GIFT AND DELAY IN THE HORATIAN CHRONOLOGY
Although the individual chapters of this book all explore the concept of a gift economy as a poetics informing Horatian verse—particularly the relationship between the Odes 1–3 and Epistles 1—it is nonetheless important to set the sequence of these two collections in a broader temporal context. As I suggest in the introduction, attempts to reconstruct the historical backdrop to Horace's relationship with Maecenas, and to the regime at large, necessarily involve some assumptions regarding irrecoverable facts. However, such a reconstructed scenario clearly exhibits the temporal delay by which the reciprocity ethic is represented as voluntary benefactions or favors. The evidence on which we may build our speculation can be broken down into three main categories: the external bits of biographical information that can be gleaned from Suetonius, the internal evidence of the poems themselves, and the relationship between the dates of publication of the poems as collections and the progress of the regime in establishing its authority. As has been recently argued, Horace may well have received up to five pieces of property from either Maecenas or Augustus himself, in addition to the sporadic gifts of actual money that the emperor may have made.
[47] See P. White 1993, 147–48; Lyne 1995, 9–11, and the sources cited therein; and see my introduction, [n. 9].
Most significantly, what appears to be the first grant of land—the Sabine farm—is made at a time just preceding, if not virtually simultaneous with, the victory at Actium. The political odes of books 1–3 are then written over the next decade; their decisive shift in genre, from satire to lyric, coincides with the period during which Octavian, later Augustus, secured the foundations of his political power. Though the so-called Roman Odes evolved into a sequence after their initial composition, they nonetheless all date to the years 29–26 B.C.E., just around the time when Octavian (in 27 B.C.E.) acquired significant proconsular authority and changed his name to Augustus, even as he made a show of yielding all his power to the Senate and people. Moreover, the second of the two major redistributions of governmental authority that ceded powers to Augustus while appearing to restore the Republic occurred in 23 B.C.E., the very same year as the Odes 1–3 were published as a collection.[48] See Eder 1990, 103–11, forafull discussion of the restructuring of government during the 20s.
As already noted in the introduction, when Horace then publishes his Epistles 1 in 19 B.C.E., his opening poem makes a literal “show”—in this case, the metaphor of a gladiatorial show—of declining to write more lyric.What is striking about this chronological sequence is the staggered, yet almost choreographed, timing of the gift-reciprocated-by-a-countergift
Significantly, after the publication of Epistles 1 in 19 B.C.E, Maecenas appears only once more in Horace's poems, in Ode 4.11. Human nature abhors a vacuum, and scholars have been quick to give voice to the poet's silence: Maecenas's absence from Horace's later works has been variously interpreted as indicating a fall from power caused by some indiscretion, a power struggle with Agrippa, and a withdrawal from imperial literary patronage intentionally planned by the regime.
[49] See G. Williams 1990, 258–75, for a lucid discussion of the evidence and the idea that Maecenas's withdrawal from the scene was preconceived.
Much of the evidence for a cooling of relations between the emperor and Maecenas stems from Suetonius, and more than one source points to the contrary. Whatever the causes of this change in Horace's texts, the poems do suggest that Maecenas no longer plays the role of a patron who brokers Horace's relationship with the regime at large and that Augustus has become more actively involved. One of the clearest documented examples of an actual request comes from Suetonius's biography of Horace. After narrating the princeps's commission of the Carmen saeculare and the fourth book of Odes, Suetonius quotes a fragment of a letter in which Augustus chides Horace for failing to address a sermo or “conversational poem” to himself. Since Suetonius's diction andAs to his writings, Augustus rated them so high, and was so convinced that they would be immortal, that he not only appointed (iniunxerit) him to write the Secular Hymn, but also bade him celebrate the victory of his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus over the Vindelici, and so compelled (coegerif) him to add a fourth to his three books of lyrics after a long silence. Furthermore, after reading several of his ‘Talks,” the Emperor thus expressed his pique that no mention was made of him: “you must know that I am not pleased with you, that in your numerous writings of this kind you do not talk with me, rather than with others. Are you afraid that your reputation with posterity will suffer because it appears that you were my friend?” In this way he forced (expressit) from Horace the selection which begins with these words[.]
[50] Suet. Poet., Vita Horati, trans. Rolfe 1924 [1914], Loeb edition.
Suetonius goes on to quote the beginning of the Epistle to Augustus, 2.1. Although the verbs that Suetonius employs here—iniunxerit, coegerit, expressit—suggest a strong degree of compulsion, scholars have often attempted to soften their force.
