Horace and the Gift Economy of Patronage "ss2.07"

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,

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the leisure and respite from the demands of negotia that may eventuate in art. Significantly, the verb used by Horace in his apparent refusal, quite literally, to negotiate his freedom—mutare—is the word that Vergil employs to juxtapose the overseas trade of the merchant with the natural and aesthetic surplus of the golden age in the fourth eclogue. In that poem, the precise equivalences of commerce yield to the spontaneous profusions of a golden age economy.

[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 invisibility

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in this text lends it the power of money as “invisible property.” Hence, despite Horace's efforts in resisting an economy of monetary equivalence, one that would allow Maecenas to trade on the exchange value of his benefactions, the endless substitutions made possible by the farm's absence demonstrate the inescapability of money as a form determining Horace's thought. In this case, Horace's freedom from the economic realities of patronage depends, in a sense, on a system of linguistic tropes-metaphor, simile, and analogy-that themselves operate as money does. We might say that in the dialectical fashion of a Marxist hermeneutic, any freedom from the economic realities of patronage contains the ideological terms of that system within the very impulse toward liberation. The farm as absent center or invisible property implies both the natural excess of the cornucopia and the hermeneutic transactions akin to monetary exchange.

The 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

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distinctions between two different communities or readers. Nagy interprets ainos in the occasional context of the praise poetry of Pindar, distinguishing the term from epic kleos or “glory.” As a mode of discourse, ainos includes praise, its function in Pindar; but more broadly it constitutes a “marked speech-act, made by and for a marked social group” (Nagy 1990, 31). Hence, ainos may refer not only to praise poetry but also to the instructive speech of admonition (parainesis), as well as to animal fables such as that of the fox in the cornbin. In Pindar's hands, the ainos constitutes a “difficult code that bears a difficult but correct message for the qualified and a wrong message or messages for the unqualified,” a form of communication that likens it to the ainigma (enigma) that, as Nagy points out, is an etymological derivative (148–49). Moreover, the use of ainoi in the Greek lyric poets, particularly in Pindar, is directed specifically at a community of the sophoi, those who are wise or skilled at decoding poetic messages; the agathoi, those “noble” in terms of their ethical standards; and the philoi, those physically and emotionally close to the poet (148). As I have argued, Horace employs two different levels of ainoi, one directed at the “aristocratic elite” and another that addresses those of less discernment, less education, and (because the fable is a genre associated with slaves) less social status. Surely Horace's use of the ainos accords with its function as a marked speech act as he carves out his two communities of readers, riddling and ambiguating his poem, at once claiming his elite status and yet conscious of his freedman father's origins.

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.