3. The Gifts of the Golden Age
Land, Debt, and Aesthetic Surplus
“Golden Latin,” a critical term for the prose and poetry of the late Republican and Augustan period, appears infrequently in contemporary criticism and the more recent handbooks of classical literature.
[1] For example, Conte (1994) employs the divisions of “Late Republic,” “Augustan,” and “Early Empire”; Kenney and Clausen (1982) use similar divisions. In contrast, Hadas (1952, 14) refers to the period 70 B.C.E.-14 C.E. as “the Golden Age,” and 14–180 C.E. as “the Silver Age”; Wilkinson (1963) accords with this periodization.
The reason, perhaps, lies in the current idea that labels reflecting qualitative distinctions serve ideological interests. Critical nomenclature and aesthetic discriminations tell us more, so one view would have it, about the assumptions, ambitions, prejudices, and politics of those who make such judgments than about the literary text or category in question. The term “Golden Latin” came into use at a time when English imperialism identified with the Roman Empire and when the Aeneid served as a paradigmatic text that justified visions of nationalism and colonial ambitions.[2] Hallet (1993, 47) cites Teuffel (1870), followed by Cruttwell (1877), as the German and English scholars who first coined the terms “Golden Age” and “Silver Age” and who “furnish historical explanations … which indeed base aesthetic judgments on political factors.”
Though the term originally referred to a stylistic zenith of purity and homogeneity to which the Latin language had evolved, it also suggests the golden age imagery that played such an important part in Augustan ideology, or the image that those in power projected of themselves.[3] On “ideology,” see Eagleton 1991, 1–2, who gives sixteen definitions currently in circulation. Four are relevant here: (1) the process of production of meanings, signs, and values in social life; (2) ideas that help legitimate a dominant political power; (3) the conjuncture of discourse and power; and (4) the process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality. For a discussion of poets as active participants in the creation of Augustan ideology, see Santirocco 1995, who argues against the tendency to see Augustan poets as either reflecting or opposing a preexisting set of ideological beliefs.
The golden age is both implicitly and explicitlyWe now turn to poems of the Horatian corpus that display the poet's rhetorical figuring of his identity as variously negotiating the cultural contradictions and ambivalences implicit in the status of the Sabine farm as a gift—a benefaction often depicted with details of the golden age or as a pastoral locale. This chapter and chapter 5 address poems in which the estate features explicitly; chapter 4 explores how Horace's Sabine property, as a suppressed term or “absent center,” mediates the representation of his relationship with Maecenas in Epistles 1.
The literary criticism concerning Horace's estate has generally been of two kinds. One group of scholars has emphasized the poet's representation of his farm as a symbol of aesthetics, a source of creative inspiration and poetic integrity.
[4] An exemplary but not exhaustive list includes Fraenkel 1957, 205–7; Commager 1962, 348–52; Schmidt 1977; Johnson 1982, 140–42; Thomas 1982; Davis 1991, 201–2; Putnam 1994, 357–75.
This approach not only presumes that the aesthetic components of a poem can be analyzed independently of its socioeconomic context but also takes for granted Horace's own independence: as a critical ideology for the Augustan period, aestheticism suggests a commitment to viewing the artist as unconstrained by contemporary political demands or social discourses. Patronage, in this view, is taken up in the poems only as a theme or motif, a rhetorical set of images determined by the internal demands of genre rather than by any pressures or discourses outside of the text.[5] Note, for example, the claim of Zetzel (1982, 87): “a good case can be made for denying utterly the importance of patronage to Latin poetry. Not necessarily to the poets, I hasten to add, but to their literary productions.”
Other critics, concerned with social issues embedded in Horace's poems, have focused almost exclusively on the role of the farm as a biographical source, a locus of admittedly tenuous information about the[6] Leach (1993b, 273) comments on Horace's allusions to his farm as “frequently scrutinized as successive watermarks in the history of his patron-client relationship.” For this approach, see Bailey 1982, 36–37. Bradshaw (1989) opines that Augustus, not Maecenas, gave Horace his Sabine estate; after reviewing the evidence, Lyne (1995, 9–11) concludes that Horace had at least three properties and maybe five, arguing that Augustus was the source of more benefactions than Maecenas.
Some, to be sure, are not so easily categorized. Eleanor Leach, for example, explores the depictions of the farm as literary topography—the verbal representations of spatial reality that invoke both the poetic context of genre and the cultural context of extraurban, villa society (1993b).My own reading of these passages similarly mediates between the two approaches by examining the degree to which representations of the farm in Horace's text suggest an ideology about the artist and aesthetic production that simultaneously depends on, competes with, and often appropriates the terms of the socioeconomic discourse of patronage. My study seeks to elucidate the cultural assumptions that underlie, together with the rhetorical and poetic strategies that negotiate, the following paradox: on the one hand, the farm invokes the discourse of patron-client reciprocity—the very real gratitude that the Horatian speaker represents himself as feeling toward his benefactor, as well as the need to requite his gifts; on the other hand, the farm, the very gift that obliges, simultaneously allows Horace the liberty to renegotiate his debts. That is, while the gift of the estate serves to expropriate the labor of the poet in the form of the Roman Odes, it is precisely the aesthetic construction of the farm, either in the pastoral terms of a locus amoenus (lovely place) or in figures of the golden age, that provides the speaker a rhetorical means of resisting the demands of reciprocity and reclaiming his “spent” self.
To understand the poetic and historical contexts of these depictions of Horace's farm, we must first examine images of benefaction in Vergil's Eclogues, poems in which the golden age topos, and pastoral ease more generally, takes on explicit associations with patronal generosity.
[7] I look to Vergil's Eclogues as a model for exploring the kinds of issues considered by Patterson (1987, 7): “how writers, artists, and intellectuals of all persuasions have twedpastoral for a range of functions and intentions that the Eclogues first articulated.” For a discussion of the literary origins of the topos of the golden age in Augustan literature, see Reckford 1958; see Wallace—Hadrill 1982 and Zanker 1988, 167–93, on the ideology of the topos. Galinsky (1996, 90–100) stresses the importance of laborto the Augustan evocations of the aurea saecula after the fourth eclogue. See Castriota 1995, 124–44, on the topos in relation to the Ara Pacis. For further bibliography, see [n. 30] below.
Vergil's work provides a critical backdrop for understanding the passages in Horace in which the lineaments of a locus amoenus appear.[8] The escapist fantasy in Epode 16, recommending withdrawal to a remote isle of the blessed as a solution to civil war, displays many elements in common with Eclogue 4, the most acclaimed vision of the aurea aetas'm European literature. However, critics generally agree that the poem is a deliberate response to Vergil; and because it lacks any explicit relationship to benefaction or aesthetics, it is not relevant to my discussion. See Clausen 1994, 145–50, for the argument that Vergil's poem postdates Horace's.
The allusions to the[9] For specific facts about the confiscations and resettlement of veterans, see Brunt 1971, 329–30; Keppie 1983. Though some of the land used for resettlement came from estates of those proscribed, according to Dio and Appian there were first eighteen and then sixteen more cities specifically set aside for land distribution to the soldiers who supported the triumvirs at Philippi. As Brunt and Moore (1967, 42) and Keppie (1983, 38–39) claim, soldiers of the Republic had no specific legal right to lands or monies on discharge; nonetheless, land distribution had historical precedent in the policies of Scipio Aemelianus and the Gracchi as well as in the settlement of Sulla's veterans. Cf. the discussion in Leach 1974, 117 n. 5, 131, and sources cited therein.
Any reading of Horace's depictions of his estate must therefore take into account both the historical context of the land confiscations of the civil wars and the intertextual resonance of the Eclogues that responds to the same political background. As we shall see, the relationship between art, otium (leisure, unencumbered time), and the gift of property in Vergil's bucolic poems reflects a discourse of patronage similar in its assumptions and uses to the Horatian images of benefaction. For both poets, land is perceived as a gift whose value lies in its capacity to ensure otium and the consequent production of poetry. Because poetry is a means of displaying gratitude, its potential to serve the political interests of the benefactor is inscribed in the codes of social exchange: ideology, as a function of art, may be produced in the very same gesture as the aesthetic expression of gratia. My concern, however, is not with the content of political ideology per se but rather with how far such ideology intersects with the poetic treatment of this relationship—with the representation of patronal relations, not always inaccurately, in terms other than those of self-interested reciprocity. For such treatment displays what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “misrecognition” of the economics of exchange in a gift economy, revealing the degree to which these aesthetic texts at one level do function ideologically, insofar as they naturalize social and political distributions of resources.
Before turning to a close reading of the poems, we should consider the general question of how aesthetics and ideology are related. Contemporary reading practices that view works of literature as necessarily, even if
[10] For an overview of Marxism in literary studies, see Kavanagh and Jameson 1984. For Marxist approaches to antiquity, see Arthur and Konstan 1984 and Rose's introduction, “Marxism and the Classics” (1992, 1–42), to which I am indebted. Marcuse (1978) strongly adhered to the notion of the autonomy of art but also appropriated Schiller's view of the unity of form—a notion problematized by poststructuralist theory, as Brenkman (1985, 184) points out.
This subversively utopic impulse of art essentially retains the romanticism of an idealist aesthetics such as Schiller's (here displaced from the harmony of form to the lack thereof), even as it is deployed within a critical practice that ultimately aims to view literary texts as fully embedded within the material and discursive practices of a particular historical period.This critical genealogy is relevant to my analysis of the Eclogues and the Horatian uses of pastoral, particularly in the depictions of the Sabine estate in the Satires and the Odes, because these poems seem consistently to pose the question of the relations between aesthetic production and political power. Benefaction as a material practice that promotes art is, in the Eclogues, also a social system of land redistribution, a practice that serves to establish or legitimize the status and authority of military leaders as political figures. I argue that by assimilating a patronal ideology to the conventions of pastoral, Vergil's eclogues not only display a “misrecognition” of the economics of literary benefaction, they also render natural—or at least comprehensible and meaningful—the confiscations by which the military were settled after Philippi. Such a reading by no means discounts the numerous ways in which Vergil draws attention to those who suffer from the expropriations and the other effects of civil war. Indeed, part of the aesthetic miracle of these poems is the fragile dialectical resolutions they achieve, speaking on both sides of the issues: in the first eclogue and later, the perspectives of both the haves and the have-nots are represented even as the poems culminate in an imaginary and, for many readers, imperfect synthesis of the two.
In this regard, Fredric Jameson, whose work draws on the insights of the
The shifting and mercurial factions of power immediately following the assassination of Julius Caesar make it difficult to locate a stable or specific set of political relations whose right to dominance the Eclogues might be said to both interrogate and render “natural.” However, as the Republic declined in the first century B.C.E. and increasingly became less a “reality” than a rhetorical concept or nostalgic ideal to be manipulated by the ambitious, political power came to rest with single individuals or the oligarchic few, whose public influence and status depended on their military backing. It is this type of political structure-power in the hands of a few who have force to defend their interests—and the social system of patronage and benefaction that supported it (particularly through land allotments to the military) that we intuit as ultimately naturalized by the Eclogues. From Jameson's perspective, this interpretation would constitute a negative hermeneutic, inasmuch as it reads the poems (if not their author) as endorsing, in however qualified a manner, the political system that essentially became a military dictatorship.
However, it is not my purpose here to provide an in-depth Marxist critique of the Eclogues: the voices of the dispossessed, marginalized, and unconvinced, and the contingencies that mark their fate, are quite visible in all of Vergil's work and have received much scholarly attention.
[11] In the Aeneid, for example, the positive hermeneutic is visible in the lyric pauses and in the interruptions of the epic's narrative telos to inaugurate the Roman Empire.
