4. From Patron to Friend
Epistolary Refashioning and
the Economics of Refusal
Toward the end of the twenty-ninth ode of his third book the Horatian speaker claims to praise Fortune as long as she stays, but should she shake her wings and fly away, he will renounce her gifts, wrap himself in his virtue, and take poverty as his dowry. This philosophical indifference to fortune's vicissitudes draws the first three books of the Odes to a close; and, as the final poem (excepting the proud sphragis where Horace compares his achievement to a monument of marble), it anticipates many of the issues that the Epistles will take up. The trope of Epicurean self-sufficiency-here figured as the warm (and Stoic) shawl of virtue and the marriage gift of poverty-appears in the epistolary poems as the ultimate benefaction bestowed by the poet on himself. Such independence, in turn, depends on a dialogue with the audience, whether that be the specific lyric or epistolary addressee or a more generalized public “readership”—those whom the poem implicitly establishes as consumers of poetry. The Horatian subject, particularly in the Epistles, takes shape in a performance of rhetorical counterpoint in which the speaker often invokes his audience as a foil for his self-definition.
The “Grand Maecenas Ode” anticipates this process of definition. Following the convention of an invitatio, Odes 3.29 bids Maecenas to leave the heat and ostentation of the city, and take refuge in the cool simplicity of the Sabine farm. Halfway through a formulaic list of why, when, where, and what to bring, the poem betrays convention; rather than ending with a gesture to R.S.V.P., it embarks on a detached philosophical meditation. This shift from personal address to ethical stance describes the movement of many of the Epistles, whose addressees frequently offer the occasion for Horace's homespun Hellenistic treatment of Roman social issues. The structural resemblances, however, extend further, for oscillating from
[1] Santirocco (1986, 153–68) traces a similar development of Horace's relationship with Maecenas in the Odes.
The historical backdrop implied by this development deserves mention. The terminus ante quern conventionally given for the publication of the Epistles is 20 or 19 B.C.E. By that time, Horace had been a member of Maecenas's “circle” or cohorsfor some fifteen years and, judging from the gratitude the poet expresses in Satires 2.6, in possession of an estate in the country-generally called “the Sabine farm”—for more than ten years.
[2] See chapter 3, [n. 6], and the introduction, [n. 9], for evidence concerning the Sabine estate.
The evidence of Suetonius, coupled with interpretations based on the poems themselves, suggests that the patronal relationship originally secured by an act of benefaction had become an external structure, or form, within which the feelings or emotive content of real friendship had developed. It is the ambiguity of such a relationship, one in which the formal structure could still impose itself, that Horace's epistolary poems to Maecenas explore. As forms of recusationes, these “refusal poems” are unusual in that they ground their demurral not by claiming inadequacy to the task but rather by referring to a past debt made good.Indeed, as chapter 2 demonstrated, the religious rhetoric of sacrificial expiation serves not only to justify the necessity of the Principate but also to lend an ideological veil to the “economic” exchanges involved in the production and consumption of such poetry: rather than being a response to the debt imposed by benefaction, the poet's sacrificial expenditure is voluntary, in keeping with a discourse of priestly euergetism. In turn, through such circulation of symbolic capital, the pax Augusta appears as the consequence of expiation, the reestablishment of the pax deorum (peace
Specifically, I analyze the epistles to Maecenas-1.1, 1.7, and 1.19—as poems that aesthetically refashion the patronal relationship into one of a more egalitarian friendship. The chapter is divided into four main sections. In the first, I review the conventional scholarly approaches to the problem of autobiography in the Epistles and then give my own account of the Horatian subject in these poems. In the second, I give a reading of the first epistle in terms of this “autobiographical subject” and its engagement with economic issues of debt, credit, and symbolic capital. My third section examines how this view of the Horatian subject bears on the other poems to Maecenas, and in particular how it explicates the problematic assertion in Epistles 1.7 that Horace, if pressed by the demands of patronage, is willing to return all benefactions to his patron. In the fourth section, I examine more closely the abundant economic imagery of the seventh epistle and the ways in which it interacts with the ambivalence of Horace's status identifications.
Because critics have, for the most part, viewed the letters to Maecenas either as straight autobiographical documents asserting independence or as essentially fictive explorations of the relationship of patronage, they have ignored the unique way in which the hermeneutic process of reading the Epistles is involved in the new configurations of identity that the poet claims for himself.
[3] The autobiographical view was popular early in the twentieth century when “biographical criticism” was still in vogue and “sincerity” was considered a major critical issue rather than a rhetorical effect. Thus Courbaud (1914) and Fraenkel (1957, 310) saw the letters as autobiographical and “real,” whereas critics of the last few decades—Becker (1963), G. Williams (1968), McGann (1969), Macleod (1983), and Kilpatrick (1986)—have inclined toward seeing the Epistles as fictions that draw in varying degrees from experience. Johnson (1993), however, reads the poems as a form of “psychobiography,” albeit filtered through Horatian art and irony.
Scholarship has not, in short, sufficiently taken into account the role of audience in the production of meaning.[4] Though disagreeing as to their biographical accuracy, most scholars of the Epistles have explored them for their philosophical statements and orientation: e.g., for Courbaud (1914), the Epistles stage the poet's development from Epicureanism through Stoicism; Maurach (1968) and McGann (1969) see the Epistles as exemplifying essentially Stoic ideas, with the latter emphasizing Panaetius as a model. Macleod (1983) and Kilpatrick (1986) see the ethics of amicitia as the major concern.
As we shall see, in theEPISTOLARY SUBJECTIVITY
Whenever the question of the status of the Epistles as autobiography comes up, critical attention has until recently focused on whether the letters were “real” or not. For Gordon Williams this is “too crude” a question to ask, and he concludes that they “had no practical function as letters” and that the “overt literary intention of the Epistles is the real one” (1968, 24).
[5] See [n. 3] above, for a summary of the critical positions. See Kilpatrick 1986, xvi, on the Epistles “as dramatic poetry [akin to] Browning's monologues.” For Johnson (1993, 10–11), the epistolary speaker's implicit claim-that “the masks are suddenly put away for good and all”—constitutes a “theatrical gesture.”
M. J. McGann discusses this question in terms of the letters' effectiveness in the real world: “To say that the epistles are not real letters is to hold that they were not intended to have consequences in the ‘real world,’ that their statements, their questions, and their advice have no entailments for the persons addressed” (1969, 89). His position seems to hamstring the power of fiction by insisting that only if the letters were actual correspondence could they impress their readers or addressees. On the contrary, as I suggest in my conclusion, the cameo glimpses of Horace on his farm were intended to have an effect on readers other than those specifically addressed. And because little is known about the addressees of many of the letters, it is difficult to imagine their individual responses.[6] Notwithstanding such uncertainties, Allen et al. (1970) discuss the addressees of Epistles 1 and conclude that they were “‘safe’ and ‘Augustan’ politically” (265).
Maecenas, however, figuring as the addressee of no fewer than three of the Epistles and as the careworn politician of Odes 3.29, a poem that ushers in the themes and structures of the philosophical letters, is a personage whose historical status invites us to infer more about him as a reader. With subtle echoes of diction and imagery extending over the range of these poems, Horace uses the Epistles to attempt a redefinition of his relationship with Maecenas. Although this transformation takes place in the temporal space of the successionTo trace how Horace's relationship with his patron changes over the course of the Epistles, we must address the autobiographical nature of the poet's persona. The issue of “sincerity” has been effectively laid to rest by critics of classical texts over the past few decades,
[7] Veyne (1988) is one of the more recent defenders of the high degree of artifice and convention in Latin poetry. Davis (1991, 78–184) analyzes autobiographical events in the Odes as a rhetorical trope that confers poetic authority on the speaker, conforming more to the rhetorical demands of such aims than to any regard for biographical truth.
but the question of connections between the postures assumed by poets in their verse and the cultural codes or conventions of their historical context obviously remains central. For the purposes of this chapter, I consider the autobiographical persona to be an aesthetic effect, in keeping with linguists' definition of subjectivity as constituted in language. And if, as Michel Foucault's work has argued, subjectivity is the product of cultural discourses that are historically specific,[8] Foucault (1970, 380) writes, “for the signifying chain by which the unique experience of the individual is constituted is perpendicular to the formal system on the basis of which the significations of a culture are constituted: at any given instant, the structure proper to individual experience finds a certain number of possible choices (and of excluded possibilities) in the systems of the society.”
then Horace's autobiographical persona would find expression in those discourses particular to his period. Moreover, subjectivity as the effect of articulations employing the pronominal shifters “I” and “you” points to the fundamentally dialogic, and therefore dyadic, structure of such discourses (Benveniste 1971, 233–30). To use a slightly different terminology, the subject positions available in language always exist relative to a second term of a dyadic relationship. The dyadic discourses particular to Horace's Rome, which he manipulates to effect a modified independence from Maecenas over the course of the Epistles, are the relation between patron and protégé, the relation between participants in a more philosophical and therefore egalitarian “friendship” (amicitia),[9] For clarity, in this chapter I generally use amicitia to refer to a philosophical ideal of friendship unmediated by political considerations. However, as already discussed in the introduction, the concept of amicitia can embrace a full spectrum of personal relations from those of patronage proper to a kind of Ciceronian ideal of identity of interests, values, and opinions.
and the relation between a praeceptor (instructor)—often Epicurean—and his pupil. Each of these relationships, in turn, has a coherent system of associated images, diction, and rhetorical conventions that the poet exploits.[10] Thus Horace manipulates his culture as a semiotic system shared by his readers. Cf. Geertz 1973, 14: “as interworked systems of construable signs … culture is not a power … [but] a context, something within which they can be intelligibly-that is, thickly-described.”
My recourse to linguistics—and to the dyadic model of subjectivity
The epistle is the genre in which the dyadic construction of the subject appears most visibly. Its essence involves the mechanics of communication, rendering it the generic articulation of Benveniste's “dialectic reality” of the subject: “Consciousness of self is only possible if it is experienced by contrast. I use T only when I am speaking to someone who will be a you in my address. It is this condition of dialogue that is constitutive of person” (1971, 224–25). Benveniste is making a universal claim here about the linguistic effect of subjectivity; by being true wherever the pronominal “I” is employed, such a claim risks becoming trivial when applied in particular contexts. But the epistle as an aesthetic genre heightens, or raises in a kind of bas-relief, the contours of the dyadic relationships informing the writing subject. Even the everyday epistle, intended as a practical means of conveying information, illustrates with remarkable clarity this language of the self, for correspondence as such mediates, and thus simultaneously fixes in relation to each other, two subject positions. As Stanley Stowers points out, the letters of Greco—Roman antiquity reflect specific social codes of behavior, and thus locate the writer and addressee in their proper place (1986, 27). The distinction between “ordinary” and “aesthetic” letter is by no means easily drawn, especially in antiquity, when not only was the writing of ordinary letters something of an art form and subject to a theoretical taxonomy, but personal correspondence was also polished and refined for publication at large (18–19, 32–35). However, we can ascertain degrees of fictionality, if not of artistry; when the fiction is greater, and the constraints of “real” communication fewer, then the artistic license is broader.
Such license would permit greater manipulation of the dyads informing epistolary relations; and it would also give a poet the freedom to occupy
[11] This production of narrative form essentially constitutes what Jameson considers a “first hermeneutic horizon.”
As we shall see, the impulse toward an aesthetic resolution derives from the ideological terms themselves of the patronal discourse whose more negative realities Horace experiences as confining: Horace's resistance to the actual economics of patronage is enabled by a rhetorical excess or “aesthetic play” that, as we saw in the previous chapter, is associated with the gift of otium and the ideology of the golden age. Horace's poems thus both reinforce and challenge the social relations from which they arise.This paradox reflects the degree to which the epistolary subject may occupy contradictory positions. As Kaja Silverman points out, Benveniste's linguistic theory allows for flexibility in the discursive construction of the subject, since with every articulation it is figured anew: “Benveniste's discontinuous subject may depend for its emergence upon already defined discursive positions, but it has the capacity to occupy multiple and even contradictory sites” (1983, 199). Horace uses this capacity in his epistles to Maecenas. Exploiting the twofold nature of the published epistle, a genre that assumes the expression of private intimacies even as it exposes them to a public readership, Horace writes a poem whose overt-or “public”—stance unravels for the audience of the elite: by occupying the role of a philosophical praeceptor, Horace encourages Maecenas to read a discourse of ideal amicitia or friendship beneath the surface gestures of a protégé, or a subordinate amicus. Horace occupies several discursive sites simultaneously to convert a hierarchical patronus-protégé relationship into the “horizontal” dyad of personal friendship.
The role of philosophical master that he employs brings up the question of doctrine in the Epistles. Much scholarly ink has been spilled in the attempt to pin Horace down to one or another creed; more recent scholars tend to agree only that the Epistles display an eclectic blend of predominantly Hellenistic philosophy presented by a persona as ironic and elusive
[12] On Horace's synthesis of different philosophical schools as Academic-reflecting the Skeptics as well as Plato and Socrates-rather than merely eclectic in orientation, see Kilpatrick 1986, xvii, 116 n. 44. Mayer (1986) reads the epistolary Horace as essentially Socratic and considers the critical tendency to discover specific philosophical orientations in the poems to be flawed.
Indeed, for all its characteristic self-deprecation, the speaker's statement in the first epistle that he harbors in whatever philosophical port the storm might have blown him has a ring of truth.[13] Mayer (1986, 58) draws attention to how similar in language, but not in context, this statement of Horace is to Cicero's complaint that young men cling to philosophical systems like shipwrecked sailors to rocks: una alicuius quern primum audierunt oratwne capti de rebus in-cognitis indicant, et ad quamcumque sunt disciplinam quasi tempestate delati ad earn tamquam adsaxum adhaerescunt (Acad. 2 [Lucullus] 3.8).
