THE CORNUCOPIA AND HERMENEUTIC ABUNDANCE: ODES 1.17
Velox amoenum saepe Lucretilem mutat Lycaeo Faunus et igneam defendit aestatem capellis usque meis pluviosque ventos.
5 impune tutum per nemus arbutos quaerunt latentis et thyma deviae olentis uxores mariti, nec viridis metuunt colubras
nec Martialis haediliae lupos, 10 utcumque dulci, Tyndari, fistula valles et Usticae cubantis levia personuere saxa.
di me tuentur, dis pietas mea et Musa cordi est. hie tibi copia 15 manabit ad plenum benigno ruris honorum opulenta cornu. ― 155 ―
hic in reducta valle Caniculae vitabis aestus et fide Teia dices laborantis in uno 20 Penelopen vitreamque Circen.
hic innocentis pocula Lesbii duces sub umbra, nee Semeleius cum Marte confundet Thyoneus proelia, nee metues protervum
25 suspecta Cyrum, ne male dispari incontinentis iniciat manus et scindat haerentem coronam crinibus immeritamque vestem. Often Faunus swiftly changes Lycaeus for lovely Lucretilis and all the while keeps the fiery heat and rainy winds away from my goats. Throughout the protected grove, safe from harm, the wives of the smelly he-goat stray seeking the hidden arbute and thyme, and the kid-goats fear neither green snakes nor warlike wolves, when, Tyndaris, the sloping valleys and smooth rocks have sounded deeply with the sweet panpipe. The gods protect me, my reverence and my Muse are dear to them. Here lush abundance of the riches of the country will flow to the full for you from the generous horn. Here, in a hidden valley, you will avoid the heat of the Dog Star, and on Teian lyre will sing of Penelope and glassy Circe contesting over one man. Here, in the shade, you will drink glasses of innocuous Lesbian wine, and Bacchus, son of Semele, will not mix in wars with Mars, and you will have no fear of impudent Cyrus, that he might attack you, unfairly matched, with unrestrained hands and tear the garland, clinging to your hair, and your innocent clothes. (1.17.1–28)
An invitation to Tyndaris to come and enjoy the sympotic delights of Horace's estate, this ode combines pastoral and golden age motifs to present an idealized landscape. As in the fourth eclogue, the topos here emphasizes the safety of the environment-sheep wander unthreatened by wolves or snakes-even as Tyndaris is assured that rough Cyrus will be kept away. Though critics have cited the accoutrements of the golden age, and discussed Horace's representation of his farm here as a privileged domain of aesthetics,
[75] Cf. the discussions of Fraenkel 1957, 205–7; Commager 1962, 348–52; Schmidt 1977; Davis 1991, 199–205; Putnam 1994. On the history of the locus amoenus in classical literature, with reference to this poem, see Schonbeck 1962, 186–93.
the implications of the central image of the cornucopia in such a context have not been fully explored. An image of pastoral plenty that came to symbolize the riches of the pax Augusta, the cornucopia appears prominently in two works of the early Empire, the cuirassed statue of Augustus found at Prima Porta and the cameo known as the Gemma Augustea.Appearing in the central stanza of the poem—the point of transition from a magic landscape of animal life protected by Faunus in the first half to the world of lyric, epic, and excluded elegy of the second half-the cornucopia emphasizes what Lewis Hyde calls the passage of the gift (1979, 45–49): in this case, the image of plenty marks the process by which the benefaction of land, the reward of genius, is transformed into song and passed on. On the one hand, the gods of this central stanza refer back to Faunus, the rustic divinity responsible for transforming Horace's estate into a charmed landscape, exchanging (mutat) Mt. Lycaeus for pleasant Lucretilis. On the other hand, the phrase di me tuentur (the gods protect me), as it leads into the ideologically charged image of the cornucopia, also suggests the gifts of the regime. Just as Horace's ingenium (talent, genius) is in the care of the god Mercury-a stand-in for Maecenas and those he represents in Satires 2.6—so here the gods protect (tuentur) the poet, because his piety and muse are dear to them. To be sure, Horatian claims about the sacro-sanctity of the poet are commonplaces and need not imply a political or socioeconomic context. But the specific diction of patronage is telling and, taken with the pastoral imagery, connotes a political source similar to the palpably historical gods of Tityrus in the first eclogue. Then, too, the poet's pietas here recalls the speaker's claim in Satires 1.6 that his upright life and blameless character (vita et pectore puro, 64) gained him entrance to Maecenas's group. Finally, the cornucopia appears elsewhere in the Horatian corpus in a context that explicitly ties the abundance of the gods to patronal relations and the plenty of the pax Augusta.
