articulate as a social vision. Thus, in this section I argue for reconsidering the ritual context of the opening of the cycle, and the poems that follow, in terms of the implicit metaphor of sacrifice: on the one hand, the trope of “poems as sacrifice” holds out the possibility of purification; on the other, it serves to construct the “Roman subject” as both inevitably contaminated—and therefore in need of “cleansing”—and a necessary participant in the process of his or her own expiation. As in the ode to Pollio, such purification depends on an audience's experience of its own history as a form of tragedy—the genre in which fall and redemption are so intimately connected.
[66] The bibliography on the Roman Odes is immense. Discussions from which I have benefited include Fraenkel 1957, 260–85; Commager 1962, 194–225; Poschl 1968, 47–61, esp. 58–61; Andre 1969, 31–46; Reckford 1969, 70–84; Syndikus 1973, 2:3–6, and his commentary on the individual poems, 7–97; Grimal 1975, 135–56; Witke 1983; Santirocco 1986, 110–22; Lowrie 1997, 224–65. See discussion of individual poems for further references.
It is sometimes acknowledged that Juno's speech in 3.3, coupled with Regulus's in 3.5 and the gloomy prognostication for the future in 3.6, suggests the tragic motif of the curse inherited from past generations—the cyclic repetition of crime and countercrime that marks the house of Atreus (Liebeschutz 1979, 92–93). Others have observed that the movement of the Roman Odes as a whole, from hope to despair, displays a tragic rhythm (Silk 1973, 136–37; Santirocco 1986, 116). But these have generally been isolated remarks, and scholars have not sufficiently pursued the implications of the tragic vision of history in the poems.
[67] Previous scholarship has focused either on determining thematic/schematic patterns within the sequence of the Roman Odes as a cycle—e.g., Wili 1948, 201–13, Heinze 1960, 190–204, Santirocco 1986, 112–22, Porter 1987, 152–70—or on tracing the literary tradition of panegyric and its relation to the presence of Augustan “ideology,” determining Horace's investment in promulgating such ideology in the poems (the never-quite-exhausted question of sincerity): for believers of Horace's praise of Augustus or his program, see Fraenkel 1957, 260–86; Doblhofer 1966, 122–59; for the less convinced view, see La Penna 1963; Lyne 1995, 158–68. See Commager 1962, 194–225, for a New Critical approach to the aesthetic strategies of these poems. Much recent criticism of the Roman Odes and poems traditionally seen as Horatian panegyric has concentrated on the difficulty of praise as a successful poetic project: see Lowrie 1997, 224–65, on “whether the struggle between lyric and narrative authority fragments the coherence of any possible praise-making” (224); and Fowler 1995, 252, who claims that Horace's union of Callimachean aesthetics with a Stoic and Epicurean philosophical stance undermines the integrity of panegyric.
To some extent, the dominant critical approaches to the Roman Odes reflect the influence of “source criticism”: because Juno's long speech of 3.3 shares many characteristics with the goddess' ultimatums in book 12 and Jupiter's prophetic visions in book i of the Aeneid, and because the ultimate source for the divine council to discuss Romulus's deification is Ennius, critics have viewed the elevated tone and mythological subject matter in terms of epic rather than tragedy.[68] E.g., Syndikus 1973, 35–37; Witke 1983, 38, 41–42; Lowrie 1997, 224–65. Witke's index, for example, has entries for both erotic elegy and pastoral as genres within the Roman Odes, but not tragedy.
And yet in the Poetics Aristotle imputes a similar structure to the plots of tragedy and Homeric epic, and the Iliad is often seen as the prototype for the unity of action that the ancient critic regarded as fundamental to tragic drama (1449b15, 1451a17–35). It is, he insists, plot or the arrangement of incidents that produces tragic catharsis—and, as I argue, the sequence of odes, particularly the movement from 3.3 through 3.6, is intended to evoke just such an effect. By presenting recent history as a consequence of errors made in a mythological past, Horace encourages his audience to experience the tragedy of Rome's fall.Let us first establish the curse. Before laying down the conditions for Romulus's accession to heaven, Juno locates the origin of Troy's demise in Laomedon's betrayal of his promise to pay the gods for building the city. This violation of fides, compounded by the judgment of Paris and by Helen's wantonness, doomed Troy and made its destruction the compensatory payment for Laomedon's crime:
hac Quirinus 15 Martis equis Acheronta fugit,
gratum elocuta consiliantibus lunone divis: ‘Ilion, Ilion fatalis incestusque iudex 20 et mulier peregrina vertit
in pulverem, ex quo destituit deos mercede pacta Laomedon, mihi castaeque damnatum Minervae cum populo et duce fraudulento.['] With this [merit] Romulus avoided Acheron on the horses of Mars, when Juno spoke pleasing words to the council of gods: “Ilion, Ilion, the fateful and unchaste judge and foreign woman turned you to dust, from that time when Laomedon cheated the gods of their agreed-upon pay, and damned you to me and chaste Pallas, with your people and deceptive leader.” (3.3.15–24)
Juno goes on to claim that should another Troy be attempted, she would initiate another cycle of destruction. Her mythic time frame provides a tragic origin for later generations of history: the sins of the Trojan past both explain the bloody auspices under which Rome was founded and establish a paradigm whose repetition can be averted only if her audience responds properly. Her shrill and emphatic pronouncement that her vengeance will hound even a third attempt to renew the walls of Troy suggests the cyclic violence of a tragedy:
[‘]Troiae renascens alite lugubri fortuna tristi clade iterabitur, ducente victrices catervas coniuge me lovis et sorore.