And though such texts as Cicero's De officiis and De amidtia clearly influence the philosophical vision of the Epistles, their anecdotal style, their loose structure, and the persistently contradictory stance of the speaker make any single source improbable. Individual elements of a poem do suggest specific schools, however, and some have argued that an Epicurean ethos permeates the entire collection. The genre itself recalls Epicurus's use of the prose epistle as a vehicle for philosophical teaching.[14] Heinze (1919; reprinted in Kiessling and Heinze 1961a, 367–80), made a case for Epicurus's letters as the primary model for Horace, a view that Becker (1963, 15–16) and others have since rejected.
The Greek philosopher notoriously disregarded poetry as insignificant to his vision of the “good life,” but Lucretius certainly vindicated the Muses, who provided the persuasive finish necessary to his transmission of Epicurus's ideas. As this and the following chapter demonstrate, Epicureanism is, at the least, a strong influence on the Epistles. I single out certain Epicurean practices and principles for their relevance to the discursive site that the Horatian speaker takes up, both as a student and a teacher of philosophy. The frequent nexus of imagery in the Epistles comparing philosophical sayings to a liquid, and the student to a vessel that must begin clean, suggests the Epicurean practices of confession and memorization.[15] See Nussbaum 1994, 126, 129, and sources cited therein. I am indebted to Nussbaum's entire discussion of Epicurean practice in her chapter “Epicurean Surgery” (102–39).
In addition, the Epicurean principle of withdrawal from public life, to the “Garden” (in Epicurus's day, at the outskirts of Athens), finds ample analogue in the Sabine farm. Finally, the democratic aspect of Epicureanism-its promise to aid the sufferings of all alike, regardless of gender or status-appears in the frequent tension in the Epistles between social hierarchies and philosophical egalitarianism.[16] The literature on Horace and Epicureanism is vast, though most scholars dispute any concrete affiliation with a school or rigidly systematic exposition of particular tenets, and later critics have tended to undermine earlier assertions of Horace's Epicurean orientation. DeWitt (1939) made piecemeal identifications of discrete Epicurean sentiments, scattered throughout the poetry; Merlan (1949, 451) claimed that Horace's Epicureanism is “whining” rather than “virile”; Ferret (1964, 95–98), Btichner (1969), and Gantar (1972) all reject any sustained Epicurean affiliation or exposition on Horace's part. For a defense of Horace's commitment to Epicurean ideas of friendship, see Diano 1968. See [nn. 4] and [12] above for discussions of the Epistles in relation to other philosophical schools.
Before we trace the development of this conversion of the dyadic relationship between Horace and Maecenas, we should briefly consider the Sabine farm as the material condition mediating, anchoring, and focusing the intersecting cultural discourses composing that dyad. In the discourse of patronage, the Sabine farm serves as a major benefidum that encourages and expects, although its ideology does not demand, the compensating gestures of officia. Moreover, the farm confers not only important economic self-sufficiency and the “leisure” time of otium, but also the symbolic capital of status attached to independent landholding:
[17] Cf. Cicero's comments (Off. 1.151): “there is no kind of gainful employment that is better, more fruitful, more pleasant and more worthy of a free man than agriculture” (trans. M. Atkins from the edition by M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins [1991]). The estate is both a discursive site of social inscription in the extratextual world of cultural discourses (”possession of land signifies aristocratic identifications”) and a variable locus of constructed meaning within the poems.
the farm made Horace eminently free in the Aristotelian sense-a freedom based on wealth and, ultimately, on social status. And yet in the logic of gift exchange and concealed economic interest, it is such benefactions that his epistles, particularly the seventh, represent as potentially still obliging.[18] Significantly, the word with which Horace claims that he has been enriched by Maecenas's benefactions is locupletem (Ep. 1.7.15), whose root meaning is “rich in land.”
Hence, the repeated gesture of a philosophical independence that we see in these letters often collides with the actual-as opposed to the ideological-code of patronage. In keeping with much of the advice in the Epistles endorsing a course between two extremes, the independence voiced by these poems is modified and conditional: for even if the Sabine farm represents the locus of an Epicurean withdrawal from the political world and demands of Augustan Rome, that world's beneficence is what makes such a renunciation possible. And though this conditional independence marks the intersection of two cultural codes-the interdependence of patronage and philosophical self-sufficiency-it is within the space of a third discourse, an ideal and philosophical amicitia, that Horace communicates his complex position to Maecenas. Finally, as the inequality characteristic of the patronus-protégé relationship yields to the horizontal dyad of friendship, another differential dyad emerges that supports this new formation: the vulgus that aligns itself with Rome, Maecenas, and publicity in the first epistle becomes,This overall trajectory of my analysis clarifies the ways in which the uniquely Horatian invention of the verse epistle constitutes a “formal” solution to social contradiction. As a genre at once private and public, it enables Horace to resolve the conflict embodied by the material condition of his estate, employing semiotic registers that speak to different audiences. Unlike lyric, which may also be understood as a private rhetorical performance before the public gaze, the verse epistle permits its creator to draw on the letter's generic affiliations with philosophical practice: in keeping with the parainetic focus of the prose epistle, Horace's novel genre brings under its philosophical scrutiny the overlapping discourses of friendship and patronage whose dyads constitute its very form.
[19] In the invocation of the epistle as a medium for philosophical instruction, the Horatian epistolary subject differs from the Horatian lyric subject. But the frequent presence of specific addressees in classical lyric, as well as the rhetorically persuasive nature of the speaker, make the I-you dyad often as pronounced in a lyric as in an epistle.
DYADIC DISEQUILIBRIUM AND THE ALTERNATION OF DEBT:
EPISTLES 1.1
The tensions of numerous cultural discourses are in play in the first few lines of the opening epistle. Whether historically “genuine” or not, a request from Maecenas for lyric poetry, possibly panegyric, serves as the occasion for Horace to justify his new interest-philosophy-in the genre that will provide the medium for its exploration:
[20] For discussion of whether a fictive or actual occasion prompted this epistle, see [n. 3] above and the critical consensus that these epistles are “fictive” but may draw from experience. See my introduction and its [nn. 1] and [3] for other interpretations of this opening.
Prima dicte mihi, summa dicende Camena, spectatum satis et donatum iam rude quaeris, Maecenas, iterum antique me includere ludo. non eadem est aetas, non mens. Veianius armis 5 Herculis ad postern fixis latet abditus agro, ne populum extrema totiens exoret harena. [21] With the OCT I read totiens in line 6 rather than Shackleton Bailey's rediens.
est mihi purgatam crebro qui personet aurem: ‘solve senescentem mature sanus equum, ne peccet ad extremum ridendus et ilia ducat.’ 10 nunc itaque et versus et cetera ludicra pono: quid verum atque decens, euro et rogo et omnis in hoc sum. condo et compono quae mox depromere possim. ― 171 ―By my first Muse glorified, to be glorified by my last, you, Maecenas, seek to confine me again in the old school, though I have been gazed upon enough and already awarded the foil. My age, my temperament are not the same. Veianius, having hung up his arms at Hercules' temple door, hides, concealed in a field, to avoid beseeching the crowd, repeatedly, from the edge of the arena. There is voice constantly sounding in my cleansed ear: “Wisely free the aging racehorse in time, lest he stumble at the very end, short of breath, a sight to be mocked.” And so, I now set aside poems and other frivolous pursuits. The true and the proper, this is my care and query, and I am completely involved in this; I am storing up and setting in order those things which soon I may bring out to use. (1.1.1–12)
The tightly woven symmetry of the near golden first line displays the conflict between the demands of patronage and the prerogative of the Muse. On the one hand, Horace claims that Maecenas was honored (dicte) by his first Muse, and will be honored (dicende) by his last, and he thus complies with the convention of dedicating a book of poems to his patron. But by drawing attention to such honor as a poetic convention, Horace privileges his own artistry at the-quite literal—expense of his patron. Honor is owed to the patron, to be sure, but aesthetic artistry converts the poet's debt into that of his benefactor: for the separation of the adjectives Prima and summa (”first” and “last”), as modifiers of Camena (Muse), and their placement at the beginning and the middle of the line create two appositional phrases in which the words modifying Maecenas, dicte and dicende, are embraced and subsumed by those describing Horace's Muse. Such brilliant hyper-baton, the famous Horatian mosaic in an image of patron-poet interdependence, pointedly underscores that Maecenas owes his poetic life to the speech of his protégé. Although dicende might suggest a continuing debt on the part of the poet, such a future obligation, looking ahead to the nineteenth epistle similarly addressed to the patron, has already been met-once the collection of poems is published as a whole-in the temporal unfolding of the poetry book and the reading process: that is, Maecenas has received the first dedication and, rest assured, the line implies, he is to receive the last. But Horace's poetic inclination comes first, both in the line and in his generic choice (Prima … Camena); it centers the line, implying that obligations diminish from this summit. By thus manipulating the dedicatory convention, Horace grounds the overt justification for refusing his patron—“My age, my temperament are not the same”—in the credit or symbolic capital that he has accrued through his celebration of Maecenas: drawing attention to the debt that Maecenas has incurred in depending on the poet for immortality, Horace inverts the hierarchy of patronage and asserts that aesthetic values have priority over the social or political qfficia of a dependent.
Renouncing his patron is not an act of willful caprice; rather, the Horatian speaker claims to have taken up the pursuit of philosophy. And because the epistle is often the medium of such pursuit,
[22] For an overview of the philosophical epistle in antiquity, see Stowers 1986, 36–40.
the generic transition from the Odes to the Epistles helps mediate between the two dyadic relationships of patronage and philosophical instruction. Horace refuses to align his identity as poet any longer with the role of a dependent, choosing rather to adopt first the position of student but ultimately that of teacher-the “doctor” of philosophy. The role of knowing praeceptor, dispensing the prescriptions of philosophy, is at this point only implicit, a consequence of genre; but the shift from an inferior to a superior position appears in the transition from the objectified Horace of line 2 to the series of emphatic first-person singular verbs, the pronominal “I”s, of lines 10–12. At first Horace compares the writing of verse to a gladiatorial school (Indus) and spectacle, whose elements of open visibility and personal compromise (or subordination to the patron) metaphorically suggest the more public genre of lyric encomia or “political” poetry that shapes many of the Odes. But the “proven” (spectatum) and “rewarded” (donatum) gladiator, weary of seeking the public's favors, now engages in gathering the fruits and distilling the wine of truth: four verbs of first-person agency—“I attend to” (euro), “I seek after” (rogo), “I store up” (condo), and “I compose” (compono)— accumulate quickly, asserting the poet's urgency in the philosophical enterprise on which, as though producing a wine from a cellar, he will soon draw (depromere). Though new to these pursuits, the speaker claims that he is bound to swear by the words of no master (nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri). And as the letter of a dependent to his patron proceeds to metamorphose into a more generalized parainesis to the good life-now lyrical, now satiric-it is clear that he himself identifies with the philosophical praeceptor.In this transition from one role to another, the metaphor of the gladiator, as I suggest in my introduction, deserves closer scrutiny. Scholars have not sufficiently explored the discursive web of associations raised by this image of laborious showmanship sponsored by another.
[23] For example, P. White (1993, 137) downplays any possible political implications of the terms Indus and ludicra by referring the connotation of “game” to the more symposiastic verse of the erotic odes. But much evidence connects Indus to political poetry. First, Horace's own inverted recusationes or revocaticmes, at the end of the ode to Pollio and Odes 3.4, point up the frequent inextricability of political and erotic motifs as part of his lyric persona. Recent criticism has brought out the importance of the poetry scroll and the arrangement of a book as a whole; hence, in referring to light erotic poems, Indus may stand synecdochally for Odes 1–3 as a whole. Lyne (1995, 78, 187) comes close to suggesting such a metonymic function of the erotic poems.
They have tended to emphasize the irony of Horace's casting his situation in terms of such extreme[24] Kilpatrick (1986, 2) suggests that the “ironic” comparison to a “superannuated gladiator” alludes to the similar image in Cic. Sen. 5.14. For Kilpatrick the irony refers more to the element of age (i.e., Horace is still writing very good poetry) than to the constraint of the gladiator. See my discussion of this passage in the introduction.
Irony no doubt exists in the discrepancy between the crude and bloody sport of the gladiator and the refined metrical rhythms of the poet, but the nexus of images connected to the idea of expenditure and debt suggested by a gladiatorial munus raises the issue of freedom in complex ways. To begin with, when Horace claims that in his new pursuit of philosophy he is sworn to no master, the word addictus has more than one implication. As commentators point out, the term can refer to one who has sworn by a gladiator's oath as well as to a person in a relationship of monetary debt to another. Thus, Horace's newfound-or keenly desired-freedom in the genre of the philosophical epistle is implicitly contrasted with a sense of past economic obligation in the figure of the gladiator. To be sure, most gladiators owed their labor to another because of slavery, not debt; nonetheless, the economic meaning of addictus reinforces Horace's use of the gladiatorial metaphor to express a past sense of obligation.[25] See Ville 1981, 228–64, for the evidence concerning origins and status of gladiators: they were originally prisoners of war, and then variously slaves, men condemned by the law, and finally “free” men who took the gladiator's oath voluntarily.
