Yale UP (2025) h/b 313pp £18.99 (ISBN 9780300256581)
S., a distinguished former newspaper editor, has secured endorsements for his new book from Mary Beard, Simon Sebag-Montefiore and other noted writers. It has twenty chapters with headlines like ‘Poets and Assassins’, ‘Connoisseur of the Concealed’ and ‘Odes and Eels’, supported by three odes with English translations, a map, source notes, chronology, bibliography and index. The subtitle ‘Poet on a Volcano’ likens Horace to Empedocles, who in the Letter to the Pisones throws himself into Mount Etna.
The publisher’s press release calls the book ‘the first modern retelling of Horace’s life’, implying a fresh approach after Peter Levi’s 1997 ‘Horace: A Life’. S. sets the style by referring to the first triumvirate in Varro’s pejorative term ‘The Three-Headed Monster’. His account of Horace’s friendships as a student in Athens and during his military service under Brutus is richly informative. Names pop in and out of his life, sometimes reappearing as distinguished Roman senators in the Augustan period. But S. sees Horace as a poet maddened by war and supports this hypothesis by focusing on Horace’s Epodes and the first book of Satires, with emphasis on the low life. The urbane and genial Horace, the songwriter of middle age, is underplayed. The Ode to Postumus (2.14), one of Horace’s most famous, is not discussed. Horace’s later sympathy with Epicureanism takes second place to his debt to Archilochus’s vicious iambics.
S.’s excitement about Horace’s sexuality is pervasive. ‘Rogare longo putidam te saeculo viris quid enervet meas’ (Epodes 8) becomes ‘You ask me why your long decaying body keeps my cock limp’ followed by ‘You ask me why I can’t fuck you.’ The student’s difficulty in isolating text from gloss is not helped by the absence of references. S. elaborates the rumour repeated by Suetonius that Horace covered his bedroom with mirrors to heighten his sexual pleasures: ‘He could see himself in the bronze plates … He had many mirrors, on the wooden ceiling as well as on the mud bricks.’ ‘No one would have denied him the mirrored room’ (p.179). Pompeius in Odes 2.7 ‘might want to share Horace’s room of mirrors’ (p.166). In the Leuconoe Ode (1.11), S. describes ‘carpe diem’ as ‘philosophical and carnal at the same time … a way of inviting sex now’.
Historically, S. is generally but not always sure-footed. Horace’s brush with death at Palinurus almost certainly occurred not, as S. believes, on his voyage home after Philippi in 42 BC, but with Maecenas in the naval disaster of 36 BC. Vergil invented the helmsman Palinurus, overcome by Somnus, as an apologia for Octavian’s incompetence as a naval commander. Horace’s rank of eques may not have been awarded by Brutus. Horace was a junior officer with no assets and the upgrade arguably originated with Maecenas. S.’s view that Pompeius of ‘O saepe mecum’ (2.7), fought under his namesake Pompeius Sextus at Naulochus and discussed it with Horace six years later is too speculative to be presented as fact. In ‘Odes and Eels’, S. astutely identifies the Murena family with the sharp-toothed eel of the same name, but confuses Lucius Licinius Varro Murena, the half-brother of Maecenas’s wife and hot-headed subject of Odes 2.10, with Aulus Terentius Varro Murena the consul designate for 24 BC who died before he could take up office. It was Licinius who was implicated in the plot of 23 BC and summarily executed. Maecenas’ fall from grace was a result. For six years, Horace reverted to writing agreeable hexameter verses.
S. acknowledges that at least some of Horace’s carmina were sung, but goes little further in elucidating his performance art. While some of Horace’s Odes had a domestic setting, the performance was unrestricted. Horace probably entertained his sponsor’s guests in the Auditorium of Maecenas on the Esquiline Hill, using the distinctive styles of the Alcaic, Sapphic and Asclepiad metres to articulate his jewel-like compositions and adjust the mood. Several Odes in Book 4 were hymns commissioned by Augustus to honour his family. In the ‘Song of the Century’ (Carmen Saeculare) referred to in a chapter headed ‘Game Show’, Horace modifies monodic Sapphics into choral rhythms. S. writes: ‘Only the demands of these games forced Horace back to a theatrical stage’ where he had ‘only a small place in the proceedings’. In that summer of 17 BC, Horace composed, rehearsed and conducted in two major religious performances. Afterwards, as he wrote in Odes 4.3, passers-by pointed him out as the minstrel of the Roman lyre.
S.’s focus on the most ribald of Horace’s early compositions makes it unsuitable for younger students, but he has focused a fresh lens on Horace. Teachers of Latin in the Classics for All programme will have to be cautious is transmitting all S.’s arguments as fact. Horatian enthusiasts will find the book an interesting addition to their libraries.
Stuart Lyons