65 ter si resurgat murus aeneus auctore Phoebo, ter pereat meis excisus Argivis, ter uxor capta virum puerosque ploret.’ The fate of Troy, should it be reborn, will be repeated with mournful destruction, under doomed auspices, with myself the consort and sister
― 98 ―of Jove leading the victorious throngs. Should the bronze wall rise a third time, under Phoebus's authorization, a third time let it perish, destroyed by my Argives, a third time may the captive wife mourn her husband and sons. (3.3.61–68)
The recent history of the civil wars assumes a coherence and clarity when viewed as tragic iteration: since the time of Laomedon's betrayal of the gods, the pax deorum has been disturbed. Rome has been repeating and expiating the crimes initiated at Troy, and it is up to the present generation to avert another cycle.
The possibility of prohairesis or “action taking the form of a decision,” which the Roman audience now faces, conforms to such a generic paradigm: understood in Aristotelian terms, the praxis or “doing” set in motion by prohairesis constitutes the tragic action (Poet. 1449b36–50b9).
[69] See Gellrich 1988, 106–8, for the idea that tragedy depicts only an action once taken, not the psychological activity of deliberation that precedes and makes possible the prohairesis. Vernant and Vidal—Nacquet (1988, 56–57) further define prohairesis as a decision that “rests upon … a rational desire, a wish (boulesis) informed by intelligence and directed, not toward pleasure, but toward a practical objective that thought has already presented to the soul as a good.”
Prohairesis is not the same concept as free will: as Jean—Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal—Nacquet have argued (1988, 49–84), the relationship in tragedy between so-called individual agency and fate is, at best, one of complicity.[70] Liebeschuetz (1979, 93 n. 1) comments, in his discussion of Vergil's and Horace's “tragic vision” of the civil wars: “That the gods influence the minds of wrongdoers to choose conduct which will bring punishment was a Greek view.”
Such tragic complicity, as we shall see, obscures the degree to which this view of Roman history is in fact imposed on its audience. All the same, by making the present a consequence of Laomedon's decision in the past and suggesting that “choices” present themselves anew, Horace brings his audience to the same conditional identification with characters of the heroic age with which spectators responded to Greek tragedy.The foreshortening of time, as Juno's speech brings the present into a face-to-face relation with an otherwise distant mythological past, suggests the same superimposition of the heroic age and contemporary time that marked the audience's experience during a fifth-century performance at the City Dionysia in democratic Athens (Vernant and Vidal—Nacquet 1988, 23–48). To be sure, the heroic age constituted a more legitimate history for fifth-century Athenians than for first-century Romans. But the important point is that Greek tragedy presented a unique fusion of time frames, a fusion related to political process: on the one hand, the heroic age gave expression to conflicts or issues of the polls in the familiar, but temporally removed, language of mythic history; on the other, the performance of
Horatian lyric explicitly superimposes time frames and relates poetry to political process in the Regulus ode, where the dramatic monologue of the captive general before the Senate provides a historical exemplum. Horace's version of the episode presents Regulus advising the Senate to reject the Carthaginians' offer to ransom captive Roman soldiers.
[71] Horace alters the version of Regulus's heroism found in Cic. Off. 1.39, 3.99, by presenting Roman soldiers held by Carthaginians rather than Carthaginian generals held captive in Rome. Quinn (1980, 254) adds that Horace has adapted details from the speech by T. Manlius Torquatus (Livy 22.59–61) concerning the ransoming of prisoners at Cannae.
The grisly monologue advocating sacrifice itself dramatizes the issue of Crassus's soldiers still held by the Parthians during Horace's own day. In this way, the specific audience of the Senate within the poem encodes the larger audience of Horatian lyric. Moreover, a Roman reader's identification with Regulus's audience is encouraged by the epithet auctor (3.5.46), which, though applied to Regulus, immediately brings Horace to mind. Thus, dominated by speeches that lend them an overtly dramatic quality, both 3.3 and 3.5 map the dynamic of speaker and audience within the fictive lyric context onto the reader's (or spectator's/listener's) relationship with the text. The rhetorical element of both Juno's and Regulus's speeches suggests a deliberative address to a council of decision makers even as the Trojan backdrop invokes the tragic situation of divinely determined choice.[72] Witke (1983, 45) remarks that Juno speaks about a future that can be averted, given the proper response. For Regulus's speech as deliberative oratory, see G. Kennedy 1972, 399.