The poet's present status as not addictus tellingly echoes the words dicte and dicende in the first line, where honoring of the patron constitutes one means by which such debt is made good.The echoes reach beyond this poem. In Epistles 1.18, Horace gives advice to his young friend Lollius, who is about to enter into a relationship of personal patronage with a potens amicus, “a powerful friend” or patron of higher status. At the poem's outset, the speaker intuits that Lollius fears becoming like the figure of the scurrawho “repeats the speeches and sayings of the rich man” (divitis iterat voces et verba, 12), just as a “boy gives back dictated lessons to his master” (utpuerum … dictata magistro / reddere, 13). These two depictions of the role of a protégé or dependent-servile parasite and compliant schoolboy-contain marked verbal echoes (verba, dictata, magistro) of the phrase addictus iurare in verba magistri, “bound over to swear by the words of a master.” Such patterns of diction become significant when we consider that the gladiator's oath (see Ville 1981, 248–49), the schoolboy's lessons, and the parasite's parroting all depend on repeated words and phrases. As I have argued elsewhere (1994), Horace's advice to Lollius contains a subtext concerning the poet's own experience of patronage; such a reading strengthens the echoes between these two epistles, which suggest that embedded in the rhetorical figure of a gladiatorial oath,
Moreover, the image of the Indus, or “gladiatorial school,” to which Horace resists returning, naturally implies the munera, or “gladiatorial shows,” for which the poet, gazed at sufficiently, has been presented with the foil signifying his discharge. Although munus specifically denotes a gladiatorial spectacle, such shows were often presented in association with athletic games (ludi), public banquets (epulae), or sacrificial feasts (viscerationes), at which the flesh of the victim was shared among the guests (Ville 1981, 386–87). And the ludicra that the speaker claims he sets aside along with verse in line i o may also refer to theatrical shows and public entertainment. Significantly, the image of ludi performed for a patron's approval-he makes a “thumbs up” gesture-also appears in Epistles 1.18. Here, too, the diction suggests the writing of poetry, and specifically political verse, since the Indus put on by Lollius is a naumachia (mock sea battle) of Octavian and Antony's showdown at Actium.
[26] Hor. Ep. 1.18.58–66: Ac ne te retrahas et inexcusabilis absis, / quamvis nil extra numerum fecisse modumque / curas, interdum nugaris run paterno; / partitur lintres exercitus, Actia pugna / te duce per pueros hostili more refertur; / adversarius est frater, locus Hadria, donee / alterutrum velox Victoria jronde coronet. / consentire suis studiis qui crediderit te, / fautor utroque tuum laudabit pollice ludum. Here, the gesture of the raised thumb to indicate the patron's approval aligns him, as in Ep. 1.1, with the public. As commentaries point out, this is the first known reference to such a gesture, one whose origin and precise form are still contested.
In turn, these images of gladiatorial and other forms of spectacle in Epistles i invoke instances in the Odes where the language of public games and display is used. As we have seen, the word munus is employed by Horace to refer to funereal offerings in the ode to Pollio, the poem that anticipates the role of tragic sacrifice and expiation in the Roman Odes. These “political” poems may therefore be specifically alluded to by the gladiatorial imagery in the Epistles: gladiatorial shows, or munera, have their origin in the ritual sacrifices for the dead that the Pollio ode invokes as symbolic expiation for the civil wars.[27] On the origin of gladiatorial munera, see Auguet 1994 [1972], 19–25; Hopkins 13–7; Barton 1993, 13.
These associations all underscore the idea of public expenditure as a primary metaphor through which Horace conceives the political poetry of the Odes, a trope that involves both patron and poet. On the one hand, the patron's munificence to the poet indebts him and causes him to become addictus, even as such patronage leads to an expenditure or munus for the sake of the public. The gladiatorial metaphor may thus be interpreted as Horace's humorous demystification of the ideal of voluntarism and disinterestedness in literary patronage as practiced by Augustus and Maecenas. On the other hand, the poet's aesthetic labor puts his benefactor(s) in his debt. As we shall see,[28] The more economic (and contractual) the exchange becomes, the less ambiguous the disequilibrium of debt. Kurke (1991, 225–39) analyzes how Pindar applies rhetorical tropes from a disembedded economy of wage and profit to an embedded economy of aristocratic expenditure on the Olympian games. In some instances, Horace may be said to do the opposite: he takes images from the embedded economy of public expenditure on the gladiatorial munera and uses them to suggest the economic calculation behind patronage: he has already (donatus iam rude) earned his withdrawal from public themes and performance, and thus he has paid off his debt. Significantly, the speaker of Epistles 1.1 also compares himself to a retired racehorse: hippotrophia, or conspicuous expenditure on horse racing, had strong associations with tyranny in the Greek world. See Kurke, 215–16, for further references.
But here, in the first epistle, the disequilibrium that marks this alternation of debt is countered (and modified) by the overriding rhetoric of the speaker's lesson of equality-both before the law of human nature and of eligibility for the treatment of philosophy. Philosophical study “helps the poor and rich alike, even as neglected, it will harm the young and old with no discrimination” (aeque pauperibus prodest, locupletibus aeque, / aeque neglectum pueris senibusque nocebit, 25–26). This disregard for difference recalls that of Epicureans, whose egalitarianism reflects their ideal of friendship.
[29] This egalitarianism holds among members, prospective or otherwise, of the school. The manifest hierarchy in the relationship of master to students in Epicureanism is discussed by Nussbaum (1994, 119).
The Epicurean indifference to distinction-whether of gender or political status-in its celebration of the horizontal relation of friendship provides a structural model, if not a concrete source, for Horace's exploration of this paramount Roman discourse. When at the end of the poem, with characteristic slipperiness, the Horatian speaker slides once more from impersonal proselytizing to personal address, resuming his dialogue with Maecenas, we witness again the collision of several dyadic relationships:
si curatus inaequali tonsore capillos 95 occurri, rides; si forte subucula pexae trita subest tunicae vel si toga dissidet impar, rides: quid mea cum pugnat sententia secum, quod petiit spernit, repetit quod nuper omisit, aestuat et vitae disconvenit ordine toto, 100 diruit aedificat, mutat quadrata rotundis? insanire putas sollemnia me neque rides, nec medici credis nee curatoris egere a praetore dati, rerum tutela mearum cum sis et prave sectum stomacheris ob unguem 105 de te pendentis, te respicientis amici. Ad summam, sapiens uno minor est love, dives, liber, honoratus, pulcher, rex denique regum, praecipue sanus-nisi cum pituita molesta est. If I run into you when my hair is cut unevenly, you laugh; if it happens that the shirt under my brand-new tunic is worn-out, or if my toga, ill-fitting, sits askew, you laugh: what about when my thought is at war with itself, rejects what it sought, seeks again what it just now abandoned, seethes and is out of sync with the entire system of life, when it destroys, builds, changes squares to circles? You think that I rage my usual fits and you neither laugh at me nor think that I'm in need of a doctor or guardian appointed by the praetor, though you are the caretaker of my affairs and get angry over a crookedly cut nail on the friend who depends on you, who looks to you for all. In sum, the wise man is second to Jove alone-he is rich, free, honored, handsome, finally a king of kings, and, particularly, healthy, except when he has a runny nose. (1.1.94–108)
After a long satiric section that ends with an image of seasickness that spares the rich man no more than the poor (aeque nauseat), the Horatian speaker turns personal once again, pointing out the superficiality of Maecenas's treatment of his protégé. With diction recalling the claim that the differences of class and age are external and irrelevant to a person's qualification for philosophy, Horace objects that Maecenas notices only imperfections of appearance-his “uneven haircut” (inaequali tonsore capillos), “an ill-fitting toga” (toga … impar), “a crookedly cut nail” (prave sectum … unguem)—and is insensitive to the busy workings of his mind. Indeed, the adjectives describing the poet's disheveled look, inaequali and impar, suggest more than simply a poet at odds with himself: they tellingly imply the stratified and unequal nature of the patronal relationship. A patron's dependents are a visible indication of his own status (Wallace—Hadrill 1989, 83), and Horace thus implies that Maecenas cares only how such bad grooming might reflect on himself-that is, when he exercises his spleen over a badly cut nail, he cares about Horace only as a “client.” But many dyadic discourses cross here, with Horace occupying first one position and then another, creating an instability of tone matched by an oscillating syntax. With the same erratic impermanence that marks Horace's mental wanderings-a mind that “scorns what it sought, seeks what it abandoned” (98)—the poet's persona vacillates from satiric philosopher to disgruntled protégé to respectful friend and back to a philosopher who mocks his own claims. Nor are these positions mutually exclusive: as the satiric philosopher shifts to the misunderstood protégé, the criticisms of the latter rely on the didactic prerogative of the former. The necessarily superior tone of reproof subsides only with the pendulum swing from the end of line 104 to line 105, where the accessory syntax of the prepositional phrase, de tependentis,
The vacillating subject-as client or protégé, friend (amicus) or prae-ceptor-is another means of manifesting the disequilibrium of debt or expenditure between Horace and Maecenas. By the end of the first epistle, the philosophical advice that Horace has given his patron, albeit in a general satirical form, constitutes further expense on the part of the poet that entitles him to his patron's private solicitudes. The poet's exhausting mental workings cause him to be as “spent” mentally as the gladiator is physically from his labor at the poem's opening. We shall see this sense of earned entitlement again in the seventh epistle, where the poet's right to refuse requests is figured as both the freedom based on the fulfillment of past obligation and as a further indulgence granted by the patron turned friend. For the independence that Horace displays in writing the Epistles rather than more odes paradoxically depends on Maecenas's generosity. In the first epistle, as we have seen, this symbiosis stirs the most refined and decorous Latin artistry: the elegant hyperbaton of the first line-with the temporal modifiers of Horace's Muse weaving in and out of the vocatives of his patron-asserts not only the priority of the poet but the dependence of such willfulness on his benefactor as well. Grammatical inflection again mirrors this syntax of relationship in line 105—de te pendentis, te respicientis amid. But in the seventh epistle, Horace communicates this complex position to Maecenas as the reader of a latent discourse, a subtext speaking to him as a friend beneath a surface discourse that addresses him as a patron.
One effect of the opening poem is to prepare Maecenas for such latency in the seventh. The very first image of the retired gladiator suggests the opposition between public and private genres: the retired gladiator, Veianius, tired of beseeching an audience, hides concealed in a field (latet abditus agro), having hung up his arms to Hercules (1.1.4–6). This imagery may seem to refer only to the generic distinction between the Odes and the Epistles, but the emphasis on secrecy and concealment points to more than just the privacy of the epistolary genre and the “life in retreat” of Epicureanism.
[30] Of course, letters became “public” as soon as they were “published”—that is, when authors allowed people other than their friends to make copies (see Starr 1987); and, as Allen et al. (1973, 130) stress, letters were often “public enough property that Cicero could caution Atticus that a letter was meant just for him (Att. 8.9. 1).” But I am emphasizing that the genre of the epistle, in contrast to the fiction—and sometimes reality-of the public performance of the odes, is predicated on the absence, and thus invisibility or concealment, of the author.
The opposition reappears at the end of the epistle, whereTo this point, however, the oppositions between public and private, appearance and reality, suggest only metaphorically a parallel with the cultural discourses of a politically nuanced patronage and the more philosophic amicitia, and with the generic choices associated with them. But before Maecenas as an actual reader arrives at the seventh epistle, where these discourses inform a contradictory tension between the semantics of the text and its subtext, he is prepared by the preceding poems in yet another way: they cause him to associate specifically with the epistolary genre the very interiority that Horace asks him to recognize. Such an association would be immediate, given that ancient epistolography often described the function of the letter as the “sharing of two selves.” As Stowers notes, this idea is conveyed clearly in a letter of Seneca to Lucilius: “I thank you for writing to me so often; for you are revealing your real self to me in the only way you can. I never receive a letter from you without being in your company forthwith” (Sen. Ep. 40.1; Stowers 1986, 29). In Quintus Cicero's comment to his brother Marcus, “I behold all of you in your letters” (te totum in litteris vidi, Cic. Fam. 16.16.2), we also see the capacity of the epistle to bring the “whole self” into the mind of the addressee.
[31] For the conventions of “real letters” invoked in Horace's Epistles, see Allen et al. 1973.
Horace builds on this a priori generic convention, using imagery developed from the related epistolary type-the philosophical exhortation.When Horace claims that he seeks the true and proper and stores up (condo) things from which he soon may draw (depromere), he asserts more than his independence as a poet; he also introduces what will be a dominant metaphor for the teachings of philosophy in many of his verse letters. He compares the philosophical content of the following epistles to a liquid-in this case, to wine. The comparison of poems to wine is, in many ways, a Horatian topos: the verb condere, for example, appears in Odes 1.20, where Horace invites Maecenas to come drink “Sabine stored in a Grecian jar” (Sabinum … Graeca … testa conditum, 1–3)—a symbol of the poet's verse, which depends on Greek forms.
[32] Much has been written on Horatian poems figured as wine. On Odes 1.20, see Pavlock 1982, 81; Cairns 1992, 88.
In Odes 1.9, with a slight variation,[33] On the “Sabine jar” as applying to both the wine and the jar, see Edmunds 1992, 31.