Rather,[12] On this type of ironic allusion, see Hubbard 1995, 12
the gift of land carries both the cultural memory of expropriation and the obligation to reciprocate. Yet insofar as earlier images of Horace's estate, in the Satires and Odes, do conform to the ideology of benefaction as naturalized by the Eclogues, such images ironically lay the foundation for the rhetorical strategies by which the poet later resists or subverts what he reveals as a tacit, if distorted, code of reciprocity. Ultimately, as chapter 5's analysis of Epistles i demonstrates, Horace's pastoral allusions construct his estate in a way that both resists the vulnerability posed by the material world and simultaneously justifies his right to ownership, serving to inscribe the poet in the ranks of the landed elite. Horatian gestures of “freedom” are, in many ways, thus incorporated within and by the discursive structures of power they are meant to resist.LAND, OTIUM, ART: ECLOGUE 1
Though Vergil by no means explicitly presents the securing of Tityrus's estate in the first eclogue in golden age terms, the pastoral theme of otium certainly connects the shepherd's relieved gratitude to the deus (god) at Rome with the prophetic visions of the fourth eclogue. The “pastoral vision” here secured for the individual, Tityrus, is later expanded into the universal topos of the peace and plenty of a golden age, as his private otium (as envisioned by Meliboeus) becomes a social Utopia enjoyed by all in Eclogue 4.
[13] I am indebted to Perkell (1990a, 171–81) for her discussion of the “pastoral vision” in Eclogue 1 as a product of Meliboeus's own transfiguring imagination. For an elucidation of her terms “pastoral vision” and “pastoral design,” the latter of which derives from Marx 1981 [1964], see Perkell 1996. For problems of dating and conflicts between the chronology of composition and the sequence of the Ecloguesas a collection, see Van Sickle 1978, 2–37. Other discussions of the first eclogue from which I have profited are G. Williams 1968, 307–12; Putnam 1970, 20–81; Leach 1974, 113–42; Alpers 1979, 65–95; Segal 1981, 271–300.
In some ways, such translation of the contingent good fortune of one (or a few) into a social vision prophesied for all characterizes the[14] Van Sickle (1978, 44–75) describes a linear, dynamic development of a “positive ideology” in the Eclogues.
But these poems do more than suggest the process by which the ideological potential of Vergil's pastoral song derives, in part, from a system of patronage; they also naturalize that social discourse of benefaction by assimilating it to conventions of the bucolic landscape. This results in an idealized vision of benefaction—as a system that promotes social cohesion and community—and downplays the idea that ideology is produced as a return gift.In Eclogue 1, the particular fictive situation of Tityrus and Meliboeus underscores the final consequence of the generosity of those in Rome: the gift of land secures otium, and leisure in turn makes possible art and aesthetic freedom. Indeed, though Meliboeus emphasizes his own loss of land and thus his experience of expropriation, the opening images in which he figures Tityrus describe the latter's musical activity rather than his possession of land:
Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi silvestrem tenui Musam meditaris avena; nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arva. nos patriam fugimus; tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas. Tityrus, reclining beneath the shady protection of the spreading beech tree, you practice your songs on a slender reed; but we leave the borders and sweet fields of our country, we are exiled from our land; you, Tityrus, comfortable in the shade, teach the woods to echo back “lovely Amaryllis.” (1.1–5)
Scholars have long recognized the contrast between the two shepherds here as a dissonance between the civic turmoil of recent history and an ideal “pastoral vision,” a conflict that characterizes the Eclogues as a whole. However, in addition to such structural or “binary” oppositions is a series of equivalences or exchanges—a particular economy of values that should be stressed. In setting his loss of property against Tityrus's song of Amaryllis, Meliboeus effectively equates property and song as values: for Meliboeus, the presence of land or property is automatically translated into its aesthetic equivalent-pastoral song.
[15] See Goux 1990, 9: “Metaphors, symptoms, signs, representations: it is always through replacement that values are created. … Value is presupposed by formal identity and by indemnity, even if no real permutation, no give-and-take trade actually makes the substitution of equivalents visible [.]” In the first eclogue, otium is one value in a chain of signification; in this respect, the substitution is metonymic rather than metaphoric.
This close relationship between land and song[16] Amaryllis appears in Theocr. Id. 3.1, 4.36.
Thus, though land is the material substance that actually enables the shepherds' lives, it is also what Meliboeus transforms into an ideal and aestheticized pastoral vision. Meliboeus represents Tityrus as enjoying what I propose to call an “economy of otium”: a system of symbolic exchanges that is materially based but in which the value of that material—land—is determined by its aesthetic returns. In such an economy, the land is itself appreciated for its aesthetic qualities, and possession of it ensures the owner the peace and tranquillity necessary for the pursuit of “letters” or the production of culture.[17] Cf. Cic. De Or. 1.224: philosophorum autem libros reserve! sibi ad huiusce modi Tusculani requiem atque otium. D'Arms (1981, 79) points up the vocabulary used to describe luxury villas in the ancient sources: “voluptas {rather than fructus), luxuria, voluptariaepossessiones, amoenitas, otium are recurring words and phrases.” On the varied connotations of otium in the late Republic and Augustan era, see Andre 1966, 205–541.
Meliboeus's particular vision is poignantly stirred by the imminence of his loss (Segal 1981, 276–77). However, by idealizing the actually mundane and unlovely landscape that Tityrus is allowed to keep, the dispossessed shepherd's song also compensates to a degree, serving to transform the pain of expropriation into an aesthetic fullness. Indeed, a recent “positive” reading of the eclogue's final lines claims that the aesthetic power itself of Meliboeus's pastoral sensibility, as expressed in song, moves Tityrus at the end of the poem to make his offer of generous, if tentative, hospitality (Perkell i ggoa, 176). Another way of putting this is to say that what is duke (melodious, delightful) about Meliboeus's poetry becomes, ultimately, utik (useful). What appears at first as merely a swan song, a haunting but helpless response to the brutal realities of civil discord, turns out to have a social function.
For the purposes of my analysis, the interdependence of this social effectiveness of Meliboeus's song and Tityrus's hospitality is crucial. The final lines of the eclogue, as many recognize (though their explanations vary), achieve a temporary synthesis of the dialectical oppositions represented by
[18] On the importance of “human needs and relations” in the pastoral world, see Alpers 1979, 225.
The bucolic community in which Tityrus includes Meliboeus, glimpsed in the smoke rising from the rooftops at a distance, reflects more than pastoral empathy, for it suggests the social cohesion to which the ideology of benefaction aspires.More than one stratified social structure is implied in this cohesion. Indeed, the deus or “god” at Rome who secures Tityrus his estate combines features of the patron with a discourse of Hellenistic king worship.
[19] This observation is not meant to reduce the eclogue to an old-style set of allegorical correspondences, with Octavian the probable figure hovering behind the deus. The historical situation is important, but only as it is filtered through the fictive encounter of the two shepherds and their individual sensibilities.
The benefaction of this particular god, accessible and ready to aid (praesentis … divos, 41), invokes the practice of exchange—the reciprocal giving of goods and services, between two parties of unequal status—that marks the Roman institution of patronage. In return for the grant of land (or the assurance that he may continue to inhabit it), Tityrus vows always to render a sacrificial victim once a month to the deus whose features will never fade from his memory. Given the Roman context and Tityrus's own dramatic perspective, the shepherd's divine nomenclature constitutes a hyperbolic expression of his overwhelming sense of gratitude. To call one's human benefactor “a god” is rhetorically consonant with the genre of the eucharistikon, a speech of gratitude usually addressed directly to the donor in question (Du Quesnay 1981, 98–103). However, such attitudes ultimately derive from the Greek-speaking world; when the Romans took over the land ruled by Hellenistic monarchs, the deification of benefactors became part “of their own stock of cultural responses” (102–4). In addition, then, to suggesting the practices of Roman patronage, the monthly sacrifice that[20] See Clausen 1994, 48, and P. White 1993, 171–73, for the Hellenistic significance of Tityrus's vow to make monthly sacrifices to the deus in Rome. Drawing a distinction between benefactors and rulers, Du Quesnay (1981, 107) in fact rejects this view, deriving from Wissowa, and considers worship of the Lar familiaris to be the model for Tityrus's monthly sacrifices. Sailer (1982, 23) emphasizes that the diction of patronage characterizes man-god relations in both the Republic and early Empire.
Within the dramatic fiction of the pastoral dialogue, Vergil has grafted a discourse of Hellenistic king worship—of which Tityrus himself would probably have been ignorant-onto a Roman context of gratitude and obligation to a patron. We shall return to the ideology of monarchy, similarly naturalized by assimilation to the pastoral landscape, in the discussion of Eclogue 4.As Seneca points out in De beneficiis, a person can never really pay back his benefactor, and the debt incurs a lifelong sense of gratitude that binds the two together (2.18–5).
[21] Seneca does not discuss the ongoing relationship between a benefactor and his beneficiary in terms of a diens-patronus bond. However, as the introduction makes clear, my views incline to those argued by Sailer (1982, 6): “We should not jump to the conclusion that patronage existed only where the terms patronus and dienswere used.”
Hence, in place of a full reciprocation to the man of higher status, the beneficiary himself becomes a benefactor to others below him, and disseminates favors in turn. Such a patronal hierarchy is indeed suggested when Tityrus offers food and shelter to Meliboeus before he must leave. Although Meliboeus is the “free citizen,” and Tityrus is or was the slave, the modalities of patronage invoked by land grants ultimately condition not only Tityrus's relationship to his deus but also the formal structure of relations between the two shepherds at the end of the poem.Critics have censured the belatedness of Tityrus's offer and the merely pragmatic or contractual element of his sacrificial offerings to the deus.
[22] See Putnam 1970, 67; Coleman 1977, 90; Patterson 1987, 3. Leach (1974, 137–38) sees Tityrus as powerless, not callous. Arguing for a more positive reading of Tityrus's hospitality, Perkell (1990a, 175) nonetheless sees him as “ready to worship a new, private, urban god, for reasons of expediency.”
And yet the eclogue tentatively (perhaps reflecting the hesitation of Tityrus's final words) endorses benefaction as the economic system that produces results. Tityrus originally goes to Rome in hopes of obtaining his liberty (spes libertatis, 32), either through manumission by censu or by securing his right to farm, because expropriation from the land would mean the loss of ususfructus (the right to the “fruits” rather than ownership of property) and the possibility of accumulating his peculium.[23] Peculium is often used to refer to a “slave's savings” by which he might buy his freedom; more technically, Varro (Rust. 1.2.17) defines a slave's peculium as the right of pasturage that could be granted by a master to slaves. Finley (1973, 64) writes that “peculiumwas property (in whatever form) assigned for use, management, and within limits, disposal to someone who in law lacked the right of property, either a slave or someone in patria potestas; … a slave … could expect to buy his freedom with the profits [of the peculium.] [.]” On ususfructusin Roman law, see Watson 1968, 203–21. Manumission by censu refers to the grant of freedom that could be given by the censor, every four years in Rome, to those slaves who presented themselves at the behest of their master. Freedom, if granted, would be accompanied by citizenship. See Treggiari 1969, 25–27. For discussion of the historical and legal realities behind Tityrus's journey to Rome to acquire his libertas, see Leach 1974, 120–21; Coleman 1977, 79, 82; Du Quesnay 1981, 115–36, and the sources cited therein.
But as Tityrus's
Libertas, quae sera tamen respexit inertem, candidior postquam tondenti barba cadebat, respexit tamen et longo post tempore venit, postquam nos Amaryllis habet, Galatea reliquit. namque (fatebor enim) dum me Galatea tenebat, nec spes libertatis erat nee cura peculi. quamvis multa meis exiret victima saeptis, pinguis et ingratae premeretur caseus urbi, non umquam gravis acre domum mihi dextra redibat. Freedom, which, though late, yet took notice of lazy me, after my whitening beard began to fall to the scissors, had regard for me nonetheless and came after a long time-after Amaryllis took me, and Galatea left. Indeed—I'll confess-while Galatea held me, there was neither hope of freedom nor the inclination to save. Although many victims left my enclosures and cheese was pressed for the ungrateful town, never did I return home with money in hand. (1.27–35)
There are several striking features in this brief glimpse of Tityrus's foray into the neighboring town to sell his goods. First, Tityrus applies to a commercial situation a word appropriate to a gift economy or to the exchange of benefits and favors: although he is presumably selling his goods for aera or bartering them for other items, he seems to be relying on the gratitude of the townspeople for the excess profit that would go to his peculium.