[51] Fraenkel (1957, 364) understands these verbs to reflect Suetonius's own context, post—Domitian Rome. However, as G. Williams (1990, 269–70) points out, Horace himself uses the verb cogere in the Epistle to Augustus: cum speramus eo rem venturam ut … arcessas et egere vetes et scribere cogas (2.1.226–28). Williams, Santirocco (1995, 236–37), and Griffin (1984, 189–91) acknowledge the power relations implicit in these verbs even as they admit actual compulsion to be absurd; P. White (1993, 114–15) claims that such language was typical of the way poets and their amid discussed “suggestions” about poetry they might write. I believe White goes too far in emptying these verbs of any coercive implications; see my introduction, [n. 25].
Moreover, as some would argue, the teasing tone of the emperor may also be understood as undermining the initial impression of patronal demand.[52] E.g., Putnam 1986, 22–23; for the contrasting view, see Griffin 1984, 191, who quotes Macrobius's observation that “power does compel, not only if it invites but even if it beseeches.”
Finally, the epistle can even be cited by those who claim that the reference to patronal pressure reflects the highly stylized convention of the recusatio, fabricated by the poets as part of their own posture of refusal. For though, as already noted, the epistle ends with Horace's admission of talents inadequate to the task of epic, we know from Suetonius that Augustus did not ask for such verse; rather he wished to be the addressee of “conversational” poems or sermones, a category many understand as inclusive of either the Epistles or the Satires.[53] Suetonius's use of sermones is generally interpreted as referring either to satires or epistles, understood as Horace's more “conversational” poems (those of his “pedestrian” Muse). However, Habinek (1998, 100) reads sermonesas strictly the conversations represented in Horatian satire: by responding to Augustus's request with an epistle rather than a satire, Horace reinforces the poem's thematic emphasis on privileging written communication over visual spectacle.
To introduce theYet from the point of view of gift exchange, Suetonius's diction of compulsion may not be so far off the mark. For by referring to Horace as potentially familiaris, Augustus invokes the discourse of amidtiaor elite patronage, whose language and conventions presume an intimacy or “proximity” that disguises the more economic interests of the relationship. As Bourdieu points out,
The general law of exchanges means that the closer the individuals or groups are in the genealogy, the easier it is to make agreements, the more frequent they are, and the more completely they are entrusted to good faith. Conversely, as the relationship becomes more impersonal, i.e. as one moves out from the relationship between brothers to that between virtual strangers …, so a transaction is less likely to occur at all, but it can become and increasingly does become purely “economic” in character, i.e. closer to its economic reality, and the interested calculation which is never absent even from the most generous exchange (in which both parties account— i.e. count—themselves satisfied) can be more and more openly revealed. (1977, 173)
Augustus, by suggesting that Horace (with an eye to posterity) is potentially embarrassedby an intimate—familiaris—relationship with the emperor, ironically plays on the muddy distinction between patronage and friendship. In a sense, the emperor taunts the poet with the economic reality beneath the fiction of voluntary benefaction: because Horace did not include Augustus in the circle of amid addressed either in Epistles i or Satires 2, the poet must see their relationship as only contractual. In other words, Augustus does more than jokingly suggest that Horace might be embarrassed by being seen as liking power and thus uneasy about being associated, albeit indirectly, with the less savory aspects of the emperor's rise to prominence—perhaps the most overt implication of his humor; the emperor also, as a superior, challenges the poet not to experience gratia and to feel a justified independence based on the satisfactory fulfillment of a mere exchange.
[54] Sailer (1982, 21), challenging Hellegouarc'h, asserts the importance of gratia regardless of the status differential between beneficiary and donor.