Odes 3.29, another lyric invitation, pointedly announces that a “smooth wine in ajar still unopened or unturned” (non ante verso kne merum cado, 3.29.2) awaits Maecenas in the country. The poetic context of this image-that is, the poem that draws the Odes to a close and anticipates the themes of the Epistles—suggests that the “wine” here connotes the philosophical content contained in the verse epistle-a genre or ‘jar” not previously “turned” (non ante verso) before Horace. Aesthetic form as a container for the substance of a “philosophical liquid” further recalls a familiar image of Lucretius, in which the brew of Epicureanism is likened to a medicine whose bitterness doctors disguise by “smearing the edges of a cup with honey” (oras pocula circum / contingunt mellis … liquore, i-937–38). Thus Lucretius relies on the “sweet honey of poetry” (musaeo duld … melk, DKN 1.947) to attract his reader's mind to the language of his argument and then to see through and grasp the nature of the universe.The relationship of poetic language to philosophical content is a notorious crux for Lucretian studies, particularly as Epicurus himself regarded clarity as the most important characteristic of speech and thus thought prose, rather than poetry, should be employed for philosophical instruction.
[34] Cf. Diog. Laert. 10.13, 10.120. As Asmis (1995, 21) claims in reference to this view, “It is the function of clear speech to communicate clear opinions that are verifiable by each student on the basis of sensory experience.” Such a view implies that language ideally is a transparent medium expressing its signified content.
Though the honeyed figures of rhetoric have the potential to mislead, Lucretius claims that his poetic language is intended to clarify rather than obscure Epicurean philosophy.[35] As Asmis (1995, 33–34) points out, Lucretius “aims to dispel the darkness of his listeners' ignorance by illuminating the discoveries of Epicurus with the language of poetry.” Nonetheless, the image of honey does address the figural and rhetorical nature of poetic surface, and thus the capacity for deception, multivalency, and the need for interpretation. The problematic role of poetry in the practice of Epicureanism in the late Republic is addressed by the essays collected in Obbink (1995).
Nevertheless, Epicurus's suspicions haunt Lucretius's medicinal simile; and as an image, it lends focus to the conflicting conceptions of language in the Epistles. In the first, the sayings of philosophers are viewed as “charms” (piacula, 1. 1.36), “songs” (decantata, 64), and mysterious chants (verba et voces, 34), which are able to “renew” (recreare, 37) the sick individual. Philosophical language can thus be internalized, taken like a liquid, so that it will work inside the soul like a medicine in the stomach. Such a view is in keeping with both the medical imagery of Epicureanism and the memorization of Epicurus's sayings[36] See Nussbaum 1994, 125–28, for discussion of the Epicurean sources, Phld. Peri Orges XLIV, Peri Parrhesias 6, 20, 54, 63–64, and the analogy of philosophy to a form of therapeutic medicine.
But against this understanding of language as transparent, unproblematically united with its referent, is another, suggested by the honey of the Muses: words as rhetorical surface, capable of deception.The conception of language as a liquid explains why Horace develops the metaphor of philosophy as a wine or potion in conjunction with images of a person's receptivity to wisdom. Indeed, the voice that whispers in Horace's purged ear to retire the aging horse before its fall precedes the speaker's own reference to his philosophical wine cellar. Here the equation is indirect, but elsewhere, as in Epistles 1.2 to Lollius, the analogy is clear. After warning that the ‘Vessel” (vas) must be “clean” (sincerum, 54), the philosopher-poet bids Lollius to drink in the teacher's words with a pure heart: nunc adbibepuro /pectore verbapuer (67–68). Epictetus is said to have similarly observed that “the writings and teachings of philosophy, when poured (influxissent) into a false and low-lived person, as though into a dirty and defiled vessel, turn, change, are spoiled.”
[37] Epictetus, frag. 10; trans. Oldfather 1952, Loeb edition.
Horace combines this idea with the convention of the philosophical epistle “as the literary genre through which the living example of the guide and the shared lives of teacher and student could best be communicated” (Stowers 1986, 38). So when he writes that he is seeking the true and the fitting and that he “is all in this” (omnis in hoc sum), and then follows with the metaphor of distilling truth or storing wine, the phrase may also refer to Horace's self as being fully within, “self-present” in, the language of philosophy—in hoc. Horace can thus be said to liken his interior self to a liquid that a reader, such as Lollius in the second epistle, will take within as he “imbibes words in his pure heart.” As I argue in the conclusion, Horace figures the image of his epistolary self as a gift to be received by his readers. Again, the tenets of Epicureanism suggest this idea of internalizing the teacher so that the student may always have reference to his or her character and principles.[38] See Nussbaum 1994, 132, on the importance of memory and repetition in Epicureanism: students were to learn the Kuriai Doxai by heart. By relying on memory, a student could take “the teaching inside himself or herself so that it [would] ‘become powerful’ and help her in the confrontation with error.”
Not only does the phrase omnis in hoc sum recall Quintus's comment to Marcus, “I see all of you in your letters” (Te totum in litteris vidi), but as Benveniste points out in his essay on shifters, hoc is a word that refers to the temporality of its own linguistic context (1971, 219). We shall see that Horace's identification of his pursuit of philosophy with the linguistic space and time of these poems themselves becomes explicit in Epistles 1.7 HereTHE DUPLICITOUS SPEAKER OF EPISTLES 1.7
This enigmatic epistle is often regarded as the “most personal and occasional of the entire collection” (Kilpatrick 1986, 8). Most critics have considered the poem as a concrete record of Horace's declaration of independence from Maecenas, whether as a letter actually sent or as a poetic treatment of his repudiation of further obligations as a dependent.
[39] I have profited from the following extended discussions of Epistles 1.7: Btichner 1972 [1940]; Gunning 1942, 303–20; Fraenkel 1957, 327–39; Hiltbrunner 1960; Wimmel 1969; Kilpatrick 1986, 7–14; Berres 1992, and see 216–18 for a review of the scholarly positions.
Taking as its occasion Maecenas's longing for his friend who has stayed too long in the country, the poem proceeds to explore the issue of patronage in a series of exempla. No other epistle contains so many fables and illustrative exempla (Fraenkel 1957, 336), and as a poem also noted for its highly personal content it presents an interesting tension between seeming unmediated “autobiography” and the interpretive uncertainties of ainoi (illustrative tales, stories, fables). The use of such exempla for didactic purposes recalls the second epistle to Lollius: there, Horace claims that Homer offers a better source of philosophical instruction than do Chrysippus and Grantor.[40] Mayer (1986, 67) emphasizes that Horace turns to Homer for philosophical instruction because he prefers “the vivid moral tales of a writer known to all” and repudiates “sectarian squabbles and opaque jargon.” Homer may have been “known” to all, but familiarity with his work, in contrast to the populist “fable” of the fox in the cornbin of Epistles 1.7, would be a mark of aristocratic allegiance.
Although the concerns of the equanimous soul in that epistle are general and the seventh focuses specifically on the social issue of patronage, the two poems share a reliance on didactic exempla and thus raise similar questions of interpretation.But the second epistle also anticipates the autobiographical element in the seventh poem. The Epicurean imagery of a medicinal liquid in this poem to Lollius, together with the epistolary function of bringing the writing self before the addressee, suggests that Horace's claim in the first poem—omnis in hoc sum—is also meant to apply to Maecenas's experience as a reader of the sequence of Epistles 1.1 through 1.7. In other words, for Maecenas as a reader, Horace is just as much present in the language of
[41] Curiously, though scholars note the playful game between the promise of “five days” and the extension into the whole of the “sixth month,” they have not seen the seventh epistle as partaking in this temporal accounting and thereby conflating literary or epistolary time with “actual” time.
However, unlike the first epistle, where language appears to be an unproblematic vehicle for the liquid of the self, a merely transparent container that safeguards philosophical queries and advice for the consumption of the reader, Horace here calls himself a mendax, or “liar,” as if to underscore the potential for deceit possessed by any representation of the self in language. Indeed, the fiction or occasion of physical absence on which his epistolary persona depends resonates with the Lacanian notion that such linguistic representations are always haunted by absence and the slippage of meaning. Because the letters are only linguistic representations of a Horatian self, they involve the aphanisis of the “real,” intending Horace: a persona is always necessarily something of a mendax. A letter does not unproblematically bring the self to the perceiving self of the addressee. In this regard, the epistolary persona poses many of the same problems as a poet's lyric ‘Voice,” understood not as a “transparent expression of self, but as a figure of self” that leads to “all the problems of figuration.” As William Batstone's analysis of the rhetorical self suggests, the “figure” of voice may, like metaphor, “mean by not meaning what it says; its path to truth may be through an explicit error” (1993, 149).[42] See Batstone 1993 generally for an analysis of the problematic lyric “voice” as a rhetorical “figure of self.”
On one level, the figure of the Horatian mendax poses hermeneutic problems akin to the paradox of the Cretan liar: such a riddle resists any conclusive interpretation because it “disempowers poetic assertion in the process
[43] Reference to the “Cretan paradox,” attributed to Epimenides, appears prominently in the first hymn of Callimachus, where the speaker is in a quandary as to how to celebrate Zeus, whose birthplace the Cretans, ever liars, claim to be Mt. Ida.
If Maecenas was the attentive reader to which his literary discernment in his entourage of poets attests, he would have picked up on Horace's complexly allusive self-accusation as a mendax. Long familiar with Horatian irony and evasion, Maecenas might well have been suspicious of a poem whose speaker begins by calling himself a liar, and then proceeds to claim his independence even at the price of giving up all he has received as a dependent.[44] Berres (1992, 219) sees the difficulty in distinguishing between Horatian levels of ironic versus nonironic speech as a major interpretive problem posed by this letter.
Such wariness, however, would not have been a reader's initial attitude toward the Epistles. When the didactic speaker at the end of the first epistle encourages Maecenas to read beneath a superficial appearance to the interior confusion of Horace's soul, the poet's confessional nakedness seems analogous to what the genre of the Epistles offers. Because Horace frequently mentions his nails when discussing his art,[45] Cf. Hor. Sat. 1.10. 70–71, where the poet addresses what Lucilius would experience if he were writing in Horace's time: et in versu faciendo / saepe caput scaberet, vivos et roderet unguis; and Ars P. 292–94: carmen reprehendite quod non / multa dies et multa litura coercuit atque / perfectum decies non castigavit ad unguem.
the crookedly cut nail that offends Maecenas's decorous sense of dress might suggest the erratic composition of the Epistles, with their radical shifts in tone, seemingly loose structure, and haphazard sequence of material. There, Horace would be saying: “Disregard any roughness of construction-it is only a reflection of the tumult in my soul—and this is what you should be reading beneath the surface.” But such a reading presumes, again, the transparency of linguistic form as supplying unproblematic access to meaning. As I have argued above, such a reading accords with the Epicurean imagery of a fluid passage of thought from the poet to his addressee,[46] SeeDiog. Laert. 10.13 for the high value that Epicurus placed on clarity of expression. See Stowers 1986, 38.
and it could have been Maecenas's understanding of the passage-until he came to the seventh epistle. Here, Horace's use of mendax warns Maecenas to suspect the overt statements of the poem, not to find meaning beneath the transparent surface of form but to interpret beneath a sometimes illogical opacity of signification. And as if to encourage this kind of reading, not only does Horace employ a conspicuous signifying system-the exempla of fable, anecdote, and epic narrative-he also exploits the connotative range of his diction and the reversal of logical expectations set up by his syntax to undermine his overt claims. Thus Horace prevents unmediated accessibility notjust by physicallyAfter calling himself a liar, Horace proceeds to ask for Maecenas's indulgence for staying away in the country, an indulgence that his patron would give Horace both when he is actually sick and when he is fearing sickness:
atqui si me vivere vis sanum recteque valentem, quam mihi das aegro, dabis aegrotare timenti, 5 Maecenas, veniam, dum ficus prima calorque dissignatorem decorat lictoribus atris dum pueris omnis pater et matercula pallet officiosaque sedulitas et opella forensis adducit febris et testamenta resignat. But if you want me living sound and well, the indulgence that you grant me when I'm ill you will give me fearing to become so, Maecenas, while the season's first figs and fierce heat adorn the undertaker with his black retinue, now when every father and dear mother grows pale for their children, and conscientious duty and legal hairsplitting draws on fevers and unseals wills. (1.7.2–9)
Painting a comic cameo of Rome in the summer (G. Williams 1968, 20), Horace claims that the insufferable heat, combined with the demands of negotia (business duties), make him afraid to come to the city. Horace's persona is clearly speaking as a dependent, requesting from Maecenas the same solicitous care for his physical health as he sought, at the end of the first epistle, for the confusion of his soul. Blaming the summer, then introducing the next sentence with the conditional conjunction quodsi, Horace sets up an expectation that he will return in the winter:
10 quodsi bruma nives Albanis illinet agris, ad mare descendet vates tuus et sibi parcet contractusque leget. te, dulcis amice, reviset cum Zephyris, si concedes, et hirundine prima. But when wintry snow blankets the Alban fields, your bard will go down to the sea and go easy on himself, and huddled up will read. You, sweet
― 185 ―friend, he will see again with the spring winds, if you will allow it, and the first swallow. (1.7.10–13)
But just as Horace has betrayed his promise to stay away for only five days-or five epistles-so too does he set up both syntactically and with his imagistic opposition of summer /winter an expectation for his return that he then betrays. He will return only with the spring winds and the first swallow. The appellations used by the poet chart the movement from one role to another that such delays effect: Horace stays away as Maecenas's vates, a word that suggests the role of public poet rejected in the first epistle, but in his withdrawal he will read (presumably philosophy) and will return, in the spring, to see Maecenas as his dulcis amice. If Maecenas cares about his vates as a friend, as the didactic philosopher has asked him to do in Epistles 1.1, he will condone the absence of his dependent from Rome.