For example, Epistles 1.12, the letter to Iccius as procurator of Agrippa's estates in Sicily, urges its addressee to enjoy his ususfructus, the rights to the use of produce of the land he oversees, as “no greater abundance could be bestowed by Jove” (non est ut copia maior / ab love donari possit, 2–3). As we saw in the introduction, when the letter later recommends Pompeius Grosphus as a friend whom Iccius should “make use of,” the social relations of patronage are expressed in openly economic terms: the “going rate of friends is cheap, when good men are in need.”
[76] Hor. Ep. 1.12.22–24: utere Pompeio Grospho et, siquidpetet, ultra / defer: nil Grosphus nisi verum orabit et aequum. / vilis amicorum est annona, bonis ubi quid deest.
Both social and economic abundance are then given a political inflection: in the coda of Roman news at the end, references to recent military victories, by Agrippa and Tiberius over the Cantabrians and Armenia respectively, are followed by the statement that golden plenty pours out grain from her full horn (aureafruges /In addition, the cornucopia symbolizes aesthetic abundance. To some degree, the image alludes to a commonplace of ancient rhetoric: both Cicero and Quintilian refer to the dazzling variety of literary tropes—that is, the dense “rhetoricity” of literature-in terms of “abundance” or copia.
[77] Cf. Cic. De Or. 3.30.121; Quint. Inst. 10. 1.5–6: opes sint quaedam parandae. … Eae constant copia rerum ac verborum. I am grateful to Robert Grudin for these references.
In Horace's poem, the cornucopia connotes such profusion of figural language as well as its consequent potential for contradiction. A concrete emblem of plērōsis, or the fullness associated with a god's presence, the cornucopia complements both the divine epiphany of Faunus and the music of his pipe echoing from the smooth rocks. The abundance of continuous sound implied by personuere develops into the “song within song” image of Tyndaris's lyric domestication of epic in the fifth stanza: as Gregson Davis points out, lyric here includes epic, reduced to an elegiac rivalry between Penelope and Circe (1991, 203). Tyndaris herself, a patronymic suggestive of Helen, is emblematic of both the source of epic conflict and its transmutation into poetry-in this case, lyric (Putnam 1994, 371). Further, the landscape echoing with music, a frequent image of pastoral, is enacted by the succession of performers—Faunus yielding implicitly to the speaker, who yields in turn to Tyndaris. Aesthetic abundance here resides in the profusion of genres, as elements of pastoral conform to a lyric convivium in which both elegiac rivalry and epic violence are contained.Odes 1.17 locates the origin of this aesthetic excess in the gifts of the patronal system. The “generous horn” (benigno cornu) from which copia flows recalls Maecenas's benignitasin Epode 1 even as it anticipates the poet's reference to his “abundant vein of talent” (ingeni / benigna vena) in Odes 2.18. But just as the cornucopia functions on a purely symbolic level in Odes 1.17, referring to no actual thing in the poem's narrative or sequence of events, so the complex hyperbaton of this stanza points up the elusive transition from material gift to aesthetic production. Suggestive of Faunus's initial transformation of the farm into a charmed landscape echoing with song, the gods here both symbolize aesthetic talent and reward that talent;
Though the precise origin of such signifying excess remains elusive, the excess is a property of aesthetics that the poem also figures as libidinal. And this libidinal element, in turn, connects with Cicero's comments on gratia: because gratia can refer to both a favor repaid and the sense of favor that remains after repayment, it parallels the libidinal excess that attaches to the object, increasing in value as the spirit of the gift is passed on. In ideal terms, because the gift is prompted by feeling—Seneca claims that a person should “love his benefactions”
[78] Sen. Ben. 2.11.5: Si gratos vis habere, quos obligas, rum tantum des op&rtet beneficia, sed ames (If you wish to have gratitude from those whom you lay under an obligation, you must not merely give, but love, your benefits).