The movement from “heaven” to “earth” in the sequence of 3.3, 3.4, and 3.5, notwithstanding the allegorical assertion of Olympian (i.e., Caesarian) will in the Gigantomachia, implies that Regulus's circumstances at some level issue from the tragic view that Juno articulates. The speeches of both characters inadvertently address and implicate the present generation even as they figure in poems that chart a trajectory of tragic and generational decline. And 3.6, as an indictment of the present generation, completes the sequence so that Roman history becomes a tragic mythos with a beginning (the time of Romulus), middle (the wars with Carthage), and end (the corrupt present). We should note that money, in particular, lends
Horace also emphasizes the centrality to these poems of the rhetorical or performative component of tragedy by a pointed allusion to the ode to Pollio. There, as we recall, the poem builds the effects of a performance of tragic history into the lyric action: the speaker's dirge for the civil wars is both an imagined response to Pollio's dramatic recitation—as a choral lament that suggests a cathartic experience—and a kind of usurpation of its voice and vision. In the final stanza of this ode, the speaker draws his Muse up short and bids her to sing a lighter strain:
sed ne relictis, Musa procax, iocis Ceae retractes munera neniae, mecum Dionaeo sub antro quaere modos leviore plectro. But lest, wanton Muse, you set aside light themes and handle anew the office of the Cean dirge, seek with me measures of a lighter strain deep within the Dionaean grove. (2.1.37–40)
At the abrupt foreshortening of Juno's speech in 3.3, the speaker addresses his Muse in a similar vein and orders her to lighter themes:
non hoc iocosae conveniet lyrae. quo, Musa, tendis? desine pervicax referre sermones deorum et magna modis tenuare parvis. But this will not suit the playful lyre: where are you headed, Muse? Stop stubbornly relating the speeches of the gods and diminishing great things with small measures. (3.3.69–72)
Not only does the gesture of reproachful address to his Muse here establish a direct connection with the Pollio ode, but similar epithets describe her in each case. Whether displaying the “wanton” impudence of procaxor the “headstrong” obstinacy of pervicax, the Muse has a mind of her own-willful, perversely resistant, and not to be controlled by the symposiastic poet of lyric. This abrupt and formulaic “break-off,” the Pindaric Abbruchs-formel, asserts anew the generic domain of lyric and informs the audience that Juno's speech is different, taking up the concerns of the high style of epic and tragedy.
[73] For the conflict between the tenueand the grandein Horace, see Lowrie 1997, 40–45.
But most significant for my argument is that Pindar's address to the Muse occurs in Pythian 11, where the poet has digressed from his epinician praise by recounting the life of Orestes (16–41). Regardless of whether Pythian 11 was composed before or after the performance of Aeschylus's Oresteiain 458, Horace surely would have associated Pindar's lyric with the dramatic version of the story. Orestes embodies the tragic double bind of divine determination and human responsibility, and Horace's Pindaric allusion in these lines connects him (an absent referent) both to the general tragic orientation of Juno's vision and to the specific need for purification. The original puer vindex (avenging boy) invoking the protection of Apollo, Orestes constitutes the mythic counterpart to Octavian before his ideological transformation into Augustus. Significantly, as 3.3ȧs reference to Augustus's future deification implies, such a transformation is already in process: the guilt of Octavian's own vindictiveness is displaced onto a mythological past that, as 3.6 suggests, has been reenacted by the Roman people (but not their ruler).There are other signs of such conversion of recent history into tragic myth. The cyclic repetition whose origin Juno places in Laomedon's betrayal is found in the very first stanza of the Pollio ode:
Motum ex Metello consule civicum bellique causas et vitia et modos ludumque fortunae gravisque principum amicitias et arma … The civil conflict that began with Metellus's consulship, the causes of war, its evils, and its patterns, Fortune's game and the fateful alliances of leaders, and arms … (2.1.1–4)
The tricola that structure this stanza pair each of the elements in the two series of collective objects (Nadeau 1980, 179). The gravisque /principum amicitias (fateful alliances of leaders) concretely specifies the bellique causas (causes of war), clearly implying the first triumvirate and the betrayal by its members. In the time frame of Pollio's history, the origin of civil discord lies in this betrayal, but the dishonoring of pacts is echoed by the reference to Laomedon in 3.3 (ex quo destituit deos / mercede pacta Laomedon, 3.3.21–22). The source of tragic cyclicity here seems to set time itself into motion-another characteristic of tragedy (Frye 1957, 213). The ex quo (from the time) of line 20 recalls the Motum ex Metello … civicum (civil conflict from the time of Metellus's consulship) of 2.1; the sense of temporal progression unleashed by a tragic fall coincides with the movement (motum) into verse. The weight of the gravis … amicitias (heavy, fatal alliances), like the fall of the tree in 2.13, crashes down and precipitates a movement into poetry. In 3.3, however, such historical origins have been displaced onto the crimes of the tragic past.
This idea of the fall, so central to any conception of tragedy, has as its corollary the notion of the tragic protagonist. In a rigorously Aristotelian vision of tragedy, the tragic protagonist suffers peripeteia, a reversal of fortune that is closely associated with prohairesis (Frye 1957, 210). Both 3.3 and 3.5 invoke this idea of a liminal decision, as if to suggest that Rome, as a tragic figure, has chosen her decline in the past and may continue her downward spiral in the future. As the speaker at the beginning of 3.5 implies by his lament for “the corrupt Senate and changed ways” (pro curia inversique mores, 7), the warning of Regulus has not prevented a fallen moral state. Already slipping and soon to fall (labantis), those with weak moral resolve find only temporary strength in the speech that Regulus gives. This implicit characterization of Rome as a tragic individual, rushing to her ruin, appears elsewhere in the Horatian corpus, often using the verbs labere (to fall, to slip) or mere (to rush headlong). The sixteenth epode, for example, opens with the explicit image of Rome's headlong fall: “Already another age is worn down by civil war and Rome herself topples (ruit) from her own strength (suis … viribus)” (Epod. 16.1–2). The fourth Roman ode evokes this idea allegorically in its Gigantomachia. The giants' rebellion, an expression of pure force, fails for lack of temperate wisdom. The moral that is drawn suggests the decline of Rome: “Force deprived of counsel falls from its own weight” (vis consili expers mole ruit sua, 3.4.65).
[74] See Newman 1967, 110 n. 3, for further citations of this trope in Augustan literature. See Commager 1962, 199–205, for Horace's appropriation of the motif from the first and eighth Pythian of Pindar.