The most significant betrayal of language occurs later in the poem-a betrayal that also depends on Maecenas's understanding as a friend and that centers on the interpretation of the verb resigno. The adjective contractus—understood here as withdrawn into oneself or “huddled up”—indirectly alludes to the later deception. For its meaning recalls the end of Odes 3.29, where the speaker claims that if Fortune flies away, he will renounce her gifts (resigno quae dedit, 54) and wrap himself in his cloak of virtue (mea virtute me involvo, 55). The verb resigno is used twice in the seventh epistle. As we have seen, the word first comes up in the parodic picture of Rome's death-dealing heat, where the city's pressing demands lead to fevers and then unseal wills (testamenta resignat). Later, it appears in an ambiguous phrase, cuncta resigno, that follows the fable of the fox and the cornbin and that has generally been understood as a hypothetical, if problematic, application of the moral of the exemplum to Horace's situation: just as the fox who wishes to exit the cornbin should leave as thin as when he entered, so Horace should “give back all” (cuncta resigno) of Maecenas's gifts if he wants to be free of obligations (29–36). Some critics claim that Horace could not possibly have meant what he writes, arguing that the epistle is merely a fictional exploration of patronage that uses Maecenas's relationship with Horace as the particular occasion (G. Williams 1968, 21–22; McGann 1969, 95–96). Ross Kilpatrick, who has written one of the more recent studies of the Epistles, offers a suggestive, though narrowly exclusive, alternative reading of this controversial line, one that depends on the principle of decorum and suitability that informs the entire epistle (1986, 11–13). My own reading, though not intentionally conceived to mediate between these two lines of argument, is informed by both interpretations insofar as it rests on a duplicity of discourse.
The betrayal of expectation that marks the opening of the epistle
25 quodsi me noles usquam discedere, reddes forte latus, nigros angusta fronte capillos, reddes dulce loqui, reddes ridere decorum et inter vina fugam Cinarae maerere protervae. But if you wish me never to leave, you will return my strong body, my black hair on a once narrow forehead, you will return my knack for sweet speech and elegant laughter and for mourning, in drink, bold Cinara's flight. (1.7.25–28)
Setting up a condition that Maecenas must meet should he wish Horace never to leave him, the poet betrays his reader's expectation by making an impossible demand-the return of lost youth. And despite what may be the humor of this trope-an adunaton or “impossibility”—mockingly applied to the poet's appearance, it brings up an issue of irrevocability that seriously affects our understanding of the fable then told:
forte per angustam tenuis vulpecula rimam 30 repserat in cumeram frumenti pastaque rursus ire foras pleno tendebat corpore frustra. cui mustela procul ‘si vis’ ait ‘effugere istinc, macra cavum repetes artum, quern macra subisti.’ hac ego si compellor imagine, cuncta resigno. Once it happened that a little fox had crept through a narrow crack into a cornbin, and having eaten his fill, with glutted body was trying to return outside in vain. A weasel some way off said to him, “if you wish to escape from there, you need to seek again the small opening as thin as when you entered.” If I am arraigned by this picture, I give back everything. (1.7.29–34)
This fable is most striking in that its overt meaning seems to invert the irrevocability of the situation that introduces it: Maecenas cannot give back Horace's youth, but Horace, if he should be accused with this imago, would give back all that he received from Maecenas. Proponents of this interpretation understand resigno in a commercial sense, as in to sign money from one account to another-to enter money “in favor of someone else” (OLD, s.v., 2b)—and hence to hand over or resign.
[47] For those who essentially subscribe to this commercial reading of resignoand. its derived implications of “handing over” or “giving back,” see Courbaud 1914, 282; Fraenkel 1957, 334; G. Williams 1968, 21–22; McGann 1969, 95–96; Johnson 1993, 44.
They adduce as support forThus we would understand the poet's challenge a few lines later, inspice si possum donata reponere laetus (39), as a variation on the same claim—“Try me: I'm quite capable of cheerfully returning everything that has been given me.” This interpretation would be in keeping with Maecenas's view of Horace's modesty, often praised (saepe verecundum laudasti), if put to the test (McGann 1969, 51). The Homeric example of Telemachus, refusing the initial gifts of Menelaus (tua dona relinquam, 43), also appears to support this reading; and the long tale of the lawyer Philippus and the auctioneer Vulteius Mena, which takes up the latter half of the epistle, concludes with a moral that one return to circumstances appropriate to a person's stature: ‘The one who recognizes, at last, how much affairs that were abandoned are better than those sought, let him return in time (mature redeat) and seek again (repetat) what was left behind. Each person should measure themselves by their own standard” (1.7.96–98). This last story alludes in many ways to what we know of Horace's life, particularly to his relationship with Maecenas, making an allegorical correspondence as “compelling” as the fable of the fox in the cornbin. In the first place, Horace's father was a coactor, a person who mediated between the auctioneer—Vulteius Mena's profession—and the buyer.
[48] For Horace's father, see Sat. 1.6. For discussion of Suetonius's biography of Horace and various elements of the received Horatian vita, see Fraenkel 1957, 1–23; Anderson 1982, 50–73, 1995; Mayer 1995; G. Williams 1995.
A freedman of independent means, he may well have influenced Horace's imaginative creation of the poor but self-sufficient Mena. Moreover, when Philippus comes upon Vulteius Mena, he is cleaning his own nails with a knife; as remarked above, Horace links his fingernails symbolically to his poetry, and the image here could then suggest an aesthetic independence existing before the compromising benefactions of the state. Most persuasive for this seductive symmetry of tale and biography is the farm in the Sabine country that Philippus, loaning money, encourages Mena to buy, and that proves his undoing. Even when a closer scrutiny of the callous and cavalier treatment of Mena by Philippus shows the exemplum to be, like that of the Calabrian host (14–19), ex contrario, some would still interpret the summarizing moral to mean that Horace, if pressed, would return the Sabine farm.[49] Critics (e.g., Kilpatrick 1986, 122) often point out that of all the exempla, only the one involving Telemachus is not excontrario. Contrast Berres (1992, 236), who claims that the Philippus—Mena story comes the closest to Horace's and Maecenas's relationship, with the poet as jokingly reflected in Mena but Philippus an inaccurate stand-in for Maecenas.
This episode, in turn, echoes the fable of the fox; and the theme of a loss of independence recalls the gladiatorial image of the first epistle, where Horace feels that Maecenas threatens to shut him in (indudere) an old profession that puts him on display. The public/private dynamic of that initial metaphor opens the way to another understanding of the seventh epistle, as it brings up yet another image of compromised freedom in Horace's verse letters-the fable of the horse and the stag in the tenth epistle. The horse, in order to beat the stag, takes on a rider; but the price of winning the contest is the loss of his independence.
[50] For the nexus of these images of compromised freedom, see McGann 1969, 34, 56.
Frederick Ahl makes this image central to his study of the duplicity of discourse in poets during the Empire (1984). His essay stresses how the overt meaning appeals to the vanity of the emperor, while a clever manipulation of allusive diction and meter produces a latent discourse undermining the professions of the surface. This paradigm is equally applicable to Horace, but the alignment of audience with discourse is reversed: in Horace, the elite literary circle around Maecenas enjoys the private understanding, accessible perhaps to only the more astute of the reading public.As I have discussed above, Horace prepares Maecenas for reading beneath the surface with his didactic reproof at the end of the first epistle. The betrayals of expectation that mark the first half of the seventh epistle would further warn the reader, Maecenas, to treat with skepticism the two most emphatic, and therefore suspicious, statements: hac ego si compellor imagine, cuncta resigno, and inspice si possum donata reponere laetus. Having earlier promised (pollicitus) and deceived (mendax), why shouldn't Horace be lying now?
[51] The self-accusation at the beginning of the epistle is clearly intended jocosely, as a way of excusing the speaker's change of mind and decision to stay away from Rome. But the use of such a strong epithet surely has a bearing on the later statements that seem so impossible to accept at face value.
Indeed, the first use of resigno in the vignette of Rome in the summer suggests a reason for Horace's deceit: should Horace give back the Sabine farm, the most prized and prominent of the donata or “gifts,” the act would be a death for him; to sign all his property over to Maecenas would be tantamount to unsealing a will, testamenta resignat. The echo of this verb in the noun dissignatorem (undertaker) further underscores this subtext.[52] This subtext may also suggest the poet's genuine intention to give back all his properly to Maecenas on his death. In fact, Maecenas died first, and Horace left his estate to Augustus: see Suet. Vita Hor.
Giving back all, resignare cuncta, would necessitate returning to the city, a place that causes death. Thus, for Horace to apply theThe lack of any explicit mention in the text of Horace's Sabine farm-the poet refers only to cuncta (everything) and donata (things given)—makes it the absent referent that enables this duplicity of discourse. Just as the absence of any concrete material referent for the cornucopia in Odes 1.17 makes it a center of signifying abundance, so the ellipsis in this epistle permits the farm to take on contradictory connotations. On the one hand, the estate is the gift that mediates between Horace and Maecenas in the cultural discourse of patronage, the central term whose relinquishment would presumably free Horace from any obligation as a dependent to return to Rome. On the other hand, since the binary opposition implicit in the cultural dyad of patronage is superimposed on the opposition Rome/country (the patronus is in Rome while his dependent stays in the country), the Sabine farm slips from being a medial to a polar term. Within the fiction of the letter, Horace implies that the rus, or country, that has detained him for all of the sixth month is one of two small resort towns: “small things suit a small man: regal Rome does not please me now, but leisurely Tibur or peaceful Tarentum” (parvum parva decent: mihi iam non regia Roma, / sed vacuum Tibur placet aut imbelle Tarentum, 44–45). But this use of parva is telling, for Horace has used the same term elsewhere to describe the Sabine farm (parva rura, Odes 2.16.37); moreover, since the self-restoring Sabine estate figures in so many of the Epistles as the rus, the place removed from Rome that creates epistolary distance, the association here is hardly farfetched. Also, as Catullus 44 suggests, the more fashionable way of referring to the Sabine territory was by the name of Tibur, the town closest to that region. Because the Sabine estate is not explicitly mentioned, the surface reading of a dependent renouncing all obligation to his patron by offering to return all his gifts is possible. But the gift itself enables that gesture,
[53] Macleod (1983, 284) claims that the Sabine estate allows the gesture of independence, but asserts that cuncta refers only to “the luxury and grandeur of city-life.” Biichner (1972 [1940], 104) makes the similar claim that donata, in the phrase donata reponere laetus, refers only to “reichen romischen Einktinfte oder die materiellen Vorteile seines Aufenthaltes in Rom.” For objections to reading cuncta in a restrictive manner, see Berres 1992, 223–25.
asIt is this position of compromised liberty that Horace communicates in his subtext, a position that depends on Maecenas's understanding as a friend. Kilpatrick's reading of the line hac ego si compellor imagine, cuncta resigno could participate in this latent discourse: in his view, Horace uses resigno in a legalistic sense, responding to the fable as an accusation of greed not by returning everything but by saying “I refute the entire charge” (omnem criminis fidem resigno).
[54] Kilpatrick (1986, 12) bases his reading on the use of resignare by Cic. Arch. 9 to mean “destroy or invalidate” in the phrase omnem tabularum fidem resignasset, “destroyed completely the reliability of the records.”
Such a meaning is perhaps present in Horace's use of the word, and it does provide a key to an understanding of the poem that focuses on Horace's modesty and refusal to accept any further gifts that might oblige him.But to read the poem exclusively this way overlooks how the simultaneously public and private audience inherent in the epistolary genre informs Horace's diction. Although the source of the accusation is obscure, the word procul (at a distance) implies an envious onlooker (Büchner 1972 [1940], 104),
[55] Kilpatrick (1986, 11) reminds us that a similar expression of envy is made in Satires 1.9 and 2.6. Also noteworthy is Epistles 1.14, where Horace avoids in the country the envy of the city dweller. This avoidance of envy by dwelling in the country makes more problematic the gesture of returning all gifts, the country estate included, as a way of avoiding the accusation of greed from an envious onlooker.
to whom Horace addresses only one of his two messages. To an envious public Horace says, “If pressed, I'll give it all back,” while a latent subtext reads, “that's a ridiculous charge—I refute its credibility; and, besides, it's impossible.” Such duplicity is supported within and outside the poem; not only does Horace call himself a mendax at the very outset of this letter, but the nineteenth and twentieth epistles refer explicitly to the private audience that Horace's work enjoyed before it ventured into the hands of the reading public. In the nineteenth epistle the poet again stands accused: not of living off the boons of the regime but, when he declines to give public recitations, of saving his poems for Jove's ears alone (lovis auribus ista / servas, 1. 19.43–5). And the sphragis poem, addressed to the book of epistles themselves as if they were a young slave (liber, 1.20.1), pities his impatience to walk the public streets, to see a world beyond the few people to whom he has already been exposed (paucis ostendi gemis et communia laudas/non ita nutritus, 1.20.4–5).[56] For a discussion of Epistles 1.20 in terms of the tension between public and private that informs the “published” epistle, see Oliensis 1995.
Moreover, the gladiatorial image of the first epistle echoes in the brawl from which Horace escapes at the endFinally, we should note that because the poet rejects the visibility that attends lyric performance and poetry of the polis, the “publicity” and exposure that the first epistle associates with the lyric genre becomes, as the sphragis poem suggests, a matter of publication-the book severed from the author's control and made available to a general readership through the written text alone.
[57] For the argument that the aristocratic elite of the late Republic and early Empire manipulated this tension between performance and publication in the effort to maintain social hegemony, see Habinek 1998, 103–21. I am indebted to this discussion.