-it carries a libidinal value in addition to its material worth; it is in response to this nonquantifiable libidinal value that the receiver is prompted to give in excess of the original gift. Surely this concept of the essential movement of the gift, or the spirit of the original gift, appears in the swift succession of figures who inhabit Horace's magical landscape in Odes 1.17: what Faunus gives to the speaker, the speaker gives to Tyndaris. The rich abundance of the farm flows (manabit) for the addressee, and she, in turn, at first receiving will then produce song of her own. The aesthetic excess that we see as a profusion of generic echoes in Tyndaris's song thus arises from, or at least parallels, the accumulation of libidinal value-or energy-as the gift changes hands. And just as Lewis Hyde argues that the libidinal element of the gift expands to include the parties involved in a form of collective ego (1979, 16–17), so the hyberbaton of the central stanza entwines gods, speaker, and addressee in a cameo image of the tripartite relationship of patron, poet, and audience. We have here an ideal view of benefaction, one in which economic transaction provides for social cohesion.Yet despite this positive image, the cornucopia of this poem also suggests the potential for its own subversion as an ideologically charged symbol for
[79] Putnam (1994, 363) observes that the phrase proelia confundere is a witty turn on the “standard idiom proelium committere or facere” and underscores the “wrong mixing” that the speaker promises to avoid.
On the other hand, this safe haven of the golden age is defined through the excluded presence of the elegiac lover at the end of the poem. Such definition through difference is paralleled in the poet's careful choice of adjectives: for though innocent (innocentis) wine, not Cyrus's incontinent (incontinentis) hands, characterizes the poet's estate, the words' distinct meanings depend on minor differences in lettering. Such traces or echoes of one word in another reflect the aesthetic play symbolized by golden age fertility and the cornucopia. Similarly, the poem's inclusion of the image of violence ensures its presence despite Cyrus's exclusion from the farm. This presence-in-absence dynamic, on the levels of both form and diction, underscores the ambiguity that some critics remark in the speaker's intentions.
[80] Dunn (1990) claims that the invitatio is governed by the rhetoric of seduction causing Cyrus's violence to function as the speaker's threats. See, too, the comments of Connor (1987, 28–31) on the figure of Cyrus.
Despite his claims, too much wine may yet bring on the more violent eroticism of a Cyrus. This uncertainty-are the speaker's intentions less honorable than he claims?-reflects still another form of abundance, the ambiguity that results from contradictory implications.This analysis may seem to depart from the subject of patronage, but it is precisely the connotative multiplicity symbolized by the cornucopia that, as I argue in the next chapter, allows Horace to refashion his relationship with Maecenas. Indeed, the negative effects of donation that Pietro Pucci has remarked in Horace's gifts to Tyndaris in this poem, subjecting her to
In this chapter I have argued that the discourse of libidinal excess and voluntarism that defines the gift-or an ideal, prescriptive view of benefaction-can be seen as assimilated to the pastoral economy and aestheticized landscape of the Eclogues; moreover, this process serves to naturalize benefaction as both an economic and ultimately a political system. When Horace invokes Vergilian pastoral in Satires 2.6, he introduces into his representation of his estate both the naturalizing discourse of the Eclogues and their darker underside-the pressures of civil turmoil, in particular the confiscations of land, that threaten to tear the imaginary resolutions of those poems just as they haunt the speaker's own rhetoric of benefaction. This ambiguating subtext to Horace's pastoral allusions is compounded by the contractual connotations of the gift and by gratitude as a burden of debt. Nonetheless, in regard to Odes 1.17 I have suggested that pastoral's assimilation of a patronal economy also provides Horace the rhetorical figures with which he transmutes the raw materiality of the estate as imperial benefaction into an image of aesthetic abundance; by so transforming his material munus into a locus a-moenus, a place that is “not for profit,” Horace appropriates the libidinal excess of patronal voluntarism and creates an imaginative site of copious connotation. For even as Faunus suggests the gods of patronage, he also implies the poet himself: at the end of 1. 16, the speaker claims that he seeks to “exchange angry lines for sweet” (nunc ego mitibus / mutare quaero tristia, 25–26), a change that Faunus's substitution (mutat) of pleasant Lucretilis for Lycaeus surely makes good. A discursive site of hermeneutic plenty, the farm, as we shall see in chapter 4, enables the poet to resist-even as he reveals-the discourse of quid pro quo exchange to which his relationship with Maecenas threatens to regress.