More broadly, the tragic protagonist's fall evokes the idea of ritual sacrifice and the slaying of a victim, bringing us back to Girard's sacrificial
The erosion of cultural distinctions, the sign of such a crisis, appears in many guises in these poems. The bristling confusion of the Titans' multiple arms in the Gigantomachia of 3.4, for example, like their attempt to pile Pelion on Olympus indiscriminately, allegerically reflects the same (if later) state of cultural disintegration as do the images of corrupt morals and sacrilegious ways in 3.6. That ode, in turn, displays the fallen state of Rome against which Regulus warns in 3.5. Complaining that his soldiers, if ransomed by the Roman Senate, would “confound peace with war,” Regulus laments the collapse of perhaps the most important distinction underwriting Roman identity. The “destruction spreading into the future age” (perniciem veniens in aevum), which would be brought on by accepting the Carthaginian terms, metastasizes in 3.6 into a flood of contamination that spreads through family, home, and fatherland: “the age fertile with sin first despoiled marriage and offspring and home; disaster stemming from this source flowed into the people and the country” (fecunda culpae saecula nuptias / primum inquinavere et genus et domos; / hoc fonte derivata clades / in patriam populumque fluxit, 3.6.17–20).
[75] With the OCT I read clades in line 19 rather than Shackleton Bailey's lobes.
As we saw in the discussion of the ode to Pollio, the sacrificial crisis lends itself to images of infection, as well as of natural cataclysms. The next few stanzas, showing the effects of such contamination, develop the idea of the collapse of values as a crisis of distinctions: the young matron, contriving illicit loves from an early age, is so far corrupted that she does not discriminate in her already transgressive adulterous liaisons. And the opening stanza of 3.6 famously presents the deteriorated temples of the gods as a symbol of decline:
Delicta maiorum immeritus lues, Romane, donee templa refeceris aedisque labentis deorum et foeda nigro simulacra fumo[.] Though you are not to blame, you will expiate the crimes of your ancestors, Roman, until you rebuild the temples and the crumbling shrines of the gods, and restore their images, filthy now from dark smoke. (3.6.1–4)
The moral irresolution of the “wavering senators” (labantispatres) in 3.5.45 clearly echoes in both the crimes of previous generations, delicta maiorum, and the “crumbling shrines” (aedisque labentis).
The image of religious monuments in decay suggests the collapse of cultural distinctions in other ways. As visual symbols of national power, monuments express by their very skyward projection a sense of vertical hierarchy. In the second stanza of 3.6 the speaker asserts the importance of this hierarchy—of a vertical distribution of cultural roles. The speaker reminds his addressee, the blamelessly corrupt Roman, that “by subordinating yourself to the gods, you rule” (dis te minorem quod geris, imperas, 5). This stanza looks back to the very opening of the cycle of odes, where Hellenistic theory of kingship combines with allusion to the end of civil conflict: “Fear-inspiring kings rule over their own flocks; over kings themselves Jove wields authority, illustrious for his triumph over the Giants, and controlling all with a nod” (Regum timendorum in proprios greges, / reges in ipsos imperium est lovis, / clari Giganteo triumpho, / cuncta supercilio moventis, 3.1.5–8). The well-ordered state-with the king as shepherd of his people, holding himself second to Jove-turns into the allegorical Gigantomachia, resolved by the assertion of Olympian authority. The orderly hierarchy of the first two lines rests on the successful triumpho that follows.
[76] I disagree with Syndikus (1973, 16–17), who dismisses any hierarchy of power in this stanza, claiming that the kings possess no real power—all is ruled by Jupiter. For Witke (1983, 21), Jupiter becomes Necessitas and all are equal before Fate. On the Hellenistic theory of kingship, see G. Williams 1968, 160–70; Santirocco 1986, 118, with n. 27, for further bibliography. See Zanker 1988, 150–52, for Augustus's preoccupation with the discrimination and stratification of social orders.
Triumpho, with all its political charge for the Roman military imagination, immediately brings to mind the referent—the real story—of the allegorical narrative told later, in 3.4. It recalls the triumph avoided by Cleopatra in 1.37, even as it intimates that cultural order, the hierarchical distribution of roles, partially depends on the military superiority of a single man. It is this vision of order, I believe, that the Roman Odes seek to justify. The audience must be persuaded to acquiesce in—even to desire—this hierarchy. The rhetorical strategy of such persuasion is twofold: first, these poems articulate a social vision, one of distinctions or boundaries—the discrimina ordinum—whose violation has led to the endless cycles of the civil wars. Second, the Roman Odes involve their audience as undeserving yet entirely implicated participants in the national tragedy: once implicated, the audience needs symbolic purification, which will, in turn, reestablish the discrimina ordinum.The audience's participation becomes explicit in the sixth Roman ode. Here the ultimate cause of Rome's fall is religious impiety: the gods, angered by human indifference, have bestowed (dederunt) a multitude of evils on sorrowing Hesperia (3.6.7–8). And yet, as we have seen, the theme of impiety specifically connects the nefas of civil war, as a crisis of distinctions,
[77] Liebeschuetz (1979, 94) comments regarding Paris and Helen's sexual crimes in Odes 3.3: “adultery was the instrument through which they were punished.” See also Thome 1992, 88, for discussion of Cic. Sull. 76, where the vicious excesses of the Catalinarians are described as expiation for their previous crimes.