Publication shifts the tension between public performance and personal-or “private”—epistle to a contrast of public textual commodity versus private redtatio. Such reorientation underscores the effect of these epistles-the point with which we began-in their aesthetic refashioning of Horace's relationship with his patron.In the first epistle, Horace associates his dicte Maecenas with the public audience to whom the political poems are directed, and thus with literary patronage as a form of sponsorship on behalf of the state: in this scenario, though a gladiator and hence a slave, Horace is the medium through which his patron speaks to a general audience, creating an image of the stratified system or hierarchical network of patronal relations. The nineteenth epistle, by contrast, finds Maecenas not dicte but docte; he is a discriminating connoisseur of the poetry scene, but with a discernment that, the epithet implies, Horace's artistry has sharpened, tested, and taught over the course of the epistolary collection. Having taken the upper hand as philosophical praeceptor, the poet establishes an egalitarianism of aesthetic discernment: Epistles 1.19, by calling Maecenas docte, flatters him as having the capacity to distinguish between the speaker and the servum pecus (servile crowd) of his imitatores (19).
At the end of 1.19, literary discrimination-shared by poet and Maecenas alike-is juxtaposed with grammatici and poets who, in an electoral metaphor, seek acclaim in the manner of patrons hunting for votes (plebis suffragia), by their public munificence on meals and the gift of worn-out clothing (impensis cenarum et tritae munere vestis, 37–38). Introducing the brawl from which the poet seeks a diludia in line 47 when he refuses to participate in a public recitation, this image again recalls the gladiatorial ludus of 1. 1 in its rejection of poetry as a form of expenditure, as euergetism
So far my argument has established, in a preliminary fashion, the following points. First and foremost, Horace's poems actively contribute to transforming his relationship with Maecenas from one jeopardized by the duties and disequilibrium of patronage to one more egalitarian and permissive. Second, these two conceptions of their relationship, though situated on a continuous spectrum, are aligned with particular-albeit notional-levels of public and private audience. Third, it is the very absence in this context of any mention of the Sabine estate, otherwise conspicuous in the Epistles, that permits the connotative ambiguity (similarly aligned with audience) regarding the speaker's seeming intention to return all benefactions. Thus, as a subordinate protégé, the poet discloses and affirms the reality of the reciprocity ethic of patronage by making the price of his independence the return of his patron's gifts. At the same time, Horace undercuts his claims to be able to make good on such a gesture by making his country estate, the place away from Rome, the implied ground from which he speaks.
Finally, as we have seen, the speaker further undermines his claims by his own demand for the return of his past self. When the poet introduces time as an element of exchange, he reveals that a purely economic understanding may inform a more public and formal conception of patronage
[58] Cicero's De amidtia suggests the degree to which absence of the friend is an integral and defining constituent of ideal amidtia; see the discussion in Leach 1993b. Absence, of course, is the sine qua non of the epistolary genre; as a defining constituent of amidtia it also plays a strong role in Epistles 1.10.
The imagery of the descent to the sea that describes the poet's first betrayal of his addressee's expectation supports this idea of the conversion process and its relation to time. Not only does Horace stay away as Maecenas's vates and then return invoking the language of amidtia, but this absence takes place over the winter season, a time that metaphorically suggests the death of one identity and the creation of another.[59] The image of the sea and water may well invoke rituals of cleansing, a process also involved in religious or philosophical ideas of conversion and renewal: on the ritual bath in the sea prescribed by the Eleusinian mysteries, see Bowie 1993, 241.
THE ECONOMICS OF SOCIAL INSCRIPTION
Now that I have laid out the framework of my own analysis of this enigmatic epistle, it remains to examine more closely how the connection between Horatian identity and notional audience is inscribed in the economic imagery of the poem. As we shall see, the philosophical uses of Homer in the second epistle reappear as ideological inscription in the seventh: here the anecdote about Telemachus is intended to assert the poet's parity with his aristocratic readership. Homeric gift exchange is invoked as the proper analogue for the ideology of voluntarism to which the aristocratic elite aspires in its practice of benefaction. The economic calculation that may lie beneath the language of affective and affected amidtia is a view of patronage that Horace simultaneously reveals to Maecenas and challenges him to repudiate.
Contractus and the Nexum
Diction referring to a patronal relationship stripped of the affective ambiguities of friendship runs throughout Epistles 1.7.
[60] Scholars note that the actual patron-client relationship, while not legally binding, was nonetheless more openly—and visibly—expressed as an “exchange relationship.” Wallace—Hadrill (1989, 66, 82–83) discusses the importance of the visibility of clients in the atrium of their patrons, and Dixon (1993, 453) comments: “The implicit exchange was therefore not only an exchange of concrete gifts and favours but the return of gratitude, widely expressed as praise of the donor. … The erection of public statues and inscriptions recording benefactions is more typical of such clearly unequal and public relationships.” Thus actual patrodnium closely approximated, if it did not actually constitute, a “contractual” relationship.
The potentially[61] Critics and commentators generally understand contractus to mean “huddled up” (OLD, s.v., la), or “sparing,” “living in a constricted fashion” (OLD, s.v., 2): cf. Mayer 1994, ad loc. Preaux 1968, ad loc., adds: “C'est l'idéal de l'εὐϑῳμίη démocritéenne sous l'éclairage de la parsimonia.” Kiessling and Heinze 1961a, ad loc., understand it similarly as “ganz auf mich selbst zurückgezogen.” Surprisingly, given the legal and commercial language of other images in the epistle, none of these commentaries remark any connotation of a literal “contract,” though such a meaning is present in the noun contractus, which itself derives from the past participle of contraho, a verb that can mean to enter into a formal legal or commercial agreement (OLD, s.v., 6).
As mentioned in the introduction, Marcel Mauss claims (and Roman legal historians concur) that the practice of debt-bondage, or nexum, constitutes an early form of contract law: the person receiving a loan temporarily relinquishes his person and its labor to the creditor until the debt is paid off (1990 [1950], 49).[62] Watson (1975, in) defines the nexum as “an act per aes et libram by which a free man was bound to a creditor and was subject to his control until an amount of bronze which had been weighed out was repaid.” As Watson goes on to specify, Varro, Ling. 7.105 discusses a difference of opinion between Manilius and Mucius, siding with the latter to the effect that “the person bound by nexum did not become the property, the slave, of the creditor” (112). The distinction thus appears to be one between having a right to the labor of the debtor and actually owning his person. Varro traces the etymology of the term nexum to neque suum in order to point up the difference between nexum and mancipatio, the latter referring to an actual transfer of ownership of property-in this case the res of a person—and thus slavery. But given the difference of opinion in our available sources, as well as the subtextual and metaphorical use of the language of contract in Horace, this distinction does not negate the basic implications of contractus.
Though on one reading tuus vates suggests a personal and intimate tone, the proximity of the phrase to contractus implies, if subtextually, the contrary: an impersonal contract created by the original benefaction of the farm. In his capacity as public poet-as a vates—Horace (or at least his labor) would, in the logic of the nexum, quite literally belong to Maecenas and justify the use of the possessive pronoun.[63] In a chapter on ususjructus, Watson (1968, 203) discusses a legal joke in Plaut. Cos. 836–37: “There seems to be a deliberate contrast, for humorous purposes, between mea est and meusfructus est [;] … a claim to the right to the fruits is put in opposition to a claim of ‘ownership.’” G. Williams (1990, 264) emphasizes that the coercive phrases like nosteresto'm comedy derive directly from the language of patronage.
Such an interpretation recalls the claim of Epistles 1.1, where Horace is no longer (he implies) addictus, or bound over, to a master, even as it finds further support in the jocular adunaton demanding the return of Horace's hair, strong body, and decorous laughter.But these lines do more than identify the poet's past physical self as a possession that the patron would, ironically, have to return should he wish never to be without Horace's bodily presence. For the autobiographical image here acquires properties associated with genre: sweet speech, graceful
In terms of a “contract,” then, Horace humorously (and wistfully) presents his account as paid: Maecenas has no right to demand further qfficia from the poet, for the latter already paid off his debt on the farm by writing the Odes. We might say that Horace takes the public understanding of “formal” patronage as one of economic exchanges and subtly represents the contract as both honored and no longer relevant. For it is a hypothetical public to which the weasel from afar (procul) gives voice, and it is precisely their potential charge of continued indebtedness that Horace refutes in addressing Maecenas: as the “third party” necessary to witness the original transaction, the weasel perceives Horace as guilty, or reus—in a state of culpability for having accepted the res of the farm.
[64] Mauss (1990 [1950], 51–52) discusses culpability in regard to early Roman law cited by Festus: “First, the contracting party is reus, he is above all the person who has received the res of another, and thereby becomes his reus, ie. the individual who is linked to him by the thing itself [.]” Moreover, as Watson (1968, 134) confirms, the handing over of property, the ceremony of mancipatio, takes place in front of five witnesses—suggesting that both the symbolic public of the “weasel” within the poem and the reading public of the Epistles are witnesses to Horace's statement.
To this public, the poet[65] For discussion of Satires i in terms of “propagandists” value, see Du Quesnay 1984.
That is, Horace subtly suggests that it is Maecenas, and more broadly the regime, who is now in debt to the poet. The verb used by Horace three times here, reddes (you will return), appears once more in just this form in Epistles 1.13, where the poet gives instructions, with exaggerated and mock anxiety, to the figure Asinius who is to “deliver sealed papyrus rolls” (reddes signata volumina, i), presumably Odes 1–3, to Augustus.[66] See Oliensis 1998, 189, for this phrase as an echo of Augustus's claims to have forced the Parthians to “return the spoils and standards” (spolia etsigna reddere) of the Romans. Pointing to Augustan coinage of the time that celebrate the occasion, Oliensis suggests that Horace's “privately minted coin shows his ‘standard-bearer’ in a Parthian posture, deferentially bowing before the emperor.”
The repetition of this verb in these two letters only furthers the identification of poet and verse in a context in which the poems as reified object participate in the transactions of patronage, with their implicit contract-the concealed economics-of gift exchange: though the Odes enjoyed an audience beyond the primi urbis alone, the representation of them as a physical bundle to be conveyed to the emperor underscores their concrete function as return gift. And the gift ideology of patronage as one that, in fact, conceals the calculating expectations of return here colors the semantic scope of reddere: beneath the immediate contextual meaning of reddes in Epistles 1. 13, as “you will deliver” or “you will hand over,” is the monetary sense of repaying a loan or discharging a debt. This economic implication draws the uses of reddere in the seventh epistle together with the diction of bookkeeping and accounts that we see in the assertions cuncta resigno (I sign everything back to your account) and inspice si possum donata reponere laetus (See [”look at my account”] whether I can repay your gifts).[67] See Sen. Ep. 81.9–10 (discussed in chapter 1) for the distinction between the language of a monetary loan, where reddere would be used, and that pertaining to benefaction and the returns it elicits, where the verb referre would be used, signifying the “voluntary” nature of expressions of gratitude. Cf. also Sen. Ben. 6.5.2. For inspiceas a bookkeeping term, see Mayer 1994, ad. loc. For reponere, see OLD, s.v., 5.
Aera versus Lupini
Other images in the seventh epistle expose the economic calculation behind patronage as both a public reality and a fact to be repudiated in the name of friendship and the ideology of voluntarism. One such image stands out in apparent contrast to the many ainoi concerned with the art of giving.
prodigus et stultus donat quae spernit et odit: haec seges ingratos tulit et feret omnibus annis. vir bonus et sapiens dignis ait esse paratus, nec tamen ignorat quid distent aera lupinis; dignum praestabo me etiam pro laude merentis. The prodigal fool makes presents of what he scorns and despises; a field so planted has yielded and will always bring forth ingratitude. The good and wise man says he is ready to give to the worthy, and yet he is able to discern the difference between real money and counterfeit. I will also show myself worthy on a par with the honor earned by the giver. (1.7.20–24)
The first two lines clearly comment on the lasting ingratitude that an unvalued gift yields, but the following lines have occasioned much debate among the commentators. If the “good and wise man” refers to the patron, and thus, by implication, Maecenas, the aera (money) as distinguished from lupinis (counterfeit coins) could represent one of three elements in a patronal transaction: the benefactions given to a deserving man, the worthy recipients themselves, or the “gifts”—officia or otherwise-rendered as acknowledgment by the recipient in return.
[68] Critics generally understand the distinction between aera and lupini to refer to the benefactions bestowed by the giver: see Btichner 1972 [1940], 92–93; Fraenkel 1957, 330–32; G. Williams 1968, 20; Macleod 1983, 284. However, Kiessling and Heinze ig6ia, ad loc., read the distinction as referring to the worth of the receiver himself, a view derived from one scholiastic tradition.
What immediately strikes the reader familiar with the ideology of benefaction is the use of a monetary image in evaluating one of the constituents of the process. For all that Seneca in De benefitiis fastidiously and repeatedly separates the loaning of money and the practice of benefaction, successful giving requires assigning values and thus invokes the metaphor of currency. To some degree, this language of evaluation reflects a more pervasive phenomenon that began in the second century, a redefinition of the semantic scope of words describing monetary processes to include notions of aristocratic “goodness, reputability, and largesse” (Habinek 1998, 49).[69] As Kurke (1995, 36–64) notes, archaic and classical Greek texts use similar imagery to express ideas of aristocratic worth. However, the novelty of coinage created a certain suspicion, with the result that the dichotomy of essentialism (money consists of precious metal) and functionalism (money is exchanged and symbolic) breaks down according to class lines; references to coinage are conspicuously absent from archaic Greek lyric.
