THE SECOND BOOK of LETTERS Hans-Christian Günther 1

THE SECOND BOOK OF LETTERS

Hans-Christian Günther

Abstract: The second book of Epistles speaks of poetological themes in two very long compositions, as does the Ars Poetica. The analysis of both letters (to Florus and Augustus) pays strict attention to the coherence of the train of thought and its relevance to the alleged epistolary situation and tries to show how Horace de nes the role of poetry, of his poetry, in particular, in contemporary society. Keywords: poetry and politics, poetological poetry

1. The Second Book of Letters and Horace’s ‘Sptwerk’

As we know more about the real person of Horace than about any other great poet of classical antiquity we also know much more about his development as an artist, his artistic self-consciousness and self-awareness. No other poet of antiquity comments so much on his own work, no other poet bequeathed to us such a large corpus of self-interpretation. It seems trivial to insist on these facts again, yet, I feel I must do so, because well-known as it is, this aspect of Horace’s work is far from being appreciated as poignantly as it should. On the contrary, it seems to me that this exceptional trait of Horace’s poetry is not seen in proper perspective, because everything today is interpreted as metapoetry; thus, the reservoir that Horace’s exceptionally explicit, detailed, and penetrating self-interpretation holds for understanding his poetry is far from being exploited. The awareness of his own self as a poet that Horace displays in his poetry is indivisible from the supreme self-awareness, evident in the autobiographical dimension of his work as sketched above in the introductory chapter on Horace’s biography.1 This Horatian self-awareness is of crucial importance for the understanding of Horace’s late work; in fact, Horace is the rst poet of European literature whose ‘Spätwerk’ we can isolate on the evidence of what the poet says himself about his poetic iter.2

1 Above, pp. 2f. 2 For the unity, character, and organic growth of Horace’s ‘Spätwerk,’ see Becker’s (1963) monograph. 468 hans-christian gnther

Horace is, as far as we know, the only poet of classical antiquity who explicitly marks a caesura in his development as an artist within his work, and, in view of what has just been said, certainly not by chance. In the introductory letter of the rst book of Epistles, Horace explains why he refuses to go on with writing poetry as he did before.3 In fact, he goes so far as to identify the most eminent type of poetry he composed hitherto, i.e., lyric poetry, with poetry stricto sensu, and announces that from now on he will no longer write poetry stricto sensu at all, but will embark instead on a new kind of semi-poetry, a poetry harking back to his poetic beginnings, a kind of very personal, ‘prosaic’ poetry, i.e., the Satires. By transforming them, with his rst book of Letters, into a new poetic genre, the literary verse epistle,4 Horace could go right back to his Lucilian model.5 The reason Horace gives for being tired of composing lyric poetry and shifting his writing interests is that he feels too old to engage in light poetry on women and wine, which he identi ed as the prevalent topic of his Carmina in the recusatio; it is philosophy, the questions of the right way to live (recte facere),6 that is suited to his advanced age, to the immediate vicinity of death, a central element of Epicurean moral philosophy,7 but now felt more poignantly than ever. Thus, in the Epistles, Horace singles out the topic to which he gave a high pro le in his lyric poetry, as perhaps no one had before him, by creating his philosophical ‘Gedankenlyrik.’8 In form or genre, he returns to the ‘philosophical’ poetry of his beginnings, the Satires, but he frees himself from the self-imposed generic restriction, from philosophical poetry vested as invective. Thus, in a way the Epistles relate to the Satires as the Odes to the Epodes.9 However, the shift in creative interest, marked by the Epistles, is twofold. It entails an ambiguity: it is at the same time a transition to themes more serious than those of Horace’s previous, lyric poetry. Nevertheless, the Epis-

3 Above, pp. 37f., with further references. 4 See Fatham, above, p. 408; also Wilamowitz-Moellendorf 1913: 323; Fiske 1971: 76f., 426f.; Heinze 1960a: 295f.; Fraenkel 1957: 308f.; Becker 1963: 14f.; MacGann 1969: 89f., below, p. 483. 5 See Puelma Piwonka 1949: 138f., 92; also Heinze 1960a: 296, 302f. 6 Above, p. 42. 7 Above, pp. 326f. 8 Above, pp. 240, 324. 9 Above, p. 171. Some Epistles treat more or less identical topics as the Odes. Epist. 1.5, for example, can be compared with the invitational poems and those on ‘carpe diem’ (pp. 266f., 273f., 326f.), Epist. 1.6 with C. 2.16 (pp. 323f.), Epist. 1.11 with C. 1.7 (pp. 266f.); cf. also Fraenkel 1957: 308f.; Becker 1963: 48f. On the diference between sermones and epistulae, cf. also Rudd 1994: 11f.; Puelma Piwonka 1949: 138f.; Knox, below, pp. 542f.