The syntax asserts that such payment will continue until the temples are restored, but within the cycle of odes as a whole, the Horatian persona as sacerdos provides the context for ritual. If the youth of Horace's audience—the “boys” (pueri) and “unmarried maidens” (virgines)—attend to his poems, the tragic frame will make possible their conditional identification with “the fall of Rome,” their own sacrilege superimposed on that of their forefathers: and they themselves, as audience to their “tragic fall,” will experience the tragic cleansing that will put an end to the cycle. Though the poetic representation initially constructs them as victims of the past, it also constructs the past as a way of releasing them from that victimhood. In addition to the pointedly expiatory diction of lucre, we should note that both the “virginal” status of the virgines at the cycle's opening and the “innocence” implied by immeritus as an epithet for the contemporary Roman are rhetorically consonant with the initial ritual purity, and abiding innocence, of a sacrificial victim (see Wissowa 1902, 351). In keeping with the fluid dynamics of sacrifice, the audience, as though witnessing an actual[78] On such identification, by which the witnesses to a sacrifice must visualize the victim's death as their own, see Feldherr 1998, 138.
Returning to the ritual context of the cycle's opening, we recall that sacerdotes refers to priests as public dignitaries of the state whose civic role was to advise the Senate on religious matters and to officiate at sacrifices. By employing the term sacerdos (used in its nominative form only once more in the Odes to refer, in 3.3, to Rhea as the mother of Romulus), Horace draws attention to the role of priests in public expiation, a duty explicitly prescribed by Cicero in De legibus: “Sacrilege which cannot be expiated shall be held to be impiously committed; that which can be expiated shall be atoned for by the public priests” (sacrum commissum, quod neque expiaripoterit, impie commissum esto; quod expiari poterit, publici sacerdotes expianto, 2.9.22).
[79] Trans. Keyes 1928, Loeb edition. Although Cicero's text provides laws for an “ideal state,” many of them were based on actual Roman law and practice. Moreover, though no acts of official expiation were recorded after 37 B.C.E., Augustus's reinstitution of the lustratio, a form of purificatory ritual performed in connection with the census in 28 B.C.E., demonstrates a concern with public acts of purification after the civil wars. See Aug. Res Gestae 8.2; Liebes-chuetz 1979, 96; Feldherr 1998, 117. On the actual purificatory acts implied by the phrase lustrum condere, see Ogilivie 1961. For further bibliography on priests and expiation, see [nn. 3] and [4] above.
In Horace's poem, the duty of public expiation combines with that of civic counsel. The rhetorical speech acts of Juno and Regulus in 3.3 and 3.5 constitute advice and warning-ultimately spoken by the Horatian sacerdos—that simultaneously counters impiety and frames history in terms of a tragic cyclicity. Juno speaks to the gods “in council” (consiliantibus, 3.3.17); and the language describing Regulus's “counsel given at no other time” (consilio numquam alias data) echoes that of the opening stanza of 3.1, “songs not previously heard” (carmina non prius audita, 2–3), thus furthering this identification: these poems, as carmina “troped” into sacrifices by the figure of Horace as priest, convert a national condition—a crisis of distinctions—into a form of public expiation. Indeed, we may even understand the consilium given by the Muses in 3.4 in such terms:
Vos Caesarem ahum, militia simul fessas cohortis abdidit oppidis, finire quaerentem labores Pierio recreatis antro,
vos lene consilium et datis et dato gaudetis almae. In your Pierian grove, you refresh and remake lofty Caesar, as he seeks to end his toils, as soon as he has hidden away his weary troops in towns; you both give gentle counsel and rejoice in giving it. (3.4.37–42)
Caesar himself is “re-created,” suggesting his transformation from the puer vindex of the years preceding Actium into Augustus the merciful, a metamorphosis that recalls by its diction—recreare—the snakes in the hair of the Eumenides in Odes 2.13, even as it implies Orestes (born anew at Delphi) and the purifying effects of religious ritual.
[80] Apollo, protector of Orestes and patron of Octavian, figures prominently in 3.4.60–64, lines deriving from Find. Pyth. 1.39–40: see Fraenkel 1957, 276–85, and Lowrie 1997, 249–52, for Horace's adaptation of Pindar. See Commager 1962, 224, on the Muses' recreation of Caesar in terms of Octavian's “new image” as Augustus.
Yet such a re-creation of Octavian already exists in these poems; more precisely, it consists in the very displacement of his guilt and responsibility (shared by those who engaged in the rivalrous competition for power) onto the Roman people. Finally, there may be an echo of Cassandra in the phrase “songs not previously heard,” an echo picked up by the phrase Troica sacerdos (3.3.32): “the Trojan priestess,” though referring to Rhea Silvia (as conflated with Ilia), cannot fail to bring to mind the most famous and ill-fated Trojan prophetess of them all.[81] Witke (1983, 19) points out that one reading of carmina non prius audita is texts whose advice, though spoken earlier, went “previously unheeded.”
Cassandra, who embodies the very paradox of tragedy—the inescapable doom it represents and the redemption effected by mimesis—is not far from the overall spirit of the Roman Odes.Thus, for a Roman audience familiar with the conventions of tragedy and sensitive to religious practices of their own culture, these poems constitute an expiation for the past, a purification that issues from the rhetoric of sacrifice performed as a speech act. And just as sacrifice reestablishes cultural differences, so these Horatian poems reinforce the distinctions between mortal, ruler, and god, thereby redefining social roles for the future. From an Aristotelian perspective, of course, the capacity to make such distinctions similarly derives from the experience of tragic catharsis as a response to dramatic mimesis.
[82] Catharsis, which follows a cognitive experience of a work of art, makes possible a refinement of the ethical sensibility that “conduces to an alignment of the emotions with the perception of moral qualities in the world” (Halliwell 1986, 196; more generally, 196–200).
