Time in the Odes of Horace Courtney Mackenzie Evans
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Time in the Odes of Horace Courtney Mackenzie Evans Concord, NH B.A. The Evergreen State College 2003 M.A. University of Virginia 2009 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Classics University of Virginia May, 2016 © 2016 Courtney Evans i Abstract This dissertation explores Horace’s engagement with time in the Odes, both as a concept and as a poetic device. It begins with a study of the language Horace uses to describe and characterize time, the words which form the basic building blocks with which Horace constructs the temporal world of his poetry. From there the scope widens to consider Horace’s employment of seasonal imagery and how he uses seasons as similes, seasons within similes, and as the dramatic setting for individual poems to create a juxtaposition of linear and cyclical time. The third chapter investigates Horace's tendency to call for dated wines for his symposia, and how this makes wine into a locus for memory, and its consumption into a time for commemoration, either celebratory or reflective. I argue that Horace’s use of temporal markers—words for time, temporal adverbs, seasonal imagery, dated wine, anniversaries, and the use of the Roman fasti—results in a poignant and persistent articulation of loss, and that the symposium becomes the locus for exploring that loss as well as the tensions between public present and private memory of the past. Horace’s poetry is both a product of and commentary on the author’s own time, as the Republic fades forever into Empire. ii Acknowledgments Breech birth might be an adequate description of this dissertation. Jenny Strauss Clay has been a heroic midwife. Every time it got turned around and stuck, she would, with expert hand, make it all right again. And if not for her guidance, it might never have seen the light of day. She has always believed in the project, even when I did not, and been encouraging and supportive of my abilities, despite my own haunting feelings of inadequacy. She has dealt with these afflictions of mine with, well, bluntness, but also her characteristic grace. The dissertation originated in her class on the Odes, and her insightful comments throughout have been absolutely indispensable. Beyond the dissertation, she has been a genuine mentor to me, and, I daresay, a real friend. I have had the great pleasure to have taken several classes with Tony Woodman (one even on Horace) and therefore I have also had the great discomfort of having to write several papers for him (he did not much like my paper on Horace). Everyone knows how critical he can be, and knows as well just how valuable that criticism is. And over the years there has grown in my head a tiny Tony Woodman. Every argument I made in the dissertation, every sentence I wrote, I would always be wondering, “What’s he going to think of this?” “What arguments will he raise here?” “How can I convince him?” When I turned things in, the real Mr. Woodman would give his valuable comments with astonishing speed. Before that, though, I tried to convince the tiny Mr. Woodman. I assure you, because of Mr. Woodman, and the one he helped create in my head, the dissertation is much the better, I am much the better. The one I will always carry with me, the other I hope will continue to be willing to chat (or fight) with me about Horace, or anything, long into the future. John Miller was a diligent, careful reader of my finished chapters. His enthusiasm for the project, especially in the later stages, gave me much needed reassurance. It was in his didactics class my first semester that I first learned how to read, and to appreciate, Latin poetry as a scholar. Thanks are due as well to Mary McKinley whom I met in a little Horace reading group and who graciously agreed to be my outside reader. This would not have been possible without the continuous support and encouragement of my wife, Harriet, who has lived with two husbands, myself and Horace for almost three years. I’m not sure I can ever repay her. I have been immeasurably shaped both by the faculty and my fellow graduate students. I have learned so much from all of you and I cannot think of a nicer, more supportive group of people to have spent the past several years with. Finally, since the dissertation affords the opportunity to give thanks to those whom propriety might exclude in a monograph, I mention a few others here who deserve to be publically acknowledged for the role they have played in my iii development as a scholar. I would never have been able to enter graduate school if it were not for the fact that the faculty at Georgetown University took a chance on a student with very little experience in Latin and none at all in Greek and admitted me to the brand new postbaccalaureate program. It was under the guidance of Josiah Osgood, Alex Sens, Victoria Pedrick, and Charlie McNelis that I first spread my classicist wings. Stephen Trzaskoma and Scott Smith were early mentors of mine and helped instill in me a love of classical literature. The latter is owed a special thanks for taking time out of his busy schedule during the summer to occasionally look over and correct some Wheelock’s exercises I was doing, as I worked through the text on my own. Lastly, I cannot give enough thanks to Gregory McMahon, who gave me an opportunity to help work on the construction of his house. He was the first to put the idea into my head to embark on this long journey. What he saw in me I cannot say. Little did I know that as I worked away, laying the foundations for his retaining wall, the foundations for this dissertation were being laid as well. To all of you, then: this dissertation, quidquid hoc libelli, is really your triumph. And here I borrow, with minor adaptation, from Horace who, as always, said it best: Quod spiro et placeo, si placeo, vestrum est. iv Contents Chapter 1: Horace’s Temporal World 1 Chapter 2: Seasonal Time 30 Chapter 3: Wine and Time 127 Conclusion 246 Appendix: time as an agent 255 Bibliography 262 1 Chapter 1: Horace’s Temporal World Time is ever-present in Horace’s Odes. It casts a shadow over the work as whole, and there is seldom an individual poem in which time does not make an appearance in some way. Temporal markers abound; annus, dies, and hora are not only remarkably common in the Odes but in the Epodes, Satires, and Epistles as well; common also are references to dates,1 specific months,2 and seasons.3 Though we know that Romans marked the vintage of their wine on their amphorae, only Horace chooses to specify the vintage of the wine in his symposia by year, or by some event.4 On a lexical level, as I will demonstrate below, time is frequently the agent of verbs, and plays an active role in Horace’s poetic world, even in places where we might not expect it.5 More broadly, Horace, throughout his poetry, advertises his own aging process, and the different stages in his own life are marked out emphatically through reference to time, or, as he writes more, to his own earlier poetry, giving the whole of his oeuvre an 1 E.g. Odes 3.8.1 Martiis…Kalendis (on the Kalends of March). 2 E.g. Epodes 11.5-6: hic tertius December ex quo destiti / Inachia furere (this is the third December since I stopped going mad for Inachia). 3 E.g. Odes 1.11.4-6: seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam, / quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare Tyrrhenum (whether Jupiter has granted you more winters or whether he has granted as your last the one which now wears out the Tyrrhenian sea on the opposing rocks). 4 E.g. Odes 3.28.8: Bibuli consulis amphoram (an amphora from Bibulus’ consulship); Odes 3.14.18: cadum Marsi memorem duelli (a cask that remembers the Marsian War). See ch. 3 below. 5 E.g. Odes 4.15.4-5: tua, Caesar, aetas / fruges et agris rettulit uberes… (your age, Caesar, has brought back rich fruits to the fields). Although there is no denying the compliment to Augustus here, and it is the first attested use of the concept of an “Augustan Age” (see Breed [2004] 245), the phrase is not so simple. Breed op. cit. 246 says, “Horace's phrase tua, Caesar, aetas ascribes credit for the successes of the age individually to Augustus the man.” But this is, on the face of it, plainly wrong; he attributes the successes to time, which, I think, is quite unexpected. Why did Horace not actually ascribe them to Augustus by making him the agent of both verb and change? 2 autobiographical quality.6 No doubt some of this emphasis on time may be due to the fact that the Odes are lyric poetry. After all, lyric was written—at least it constructs itself as having been written—at a specific time and/or for a specific occasion, and there are plenty of precedents in Greek lyric for poets aging.7 Though this may justify a tendency on the part of lyric poetry toward a wider use of time and temporal markers, it does not, I think, adequately explain the pervasiveness of them in Horace.