That being said, the[70] This formulation is essentially in keeping with the theory of proper benefaction or liberality as articulated in Arist. Eth. Nic. 4.1119b18–123a33 and Cic. Off. 1.45–49. See the discussion in Fraenkel 1957, 330–32; Kilpatrick 1986, 10.
The line dignum praestabo me etiam pro laude merentis further accentuates the equivalence of all these constituents of the patronal relationship: the return “gift” of acknowledgment, implied as the effect of the dignum praestabo me (I will show myself worthy), corresponds or answers to (pro) the glory-the symbolic capital of generosity-of the one who merits such reciprocation. Although the art of benefaction ideally eschews the sharp, if arbitrary, distinctions in value ensured by money, currency as the symbol of the concept of worth is readily used to illuminate the speaker's anecdote. The use of money as the metaphor's vehicle suggests the underlying monetary economics of its tenor, the relationship between a patron and his dependent.The distinction between aera and lupini as a metaphor specifically for the return gift or acknowledgment of the original recipient also brings to mind the particular offerings that this epistle renders to Maecenas. When Horace claims cuncta resigno, we are reminded that the verb resigno can mean rescribere (”to write back” or “to transfer by writing from one account to another”) in the economic sense. Rescribere itself suggests the very act of writing in which the poet presently engages. As Mark Shell suggests, the tropic nature of language is analogous to the symbolic value of money: “Literary works are composed of small tropic exchanges or metaphors, some of which can be analyzed in terms of signified economic content and all of which can be analyzed in terms of economic form” (1978, 7).
[71] The distinction between content and form applies to tropes containing money (if there is money or some kind of economic content in the vehicle) and to tropes generally, because each refers to an exchange of value and hence is economic in form. See the remarks of Goux (1990) discussed in chapter 3, [n. 15].
The monetary metaphor in Horace's epistle displays both economic form and content. Moreover, as a metaphor of economic content, the aera and lupini suggestively allude to a larger scale of exchanges of meaning in the epistle. For when Horace employs a series of fables, anecdotes, and metaphors for the art of benefaction, he offers Maecenas comparisons that may or may not be valid to the poet's own autobiographical experience. In short, he[72] Shell (1982, 15) comments on this separation: “when the ingot itself disappears, and all that remains is the inscription-the literature-is the numismatic inscription still substantially valid, as is symbolic paper money?”
His words, at least for those without the power of discrimination, are lupini that he presumes to pass off as aera.This analogy between the words offered by a poet to his patron and the aera of legitimate currency returns us to a specific ritual that accompanied the dissolution of the nexum, or state of debt-bondage. Quoting Festus, Mauss claims that the original transaction is sealed by the gift of a bronze ingot, or aes nexum, given by the tradens (the lender, the seller) to the accipiens. Later, when the accipiens “discharges himself from the bond, not only does he carry out the service promised or hand over the thing or its price, but, in particular, on the same pair of scales and before the same witnesses, he returns the same aes to the lender, to the seller” (Mauss 1990 [1950], 139 n. 10). The offer to return his patron's benefactions, to discharge himself of his debt, metaphorically becomes in this epistle the very aes (in this case lupini) that would have accompanied the actual transfer.
[73] The network of images in the text suggests this reading regardless of whether Horace intended such an equation.
Because of this analogy between aera and language, we can say that the gesture or offer to give back the goods received replaces the property itself. Or, in keeping with the relationship between inscription and the substance of coinage (a relationship that enables the development of paper currency), the promise made in language (writing) becomes dissociated from the actual referent-the act of return. This distinction between the writing that signifies and may confer value and the actual worth of a coin's metal-its substance-is implied here only when we apply the metaphor of realThe power of the inscription to turn valuable metal into money as a medium of exchange, and thus the importance of credit attributed to an inscription, suggests the semiotic nature of coinage: it represents or substitutes for something else.
[74] Shell (1978, 66–67) points out that the first known inscribed coin bears the inscription Phaneos eimi sema (I am the sema of Phanos), on one side, and the image of a stag, a “heraldic badge of the goddess Artemis,” on the other. The sema can refer both to the linguistic inscription or the stag and to the coin itself, making it “twice semiotic.”
This idea of substitution, which underlies both currency (real or counterfeit) and language, and which is invoked by the distinction between aera and lupini, appears in various ways when the poet refers to his separation from his patron. Just as the letter itself serves to substitute for the physical presence of the poet, a missive that only represents him, so the epithets by which Horace refers to Maecenas and which are “tokens” of his gratitude hold true (so the poet implies) even when the two are absent from each other:
saepe verecundum laudasti, rexque paterque audisti coram, nee verbo parcius absens: inspice si possum donata reponere laetus. Often you have praised me as modest, and you have been called both king and father by me in your presence, nor, away from you, am I more sparing of my epithets: see, now, if I am able, cheerfully, to return your gifts. (1.7.37–39)
These lines most overtly engage the issue of Horace's credibility and make Maecenas the guarantor of the poet's statement that he could reponere donata. Horace's modesty and gratitude for past gifts, qualities witnessed by Maecenas himself, are such that he is quite capable of making good his earlier offer, cuncta resigno. And yet the workings of credit and credibility here are more complicated than they first appear. Invoking the initial issue of Horace's attendance on Maecenas in Rome, these lines also suggest that the language of gratitude, though separated from the immediate context of speaking and hearing, still carries value; in other words, credit must be accorded to the epithets rex (king) and pater (father) as symbols of Horace's gratitude, as the aera of return acknowledgment, despite their separation from the context of Maecenas as witness—coram (face-to-face)—that originally guarantees their worth. Horace shows himself worthy (dignum praestabo me etiam pro laude merentis, 24) through speech and, by implication, through poetry, not by returning in person to Rome. And poetry as a substitute for Horace's presence seems implied by more than the epistle itself:
[75] OLD, s.v. “audire,” 5b), 6b. According to Mayer 1994, ad loc., audisti is a “lexical Gre-cism” and que … que is perhaps modeled after te … te, lending these lines an epic tone. This reading would further support my argument that the Telemachus anecdote, the one analogy from epic, is intended to appeal to Maecenas's aristocratic sympathies.
Thus, the poet's demonstration of worthiness as equivalent to the glory of his patron is an issue of the credit accorded to language: the credit, belief, or investment with value that language demands is superimposed on the issue of Maecenas's own credit or symbolic capital as a benefactor; and Maecenas's reputation-his credibility-depends, to some degree, on the credibility or sincerity of Horace's own words of praise. And the workings of credit extend further than the authenticity of sentiment behind praise spoken or written in absentia. The credit that the poet himself has earned through the aesthetic celebration of his patron guarantees his ability to return his benefactor's gifts. The credibility of the latter statement—inspice si possum donata reponere laetus—is underwritten, so to speak, by the sincerity of his previous recognition of his patron.
It is here that aera and lupini, as marking the distinction between effective signifying value and falsehood or worthlessness, come into play. For the separation from an immediate context that would guarantee or secure the meaning of some form of “signiner” is what invokes the problems of interpretation and the potential for deceit or counterfeit. That the capacity to make distinctions of value applies to language as well as to benefactions is reinforced by verbal repetition in the epistle: the negated adverb parcius (more sparingly), referring to the prodigality of Horace's praise and acknowledgment of his patron even when absent, looks back to the epithet prodigus (extravagant, wasteful) for the man who does not value what he gives away (20), as well as ahead to the exemplum from Homer, where Telemachus, by claiming that Ithaca is not very grassy (prodigus herbae), justifies his refusal of Menelaus's inappropriately ostentatious gifts (40–43). These verbal echoes suggest not that Horace offers lupini—or worthless words—when he calls Maecenas rex and pater, but that absence or separation from the context that initially guarantees the value of these words (spoken face-to-face) demands greater credulity, or credit, and thus raises the possibility of counterfeit status.
[76] Another implication of the speaker's claim to be no less sparing of praise when he is away from Maecenas is to validate the words of praise spoken coram. In this regard, “writing” may confer value on speech.
That is, because the epistle itself has replaced face-to-face interaction (coram), the ainoi of the epistolary context, though seemingly adduced to “clarify” and “illustrate,” may in factLike Father, Like Son: Tekmachus and the Power of Refusal
On the one hand, inspice (examine, see) looks back to coram and suggests the presence of witnesses in an economic transaction. In this sense, the imperative would be directed at Maecenas and would issue the challenge “Try me, I'm as good as my word.”
[77] Berres (1992, 228) emphasizes that Horace invokes Maecenas as a witness to the poet's capacity to make good his claim, but also stresses that Horace responds to those who might suspect his economic motives.
On the other hand, inspice also looks forward to the exemplum from the Odyssey that follows. This anecdote, too, signifies outside of its original context: removed from the surrounding epic story of Telemachus's visit to Menelaus to acquire news of Odysseus, it is here applied to a discussion of patronage. Exchanging one context for another, the exemplum demands from the reader—Maecenas, the larger reading public of ancient Rome, or ourselves-that we determine whether, like aera, this epic anecdote “gives an honest value” and is backed up by its referent (the assertion that Horace will give it all back) or, like lupini, the story does not translate into the real value of meaning. In other words, the imperative inspice, followed by the exemplum from Homer, points not to witnesses to an actual act of return but to a demand that the reader interpret whether any intention to return is present.As I argued earlier, for those who believe the Homeric exemplum, like the fable of the fox in the cornbin, to imply that Horace would return all benefactions, the poet is being a mendax and passing off lupini as aera. But for those who perceive the lie and see the Horatian persona as up to something more complex, the anecdote in a sense does give back real value beneath its seeming falsehood.
[78] The truth or value of the Horatian lie here suggests the nature of poetry in general-communicating some form of truth or meaning through the deceptive surface of rhetoric.
Part of the complexity of the exemplum lies in the contrast between the original context of aristocratic gift exchange and the immediate one of patronage presented in the language of monetary accounts. Not only is inspice used of witnesses to an economic transaction, but reponere can also apply to the absolution of monetary debt (Preaux 1968, ad loc.). Yet the exemplum itself refers to gifts refused because of their extravagant inappropriateness to the situation of the receiver. Moreover, as one critic has recently suggested, such a refusal amounts not to a manifestation of decorum but rather to a breach in the etiquette of gift exchange (Lyne 1995, 154). For although the wise man should give appropriately to the merits of the recipient, the code of Homeric gift[79] For example, when Glaucon and Diomedes exchange armor in Il. 6.234–36, considerations of economic disparity between the gifts, though noted by Homer, are completely subordinated to the obligation to give and receive in keeping with the code of xenia that obtained between their fathers. For the psychology of the pressure to accept in gift-exchange societies, see the comments of Mauss (1990 [1950],41) on the potlatch of the Kwakiutl tribe. On the appropriateness of the gift, see [n. 70] above.
Hence, by displaying his own lack of decorum, Telemachus in fact matches the indecorousness in the extravagant giving on the part of Menelaus. In matching gaff for gaff, Telemachus may very well illustrate Horace's ability to requite Maecenas on the level of indecorous behavior. Such a reading may seem to take to an extreme the simple observation that Telemachus is rude, but it nonetheless accords with one meaning of reponere—to repay or pay back injuries or benefits (OLD, s.v., 5)—a sense very close to the straightforwardly economic meaning of repaying a debt. The poet thus behaves in a way ironically consonant with his earlier statement: “I will also show myself worthy on a par with the honor earned by the giver.”The above reading may exaggerate the ambiguities of the statement inspice si possum reponere donata when read against the backdrop of the Homeric exemplum and the larger context of the epistle, but it accurately points up the problematic deferral and deflection of the value of Horace's statement—what it actually means-onto the anecdote from Homer. Hence, the distinction between aera and lupini may reflect the binary opposition of true and false in a way that does not always neatly divide the ainoi one from the other. Rather, the value of these fables and anecdotes lies in the complexity of their implications when applied to Horace's experience.
A final reading of the Telemachus anecdote is suggested by the rex and pater by which Horace refers to Maecenas and which stand as the testimony, and linguistic embodiment, of gratitude-a form of aera or return. These conventional epithets for a patron find an almost asymmetric correspondence in the Homeric exemplum that follows: although Telemachus turns down Menelaus's gifts, making the son of Atreus into a Maecenas figure, the associations of “king” and “father” would better apply to Odysseus. Moreover, the manuscript reading of sapientis (wise) rather than patientis Ulixi (enduring Ulysses) recalls the phrase vir bonus et sapiens (the good and wise man) in line 22, where the good benefactor is defined and associated with Maecenas.
[80] This manuscript reading also likely alludes to Philodemus's treatise On the Good King According to Homer.
One explanation of this asymmetrical correspondence may lie in the particular nature of the “goods” that Telemachus receives from Odysseus: the son acquires the father's name, the[81] Hor. Odes 2.16.37–38, mihiparva rura et / spiritum Graiaetenuem Camenae, is traditionally understood as referring to the Sabine farm and the conflation of humble needs with Callimachean aesthetics.