[24] Tityrus brings expectations of the “pastoral pleasance” to a market situation. For discussion of the pastoral economy as what I am calling a “gift economy,” where monetary calculation and precise values are unknown, see Rosenmeyer 1969, 161–67, who notes that “In spite of the absence of labor from the pleasance, a gift in which the donor has invested some of his time and energy is especially welcome. Hence the cups lovingly chiseled, the pipes meticulously honed and waxed, and the garment newly oiled.” He adds that “the emphasis is on their [the gifts'] aesthetic qualities[;] … they are rewards or signs of accreditation” (163–64). In this regard, pastoral gifts, though often “humble,”nonetheless suggest the “prestige objects” of primitive gift economies.
But[25] Commentators often ascribe Tityrus's inability to save money for his peculium to the spendthrift ways of Galatea, his sweetheart before Amaryllis: e.g., Coleman 1977, ad loc. However, as Du Quesnay (1981, 122) rightly points out, “Tityrus presents the connection between his manumission and his relationship with Amaryllis as temporal, not causal (postquam).”
Second, Tityrus's use of the word victima to describe the sheep taken to the town market suggests the ritual of sacrifice and not a commercial transaction. Pinguis (fat) is likewise an epithet often used to describe an animal used in such a ritual. To be sure, the phrasing may simply reflect Tityrus's expectation that his sheep will be bought by priests or those who must make sacrifices but have no animals of their own.[26] Servius refers pinguis to victima, but otherwise does not comment. For the idea that the process of sacrifice was necessarily mediated through the market, cf. Plin. Tra. 10.96.10: Certe satis constat prope iam desolata templa coepisse celebrari et sacra sollemnia diu intermissa repeti passimque venire (camem) victimarum, cuius adhuc rarissimus empt&r inveniebatur. I am grateful to C. Bennett Pascal for this reference.
Nonetheless, his use of the word victima here appears somewhat overdetermined. Tityrus is in the full flush of having just received a benefaction and is full of gratia to his benefactor. Such gratia expresses itself in images of sacrifice; thus whenever he mentions his benefactor, Tityrus includes images of the ritual offering of lambs that he will make in return (1.7–8, 42–43). The association of victima with these other images of sacrifice appears, for example, in the repetition of the verb exiret: Tityrus thinks in terms of sacrificial offerings (”though many fat victims left [exiret] my enclosures”), when he considers escaping the condition of slavery—“it was not possible for me to escape the status of a slave nor elsewhere discover gods so accessible and helpful” (neque servitio me exire licebat / nee tarn praesentis alibi cognoscere divos, 41–42). Hence, despite the discrepancy between the commercial and gift economies, he impulsively views the former system, and its failure to gain him his libertas, through the lens of the economic system—benefaction—that has just blessed him. Finally, both of the goods that “fail” to produce gratia in the commercial context are the very ones that, as return gifts or generous gestures, are prompted by gratia within a gift economy: in addition to the “tender lamb,” the sacrificial victima to be rendered to the deus, the caseus or cheese-thanklessly pressed for the townspeople—is one of the items Tityrus offers to Meliboeus at the end of the poem. In contrast to commerce, as dramatically presented by the poem, benefaction inspires gratia, the gratitude that, in an ideal world, lays the groundwork for community.It is often remarked that ideology functions by canvassing alternative
[27] Perkell (1990b, 45) argues that this uncertainty in the poem constitutes one of its “hermeneutic gaps” or “loci of indeterminacy”—terms derived from Wolfgang Iser's reader-response theory.
However, regardless of what Tityrus does in fact receive, several textual details combine to present benefaction in a positive light: the market system as a negative foil, the mention of the same “goods” that failed to gain Tityrus's liberty in a commercial context as positive expressions of gratia in a gift economy, the offer of pastoral gifts in a moment of tenuous community at the end of the poem. This endorsement is hardly absolute: it is presented dramatically, through Tityrus's perceptions and experience. Moreover, as Christine Perkell notes, it is only through the power of Meliboeus's sensibility that Tityrus awakens from the solipsism of his good fortune. The social cohesion enabled by an ideal view of benefaction—and only glimpsed in the final lines as an ironic alternative to, or commentary on, the divided fortunes of the two shepherds—is a specific response to song. But what begins as a response is also appropriated. For pastoral song succeeds in translating or assimilating the social and historical discourse of benefaction to the conventions of bucolic generosity and community. The effects of this assimilation are twofold: first, such an ending dramatizes the ideological potential of pastoral song (and its idealizing motifs) to overcome historical division and provide a shared set of values[28] See Perkell 1990a, lyg, on the “community of longing” for shared values effected by Meliboeus's pastoral song.
—thereby showing art and benefaction to have similar goals; and second, the ending serves to naturalize the contingent power relations behind such benefactions, gifts that, if the eclogue is read allegorically, were quite possibly made with a self-interested view to such endorsement.GRATIA AND THE POETICS OF EXCESS: ECLOGUE 4
The fourth eclogue provides another example of the way in which Vergil's pastoral absorbs the discourse of benefaction. Because self-reflexivity is a
[29] See Hellegouarc'h 1963, 202, on the association of gratia-with elogeand thus laudes. I discuss the association between gratiaand libidinal excess in chapter 1. See Sailer 1982, 21, on gratia as “an attitude rather than an action.”
Vergil's most famous “pastoral” is a poem not originally conceived in the bucolic mode. Written to celebrate Asinius Pollio's consulship in 40 B.C.E., the fourth eclogue's messianic predictions of the return of a golden age, the rule of Saturn, anticipate and arguably provide a source for the political use of the topos in the art and poetry of the 20s B.C.E. and later.
[30] Eclogue 4 has generated vast critical commentary. I have particularly profited from Putnam 1970, 136–65; Leach 1974, 216–44; Du Quesnay 1977, 25–99; Van Sickle 1978, 55–75;Segal 1981, 265–70; Arnold 1994; Hubbard 1995. For broader discussions of the concept of the golden age in Augustan ideology and literature, see [n. 7] above. Both Galinsky (1996, 90–100) and Barker (1996) argue against taking the fourth eclogue as a blueprint for later appearances or evocations of the golden age topos.
Possibly influenced by the Sibylline prophecy of a new temporal order, Vergil adapts the idea of a golden race in Hesiod and Aratus to the Roman concept of a new saeculum, or “age.” The identity of the child whose birth and successive stages of life will coincide with generations of mythic historical time remains obscure; he is possibly a son of Asinius Pollio, but more likely the offspring of the recent alliance between Antony and Octavia (a marriage that was to be short-lived). This political union was intended to cement through kinship the treaty of Brundisium, negotiated with the assistance of Pollio in September of 40 B.C.E., between the political rivals Antony and Octavian. Thus, Vergil's poem draws both from the genre of the epithalamium, in celebration of the recent wedding, and from the basilikon, adapted to the Roman occasion of Pollio's consulate: the praise of Pollio includes and is partially displaced onto the praise of the child who will rule as a king (Du Quesnay 1977, 56–57). Despite the eventual dissolution of the treaty, the marriage, and the accord between the factions of the Caesarian party, the attributes of the golden age here—the lion lying down with the lamb, the voluntary fecundity of nature-resemble the emblems of peace that later decorate so much of the sculpture of the Principate and early Empire. Recent scholarship has stressed the mutability of[31] As Barker (1996, 436) suggests, “in the myth of the golden age one is confronted less by a fixed symbol than by a mobile discourse—that is, by a composite of different positions taken by different Romans at different times around the idea of a returning golden race.”
the fourth eclogue differs from later literary narratives of the golden age in its emphasis on nature's spontaneous fertility without the need for human labor. This feature not only characterizes Hesiod's description, one of Vergil's major sources; it is also dramatically consistent with the social relations of patronage in which the poem is embedded.To begin with, in contrast to the dramatic fiction of shepherds engaged in song, the occasion of the fourth eclogue draws attention to the poem as a means of honoring Pollio, possibly Vergil's patron at this time.
[32] Pollio's role as a patron of the Eclogues is by no means indisputable, given the ambiguity of lines 6–13 in Eclogue 8, where the speaker claims that his songs began at the command of the addressee's bidding (iussis / carmina coepta tuis). The patron here has often been understood as referring to Pollio, because Vergil describes his addressee as a poet of tragedy, and Pollio was the most famous tragedian of his day. However, Clausen (1994, 234–37), following recent scholarship, attributes the reference to Octavian, who was known to have begun an Ajax and whose travels at the time of this eclogue's composition better square with the lines describing the patron's journey.
The speaker introduces a grander, more amplified tone, using a pastoral metaphor:
Sicelides Musae, paulo maiora canamus! non omnis arbusta iuvant humilesque myricae; si canimus silvas, silvae sint consule dignae. Sicilian Muses, let us sing in a slightly higher mode, more lofty matters! Orchards and humble tamarisks do not please all; if we sing about woods, let them be a forest worthy of a consul. (4.1–3)
The consulate as a political occasion clearly demands a grander strain, but the honor accorded to Pollio in this poem also flatters him as a patron of poets. In particular, the theme of the golden age looks back to Pollio's appearance in the third eclogue (Segal 1981, 251–52, 261; Arnold 1994, 146–47). There, Damoetas's appreciation of Vergil's patron as a reader expresses itself in the invocation to the Muses to “fatten a calf” for him (vitulam lectori pascite vestro, 85). When Menalcas tops this display of gratitude by flattering Pollio's talent as a poet himself, and invokes the preparation of a bull as sacrificial offering, Damoetas responds with lavish praise that pulls out all the stops: he wishes that the one who appreciates Pollio's verse arrive in a place that the poet already inhabits, a land where honey flows and the thornbush bears spice—adunata, or impossibilities, that
[33] Verg. Eel. 3.84–89: Damoetas: Pollio amat, quamuis est rustica, Musam: /Pierides, vitulam lectori pascite vestro. Menalcas: Pollio et ipse facit nova carmina: pascite taurum, / iam comu petat et pedibus qui spargat harenam. Damoetas: Qui te, Pollio, amat, veniat, quo te quoque gaudet; / mella fluant itti, ferat et rubus asper amomum.
Thus Damoetas flatters Pollio, through a metaphor that suggests he has already achieved perfection of pastoral technique. Though both the initial lines of Eclogue 4 and this exchange in Eclogue 3 are thought to be additions to the poems as originally composed, intended to help integrate them into a unified book (Clausen 1982, 310–11; 1995, 126), the alteration only enhances an effect already present. The amplification of tone, the more grandiose strain of Eclogue 4 is, at some level, already inscribed in a discourse of benefaction: without conflating Damoetas with the Eclogue poet or the author himself, figures who operate on different contextual levels,[34] See Leach 1974, 245–76, on the various roles played by the “Eclogue poet.”
we may still read the elevation of tone in part as an impulse or function of gratia—the appreciation felt in response to Pollio's patronage of Vergil as a poet. Damoetas's desire for the discriminating reader qua poet to join Pollio, already set in the metaphorical land of honey and adunata, structurally parallels the Eclogue poet's invocation of the Muses' assistance, in the next poem, to sing paulo maiora worthy of a consul.Moreover, though the comparative maiora refers in its immediate context to the difference between the lowly tamarisk and more stately woods, and thus metaphorically to the contrast between humble and grand themes, it also strongly connotes the idea of excess or surplus value associated with gratia. As I discussed in chapter 1, when Cicero distinguishes between monetary exchange and a gift economy, he alludes to the paradox that gratia, though returned, leaves behind an excess or residue, a trace of itself-something that, in fact, causes the favor to increase in value.
[35] “A man has not repaid money if he still has it; if he has repaid it, he has ceased to have it. But a man still has the sense of favour, if he has returned the favour; and if he has the sense of the favour, he has repaid it” (Cic. Off. 2.69; trans. W. Miller 1913, Loeb edition).
Specifically, Cicero's distinction suggests the consequences of the idea that one who receives a benefit or kindness can never fully pay back his benefactor and be free of the debt: gratia as expressed in a concrete form of return, as “return favors,” may very well exceed the original gift; and, because a feeling of gratitude is left over despite the return favors, causing the social relationship to outlast the exchange, gratia suggests a value of libidinal excess.[36] Seneca (Ben. 2.18.5) makes the same distinction as Cicero; he concludes that to the benefactor (as opposed to the creditor), at illi e plus solvendum est, et nihilo minus etiam relata gratia cohaeremus; debeo enim, cum reddidi, rursus incipere, manetque amicitia.
