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 Here