Yet, as I have argued, by substituting for a sacrificial action these poems effect more than the Aristotelian notion of catharsis. Eisner's analysis of certain ancient responses to artistic images, as described by Pausanias (10.18.5), helps clarify this relationship of mimesis to ritual. Taking the case of the offering of the Orneatai at Delphi, where bronze figures representing a sacrifice and a procession were substituted for the actual rites promised to the gods-daily victims having become too costly—Eisner points out that such a “performative or ritual imitation complicates the dynamics of mimesis” because it presupposes an “identity… between … the act and its representation” (1996, 529; more generally, 526–29). Eisner concludes by claiming that such “supernaturalTHE GIFT OF IDEOLOGY
Now that we have examined how these poems invoke the rhetoric of sacrificial ritual, we can situate this religious transaction in the context of public munera and patronage, both literary and political. Despite the unending debate over the precise function of Greek tragedy, there is qualified agreement that the civic drama served as a form of ritual initiation into the prevailing ideologies of the city (Zeitlin 1990, 68–69; Goldhill 1990). The opening stanza of the Roman Odes clearly presents one such image of initiation, but we still must be careful in considering the function of Odes 3.1–6 in this light. These poems present material that is often interpreted as “Augustan” ideology—the apparent advocacy of martial virtue in 3.2 or the denunciation of promiscuity in 3.6 certainly conforms to, and has recently been taken to be complicitous in creating, the attitudes that fall under this rubric.
[83] For discussion of whether or not the Roman Odes effectively “reflect” Augustan ideology, see Pasquali 1964 [1920], 649–710; Btichner 1962; Klingner 1964a; and [n. 67] above. For Horace as a participant in the creation of ideology, see Santirocco 1995. Lowrie (1997, 227 n. 4) comments that Syme's frequent quotes of Augustan poetry points up the ease with which poetry becomes assimilated to “history.”
Nevertheless, insofar as ideology can be understood not as a static set of beliefs but rather as a “combative arena of persuasion and struggle” (Rose 1995, 62), we might better view the Roman Odes as poems whose main ideological function is again performative—to enact the tragedy of Rome's fall as a means of convincing a literate audience of the necessity of the Principate. That such persuasion occurs through poems whose dramatic monologues suggest the political oratory of Republicanism and civic participation only underscores the degree of complicity required by consent to this vision.As critics remark, by presenting civil unrest as a consequence of religious impiety, the Roman Odes recast the actual political and socioeconomic causes of the wars in terms of divine fate and an inherited debt to the gods (see Gordon 1990a, 194–95). My own interpretation has claimed that for
[84] Most scholars see Romulus as a model for Augustus in this poem: see Commager 1962, 212–16; Andre 1969, 44; Witke 1983, 42–43; Lowrie 1997, 238. Syndikus (1973, 42–42), however, cautions against too easily identifying Augustus with Romulus, as the latter's name was conventionally applied to those giving new foundations to the state.
The superimposition of the two figures suggests that Augustus's future divinity, as well as the conditional benediction for the Roman Empire, similarly issues from the appeasement of the angry goddess. We perceive here a dynamic of gift eliciting countergift—do ut des—that structurally parallels but inverts the idea of vindictive reciprocity: now that the pax dearum has been restored by the “gifts” of the Muses' counsel (consilium et datis) and the speaker's implied sacrifice, Juno will no longer punish the impious; although she, along with others, previously bestowed (dederunt) a multitude of ills on sorrowing Hesperia (3.6.7–8) and offered up Italians as sacrifices to the shades of Jugurtha (2.1.27–28), Juno will now reward the deserving—the man “just and resolute of purpose” (iustum et tenacempropositi virum, 3–3.1).[85] In the first half of 3.3, the deification of “culture heroes” such as Hercules, Romulus, Pollux, and finally Augustus, is presented as a consequence of hac arte, a phrase that refers to the “virtue” of the poem's first stanza—the tenacity of purpose. However, from a perspective of self-referential discourse, hac arte also implies the speaker's own capacity to immortalize—a connotation supported by Odes 4.8, a poem that explicitly addresses the fame of Hercules and Romulus as dependent exclusively on the poet for their continued glory.
To be sure, such a reading requires us to consider Juno's speech from two perspectives: both as the effect of her expiation and, as argued in the previous section, as part of the tragic frame of Roman history, wherein the successive violations committed by the Roman people account for the fall of the Republic. Nonetheless, insofar as Juno's speech contributes to the construction of the past as mythic tragedy and thus allows for purification in the present, such expiation is implicit in what she says: for just as her language of Roman religious contract—“I will return” (redonabo)—is discursively linked to the Horatian speaker's own rhetoric of expiation and his posture as sacerdos, so too the superimposition[86] Witke (1983, 42) notes that “the word redonabo [3.3.33], in its religious sense of pardon, remit, condone, with implications of expiation and atonement, is of course to be construed with Augustus as much as with Quirinus.”
From the perspective of ideology, such contractual rhetoric seeks to persuade its audience of the legitimacy of Augustus's power—an imperium that, despite all the conditions attending its prophecy, is both divinely sanctioned and the consequence of debt made good.To take another example, the persuasion and consent by which ideology functions surely inform the two uses of merces (payment, reward) in Odes 3.2 and 3.3. Variously interpreted in terms of political allegory, encomiastic convention, and the kleos of immortality, the rewards for silence held out by the speaker in 3.2.25–28 will forever resist hermeneutic certainty.