Indeed, we perceive one aspect of such excess assimilated to the conventions of pastoral in the amoebean competition between DamoetasIn addition, paulo maiora might suggest the actual excess involved in a return gift or acknowledgment of a benefaction pure and simple. Again, as we saw in chapter 1, Cicero quite explicitly relates gratia and the idea of increase when he discusses the appropriate response to an unlooked-for benefaction: “for no duty (qfficium) is more imperative than that of proving one's gratitude (referenda gratia). But if, as Hesiod bids, one is to repay with interest (maiore mensura), if possible (si modo possis), what one has borrowed in time of need, what, pray, ought we to do when challenged by an unsought kindness? Shall we not imitate the fruitful fields, which return more than they receive?” (Off. 1.47–48).
[37] Trans. W. Miller 1913, Loeb edition.
The use of the comparative maiorin both contexts is slim evidence of a connection, but Cicero's analogy to Hesiod and agriculture is relevant in many ways to Vergil's description of the golden age in Eclogues 4.[38] The idea of measurement in relation to Rome comes up in the first eclogue, when Tityrus admits that the city confounded his pastoral sense of dimension: sic canibus catulos similis, sic matribus haedos / noram, sic paruis componere magna solebam. / verum haec tantum alias inter caput extulit urbes / quantum lenta solent inter vibuma cupressi (22–25).
Given that Pollio is not only a consul in this poem but also possibly the person who as a patron first encouraged Vergil to write bucolics, the phrase paulo maiora suggests Hesiod's advice to give back more than one has received. Paulo, unattested elsewhere in Vergil, could allude to Cicero's qualification of si modo possis, his acknowledgment that repayment in “greater measure” is difficult and not always possible. More important, for all that Hesiod's advice occurs in the context of the human toil of the iron age, Cicero's analogy to crops growing in natural and spontaneous increase suggests the voluntary surplus of the golden age. To be sure, Cicero presents the increase of gratia in terms of nature's response to the labor of planting or the “gift” of seed—that which is analogous to the unprompted or unsought benefaction. However, the emphasis on both the apparent spontaneity of the original gift—it is not expected or induced—and the similarly spontaneous “excess” of the return suggests[39] For a list of passages in the Greco—Roman tradition that contain these specific features as part of the golden age, see the conspectus rerum in Gatz 1967, 229, and the specific headings 1. terra sua sponte victumferens and 1.b) variae res se ultra offerentes.
Hesiod's advice to give back more than one has received is, in many ways, a translation of nature's generosity in the golden age into the ethical realm of human relations (see esp. Op. 352–60).I propose, then, that the discourse of patronage conditions more than just the loftier tone of the eclogue. Gratia, which expresses appreciative responsiveness either as an attitude or in the concrete terms of a return gift, metaphorically characterizes the very activity of nature's spontaneous profusions in this depiction of the golden age. In sympathetic response to the child's birth, at first the earth spontaneously produces little gifts (nullo munuscula cultu) of flowers, ivy, and acanthus (18–20). The word munuscula, appearing nowhere else in the Vergilian corpus, initially suggests the offerings of the shepherd-lover in a pastoral context displaced to the symbiotic relationship between earth and child (Putnam 1970, 146). Significantly, however, it also connotes the symbolic gifts of Roman social relations.
[40] See Veyne 1990, 216: “petty gifts maintained the relation of clientage, which often consisted in an exchange of services very widely separated in time. In order that the obligation to return the service received might be kept up, there had to be a bond of affection between protector and protégé, and this affection was symbolized by petty gifts which seemed to create the bond but in fact merely served to maintain friendship and the memory of a service which still awaited its reward.”
Cicero uses the word to describe a speech as a “little gift” he has written in defense of Deiotarus, his old host and friend, which he later sends to Dolabella.[41] Cic. Fam. 9.12.2: Sed ego hospiti veteri et amico munusculum mittere volui.
Caelius employs it ironically to refer to a charge brought by a defendant against his accuser,[42] Cic. Fam. 8.8. 1: Nemini hoc deferre munusculum maluit quam suo accusatori.
a usage that underscores its usual positive connotation as a symbol of relationship. Suetonius describes Augustus's distribution of munuscula to the residents of Capreae, again suggesting the bond symbolized by the gift (Aug. 98.3). Horace uses the word, though somewhat negatively, to describe an unsolicited gift in Epistles 1.7.17. Indeed, though I am choosing to read munuscula in the fourth eclogue as an expression of gratia, it is also possible to read these gifts as spontaneous benefactions. Spontaneity and the absence of coercion are visible in other motifs: the goats returning home unbidden, a common feature of golden age descriptions; or the sheep famously changing the color of their wool by their own will (sua sponte), a fanciful invention of Vergil's own that he adapted from Etruscan prophecy (Du Quesnay 1977, 42). Suggestive of either benefaction or gratia, the emphasis on voluntarism and the lack of calculated interest behind these gifts of nature accord withThe ease with which a golden age discourse could assimilate such Roman attitudes to the bucolic landscape helps account for the later adoption of such motifs as symbolic of the Augustan regime. For it is precisely the patronal aspect of the imperial rule ushered in by Augustus's regime, as it became established in the 20s B.C.E. and later, that is “naturalized” by the topos of the golden age or pastoral motifs more generally.
[43] For example, the issue of coins with Octavian in 41 B.C.E., and later Augustus in 17 B.C.E., in conjunction with the image of cornucopiae, suggests precisely the role of the emperor as ultimate benefactor. See, too, my discussion of Horace's epistle to Iccius (1.12.28–29) later in this chapter. Galinsky (1996, 111) cautions that the images on coins cannot be “interpreted indiscriminately as betokening a Golden Age suggestive of the fourth Eclogue” and cites the tradition of such iconography dating back to 207 B.C.E. and the Second Punic War. Such caveats and observations notwithstanding, Vergil's poem associates nature's fertility with a discourse of benefaction, a connection elsewhere visible in Augustan iconography and literature.
In Eclogue 4, nature's enthusiastic response to the advent of the young child and the stages of his maturation serves literally to provide the initial lineaments of a naturalizing discourse for the authoritarian rule of a single man who will “rule the world” (reget … orbem, 17); such a discourse gains power from originating in and evoking the recognizable terms of Roman social relations. Rather than appear as imposed by force, authoritarian rule evolves as a form of gift or distinction, a glorious age (decus hoc aevi, 11) that is freely bestowed or “sent down from heaven” (caelo demittitur alto, 7) and voluntarily received. The amplified tone and vatic register of the speaker, as a reflex of honor and index of gratia for Pollio, parallels nature's expressions of gratitude and symbiotic responsiveness to the child as a metaphoric “gift” of Pollio's consulship: the external frame of the poem's occasion is repeated in the structural relationship between the child and nature.Yet ironically, Vergil's deployment of the topos here presents nature's superfluity as an excess that becomes aesthetic. What begins as the libidinal excess of gratitude expresses itself in images that self-reflexively connote poetic production. As we have seen, in sympathetic response to the child's birth the earth spontaneously produces little gifts of flowers, ivy, and acanthus. Their aesthetic associations are heightened by analogy to the Greek word for flower, anthos, which can allude to poetry (Arnold 1994, 147). But aesthetic production is also seen as cumulative: the golden age is a place of extremes, and so we find an organic world pumped full of hormones to the point of monstrous, or at least “unnatural,” output. Not only does honey—a symbol of pastoral poetry-drip from trees (cf. Theoc. Id. 1.146), but nature expands beyond her bounds: iridescent sheep, effortlessly
[44] Rosenmeyer (1969, 214–17) notes that the golden age topos, replete with the adunata of “animal skins that come in technicolor hues,” honey from oaks, and the lion bedding down with the lamb, becomes a feature of the pastoral tradition only with the fourth eclogue. Vergil's sheep have often been considered a breach of aesthetic decorum.
The landscape as a place of aesthetic production thus recalls the effects of Meliboeus's transfiguring imagination in the first eclogue. Here, however, the capacity to transform, to metamorphose, literally to change (mutare) appearances or colores originally emanates not from loss but from an impulse of gratia. The Eclogue poet again invokes this assimilation of the libidinal excess of grateful joy to the aesthetic fertility of the pastoral landscape when he claims: “Behold how all things rejoice at the coming age! O, may the end of a long life remain for me then, and enough breath to glorify your deeds!” (aspice, venture laetentur ut omnia saeclo! / o mihi turn longae maneat pars ultima vitae, / spiritus et quantum sat erit tua dicere facta! 52–54). The rejoicing of all things (laetentur ut omnia), including the speaker's own wish to celebrate, looks back to the phrase omnis feret omnia tellus, which leads into the sheep as emblems of aesthetic production. The desire to praise the future deeds of the child thus derives from the same responsive sympathy as do the metamorphosing sheep. Epideixis, or the rhetoric of praise, is here symbolized by the ovine colores (a symbolism distinct from the meaning of colores in Roman rhetoric, discussed below). Thus, even as the eclogue provides a naturalizing discourse for political
We might push this reading further and suggest that the potential for the aesthetic to manufacture consent, to elicit the voluntary acceptance of contingent social formations as natural, is perhaps self-reflexively represented by this figure of Vergil's famously “indecorous” sheep. For the aries spontaneously changing the color of his coat presents in a kind of hybrid form the image of a citizen, needing no intervention from the law above, conflated with art as a means of persuasion. This veiled reference to the operations of ideology becomes clear when we consider two other distinct connotations of the ram's colores. On the one hand, the activity of dyeing to produce colorful hues is associated, in the literature of late Republican Rome, with an extensive poetic discourse of sin, deceit, and corruption (see Putnam 1970, 153–55; Barker 1996, 445–46). Here, in the golden age, the wool will not have to be taught “to deceive,” or falsely represent, various colors (nee varios discet mentiri lana colores). Sheep changing their own color, as a replacement for the maritime trade that once brought in the expensive dyes, thus implies a liberation from the trafficking and economic exploitation that led to moral decline. In this respect, sheep qua citizens are choosing, autonomously (sua sponte), to live in a way that is virtuous and free of sin. On the other hand, the colores also connote the figurative embellishments and excesses of Roman rhetoric (Arnold 1994, 149). Even more specifically, as one commentator remarks about the use of colorin Quintilian, it is the technical term for “the particular aspect given to a case by skilful manipulation of the facts”—the gloss or varnish that may even alter the truth (Peterson 1891, on Quint. Inst. 10.1.116.). Hence, in the fourth eclogue the colores ironically suggest the aesthetic means by which spontaneous good conduct and the acceptance of the child as king are encouraged. That is, the various colores imply Vergil's own pastoral art, with all its rhetorical figuration, as it provides the naturalizing discourse that brings the freely choosing citizen into alignment with the governance of the single man. However, such authoritarian rule is only a vision, intimated rather than spelled out by the celebration of the child in conjunction with the return to a golden age.
Given the probable date of the fourth eclogue's initial composition, this poem should not be read as a conscious endorsement of Octavian and what later became the Augustan regime: in 40 B.C.E., Antony was the man of the moment (Clausen 1994, 125).
[45] Du Quesnay (1977, 38) remarks that many of Vergil's Epicurean friends from Philodemus's community at Naples fought on the Republican side at Philippi and, after their defeat, turned to Antony rather than to Octavian.
But the Eclogues were no doubt continuously modified with both additions and deletions until the moment of their[46] See Hubbard 1995, 6, for this reading. If these lines were added later, I would tentatively suggest yet one more connotation of the changing colores: in 35 B.C.E., Octavian had superseded Antony as the man of the day, and Vergil may well be referring to a shift—and possibly his own—of political sympathy, a necessary (perhaps voluntary) reorientation of his own allegiances.
