CUP (2023) p/b 299pp £29.99 (ISBN 9781009018555)
Carpe diem is everywhere. I put the phrase into a search engine and found four million hits, many of them equating the phrase with the injunction to ‘eat, drink and be merry.’ When Horace coined the original Latin phrase (Odes 1.11.8) it came after his reminder that no amount of astrology can tell us our fortune—and he tells us elsewhere (Odes 4.7.16) that death will reduce all of us to the same condition of ‘dust and shadow.’ Why not therefore enjoy the good things of life while we can? Why suffer the miser’s fate of being the richest man in the cemetery? Life is too short to stuff a mushroom; although stuffed mushrooms would certainly be on the menu for that maudlin ringmaster of the dinner-party circus, Trimalchio in Petronius’ Satyrika, who could buy everything except release from the death which haunts his garish hedonism.
There is a note of erotic urgency to some of this (‘make the most of what is on offer while you are young and fit’) and Horace is possibly telling Leuconoe to carpe diem for sexually manipulative purposes. Ironically, however, it is the poet/artist who can cheat death and grant the immortality which we crave: he freezes the present moment in time and so both enacts the fleeting pleasure and preserves it.
This excellent book takes on all this and much more. R. finds the ‘archaeology’ of the phrase in the Greek inscription on an image of the Assyrian king Sardanapalus: this inscription helped to feed into the Greek tendency to see Eastern potentates as figures of luxurious effeminacy and was much imitated. Greeks and Romans found much to critique in the reductive ethics which it seems to enshrine, and carpe diem became another stick with which to beat (for instance) Epicurus, but the motif was not confined to eastern potentates or clever philosophers—there are (for instance) clear echoes of carpe diem in the godless hedonism of Polyphemus in Euripides Cyclops (316-346) as well as in the ruder appetites on show in ancient comedy (and the more refined tones of Latin Love Elegy [see for example Tibullus 1.8.41-8]).
Much of the book rightly concerns itself with Horace. R. examines with rare sensitivity some key passages of the Odes and makes some astute observations on the comparative fortunes of wine and of people: Odes 3.14, for instance, shows that what was an old conflict is now an oenological memory since Caesar took power. Horace, R. tells us, has a verbal wine-cellar of archaic words to bring out at the right moment, and while wine is a seasonal product enjoyed in a particular sympotic moment, this brief point in time can be preserved for years—like the poetry itself. The imagery of falling leaves (deriving from Homer Iliad 6.145-9) is explored in chapter four, and R. explores a rich seam of intertextual resonance via Mimnermus, Simonides, Horace’s Ars Poetica 60-72, and many others right up to the present (‘thus there is at least one thing Quintus of Smyrna and Keith Richards have in common’, he comments drily [113n.14]). I would add to this impressive list the use of falling leaves in love-poetry such as Propertius 2.15.49-54 where the leaves of the garland fall into the wine-cup, symbolising the brevity of love and of life: but no one chapter can cover everything and R. more than proves his point. The language of Odes 4.7 shows that human time is linear while nature’s time is one of endless recurrence: suns can set and rise again, spring comes every year—but human lives are a one-way trip down Cemetery Road. Horace’s inventive use of language, however, offers something longer lasting: the metaphor in carpe diem (‘the day has to be plucked like a fruit in a momentarily fleeting season’) is the ultimate ‘clever word-combination’ (callida iunctura: pp.131-3), and Odes 1.11 formally enacts its own message, being pruned down in length and ending up broader than it is long.
Nor is it only literary texts which handle this theme. R. discusses (and illustrates) several fine examples of vessels—some of which have inscriptions telling the holder to drink, others showing (in the case of the silver Boscoreale cups) a memento mori such as a skeleton to remind us of the skull beneath the skin. Some of these skeletons have names of great men (to remind us of the universality of death), and some have natty little fortune-cookie mottos like ‘enjoy yourself while you live.’ Gems show us a recurring image of a shepherd and a skull—picking up a famous epigram by Crinagoras (AP 9.439) addressed to a wayside skull. One especially garish item (figure 4.8) shows two men having enthusiastic sex below the motto that ‘Time is short’ and above the response ‘Live it up!’ The chapter ends with the telling juxtaposition of the dining room and the tomb, telling us that we need to enjoy the former since the latter will soon be our resting place. Some tombs (real or imaginary) even contain dining rooms and vice versa—such as the bizarre mock funeral which Trimalchio stages as part of his dinner-party ‘entertainment’.
The final chapter looks at some places where carpe diem was excerpted and used for effect outside its natural context. Virgil (Georgics 3.323-38) tells his readers to make the best of each part of the day, picking up themes from Hesiod and Alcaeus, and adapting the agricultural wisdom for the benefit of the animals as well as their owners. An earlier passage from the same book of the Georgics (3.63-71) tells the farmer to let the cattle have sex while they can—a neat example of carpe diem as applied to his ‘humanised cows’ and almost close to the erotic subtext of Horace Odes 1.11. Elsewhere poets show speakers using this theme as a means of characterisation: Horace’s town mouse (Satires 2.6) affects a suave carpe diem veneer (and some nice lyric language) as part of the urbanus window-dressing which will impress his country cousin—only to have his purple-garmented luxury wrecked by the barking dogs (2.6.204-5). Trimalchio uses similarly urbane moralising to impress his guests with a metrically bizarre elegiac triad (Petronius 34.10), while Juvenal’s one use of dialogue form (Satire 9) shows his comic creation Naevolus using maudlin sentimentality as part of his mendacious and meretricious hypocrisy. All these speakers can be seen plucking conventional flowers to create a persona—only to be shown up as selling plastic flowers rather than the real thing.
‘This is a book about pleasure’ is the opening sentence of this book, and it is certainly a pleasure to read. The style is hugely entertaining and accessible, while not being afraid to slip in witty touches—chapter two opens, for example: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that Horace wrote his poems in order to provide posterity with quotations for any circumstance’ (p.76). R.’s range of reference extends to Patrick Leigh Fermor and even Winnie the Pooh. There are forty-two pages of bibliography, a general index and an index locorum, and the book is illustrated with a dozen fine images. All Latin and Greek is translated in the main text (although some lurks untranslated in the copious footnotes). The copy-editing and the presentation of this book are exemplary, and at £30 this banquet of a book is as cheap as chips but is in fact haute cuisine of the highest order.
John Godwin