[87] See Davis 1983 for both a summary of the history of criticism on this stanza and his own argument that, in keeping with Pindaric conventions, it refers to the decorous silence the laudator should keep-knowing when to stop the encomium. On the ambiguity of Horace's statements concerning virtus in general in this poem, see Connor 1972.
Their meaning is shrouded by the very inscrutability of the Eleusinian mysteries that metaphorically develop the image:
25 est et fideli tuta silentio merces: vetabo, qui Cereris sacrum vulgarit arcanae, sub isdem sit trabibus fragilemque mecum
solvat phaselon; saepe Diespiter 30 neglectus incesto addidit integrum. raro antecedentem scelestum deseruit pede Poena claudo. For faithful silence there is a sure reward: I will forbid anyone who has revealed the sacred rite of mysterious Ceres to reside in the same abode or to unloose the delicate ship with me; often Jupiter, disdained, has added the innocent to the guilty, but rarely does Vengeance, despite her crippled gait, not catch up to the impious, though he has a head start. (3.2.25–32)
As is often remarked, the silence both looks back to the “held tongues” of the audience that witnesses the symbolic sacrifice of the sacerdos Musarum in the first poem and presumably allows the voices of Juno and Regulus to be “heard” in the following poems. Given that purification rites of some form were an integral component of the Eleusinian mysteries, we can justifiably see one meaning of the merces as the reward of expiation, the payment that rights the imbalance initiated by Laomedon's having refused the
This reading parallels the more explicit vision of exchange in Odes 3.2—the soldier's sacrifice of life for glory: here, the kleos of immortality is won by the military courage, or virtus, that sacrifices itself for the state. In the first half of the poem, a form of social sacrifice brings the reward of “divinity,” or access to the divine, whereas in lines 25–32, pious religious conduct converts divine vengeance into the divine beneficence that Juno displays in 3.3. Because Juno's relinquishing of Romulus so that he may become deified suggests the divine forgiveness born of expiation, it connects with and develops these two hermeneutic strands from the second poem.
In this context we may further understand the term merces much as Leslie Kurke has in analyzing Pindar's use of analogous terms appropriate to a monetary or “market” economy (see 1991, 240–56, on Isthmian 2): by applying a lexicon from a disembedded economy to an embedded transaction, Horace advocates a form of profit, but one achieved through sacrificial expenditure and “loss.” The implied devotio offered by Regulus in 3.5 suggests a similar expiatory profit: only by sacrificing himself and his soldiers to the enemy will Rome be purged and cleansed of the pernicies (destruction, plague) that threatens the whole community.
[88] See Thome 1992, 88, for this explicit connotation of devotio. Cicero (Off. 3.99) discusses Regulus's behavior initially in terms of magnitude animi, or “greatness of spirit,” the Latin equivalent of megalopsuchia. Fowler (1995, 252 n. 11) points out that megalopsuchia and megaloprepeia, “magnificent spending,” are kindred concepts in Aristotle.
In keeping with Juno's advice to leave gold quite literally “embedded” in the ground, Regulus depicts the dangers of ransoming his army, of redeeming a soldier with gold (repensus auro, 3.5.25): commodifying the soldier will undercut his “use value.” In contrast, the metaphoric gleam of courage or true worth (Virtus) in 3.2.17–22 shines with untainted honor (intaminatis fulget honoribus) and opens heaven for those who do not deserve to die (redudens immeritis mori caelum). It is this virtus that brings immortality and then evolves into the attribute of fides, displayed in the trustworthy silence (fideliAnd yet this silence, which the Roman Odes present in terms of religious metaphor, constitutes a kind of euphemism for the way in which the poems make their audience complicit with an ideological vision. Silence is a form of consent to how this cycle of odes naturalizes a “monarchic” ideology by recasting it in terms of a divine-mortal gift exchange: the deification of Romulus, and by implication Augustus, is both the reward and the precondition for expiation. By constructing the past in terms of tragic history and sacrifice, these poems present the increasing political domination of one man as a divine gift rendered necessary by the collapse of values, the erasure of cultural distinctions—the discrimina ordinum—that constitutes Girard's sacrificial crisis. Thus the allegorical Gigantomachia of 3.4, in which Olympian (Augustan) hierarchy asserts itself anew, restoring (or rather creating) the stratified social vision of gods, kings, and people presented in 3.1, evolves into the prediction in 3.5 of Augustus as a god incarnate who, having reestablished order in a country beset by civil conflict, is now ready to add Parthia and Britain to his empire.
Finally, this “re-creation” of the past, as an ideological strategy for legitimizing the present, disguises a certain economic calculation on the political level. It is really loyalty to Augustus that is at stake here, but the speaker, as priest, elicits adherence to the princeps by the symbolic expenditure on behalf of his people. As mentioned in chapter 1, Richard Gordon has drawn attention to the “voluntary” expenditures of priests in the early Empire as a means of creating fides, or loyalty—the symbolic capital garnered through giving.
[89] Thus Gordon (1990a, 194) interprets the hyperbolic attention paid to the forms of religious sacrifice as a means of creating symbolic capital—or loyalty and a sense of obligation. Gordon here concurs with what he calls the “political” argument of Veyne (1990, 298–327).
Pierre Bourdieu suggests that such symbolic gifts possess value by virtue of the “wastage of money, energy, time, and ingenuity,” or the labor devoted to the form and presentation of giving (1977, 194). We see this idea of the symbolic gift not only in the implied trope of the cycle of poems as sacrifice, with the speaker's emphasis on religious form, but also, as I have suggested, in the sacrificial ideology behind the martial courage advocated in 3.2 and 3.5.Though the “patriotism” of the famous gnome “it is sweet and fitting to die for your country” (dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, 3.2.13) may be undercut by the lines that follow it, the idea of personal expenditure—the “expense of spirit”—nonetheless develops tellingly from a sequence of images ultimately connected to the speaker's own symbolic sacrifice. For the
[90] For criticism on the cyclic connections between the end of 3.1 and the beginning of 3.2, see Santirocco 1986, 116: Witke 1983, 31.