One way in which the eclogues function to legitimize or naturalize political structures is through the very absence of overtly specific and identifiably consistent contemporary references: thus, though Antony may hover behind the original epithalamium of Eclogue 4, with his offspring the recipient of the implied basilikon, it is Octavian whom many perceive as the deus of Eclogue 1. And because neither figure is named outright, the poems can represent a political structure—in this case the phenomenon of “Caesarism” or the charismatic single leader-headed now by one, now by another individual. That the topos of the new saeculum or “age” inaugurated by a single “ruler” was originally associated with Julius Caesar (see Du Quesnay 1977, 61) underscores the vanity of seeking allegorical precision. Rather, we should note that the basilikon of Eclogue 4 and the sacrificial practice of Hellenistic ruler cult in Eclogue 1 are both embedded, in different ways, in a Roman discourse of benefaction and assimilated to a pastoral context.The backdrop to this assimilation is, of course, the redistribution of land to the various veterans supporting these powerful military figures; and whereas the first eclogue unflinchingly confronts, if only to resolve temporarily, the painful and inequitable practice of expropriation from the land, the fourth treats the issue indirectly but no less ideologically. As we noted earlier, pastoral abundance has resonances both generally with responsive gratitude and specifically with the “initial” gift in a patronal exchange. And so, if land grants were one means of securing loyalty to the Caesarians' program, particularly the loyalty of veteran soldiers (as well as of poets), then a topos of a natural economy of spontaneous surplus would serve to gloss over and mystify the material reality of confiscations that made many of those grants possible.
[47] See [n. 9] above for specific facts on land confiscation. To be sure, the collection as a whole starkly acknowledges the effects of expropriation. Nonetheless, in the fourth eclogue, human authority is entirely sanctioned by nature in a dialogic interaction: the spontaneous flowers that spill into the cradle at the poem's beginning suggest the same interactive endorsement as the image at the end (so ambiguously reflective of this dialogue) of the child recognizing-either with his own or by her smile—his mother's face. As a powerful semiotic emblem of “nature,” the image of maternity here contributes to the overall effect of pastoral as mystifying the real facts of dispossession that surface in the first and ninth eclogues.
Moreover, we know that Vergil'sThe manipulation of property law that such confiscations entailed may have prompted two of the most striking features in Vergil's later versions of the golden age: the lack of laws and the absence of private property.
[48] For discussion of these attributes of the golden age in particular, see Wallace—Hadrill 1982, 22–28. Gatz (1967, 229) notes that the absence of private property is a Roman innovation. Keppie (1983, 59–66) cites the agreement at Bononia backed by the lex Titia as the authority by which Octavian and Antony carried out the confiscations that enabled resettlement of the veterans who fought at Philippi.
To be sure, such defining absences were always implicit in the Greek tradition of the topos, whether the perverted and antisocial “paradise” of the Cyclopes in Homer (see E. Cook 1995, 98–99) or the prototypical account of Hesiod. The anxiety connected with justice, inheritance, and the bequeathing of property that motivates the speaker of the Works and Days, toiling to make ends meet in the fallen age of iron, implicitly assumes a golden age free of such concerns. And the Cynic and Pythagorean cry “back to the golden age,” with its rejection of the structures and institutions of the polis, certainly voices a critique of private property (Detienne 1979, 60–66). Nonetheless, that Vergil brought these implicit features to the fore, proclaiming the imminent return of an age in which laws and property divisions are unnecessary, fits his particular, late Republican or triumviral context. On one level, the prophecy constitutes a Utopian fantasy born of a sincere desire to be free of the effects of civic turmoil; but such a vision also weakens, or at least casts in a different light, any criminality in the confiscation of land. Expropriation may be necessary to bring about a social order in which prosperity will be had by all.This necessity is intimated, albeit in a distorted fashion (there is no outright reference to land confiscation), in the fourth eclogue: traces of sin (sceleris vestigia, 13) will become inactive under Pollio's consulship yet
[49] Verg. Eel. 4–31–33: pauca tamen subemnt priscae vestigia fraudis, /quae temptare Thetim ratibus, quae cingere muris / oppida, quae iubeant telluri infindere sulcos.
Thus it is property itself, rather than its seizure and expropriation, that constitutes a crime. Precisely that point is made in the description of Saturn's kingdom in the Georgics: “Before Jove there were no farmers turning over the soil; it was not lawful even to mark or divide the field with a boundary.”[50] Verg. Geo. 1.125–28: antelovem nutti subigebant arua coloni: / ne signare quidem aut partiri limite campum /fas erat; in medium quaerebant, ipsaque tellus / omnia liberius nullo poscenteferebat. Comparing these lines to other passages in Vergil in which Saturn (the ruler of the Golden Age ante lovem) is the original legislator (Aen. 8.321–32), and toil and hard work characterize the true Italian “golden age” (Geo. 2.532–40), Wallace—Hadrill (1982, 23–24) relates these “internal incoherences” in the accounts to “embarrassment” over “the security of property, the unequal hierarchy of rank and the strict legislative structure which the Augustan regime in fact ensured” at a later date.
The motif that the land belongs to all thus underplays the deprivations suffered by those who are individually dispossessed.Alternatively, from the perspective of the recipient, the topos of communal ownership is paradoxically reassuring. A gift of property may never adequately ensure ownership, for the benefactor may never loosen his hold over the recipient.
[51] For Augustus's wish to maintain a close “patronal” relationship with his veterans, see Keppie 1983, 114–22.
But to anticipate a return to an era of plenty, in which the earth's spontaneous profusions are enjoyed by all, shifts the focus from any uncertainty about ownership and sense of constraint felt by the recipient to an ideology of disinterested voluntarism on the part of the benefactor. Once again, we see such attitudes, reminiscent of the language of Roman social relations, in the first book of the Georgics: “people would acquire things for common use, and the earth gave all things more freely then when no one was asking” (1.127–28).[52] As Sen. Ben. 2.2.1 repeatedly stresses, the best benefaction is the one that is not explicitly sought: Molestum verbum est, onerosum, demisso vultu dicendum, rogo, and properet licet, sero beneficium dedit, qui roganti dedit.
Karl Galinsky has recently stressed the uniqueness of the golden age vision in the fourth eclogue, claiming that its view of an age of indolence, in which nature provides spontaneously and no human effort is required, is replaced in subsequent versions by the conditional dependence on human labor. He points out that the description of the age of Saturn in the Georgics, quoted above, is a world to which Jove introduces labor as a means of inciting civilization. The hard-earned profits and pleasures of the farmer, the fruits of toil, constitute the real golden age. A similar conditionality is present, he argues, in the plastic arts, where images of agricultural fertility
I would qualify these claims: images of pastoral abundance may not have obscured the realities of the age, but they certainly constituted an element of an ideological discourse that rendered the presence of militarism necessary and even natural. The coexistence of these seemingly antithetical images-military arms and fruitful fields-encourages a belief in their co-dependence, an idea that goes back to the early Roman concept of the citizen as both farmer and soldier. And just as these images were ideologically linked in the plastic arts of the Principate, so we have seen that Vergil's novel use of literary pastoral provides, if not an easy justification for, at least a way of understanding land confiscations and the resettlement of veterans in the late forties. David Halperin's comments on the attributes particular to pastoral as a genre also suggest that it is especially suited to the work of ideology: “A kind of contrast … intimate to pastoral's manner of representation is that between a confused or conflict-ridden reality and the artistic depiction of it as comprehensible, meaningful, or harmonious” (1983, 68). Rather than elide dark realities, Vergil's daring reshaping of Theocritean pastoral builds the dissonance between the confusions of history and the harmonies of art into the very structure of many of the eclogues. Vergilian pastoral “manages” contradictions through imaginary resolutions even as it calls attention to, and comments on, their imaginary status.
[53] See Rose 1992, 36, for such management as a feature of all ideology, a process that Jameson's negative hermeneutic makes explicit.
In this respect, the social and economic conflicts that ideology resolves or negotiates lend themselves to pastoral.So far we have examined pastoral images only in terms of their capacity to endorse or at minimum render “meaningful” the contingent power relations of the triumviral period and the uneven distribution of resources that maintained that power. Viewed through Jameson's negative herme-neutic, the system of benefaction by which those resources (specifically land) were transmitted is naturalized by its assimilation to the pastoral landscape. Yet poetry cannot be reduced to a seamless articulation of ideology, for aesthetic texts are necessarily overdetermined by rhetorical excess; that is, they manifest certain elements of diction, formal structure, registers of imagery, and gaps or lacunae that contradict, reveal, or even resist the ideological distortions supporting the social formations of a particular period.
To some degree, this idea of subversion shares its origins and intellectual ground with the language and effects of deconstruction. For it is precisely
[54] Derrida's (1978) concepts of “play” and “supplementation” contribute to “undecidability” when, in de Man's (1979a) analysis of the rhetoric of literature, its “performative “aspect works against its “constative” aspect, or what it states.
As Geoffrey Hartman comments, “Literature destabilizes, by overdetermination or indeterminacy—by what seems to be an excess (figurality) or a defect (equivocation)—the ‘real character’ of communication” (1978, viii).[55] See also Preminger and Brogan 1993, s.v. “deconstruction.”
Those who practice deconstruction tend to find in the free play of signification a text so “undecidable” and “decentered” that political implications become moot, but a positive hermeneutic could use a deconstructive tactic to illuminate ways in which aesthetic play provides resistance to hegemonic discourses.When Horace invokes either a pastoral or a golden age motif as ways of figuring his relationship to his estate, these generic allusions introduce a certain rhetorical instability to his poems: this figural excess, I believe, is connected both to the aesthetic connotations of pastoral as a genre in general and to the historical moment of Vergil's Eclogues in particular. As in Vergil, the estate gives rise to an economy of otium, in which land is valued for its aesthetic returns and the socioeconomic context of patronage may be comfortably assimilated to pastoral conventions. On the one hand, these Horatian poems conform to an ideal vision of benefaction and demonstrate Bourdieu's notion of the misrecognition of the economics behind gift exchange; on the other, they simultaneously reveal how the farm, as a site of pastoral aestheticism and hermeneutic multivalency, provides the rhetorical strategies by which the speaker resists ideas of debt, constraint, and potential deprivation paradoxically associated with the estate as a gift.
THE MAN PROTESTETH TOO MUCH: SATIRES 2.6
The multivalency implicit in the golden age representations of the farm appears most prominently in Odes 1.17, but the libidinal excess associated with the estate as a gift informs the opening of Satires 2.6.
[56] Such excess value is apparent not only in the concept of gratia, but also in the “goodwill” or voluntas of the benefactor. Cf. Sen. Ben. 1.5.2–3: “There is a great difference between the matter of a benefit and the benefit itself: and so it is neither gold nor silver nor any of the gifts which are held to be most valuable that constitutes a benefit, but merely the goodwill of him who bestows it. … But a benefit endures even after that through which it was manifested has been lost.”
In this pious
Hoc erat in votis: modus agri non ita magnus, hortus ubi et tecti vicinus iugis aquae fons et paulum silvae super his foret. auctius atque di melius fecere. bene est. nil amplius oro, 5 Maia nate, nisi ut propria haec mihi munera faxis. si neque maiorem feci ratione mala rem nec sum facturus vitio culpave minorem, si veneror stultus nihil horum, ‘o si angulus ille proximus accedat qui nunc denormat agellum! 10 o si urnam argenti fors quae mihi monstret, ut illi, thesauro invento qui mercennarius agrum ilium ipsum mercatus aravit, dives amico Hercule!’, si quod adest gratum iuvat, hac prece te oro: pingue pecus domino facias et cetera praeter 15 ingenium utque soles, custos mihi maximus adsis. This was in my prayers: a measure of land not so large, with a garden and near the house a spring of pure water and above this [in addition] a little patch of woods. The gods have given me more and better. It is good. I ask for nothing more, son of Maia, except that you make these gifts lasting [truly mine]. If I neither make my property greater by crooked calculation, nor have diminished it through the vice of waste, if foolishly I pray for none of these things: “Oh, if that nearby corner could be added, which now skews my farm's shape! Oh, if lucky chance would reveal to me a pot of money, as it did for him, who once the treasure was found plowed the same field as an owner which he had as a hired laborer, made wealthy by his friend Hercules!” If what is here now pleases me, grateful for it, with this prayer I ask: fatten the master's flock and all else but his talent, and, as you are accustomed, always be my greatest guardian! (2.6.1–15)
For all that this satire continues to furnish commentators with a rich source of biographical knowledge about the poet, savvy readers have been careful to acknowledge Horace's conscious manipulation of a humble persona.