In this sense, patronal compulsion may exercise itself by selfconsciously drawing attention to the affective component of the relationship and thus, covertly, to the continuing indebtedness that Horace ought to feel.Such an analysis puts the diction of the speaker's recusatio in the Epistle to Augustus in a different light. As we recall, the issue of immortality is there cast in terms of aesthetic refinement and decorum—the poetic gift that lacks discrimination, pingui munere, dooming poet and subject alike to
But beneath the ideological veil of voluntarism we can detect traces of the discourse of reciprocity or debt made good, a discursive web of images that I analyze in greater depth in chapters 4 and 5. Here, in the Epistle to Augustus, we may note that the language with which the speaker characterizes the poetic gift “that burdens” him (quod me gravat)—an attention for which he “has no patience” (nil moror officium, 264), a “zeal foolishly oppressing the one whom it cherishes” (sedulitas autem stulte quern diligit urget, 260)—recalls that of Epistles 1.13, the poem traditionally understood as a playful if fictive evocation of a cover letter to accompany a copy of Odes 1–3 presented to Augustus. In this epistle, the speaker instructs Vinius Asina not “to incite dislike for the poems [he] delivers through the zealous performance of duty” (ne … odiumque libellis / sedulus importes opera vehemente minister, 4–5) and urges him to toss away the poems if the “heavy” pack begins to chafe rather than throwing them down unceremoniously at Augustus's feet (si te forte meae gravis uret sarcina chartae, / abidtopotius quam quo perferre iuberis / clitellas ferus impingas, 6–7). The ironic gravis … sarcina chartae, “heavy pack of papers,” may very well be alluded to in the later poem when the speaker, identifying with Augustus, claims nil moror officium quod me gravat. That is, not only does the refusal justify itself on Callimachean grounds, but it also refers to a previous delivery of poems—poems similarly neoteric in their aesthetic affiliation (and thus the ironic opposite of gravis) but nonetheless possessing a significant pondus, or authoritative weight, in their ideological contribution to Augustus's interests. Finally, the speaker of 1. 13 refers to his poems as verses that may “delay” the eyes and ears of Caesar (carmina quae possint oculos aurisque morari / Caesaris, 17–18), diction similar to that at the beginning of Epistles 2.1. While the language of unduly “delaying” or “catching the attention of” an addressee or recipient of verse is somewhat conventional in Horace's poems to his patrons
[55] By these specific allusions, not just Odes 1–3 but also Odes 4, if dated before the epistle, would certainly be included in the dynamic of reciprocal munera. See Brink 1982, 552–54, on the dating. Indeed, an alternative reading of nil moror officium quod me gravat might subtly imply that Horace, still speaking as writer rather than recipient of verse, wishes to have nothing to do with the officium of composing panegyric, a service that he finds oppressive and has already executed with Odes 4. From this point of view, the embarrassment regarding posthumous reputation that is both an issue in Augustus's own letter, as narrated by Suetonius, and an image informing the funereal metaphor at the end of the Epistle to Augustus turned out to be remarkably on target: Odes 4 has not fared well with critics of Horace, many of whom consider its encomiastic pieces hollow, insincere, and aesthetically inferior. See further references cited in Putnam 1986, 21 n. 5.
The recusatio in this instance refers to a past debt made good even as it asserts an ideology of voluntary giving.By returning to Horace's letter to Augustus after examining the characteristic features of a gift economy, we may now perceive more clearly some of the contradictions in Augustan literary patronage. The spectrum of systems—poems at one end purchased for money, at the other end produced voluntarily as gifts—appears less polarized: once temporal delay and the posture of decorous giving are understood as social strategies for veiling the calculated exchanges of material and symbolic capital, the economic interest behind literary benefaction is revealed. At the same time, anthropological functionalism suggests that the symbolic capital of loyalty and gratitude elicited by gifts produces social cohesion. Indeed, Wallace—Hadrill's claim, discussed in the introduction, that any critical analysis of patronage must speak in terms of both structure and ideology sums up this imbrication of economically interested exchange and the language of libidinal voluntarism—of friendship, affection, goodwill, and gratitude—through which those exchanges were conducted.
Social cohesion, we noted, results particularly when the gift passes to a third person, a feature of “primitive” gift circulation (such as the kula) that, mutatis mutandis, also marks the basic triangulation or “network” of patronal relations in Roman society. Our theoretical paradigm suggests that literary patronage displays not the ongoing circulation of a prestige object but the transmutation of forms of “capital”: a material boon such as land produces the symbolic capital of gratitude or obligation, which, in turn, becomes poetry that reaches an audience beyond the patron alone.
As the speaker claims in the letter to Augustus, a poet's gifts not only immortalize Rome's leading men but also serve the public state by educating the young—the poet's civic function: “although reluctant in battle, illsuited
[56] We also see traces of the Callimachean aesthetic in the emphasis on paruis … rebus (small things).
Though these lines denote the use of poetic texts as a means of shaping the speech patterns of the young, the poet helps shape moral character as well with precepts and noble exempla (126–30), a civic function clearly visible in the Roman Odes. As scholars have long pointed out, the quintessential expression of the poet's role as the didactic spokesman for civic values is Aristophanes' depiction of Aeschylus in the Frogs, and Horace's vision of poetic service here recalls the comic poet's view of Greek tragedy. In this regard, as we shall see in the next chapter, Horace's munus of poetry invokes a discourse of euergetism—private expenditure for the public good—even as it suggests a form of political or civic office. Reciprocating the regime's gifts with the production of ideology, the speaker—in the metaphoric posture of a priest, the public office of sacerdos—converts the symbolic capital of benefactions received into cultural capital of poems for the people. Let us then turn to an analysis of exemplary poems of Odes 1–3 in which discourses of religious, political, and social exchange combine to present Horatian lyric as a form of expiation for the crimes of the civil wars.