The careful placement of this image implies two related ideas: first, that the speaker's own “character” or “spirit,” nourished on his humble estate, is expended in the symbolic offering of his poetry, a gift to his country that will earn him kleos; and second, that die uldmate source of that expenditure is die patronage of die Augustan regime. As I discuss in chapter 4, the echo in Epistles 1.7 of the phrase dulce et decorum est raises this issue of poetry as “expense” or “loss” in a context that challenges the emphasis on voluntarism in Roman descriptions of patronage. In 3.1 die speaker as sacerdos similarly hints that economic calculation may lie beneath a generous gesture.For though he disdains material wealth and die anxieties it brings, die speaker ironically draws attendon to the exchange value of die farm: “why should I raise high, in the style of die nouveau riche, a hall with columns intended to be envied? Why should I exchange my Sabine valley for burdensome wealth?” (cur invidendis postibus et novo / sublime ritu moliar atrium ? / cur valle permutem Sabina / divitias operosiores ? 3. 1.45–48). As a symbol of die virtue of die restrained desire advocated earlier in the poem (3.1.25), the farm possesses an abstract value akin to die symbolic capital that die loss or expenditure of “riches” (divitias) would create: the speaker's stance may elevate die farm over material wealth, even as he implies that, judged by externals, it is in fact worth less than a hall in die style of nouveau ostentation; however, his rhetorical question effectively equates, in an image of exchange, the symbolic value of his property with die material value of wealth. Balancing with perfect symmetry the opening stanza featuring die priest, tins final image of 3.1, die poet's property, may be said to participate in an implied circulation of symbolic capital, eventuating in die gift of expiation: for if die gift of die farm creates die symbolic capital of die poet's loyalty or obligation to die regime, then dial capital is circulated furdier in die form of symbolic sacrifices on behalf of die people. These munera, in turn, indebt the people to die poet, and ultimately to die princeps, for die very act of canceling a debt to die gods. In light of tins “movement” of die original capital of die farm, die formulaic “break-off” at die end of 3.3 (recalling Pindar's address to his Muse in Pythian 11, discussed above), takes on greater significance: for after die digression on Orestes, die Pindaric speaker claims, “Muse, if you have agreed to hire your voice for a fee, you must dart hither and thither, other ways than for Pythonicus and Thrasydaeus” (Mοῖσα, τὸ δὲ τεόν, εἰ μɩσθοῖο σῳνέθεῳ παρέΧεɩν / Φωνὰν
[91] I follow the translation and interpretation of Richard Stoneman in his notes to Conway and Stoneman 1991 [1972].
The passage implies that digression on other topics is necessary to offset a quid pro quo exchange of patronage. Horace's allusion to these lines both in 3.3, the ode that refers to Augustus's deification, and at the end of Odes 2.1, a poem that evolves from the praises of Pollio into the speaker's own sacrificial munera, underscores that public expiation and the tragic frame in which it is offered simultaneously obscure and serve the interests of patronal exchange.This chapter has analyzed the discourse of sacrifice and tragedy in Horace's political poems from two related angles: on the one hand, tracing an evolution from Odes 2.1 and 2.13 into the Roman Odes, we have examined the performative aspect of Horace's religious rhetoric and found a “ritual-centered” discourse that fulfills the need for public expiation; on the other, we have situated this rhetoric in terms of its ideological function as serving to justify the Principate and its prophesied imperium as divinely sanctioned, as the “return gift” of the gods — the pax Augusta issuing from the reestablishment of the pax deorum. Subtly recalling but differing from the expiation of Orestes, the original puervindex, the ideological makeover that recreates Octavian as the divine Augustus displaces his guilt onto the people, making it a matter for their, not his, purification. Finally, we have seen that the posture of the Horatian priest has a further ideological function in that it serves to veil the economic interests of the regime in the creation of this vision of divine imperium. Such a poetic vision does not appear automatically to respond to the gift of land — or literary, imperial patronage — in a quid pro quo exchange; instead, it is structured in terms of voluntary expenditure, a discourse of priestly euergetism in which gifts to the people involve both philanthropia (benevolence) and liberalitas (generosity).
[92] See Gordon 1990c, 219–31, for the Principate's increasing dependence on such a discourse of sacrificial euergetism, one particularly centered around the princeps himself.
Though Gordon here refers to real goods, such as the provision of “games, feasts, monetary distributions and dispensations of oil or wine” (1990a, 194), as well as the construction of civic buildings — all forms of the so-called voluntary payments, or summa honoraria, that were incumbent upon priests on election — we might nonetheless understand Horace's sacrificial expenditure in the same terms.[93] Benveniste (1971, 278) connects damnum to the Greek verb dapanōn, “to spend or consume,” and to the Latin daps, “a sacrificial meal.” He thus establishes the relationship between the “loss” suffered in compensation for a crime and the “loss” of conspicuous consumption in a voluntary sacrifice.
For Horatian lyric, invoking the public spirit of Greek[94] As Jameson (1981, 106) remarks, “genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular artifact.”
these poems promote a cohesive national identity and justify Augustus's power in a discourse that parallels the voluntary public gifts of Rome's leader.