[57] Lyne (1995, 17–20) emphasizes Horace's “image-management” because of his self-consciousness over earlier Republican sympathies.
Horatian satire, particularly in the second book, performs a defensive function:[58] See now Oliensis 1998, 46–51. Though I have profited much from Oliensis's discussion of this poem and the Satires in general, I had essentially completed my manuscript before the publication of her book.
Traditionally this poem has been understood as a kind of “thank-you letter” to Maecenas for the grant of the Sabine farm. Those who object to this view claim that nowhere is Maecenas actually addressed; nor does the speaker explicitly claim that he has been given something (Bradshaw 1989, 161). However, the use of the euphemism “gods” to refer to those in power, particularly in their capacity to dispense favors and the benefactions of land, appears later in the satire itself, in reference to the settlement of soldiers in Sicily after the battle of Actium. We have also seen this euphemism employed as the “exaggeration” of the grateful rustic, Tityrus, in the first eclogue. As noted there, such deifying language is common in acknowledging one's benefactor, following the rhetorical convention of the eucharistikon or “speech of gratitude,” and it is in keeping with Seneca's claim that “those who make benefactions resemble the gods” (qui dat beneficia deos imitatur, Ben. 3.15–4).
[59] See Du Quesnay 1981, 102 and passim for Tityrus's eucharistikon.
And yet, though this poem does express gratia to Maecenas as well as the regime in general, the opening displays a tension between the dramatic enactment of the conventions of an ideal discourse of benefaction and a rhetorical resistance to benefaction's more negative realities. Thus, despite the attempt to represent his relationship with Maecenas as conforming to an ideology of voluntarism, the rhetoric reveals the speaker's anxiety that his newly acquired gift translates too easily into the connotative values of both debt and compensation.On the one hand, the speaker repeatedly and in various guises emphasizes a discrepancy between his own wishes and the more fulsome resources of his implied benefactors. Whether in the restrained diminution of non ita magnus (not so large) and paulum (a little), or the humorous wish for the simple fare of beans, the kinsmen of Pythagoras (faba cognata Pythagorae, 63), or, finally, the fable of the country mouse and city mouse, the author's autobiographical persona consistently identifies with images of modest needs. Indeed, the primary meaning of modus in this passage, “quantity” or
[60] Given the reference to resettlement of veterans later in the satire, it is significant that modus is the term used for the plots of land distributed to soldiers as well as for the yield of a plot of land.
What Horace stresses in his opening words of solemn gratitude is that the gods' beneficence has gone beyond the limit of his prayers (auctius atque / di melius fecere).Such a claim—that the gift exceeds the expectation or wish of the recipient-suggests a certain voluntarism on the part of the giver: the excess implies that the speaker may not be able to requite the benefaction and thus that it was made without a calculated interest in recompense. It brings to mind Cicero's advice that benefactions are more honorably made to men of good conduct than to those of fortune, for “the needy person, if he is also a good man, may indeed be unable to requite his gratitude, but he can certainly have it.” And Cicero goes on to describe the poor man who has received a gift: “If, however, you do anything for a poor man, he thinks that you are observing not his fortune, but himself” (Off. 2.69–70).
[61] Although the literature on benefaction condemns giving in order to profit from a return, there is nonetheless an explicit form of calculation in the benefactor's assessment of the merits of the beneficiary. The gift should be appropriate to the standing and need of the recipient: see Cic. Off. 145, 2.61–3, 2.69–71. Hence, from the perspective of “ideal benefaction,” to surpass such decorous matching of gift to receiver would further display the good will—voluntarism—of the giver.
Indeed, the speaker's willing identification with humble needs, his open display of appreciation, and his desire to maintain a virtuous restraint concerning his property all present an ideal vision of benefaction in which neither giver nor receiver looks to profit in a self-interested way. This matches Vergil's description of the golden age in the Georgics: “the earth gave more freely then, when no one was demanding it.” The deifying language displays the same libidinal excess as a function of gratitude, as do the comparative adverbs (auctius, melius) in regard to the gods' “more liberal” beneficence. Such a portrait of benefaction flatters the giver and thus expresses gratia as a dedicatory inscription might; but because Maecenas is not explicitly mentioned, the expression of gratitude is not immediately implicated in a quid pro quo reciprocity.However, if we look more closely at the dense rhetoric of wish and gratitude here, we see fissures in this posture of humble desires rewarded. The opening seems to invite a deconstructionist reading: whereas some commentators understand paulum silvae super his as referring to the spatial location of the woods over the poet's land, others take it to mean “in addition to,” “over and above,” “in excess of” the land with its garden, spring, and house (Brind'amour 1972). The semantic ambivalence of the preposition
[62] Thus Cicero (Off. 1.150) writes, “Again, all those workers who are paid for their labour (mercennarimum) and not for their skill have servile and demeaning employment; for in their case the very wage is a contract to servitude” (trans. M. Atkins from the edition by M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins [1991]). K. White (1970, 348) provides grim details concerning the unprotected position of the hired laborer in times of sickness or when weather interferes with his work. He is, in many respects, inferior to a slave.
Without the moral, the wish appears not so unreasonable.Indeed, since the substance of this “foolish request” involves the question of ownership, it causes the previous wish that Mercury make enduring (propria) the poet's gifts to take on an ironic resonance: propria, of course, could refer to the poet's full ownership and possession of his gifts as easily as it could mean “constant” or enduring. To be sure, propria occurs here in a formal prayer, a context that encourages the sense of perpetuus or “enduring.”
[63] See Kiessling and Heinze 1961b, ad loc., who quote from Val. Max. 4.1.10: ‘satisbonae et magnae sunt: itaqueprecor ut eas perpetuo incolumes seruent.’ On propria, see OLD, s.v., 1,2.
Yet it is also partly through the negative exemplum of the foolish request that propria has been interpreted as meaning “enduring” and not “one's own” in line 5: the desire for full ownership provides one term of the binary opposition that defines propria as the other term-enduring use. However, the actual semantic ambiguity of the word suggests that the speaker's overt wish is, at some level, haunted by the foolish wish that he should not make and whose avoidance becomes the condition for[64] Such contradictory wishes resemble Freudian compromise formations, the distorted and compromised ways in which covert and forbidden desires make themselves known. The use of the term mercennarius, as the person with whom Horace negatively identifies, strikes me as similarly overdetermined: in addition to a hired farm laborer—the overt meaning in the context of Horace's negative exemplum—mercennarius of course can refer to the “hired” mercenary soldier, a figure whom the satire's later reference to land allotments for the veterans of Actium might very well bring to mind, even if Octavian's soldiers did not strictly fall into such a category.
Both requests—the permissible wish that the gifts be enduring and the taboo wish based on the example of the mercennarius (hired laborer)—are bound together as a series of convoluted rhetorical contingencies. Like the man who buys the property he tills, Horace covertly desires his property to be his very own.Given the historical background of land expropriations at this time, the poem's own mention of the resettlement of veterans (2.6.55–56), and Horace's own probable background (losing his family estate in the earlier dispossessions after Philippi and gaining an estate that may have been seized from another owner), the wish to own securely would hardly be unexpected (see Ep. 2.2.49–52). But the ease with which the victors at Actium both seized and gave away property would only prove the futility of the idea of secure ownership: continuous use would be all that one could really hope for. Ofellus, the peasant-philosopher of Satires 2.2, provides an ironic example: he had previously been a landowner, but he now works as a tenant farmer on the same plot, now measured off for another (metato in agello … mercede colonum, 114). Having most likely lost his land in the expropriations after Philippi, Ofellus is a man who “continues to use” his land even as, in an inversion of the forbidden wish in 2.6, he has moved down the ladder from one who owns (or “has bought”)—mercatus—to one who tills for hire, mercennarius.
[65] While colonus, or “tenant,” is generally distinguished from mercennarius, or “wage laborer,” for purposes of translation, Foxhall (1990, 97) reminds us that tenants cannot be clearly “separated from other labourers: debt bondsmen, slaves, ‘serfs,’ wage labourers and even ‘independent’ peasants may also have been entangled in some kind of tenancy relationship. “
As Ofellus muses, the turmoil of the civil wars only underscores the degree to which ownership and private property are “cultural” constructions: “now the land is deeded to Umbrenus, recently it belonged to Ofellus; it will belong to no one absolutely, but passes, now to me now to another, for use” (nunc ager Umbreni sub nomine, nuper Ofetti / dictus, erit nulli proprius, sed cedit in usum / nunc mihi, nunc alii, 133–35). As an emblem of diminished status, Ofellus serves as a mirror image showing the reverse of Horace's upward mobility. Yet even though not owning reflects a lowered[66] Augustus later passed much legislation to make property ownership more secure. See Nicolet 1984.
Horace's new status as the beneficiary of an estate is fragile, and the contortions of his prayers reflect his uncertainty.The darker implications of Horace's good fortune may similarly be revealed in the allusion of the phrase di melius fecere to the first eclogue and Tityrus's statement deus nobis haec otiafecit (the gods are responsible for this leisure, 6). Just as Tityrus's own blessings are inextricably bound up with Meliboeus's losses, both within the poetic counterpoint of the text and within its historical context, so Horace's allusion here evokes the dispossessed farmer as an implied presence. Moreover, Tityrus's status as a slave who regains the continued use of his land rather than the explicit purchase of his freedom may be hinted at in the figure of the hired laborer. The wish to buy land may be no more practical than Tityrus's desire to buy his liberty. In both poems benefaction, rather than acquisition through purchase, is the economic system that secures results, and the giver appears to maintain his hold on, thereby exercising control through, his gifts.
From another perspective, when we consider that it is the wish of the hired laborer, his desire to own, and not his identity that the speaker of the satire claims to disavow, then the opposition between gift and contract begins to break down. We might read this, again, as the poet's anxiety surfacing in an analogy that he invokes simply to repudiate—his fear that his acceptance of the estate draws him symbolically near to the role of the mercennarius, the hired laborer. Mercury is in fact the god of commerce, of exchange; and as Eduard Fraenkel observed, the language of the first line of Satires 2.6, hoc erat in votis (this was in my prayers) recalls the formula of prayer, “as if the poet were saying hoc modo nunc voti compos factus (or damnatus) sum [having acquired my wish, now I am bound by my vow]” (1957, 138). Such language suggests that the speaker, voti damnatusby the grant of the estate, is in the very condition of obligation that provided, according to Marcel Mauss's early speculations, the origin of a contract, of nexum and actio: ‘The mere fact of having the thing puts the accipiens in an uncertain state of quasi-culpability (damnatus, nexus, aere obaeratus), of spiritual inferiority and moral inequality … in relation to the one delivering (tradens) the contract” (1990 [1950], 52). Though the development of a market economy eventually disembedded such transactions, the system of benefaction retained the traces of moral obligation and commitment that characterize gift exchange and the origins of contract. As Mauss speculates regarding mancipatio, the “thing handed over continues, in part and for a time, to belong to the ‘family’ of the original owner. It remains bound to
[67] Commentators or translators generally read res here as referring to external circumstances, but Treggiari (1979, 53) reminds us that the word also suggests property. For the language of binding in relation to benefaction in Cicero's correspondence, see chapter 1, [n. 45], and the corresponding text.
Indeed, just as we may recognize the diction of gifts in such “contract” words as tradere, reddere, and vendere, all of which retain the root verb do, dare, so the term munera, or munus in its singular form, by which the speaker refers to the “gifts” of Mercury, derives from the root *mei, or “exchange.” In keeping with such etymological roots, munus, understood as “political office,” requires expenditure on munera as spectacles and games (Benveniste 1973, 79–80). Munus, as “a gift carrying the obligation of an exchange,” therefore draws together a series of discursive strands in the Horatian corpus and the exchanges they imply: the gift of the estate, the public office of sacerdos, and the sacrificial expenditures which that office required.Perhaps because of these implications of the estate as “gift,” the rhetoric and diction of both the poet's gratitude and his denial of any desire for more appear to undo the overt meaning of his statement. On one level, the poet does wish to have a form of ownership over the farm, to make it “his own,” and thus he does wish for more—more than simply to have use of the estate for the rest of his life.
