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LANGUAGE, STYLE, and METER in HORACE Peter E. Knox Horace

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LANGUAGE, STYLE, and METER in HORACE Peter E. Knox Horace LANGUAGE, STYLE, AND METER IN HORACE Peter E. Knox Abstract: Unlike most of his contemporaries, Horace composed in a wide variety of genres and metrical forms. It is therefore advisable to consider in detail at the levels of language, rhythm, and forms of expression how he adapted his manner to each particular genre. Horace was not unafected by the stylistic trends in Latin poetry that began with the generation of Catullus, but he adapted those aesthetic principles to modes not attempted by them, with corresponding innovations in technique. Keywords: style, diction, meter Horace ‘of the many rhythms,’ as Ovid styled him (Tr. 4.10.49, numerosus Horatius), was widely recognized in antiquity as a virtuoso metrist. This rep- utation was won largely through the publication of the Odes, which, thanks in large part to testimonies like Ovid’s, tend to overshadow Horace’s other verse collections, even though they also have their part in this legacy. About a century after his death, Quintilian observed that Horace was practically the only lyric poet worth reading (Inst. 10.1.96, at lyricorum idem Horatius fere solus legi dignus). As a sophisticated stylist, Horace earned a place in the curriculum of the schools as well, and already in the century after his death, his works became case studies in the metrical treatise compiled by Caesius Bassus.1 But, uniquely among the surviving Augustan poets, Horace composed in several genres and a wide variety of meters, not only in the polymetric Odes, but the epodic meters of the Iambi, and the satiric and epistolary hexameters of the Sermones and Epistles. With Horace it is bet- ter to speak of the evolution of his many styles than to consider the body of his work as a monolithic whole. 1 On Caesius Bassus, cf. Skutsch in RE 3.1312–1313. The fragments of a late treatise trans- mitted under the name of Atilius Fortunatianus probably derive from Bassus, as Keil (GL 6.245–254) showed and examples from Horace feature prominently in the surviving frag- ments (GL 255–272). This Bassus was probably identical with the person who is mentioned by Quintilian (Inst. 10.1.96) as the only Latin lyric poet worth reading after Horace; cf. Courtney 2003: 351. 528 peter e. knox 1. The Callimachean Style of Discourse In the rst book of the Sermones, the earliest collection that he released to the public, Horace participates in the stylistic revolution that began with Catullus and the neoterics and was being prosecuted in the Triumviral period by Virgil in his Eclogues and, we must assume, Cornelius Gallus in his elegies.2 Virgil declares the stylistic a liations of his rst collection by recasting the moment of inspiration depicted in Callimachus’s Prologue to the Aetia (fr. 1.21–24 Pf): καὶ γὰρ ὅτε πρώτιστον ἐµοῖς ἐπὶ δέλτον ἔθηκα γούνασιν, ᾽Α[πό] ων εἶπεν ὅ µοι Λύκιος· … ἀοιδέ, τὸ µὲν θύος ὅττι πάχιστον θρέψαι, τὴ]ν Μοῦσαν δ’ ὠγαθὲ λεπταλέην. And when rst I put a writing tablet on my knees, Lycian Apollo said to me, ‘… poet, feed your sacri cial victim as fat as possible, but, my friend, keep your Muse thin.’ The scene is depicted by Callimachus with a light touch and in a familiar, conversational tone (4 ὠγαθὲ, ‘my friend’) that is captured by Virgil, when he recasts it to incorporate Roman pastoral into Callimachean aesthetics (Ecl. 4.3–5): cum canerem reges et proelia Cynthius aurem uellit et admonuit, ‘pastorem, Tityre, pinguis pascere oportet ouis, deductum dicere carmen.’ When I started to sing of kings and battles, the Cynthian tweaked my ear and upbraided me, saying ‘Tityrus, it behooves a shepherd to fatten up his sheep, but to tell a ne-spun poem.’ Virgil appropriates the scene to a familiar Roman context by representing Apollo tweaking Tityrus’s ear, a proverbial expression for a quintessentially Roman gesture,3 and having him speak in an everyday, neutral tone.4 2 On Callimachean inuences in the Sermones, see most recently Scodel 1987, Freuden- burg 1993: 185–235. 3 Cf. Otto 1890: 48. 4 In terms of lexis this is most evident in oportet. Axelson (1945: 13–14) began his seminal study of poetic and non-poetic diction with this word, on which see also Clausen 1994: 180. This word, which is common in prose, occurs only four times in Horace, all in the Satires and Epistles. For Axelson and subsequent commentators such words are ‘prosaic,’ but a better term for the register to which they belong is ‘neutral’; cf. Adams and Mayer 1999: 3– 4..
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