Though only implicit, it reinforces an overall representation of Maecenas's good patronage in terms of aristocratic and familial inheritance. Even as the poet represents his patron's present offer in the negative terms of Menelaus's excessive wealth, Horace allegorically grounds his capacity for refusal in terms of the symbolic capital that Maecenas's past patronage has accorded him: in Homer, Telemachus's refusal prompts the smiling recognition from Menelaus that the son has behaved with the practical forethought of his father. Thus, we see that an inherited disposition, the landed “patrimony” of Ithaca, and finally a freedom to breach social etiquette-a liberty based on Odysseus's kleos rather than on Telemachus's own stature-all combine to represent the aristocratic standing, the symbolic capital with which Maecenas has endowed Horace and which then allows him, paradoxically, the power of refusal. The understanding of reponere donata to mean “store up gifts”—Kilpatrick's interpretation (1986, 12)—would, in my reading, refer to this accumulation of symbolic capital that Horace then uses to assert his independence.Discriminating readers perceive the aesthetic complexity of this Homeric exemplum: they separate the real value (aera) from the false (lupini), which the less astute reading public would understand as the apparent assertion of the poet's ability and willingness to return all Maecenas's benefactions. Such a public would automatically identify the Telemachus anecdote with the fable of the fox in the cornbin, as well as the Vulteius Mena story, failing to note how far the real value of the one exemplum differs (distat) from the false value of the others. Horace's counterfeit gesture, like Odysseus's disguises, ironically tests the worth of his readership: those who believe him foolishly count him discharged, while those who perceive the deceit have their capacity for aesthetic discrimination confirmed. It is no coincidence that the verb for perception in Greek—aisthanomai—is the etymological root of “aesthetic.” By perceiving the problematic nature of the exempla that might illustrate or validate the speaker's assertion, discriminating readers do in fact receive a certain compensation for their engagement with the epistle. As speaker and reader alike align themselves with the “true” value that the Homeric exemplum reveals, aesthetic perception and aristocratic ideology reinforce each other.
Moreover, the distinction between aera and lupini is inscribed in the first three ainoi even in terms of the material that they represent as ingested or exchanged: lupini were used as play money on the stage, but they were also the fodder of livestock and a staple of the poor man's diet.
[82] For lupini as food of the common man, see Préaux 1968, ad loc., with sources cited there.
Hence, as both a symbol of the worthless gift and the simple food of the common man, the lupini derive from the same semiotic register as the pears left for the pigs in the story of the Calabrian host or the corn that the fox consumes. In contrast, those who know the Homeric story remember that Telemachus receives a bowl of precious metal—aes—in place of the rejected horses and chariot (Od. 4.590–619). In Homer, this bowl is a keimelion, a precious object retrieved from Menelaus's innermost chamber. The aristocratic world of gift exchange is thus the model in which the poet chooses to inscribe his own experience, likening the institution of amicitia to the guest-host relations of Homeric xenia. As Leslie Kurke claims in her discussion of Pindar's epinician allusions to the epic relations of xenia, the “invocation of the Homeric model is not merely a literary allusion but an ideological gesture common to the poet and his aristocratic group” (1991, 139).[83] Kurke (1991, 145) discusses the symbol of the Homeric keimelion as a trope by which Pindar represents the power of poetry as an enduring utterance.
Similarly, the echo of aera in the keimelion of the background to the Telemachus anecdote both identifies good patronal relations with the aristocratic equals of Homeric xenia and gestures toward a shared elite culture.Philippus and the Power of Return
The Vulteius Mena story provides a sharp contrast to an aristocratic ideology of gift exchange-one whose pretense to voluntarism in its own right permits the refusals of a Telemachus.
[84] Although reciprocity was very much the rule of xenia, the delay between gift and countergift enables the ideology of voluntarism and friendship to conceal the economic aspect of the exchange. Finley (1953, 237) makes this distinction but inverts the emphasis: “In essence, Homeric gift-giving was normally a bilateral action, not a unilateral one. Although it retained the outward appearance of a free, voluntary act, it came very near to being obligatory.” See also the comments of Donlan (1993, 150) on Menelaus's wish to make gifts to Telemachus. Donlan defines guest-host friendship in terms of “generalized reciprocity,” a category of exchange employed by Sahlins (1965), where the “giving is (ideally) altruistic. There is no overt pressure for a return. Those who can, give; those who need, take. The emphasis is on social solidarity, and the “material” aspect is minimal” (Donlan 1993, 140). See chapter 1, [n. 7].
Whereas the figures in the Homeric exemplum are more or less equal, the difference in social station between Philippus and Mena is clear. Indeed, despite the emphasis on Mena's independence as a coactor, it is the difference in status that causes Philippus[85] See Cornell 1995, 291, on early patronage: “The goods and services exchanged can be materialist in the crudest sense, when the patron provides the barest means of subsistence, and the client is obliged to provide labour services. At this point the relationship shades into servitude, and it is probably not incorrect to see nexum as an extreme form of patronage.”
Livy's description of a man suffering from such debt-bondage (2.23.3–9) bears an uncanny resemblance to the run-down condition of Mena when he bursts in on Philippus and demands “patron, return me to my previous life” (patrone … vitae me redde priori, 1.7.92–95). Mena is described as scabrum intonsumque (scabrous and unshorn, 90); he is anxious about his losses (qffensus damnis), for his farm has been destroyed: “His sheep were stolen, his goats perished from disease, his crop deceived his expectations, his ox was near dead from ploughing” (ovesfurto, morboperiere capellae, / spem mentita seges, bos est enectus arando, 86–87). In Livy, the conflicts interpatres plebemquejust preceding the war with the Volsci in 495 B.C.E. are brought to a head when one of those nexos ob aes alienum (bound in labor for their debts) rushed into the Forum:
His dress was covered with filth, and the condition of his body was even worse, for he was pale and half dead with emaciation (foedior carporis habitus pallore ac made perempti). Besides this, his straggling beard and hair had given a savage look to his countenance (promissa barba et capilli efferaverant speciem oris). … When they asked the reason of his condition and his squalor, he replied … that during his service in the Sabine war not only had the enemy's depredations deprived him of his crops, but his cottage had been burnt, all his belongings plundered, and his flocks driven off. Then the taxes had been levied, in an untoward moment for him, and he had contracted debts.
[86] Trans. Foster 1919, Loeb edition.
Though nexum was obsolete by the time Horace writes, the similar details in these two descriptions and the emphasis on Philippus's power to “return” (redde) Mena-as though he were a physical possession-by relieving him of his debt suggests traces of this archaic economic practice.
The imperative redde here also returns us to Horace's earlier use of the verb in his jocular adunata demanding that Maecenas give back the poet's youth. There, too, we found subtextual traces of primitive contract law in the diction articulating the poet's present relations with his patron. The echo of these earlier autobiographical statements in the later anecdote demands, once again, that the reader distinguish between the aera and lupini of the epistle's exempla. As many critics recognize, the Vulteius Mena episode is clearly not an unmediated reflection of Horatian experience, and thus it can be aligned with the fable of the fox in the cornbin. Yet the many correspondences with Horace's life offered by specific details in the story suggest that it is an extreme, if inexact, exemplum intended for those who believe Horace's statement that he could return his gifts. In this final anecdote, Horace fully exposes the implicitly contractual element to benefaction by using the actual language of patronage in what becomes a situation of monetary debt.
[87] Mena is called a cliens (75) and Philippus is patrone (92). The latter usage is unusual; during this period patronus generally refers only to a lawyer, a master of a freedman, or the benefactor of a town.
This revelation is directed-notionally, at least-at a public readership that might consider the poet a paid hack of the regime. For Maecenas, however, the Vulteius Mena episode stands as a model of bad patronage, an exemplum ex contrario to be repudiated in the name of amidtia, or friendly, voluntary relations among the elite. Whereas Philippus has the power to “return” Mena, through the monetary relation of actual debt, to his previous life, the element of time has so radically altered Maecenas's relationship to Horace that the poet can no more give back his patron's donata than the latter can give back the poet's youth and labor reified in the Satires and the Odes.Otium and Hermeneutic Exchange
As noted above, the lack of direct reference to the Sabine farm makes possible the poet's duplicitous representations. It is, in fact, the poet's resistance to turning what the estate represents for him—otium—into mere exchange value that enables it to signify in contradictory ways. Claiming that he would not traffic in otium, Horace refuses to convert his symbolic capital-the leisure of landed wealth-back into material capital: “I would not trade (muto) my leisure (otia) for all the wealth (divitiis) of Arabia” (1.7–36).
[88] On the surface, this line appears to refer only to the leisure time of the man unconstrained by the duties and burdens of excessive riches and thus can be taken as evidence that the speaker would return the farm, or cuncta donata, should they constrain his otium. However, otia also refers to the farm, as the tellingly similar line from the first Roman Ode implies—cur vallepermutem Sabina / divitias operosiores (3.1.47–48). Here it is the Sabine property quite explicitly that the speaker discusses in terms of potential exchange for divitias or riches.
Otium, as we saw in chapter 3, is the source of aesthetic production,[89] In Eclogue 4, nee nautica pinus / mutabit merces (38–39) yields to aries iam suaverubenti / murice, iam croceo mutabit vellera luto (43–44).
The libidinal, nonquantifiable quality of gratia, as I discussed in chapters 1 and 3, ideally eludes such precise calculations of a monetary economy and displays the same tendency to excess as the Eclogues' representation of the golden age.
[90] See Cic. Off. 2.69–70 and Sen. Ben. 2.25.1: “For what so much proves a grateful heart as the impossibility of ever satisfying oneself, or of even attaining the hope of ever being able to make adequate return for a benefit.” Cf. Sen. Ben. 5.4.1: “No one can be outdone in benefits if he knows how to owe a debt, if he desires to make return [;] … so long as he holds the desire to give proof of a grateful heart, what difference does it make on which side the greater number of gifts is reckoned?” (trans. Basore 1935, Loeb edition).
As a rhetorical figure the trope of the golden age, and more specifically the cornucopia, articulates the same ideology of disinterested giving to which the emotion of gratia responds. Horace's estate as place of polysemous connotation-gift, ground of independence, object of status, symbol of debt-recalls the cornucopia of Odes 1.17 as emblem of signifying abundance and excess of libidinal feeling. By appropriating the semiotic register of benefaction as one of natural abundance,[91] See Off. 1.22, where Cicero recommends that human beings imitate the natural abundance of the earth in their distribution of benefits and services.
Horace thus converts his farm, an image of otium, into a site of rhetorical or aesthetic play that secures his freedom.On the other hand, we have also seen that the terms of a monetary economy may be said to structure the aesthetic form of Epistles 1.7. Hence, monetary equivalence and aesthetic excess are, so to speak, two sides of the same coin. For though the farm may be implicitly valued as aera (real coin) rather than lupini (counterfeit) by the giver, Maecenas, its value for Horace lies not just in monetary exchange but also in aesthetics and its “endlessly tropic and infinitely hermeneutic” transactions (Shell 1978, 85).
[92] See Shell 1978, 63–88, for discussion of the simultaneously aesthetic and economic nature of coinage and the inherently economic nature of the exchanges performed by meta-phorization and symbolization in thought.
Yet only as an absent center does the material farm allow these infinite substitutions of meaning, this perpetual aesthetic supplementation. As property conspicuous for its absence, the farm justifies the metaphor of coinage: although real estate constitutes ‘Visible property,” the farm's very invisibilityThe idea that Horace's gestures toward a modified freedom should draw both from the ideology of voluntarism and from symbolism of pure economic reciprocity accords with the twofold nature of his audience and the fundamental ambivalence of his self-identifications. On the one hand, in keeping with the populist impulse of the fable as a genre, Horace's offer as “client” to return his patron's gifts reveals and rejects any underlying contractual character they may represent. We hear about such use of the animal fable, the particular type of ainos that Aesop wrote, in the comments of Phaedrus. A slave and freedman of Augustus, Phaedrus claimed that the fable “was invented … to enable the slave to give expression in a disguised form to sentiments which he dared not speak out aloud for fear of punishment.”
[93] De Ste.-Croix 1981, 444; he goes on to comment that “it was not only slaves whom Phaedrus had in mind as the disguised heroes of fables. One of his pieces, about a frog dreading a fight between two bulls, is introduced with the words, ‘The lowly are in trouble when the powerful quarrel’ (humiks laborant ubipotentes dissident, 1.30.1).” Shell (1978, 113) notes that Aristotle (Rhet. 2.20.6) warns against Aesop's fables as subversive of the political order.
Moreover, as G. E. M. de Ste.-Croix points out, Aesopic fables were a literary genre whose simplicity particularly found favor with “those who lacked the elaborate literary education needed for a proper understanding of a large part of Greek and Latin literature” (1981, 444). Horace uses the fable both as a form of protest and as an ainos that appeals to a particular level of audience. On the other hand, it is precisely by appealing to an “elaborate literary education” that Horace places himself on equal footing with Maecenas. By inscribing himself in the aristocratic gift-exchange culture of Homer's Odyssey, Horace recasts their relationship as one of egalitarian amicitia distinguished by an aesthetic of giving.Gregory Nagy's analysis of the function of ainoi in Greek society may shed further light on Horace's use of such tales, exempla, or fables to make
In this chapter, my overarching argument has demonstrated that Horace both reveals his sense of the economic calculations behind benefaction and also reinscribes himself in an aristocratic ideology of voluntarism. Against the open acknowledgment of the exchanges that constitute patronage, the poet invokes temporality, a “commodity” that resists the logic of reciprocity and disrupts the law of return. It is time away from his patron that Horace initially seeks, just as he jokingly asks for the return of the past should Maecenas still consider him in debt. Time's irrevocability-time as the ultimate benefaction, or qfficium (duty), for which there is no return-serves, paradoxically, to enforce the ideology of voluntarism that the poet exposes as the false consciousness of patronage: despite the poet's offers, it is too late to give back benefactions received. Once exposed as ideology, such voluntarism then becomes a defining component of the more egalitarian amicitia (”friendship,” in this case) that replaces the patronal relationship. The aristocratic sense of time not spent as an qfficium is, of course, otium. As we shall see in the next chapter, it is the farm as a place of otium that allows Horace to distinguish himself from his bailiff and further his identification with the landholding elite.