[68] Jonathan Swift's rendition of the opening of Satires 2.6 (possibly modified by Alexander Pope) would imply a similar covert wish, one that his version in fact brings to the fore.
Res, or property, in the form of munera, or gifts, and the future implications and obligations that these transactions signify for the poet create an ambiguity or contradiction in the poet's stance of humble gratitude. The implicit contract that accompanies munera belies the ideology of voluntarism even as it reveals gratia as a form of obligatory debt to be paid in time. This “debt of gratitude” partially accounts for the covert wish to own the farm outright, and anxiety over such debt may be found in yet one more connotation of munera propria—as gifts “suitable” or appropriate to Horace's modest nature, and thus not obliging him unduly.[69] I am grateful to one of the anonymous readers for the University of California Press for this point.
In contrast, the advantage of outright ownership lies in the complete absence of any obligation—the independence guaranteed by theThe Epistles and Odes provide further evidence for this complex of ideas. Epistles 1.16, the letter to Quinctius, begins with an extended description of the topography of the Sabine farm and ends with a scene adapted from the Bacchae, in which Pentheus threatens to strip the “good man” of all his belongings. However, since virtue is an internal bonum (good), the removal of external bona has no effect on the integrity of Dionysus—the “man” enslaved by Pentheus. And when Pentheus threatens to throw Dionysus in chains, the prisoner calmly and ironically replies that the god will free him when he wishes. Horace's interpretation of this line to mean “I will die” presents death as the only absolute liberty available in the face of absolute power.
[70] For discussion of the end of this epistle, see Johnson 1993, 45–46; Bowditch 1996, 474–75.
Read in conjunction with the references to Jove at the end of Epistles 1.18 and 1.19, this image of Dionysus stripped of his goods suggests more than the poet's characteristic concern with independence of will and thought, for it must be set against the autobiographical image of the author, literally self-present with his farm, at the beginning of Epistles 1.16. As a material good the farm is an external bonum and thus subject to the same caprices of power as are Dionysus's belongings. A similar, though by no means so sinister, image of arbitrary power appears at the end of Epistles 1.18. That poem, an explicit meditation on the institution of amicitia, ends with a cameo of the poet, accepting his vulnerability to the whims of Jove but maintaining equanimity for himself.[71] Hor. Ep. 1.18.111–12: sed satis est mare lovem qui ponit et aufert, / det vitam, det opes: aequum mi animum ipse parabo.
While this reference to Jove may simply denote the gods, the allusion to the “ears of Jove” by an angry would-be poet in Epistles 1.19.43 suggests that the Olympian god in Epistles 1.18 may also connote Augustus. Moreover, the identification of the politically powerful with the gods is a trope of the literature of this period, registering in colloquial slang the awareness of the concentration of power in the hands of a few (Reckford 1959, 196). In Satires 2.6, as discussed in the introduction, Horace presents himself as constantly hassled in the streets by those who perceive him as “closer to the gods” and hence more privy to the state's handling of the pressing affairs of the moment:[72] Hor. Sat. 2.6.51–56: ‘o bone, nam te /scire, deos quoniam propius contingis, oportet, / numquid de Dacis audisti ? … quid ? militibus promissa Triquetra / praedia Caesar an est Itala tellure daturus?’
here, the passerby asks whether Horace knows of a possible invasion by Dacians, or the use of Sicilian land for the resettlement of veterans-pointing again to theA similar awareness of the caprices of material fortune, if not explicitly the whims of authority, appears in Odes 3.29. Here, the speaker's invitation to Maecenas to join him at his Sabine estate evolves into a meditation on the vicissitudes of time, whose unpredictability the poet likens to the Tiber-at one moment flowing calmly, at another gathering up and “whirling together smoothed stones and uprooted trunks and livestock and houses” (nunc lapides adesos / stirpesque raptas etpecus et domos / volventis una, 36–38). As at the end of Epistles 1.16, where Pentheus threatens to remove the disguised Dionysus's property—his livestock, money, couches, and silver (pecus, rem, kctos, argentum, 1.16.75)—so the metaphor of a river's raging dispossessions in Odes 3.29 ironically responds to the poem's earlier evocation of the Sabine estate in specifically pastoral terms. Though the farm is not mentioned explicitly, the speaker has invited Maecenas into the country for respite at the hottest time of the year, when “the weary shepherd with his sluggish flock seeks the shade and stream and thickets of rough Silvanus, and the silent bank is untouched by the wandering breeze” (iam pastor umbras cum grege languido / rivumque fessus quaerit et horridi / dumeta Silvani, caretque / ripa vagis taciturna ventis, 3.29.21–24). Surely the marker of the estate here, as a pastoral retreat, should be read against the references to the river of time and the unpredictability of Fortune, who, “delighting in her cruel commerce … redistributes insecure rewards, generous now to [the poet], now to another” (Fortuna saevo laeta negotio/ … transmutat incertos honores, /nunc mihi, nunc alii benigna, 49–52): pastoral allusion in this context conjures up the fragile fortunes of Vergil's shepherds as it ambiguates the practice of benefaction; the gift of pastoral otium remains haunted by the cultural memory of the confiscations. And though we should resist glibly identifying Maecenas here with Fortuna—indeed, the statesman should beware her capricious ways as much as the speaker—we may nonetheless remark that the adjective benigna, or “generous,” also appears in its nominal form in the first epode, where the poet directly acknowledges Maecenas as the source of his material well-being: “sufficiently and more has your generosity enriched me” (satis superque me benignitas tua ditavit, 1.31). Moreover, as I discuss in the next chapter, the gesture of renunciation that the speaker makes at the end of Odes 3.29—“I give up what she has given me, should Fortune shake her wings and fly away” (si celeris quatit / pennas resigno quae dedit, 53–54)—employs the very same diction as the poet's controversial claim in Epistles 1.7 that he would return everything (cuncta resigno) if constrained by benefactions.
Thus, as physical property, or res, the estate ironically signifies potential loss in two ways: as a material gift of the regime, the farm is a reminder of the arbitrary seizure of property by which many such dispensations were made and by which they could just as easily be revoked; in addition, as the opening to Satires 2.6 reveals, the farm symbolically expropriates the poet's person, laying claim to his labor by fulfilling his wish. Nonetheless, as I argue fully in chapter 5, Horace counters such potential loss by representing his estate as a locus a-moenus, a place that makes possible both the poetic fantasy of a plenitude of self and a resistance to the exchanges implied by gifts.
The aestheticizing of the farm involved in such a representation appears earlier in the Horatian corpus, in both Satires 2.6 and Odes 1.17. The satire presents the farm both as a place undergoing the transformation from real locale to textual space and as a pastoral refuge from the hazards of the city. When we consider again the phrase “this was what I sought in prayers” (Hoc erat in votis, 2.6.1), we may note that hoc, or “this,” is what linguists call a shifter: it acquires meaning from its unique moment of utterance. Its meaning therefore shifts, depending on the context of utterance and on the speaking subject or “I” activating the particular speech. In Horace's satire, hoc does indeed refer to its own linguistic context insofar as it gestures forward to the description of what hadbeen in the poet's wishes-the small plot of land, garden, spring of pure water, and patch of woods-a vision now exceeded by the present reality of the estate. But as a deictic (or “pointer”) that is inherently unstable or empty, filled with meaning only through context, “this,” as the commentator Edward Morris suggests, also points to the scene that Horace observes before him in the moment of writing (1939, ad loc.):
[73] See Benveniste 1971, 218–22, on shifters and deixis. Kiessling and Heinze (ig6ib, ad loc.) comment that the hoc refers to a unity composed of the discrete elements in the following description amassed into a whole.
the poet has retreated to his “refuge in the hills” and now, as he gazes out over his land, asks “what sooner should I celebrate with my satiric and pedestrian Muse?” Poised on the very edge between the phenomenal reality before him and the conventions of description, Horace underscores his initial act of topographical representation with his use of the deliberately ambiguous hoc as well as with his rhetorical question. On the one hand, from the extratextual perspective of the physical property—“this” estate upon which the speaker gazes-the poet is bound: as noted above, hoc erat in votis implies voti damnatus, the state of obligation to the deus or, in the language of contract, to the “giver” (tradens). And yet, on the other hand, the poet's brief sketch of his dream farm initiates the topos of the Sabine property as an idealized landscape, a topos that will develop, in the Odes and the Epistles, into a locus amoenus that draws on a literaryWhen we then consider the second prayer that Horace makes to Maia nate in relation to the first, a relationship between the farm, language, and independence (if not plenitude) begins to emerge. Horace's first wish is that the farm be proprius—enduring-or, as I have suggested, in fact his very own. The condition of his prayer, again, is the restraint and modesty of his wishes, a limit that has already been exceeded by reality (and perhaps undermined by the language of the wish itself). But if he is content with what he has (13), Horace is then entitled to a second wish, and with this he directly invokes Callimachean aesthetics and the Aetia: “fatten the master's flock and all else but his talent, and, as you are accustomed, always be my greatest guardian!” (pinguepecus domino facias et cetera praeter / ingenium, utque soles custos mihi maximus adsis, 14–15). Only slightly altering the conventional trope that distinguishes the fat flock from lean language, this particular gesture of Alexandrian affiliation calls up Vergilian pastoral and specifically the intervention of Apollo at the beginning of Eclogue 6: “Tityrus, a shepherd should feed and fatten his sheep, but sing a finespun song” (pastorem, Tityre, pinguis /pascere oportet avis, deductum dicere carmen, 6.4–5). Apollo's advice, coming after the speaker claims he was about to sing of reges et proelia (kings and battles), equates, if provisionally, the Eclogue poet with the figure of Tityrus. We are thus led back, through a web of allusions, to the first eclogue and its identification of land with otium and the conversion of such leisure, in turn, into song. Such intertextuality suggests that one way in which the speaker makes the farm his own—proprius—is to convert it into a pastoral locale that has affinities with a particular literary tradition. Horace aesthetically appropriates the farm for himself-exercising over it the rights of representation—at the same time as he acknowledges the actual source of his gift in the figure of Maia nate (Mercury born of Maia), god of commerce and exchange, the vowels and consonants of whose name suggest “Maecenas.”
[74] Referring to Odes 1.2, where Mercury and Octavian are conflated, Bradshaw (1989, 163–64) argues that the allegorical figure here suggests Augustus, not Maecenas.
By inserting the farm into the motif of the recusatio, the speaker also declares his wish that the estate not compromise his aesthetic independence regarding genre. Insofar as the estate does participate in a circuit of exchange and eventuates in poetry, let those poems remain lean, the poet says, let them be Alexandrian in style to suit a Callimachean ingenium. Once again, Horace lays a certain claim to the farm, asserting his rights of aesthetic property—of propriety or decorum. Given that the references to land settlements for the veteran soldiers dateSatire 2.6 is thus the first poem in the corpus that takes up the theme of the farm as a gift, transformed by the poet into a topos with generic allusions to pastoral. Such imaginative transfiguration recalls both the economy of otium that underlies Meliboeus's assessment of Tityrus's land and the aesthetic fertility to which the libidinal excess of gratitude is assimilated in the fourth eclogue. For Horace's idealizing of his farm is initially an expression of gratitude, an instance of praise poetry that indirectly compliments Maecenas on his magnanimity: Horace acknowledges his patron by displacing the praise due him onto his gift—“what sooner should I make illustrious (illustrem, 17),” the poet asks in reference to his land—and by showing the pleasure that the estate brings him. The libidinal excess that accompanies the gift (auctius atque / di melius fecere), and that is returned in gratia, may be said to contribute to the idealizing vision of the country and thus parallel, if not in fact become, the excess associated with aesthetics. In Ode 1.17, to which we now turn, the aesthetic excess associated with the topos of the golden age is even more explicitly embedded in the gift-exchange modalities of patronage.
THE CORNUCOPIA AND HERMENEUTIC ABUNDANCE: ODES 1.17
Velox amoenum saepe Lucretilem mutat Lycaeo Faunus et igneam defendit aestatem capellis usque meis pluviosque ventos.
5 impune tutum per nemus arbutos quaerunt latentis et thyma deviae olentis uxores mariti, nec viridis metuunt colubras
nec Martialis haediliae lupos, 10 utcumque dulci, Tyndari, fistula valles et Usticae cubantis levia personuere saxa.
di me tuentur, dis pietas mea et Musa cordi est. hie tibi copia 15 manabit ad plenum benigno ruris honorum opulenta cornu. ― 155 ―
hic in reducta valle Caniculae vitabis aestus et fide Teia dices laborantis in uno 20 Penelopen vitreamque Circen.
hic innocentis pocula Lesbii duces sub umbra, nee Semeleius cum Marte confundet Thyoneus proelia, nee metues protervum
25 suspecta Cyrum, ne male dispari incontinentis iniciat manus et scindat haerentem coronam crinibus immeritamque vestem. Often Faunus swiftly changes Lycaeus for lovely Lucretilis and all the while keeps the fiery heat and rainy winds away from my goats. Throughout the protected grove, safe from harm, the wives of the smelly he-goat stray seeking the hidden arbute and thyme, and the kid-goats fear neither green snakes nor warlike wolves, when, Tyndaris, the sloping valleys and smooth rocks have sounded deeply with the sweet panpipe. The gods protect me, my reverence and my Muse are dear to them. Here lush abundance of the riches of the country will flow to the full for you from the generous horn. Here, in a hidden valley, you will avoid the heat of the Dog Star, and on Teian lyre will sing of Penelope and glassy Circe contesting over one man. Here, in the shade, you will drink glasses of innocuous Lesbian wine, and Bacchus, son of Semele, will not mix in wars with Mars, and you will have no fear of impudent Cyrus, that he might attack you, unfairly matched, with unrestrained hands and tear the garland, clinging to your hair, and your innocent clothes. (1.17.1–28)
An invitation to Tyndaris to come and enjoy the sympotic delights of Horace's estate, this ode combines pastoral and golden age motifs to present an idealized landscape. As in the fourth eclogue, the topos here emphasizes the safety of the environment-sheep wander unthreatened by wolves or snakes-even as Tyndaris is assured that rough Cyrus will be kept away. Though critics have cited the accoutrements of the golden age, and discussed Horace's representation of his farm here as a privileged domain of aesthetics,
[75] Cf. the discussions of Fraenkel 1957, 205–7; Commager 1962, 348–52; Schmidt 1977; Davis 1991, 199–205; Putnam 1994. On the history of the locus amoenus in classical literature, with reference to this poem, see Schonbeck 1962, 186–93.
the implications of the central image of the cornucopia in such a context have not been fully explored. An image of pastoral plenty that came to symbolize the riches of the pax Augusta, the cornucopia appears prominently in two works of the early Empire, the cuirassed statue of Augustus found at Prima Porta and the cameo known as the Gemma Augustea.Appearing in the central stanza of the poem—the point of transition from a magic landscape of animal life protected by Faunus in the first half to the world of lyric, epic, and excluded elegy of the second half-the cornucopia emphasizes what Lewis Hyde calls the passage of the gift (1979, 45–49): in this case, the image of plenty marks the process by which the benefaction of land, the reward of genius, is transformed into song and passed on. On the one hand, the gods of this central stanza refer back to Faunus, the rustic divinity responsible for transforming Horace's estate into a charmed landscape, exchanging (mutat) Mt. Lycaeus for pleasant Lucretilis. On the other hand, the phrase di me tuentur (the gods protect me), as it leads into the ideologically charged image of the cornucopia, also suggests the gifts of the regime. Just as Horace's ingenium (talent, genius) is in the care of the god Mercury-a stand-in for Maecenas and those he represents in Satires 2.6—so here the gods protect (tuentur) the poet, because his piety and muse are dear to them. To be sure, Horatian claims about the sacro-sanctity of the poet are commonplaces and need not imply a political or socioeconomic context. But the specific diction of patronage is telling and, taken with the pastoral imagery, connotes a political source similar to the palpably historical gods of Tityrus in the first eclogue. Then, too, the poet's pietas here recalls the speaker's claim in Satires 1.6 that his upright life and blameless character (vita et pectore puro, 64) gained him entrance to Maecenas's group. Finally, the cornucopia appears elsewhere in the Horatian corpus in a context that explicitly ties the abundance of the gods to patronal relations and the plenty of the pax Augusta.
For example, Epistles 1.12, the letter to Iccius as procurator of Agrippa's estates in Sicily, urges its addressee to enjoy his ususfructus, the rights to the use of produce of the land he oversees, as “no greater abundance could be bestowed by Jove” (non est ut copia maior / ab love donari possit, 2–3). As we saw in the introduction, when the letter later recommends Pompeius Grosphus as a friend whom Iccius should “make use of,” the social relations of patronage are expressed in openly economic terms: the “going rate of friends is cheap, when good men are in need.”
[76] Hor. Ep. 1.12.22–24: utere Pompeio Grospho et, siquidpetet, ultra / defer: nil Grosphus nisi verum orabit et aequum. / vilis amicorum est annona, bonis ubi quid deest.
Both social and economic abundance are then given a political inflection: in the coda of Roman news at the end, references to recent military victories, by Agrippa and Tiberius over the Cantabrians and Armenia respectively, are followed by the statement that golden plenty pours out grain from her full horn (aureafruges /In addition, the cornucopia symbolizes aesthetic abundance. To some degree, the image alludes to a commonplace of ancient rhetoric: both Cicero and Quintilian refer to the dazzling variety of literary tropes—that is, the dense “rhetoricity” of literature-in terms of “abundance” or copia.
[77] Cf. Cic. De Or. 3.30.121; Quint. Inst. 10. 1.5–6: opes sint quaedam parandae. … Eae constant copia rerum ac verborum. I am grateful to Robert Grudin for these references.
In Horace's poem, the cornucopia connotes such profusion of figural language as well as its consequent potential for contradiction. A concrete emblem of plērōsis, or the fullness associated with a god's presence, the cornucopia complements both the divine epiphany of Faunus and the music of his pipe echoing from the smooth rocks. The abundance of continuous sound implied by personuere develops into the “song within song” image of Tyndaris's lyric domestication of epic in the fifth stanza: as Gregson Davis points out, lyric here includes epic, reduced to an elegiac rivalry between Penelope and Circe (1991, 203). Tyndaris herself, a patronymic suggestive of Helen, is emblematic of both the source of epic conflict and its transmutation into poetry-in this case, lyric (Putnam 1994, 371). Further, the landscape echoing with music, a frequent image of pastoral, is enacted by the succession of performers—Faunus yielding implicitly to the speaker, who yields in turn to Tyndaris. Aesthetic abundance here resides in the profusion of genres, as elements of pastoral conform to a lyric convivium in which both elegiac rivalry and epic violence are contained.Odes 1.17 locates the origin of this aesthetic excess in the gifts of the patronal system. The “generous horn” (benigno cornu) from which copia flows recalls Maecenas's benignitasin Epode 1 even as it anticipates the poet's reference to his “abundant vein of talent” (ingeni / benigna vena) in Odes 2.18. But just as the cornucopia functions on a purely symbolic level in Odes 1.17, referring to no actual thing in the poem's narrative or sequence of events, so the complex hyperbaton of this stanza points up the elusive transition from material gift to aesthetic production. Suggestive of Faunus's initial transformation of the farm into a charmed landscape echoing with song, the gods here both symbolize aesthetic talent and reward that talent;
Though the precise origin of such signifying excess remains elusive, the excess is a property of aesthetics that the poem also figures as libidinal. And this libidinal element, in turn, connects with Cicero's comments on gratia: because gratia can refer to both a favor repaid and the sense of favor that remains after repayment, it parallels the libidinal excess that attaches to the object, increasing in value as the spirit of the gift is passed on. In ideal terms, because the gift is prompted by feeling—Seneca claims that a person should “love his benefactions”
[78] Sen. Ben. 2.11.5: Si gratos vis habere, quos obligas, rum tantum des op&rtet beneficia, sed ames (If you wish to have gratitude from those whom you lay under an obligation, you must not merely give, but love, your benefits).
-it carries a libidinal value in addition to its material worth; it is in response to this nonquantifiable libidinal value that the receiver is prompted to give in excess of the original gift. Surely this concept of the essential movement of the gift, or the spirit of the original gift, appears in the swift succession of figures who inhabit Horace's magical landscape in Odes 1.17: what Faunus gives to the speaker, the speaker gives to Tyndaris. The rich abundance of the farm flows (manabit) for the addressee, and she, in turn, at first receiving will then produce song of her own. The aesthetic excess that we see as a profusion of generic echoes in Tyndaris's song thus arises from, or at least parallels, the accumulation of libidinal value-or energy-as the gift changes hands. And just as Lewis Hyde argues that the libidinal element of the gift expands to include the parties involved in a form of collective ego (1979, 16–17), so the hyberbaton of the central stanza entwines gods, speaker, and addressee in a cameo image of the tripartite relationship of patron, poet, and audience. We have here an ideal view of benefaction, one in which economic transaction provides for social cohesion.Yet despite this positive image, the cornucopia of this poem also suggests the potential for its own subversion as an ideologically charged symbol for
[79] Putnam (1994, 363) observes that the phrase proelia confundere is a witty turn on the “standard idiom proelium committere or facere” and underscores the “wrong mixing” that the speaker promises to avoid.
On the other hand, this safe haven of the golden age is defined through the excluded presence of the elegiac lover at the end of the poem. Such definition through difference is paralleled in the poet's careful choice of adjectives: for though innocent (innocentis) wine, not Cyrus's incontinent (incontinentis) hands, characterizes the poet's estate, the words' distinct meanings depend on minor differences in lettering. Such traces or echoes of one word in another reflect the aesthetic play symbolized by golden age fertility and the cornucopia. Similarly, the poem's inclusion of the image of violence ensures its presence despite Cyrus's exclusion from the farm. This presence-in-absence dynamic, on the levels of both form and diction, underscores the ambiguity that some critics remark in the speaker's intentions.
[80] Dunn (1990) claims that the invitatio is governed by the rhetoric of seduction causing Cyrus's violence to function as the speaker's threats. See, too, the comments of Connor (1987, 28–31) on the figure of Cyrus.
Despite his claims, too much wine may yet bring on the more violent eroticism of a Cyrus. This uncertainty-are the speaker's intentions less honorable than he claims?-reflects still another form of abundance, the ambiguity that results from contradictory implications.This analysis may seem to depart from the subject of patronage, but it is precisely the connotative multiplicity symbolized by the cornucopia that, as I argue in the next chapter, allows Horace to refashion his relationship with Maecenas. Indeed, the negative effects of donation that Pietro Pucci has remarked in Horace's gifts to Tyndaris in this poem, subjecting her to
In this chapter I have argued that the discourse of libidinal excess and voluntarism that defines the gift-or an ideal, prescriptive view of benefaction-can be seen as assimilated to the pastoral economy and aestheticized landscape of the Eclogues; moreover, this process serves to naturalize benefaction as both an economic and ultimately a political system. When Horace invokes Vergilian pastoral in Satires 2.6, he introduces into his representation of his estate both the naturalizing discourse of the Eclogues and their darker underside-the pressures of civil turmoil, in particular the confiscations of land, that threaten to tear the imaginary resolutions of those poems just as they haunt the speaker's own rhetoric of benefaction. This ambiguating subtext to Horace's pastoral allusions is compounded by the contractual connotations of the gift and by gratitude as a burden of debt. Nonetheless, in regard to Odes 1.17 I have suggested that pastoral's assimilation of a patronal economy also provides Horace the rhetorical figures with which he transmutes the raw materiality of the estate as imperial benefaction into an image of aesthetic abundance; by so transforming his material munus into a locus a-moenus, a place that is “not for profit,” Horace appropriates the libidinal excess of patronal voluntarism and creates an imaginative site of copious connotation. For even as Faunus suggests the gods of patronage, he also implies the poet himself: at the end of 1. 16, the speaker claims that he seeks to “exchange angry lines for sweet” (nunc ego mitibus / mutare quaero tristia, 25–26), a change that Faunus's substitution (mutat) of pleasant Lucretilis for Lycaeus surely makes good. A discursive site of hermeneutic plenty, the farm, as we shall see in chapter 4, enables the poet to resist-even as he reveals-the discourse of quid pro quo exchange to which his relationship with Maecenas threatens to regress.