horace issue || the new nisbet-hubbard horace

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The New Nisbet-Hubbard HoraceAuthor(s): Kenneth QuinnSource: Arion, Vol. 9, No. 2/3, Horace Issue (Summer - Autumn, 1970), pp. 264-273Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20163260 .

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THE NEW NISBET-HUBBARD HORACE

Kenneth Quinn

i Iorace's odes are among the

most popular, and the most misunderstood, of ancient writ

ings" says the publishers blurb. The theme recurs, a little more blandly, in the opening words of the Preface: "The

Odes of Horace, in spite of all their popularity, are unusually

liable to misinterpretation. The standard commentaries,

though they often explain the meaning of the words, tend

to be less illuminating on the wider issues." One catches the

echo, appropriately muted, of the gauntlet thrown down by Eduard Fraenkel: "I assume that in approaching

a real poet it should be our main concern to try to understand his poetry.

This task, in the case of Horace, is far more difficult than it

might appear at first sight." (Horace, p. vii.) True, in this

carefully worded context * m spite of all their popularity"

may cause the odd eyebrow to flicker; even fifteen years after

Fraenkel's massive rehabilitation Horace is still a poet more

often damned with faint praise than treated with respect as

a serious artist who has something to say. Still, a wish to be illuminating on "the wider issues" can

only be welcomed. A passage a few lines further down in

the Preface sounds even more encouraging:

Horace has suffered from undiscriminating praise even more than other ancient writers. This seems the

wrong attitude towards so astringent a poet, and we

have occasionally suggested that some odes may be

better than others.

The discreet allusion to Mr. Robert Graves's well known

story about his Oxford tutor suggests breadth of reading as well as breadth of mind, though the persistent Aunt Sally of a Horace undiscriminatingly praised by uninformed ad

mirers is a little puzzling. A few lines later the authors lay their cards upon the table with something of a flourish.

A Commentary on Horace: Odes 1, R.G.M. Nisbet and Margaret Hubbard (Oxford, Clarendon Press 1970). lviii + 440 pp. $11.75.



Kenneth Quinn 265

This is not of course a new interpretation of Horace which we are offered by the present Corpus professor and his col

laboratrix, but a commentary. It is still a shock when Nisbet

and Hubbard abruptly protest their critical incompetence and their determinism to abstain from criticism:

We do not rule out the possibility of serious literary criticism on a Latin poet, but we had neither the con

fidence nor the time to take on the job ourselves.

Fortunately it is not as bad as it sounds: despite this mani

festo, the authors have found time for a good deal of literary criticism, and even a good deal of space. But readers anxious to divest themselves of misunderstandings about Horace are

to be excused if they ask themselves at this point what "the wider issues" in the authors' view of the matter are.

This new commentary on Odes 1 begins with a fifty-page Introduction, nearly a third of it devoted to "The Odes and their literary form," in which I was startled to find Richard

Heinze's view of the Odes, now half a century old, repeated as

gospel:

Quite apart from style and structure Horace's odes have other characteristics alien to the manner of much

modern poetry. He normally professes to be talking in propria persona . . . And he talks at somebody,

usually a real or imaginary friend, sometimes a god or Muse, occasionally even an inanimate object

. . .

He does not meditate or introspect, but exhorts, ques tions, invites, consoles, prays, and orders. The moral

izing is public, in the ancient manner, being directed at the improvement of others rather than the poet.

..

I have dealt with Heinze's very dated, very German Romantic view of the Odes and the fundamental difference

(as he argued) between them and modern poetry elsewhere.

My concern here is with the assurance with which these very dubious assertions are fired at the reader: it suggests the dis

turbing suspicion that the authors haven't much time for modern poetry either. If they had looked, for example, at some of the poems of Mr. Robert Graves which won him his return to Oxford as Professor of Poetry, they might have



266 THE NEW NISBET-HUBBARD HORACE

been surprised to find him doing most of the things listed

above as alien to the manner of much modern poetry; it

might even have occurred to them that he was indeed re

markably like (all the more remarkably, because this was, I imagine, no part of Graves's conscious intention) a twen

tieth-century Horace. Or if they had consulted instead Mr.

Northrop Frye, they might have been disconcerted to find

described, as characteristic of lyric in general, pretty much

those features which, according to them, make Horace's

odes "alien to the manner of much modern poetry":

The lyric is. . . preeminently the utterance that is

overheard. The lyric poet normally pretends to be

talking to himself or to someone else: a spirit of na

ture, a Muse. . . , a personal friend, a lover, a god,

a

personified abstraction, or a natural object. . . .

[Anatomy of Criticism, p. 249]

The commentary proper follows . uniform pattern. A well selected bibliography (in which modern critical writing is

given its fair share of limited space) precedes a long intro

duction ( often several pages ) to each of the poems?heavily weighted towards a listing and discussion of Horace's Greek

sources, but going very fully into historical references, and

usually concluding with a firm, clear, forthright appraisal. There is some

tendency to faint praise ( 1.29, for example, "though unpretentious

... is perfect of its kind"); there are

also final appraisals in which opening words of approval (for

example, on the Pyrrha Ode: "The manner of the poem is

perfectly attuned to its matter. The structure is flawless . . .") are followed by loud damns ("The diction is prosaic . . . The Pyrrha ode is not sentimental, heart-felt, or particu

larly pretty."). Then comes the orthodox line by line com

mentary, tied to isolated words and phrases. An index nomi num and an index rerum complete the volume. There is no

text, following the precedent of the Ogilvie Livy and the Sherwin-White Pliny, as against Fordyce's Catullus, or the volumes of the Oxford Virgil and Euripides. The precedent is hardly valid: one would not expect Sherwin-White to redo the work of Mynors, or

Ogilvie to duplicate the work



Kenneth Quinn 267

of McDonald; the need for a decent modern Oxford text of

Horace is considerable. The volume is handsomely produced

?large, generous print, good paper, solidly bound, com

mendably few misprints. These days when shoddy produc tion and careless printing are increasingly forced on those

who try to write scholarly books, I for one feel green with

envy. It is of course expensive. To find fault is never hard. Let me instead give some in

dication of the sort of book this is. Take the Soracte Ode

(1.9), which shows Nisbet and Hubbard just about at their

worst. They like the Soracte Ode, rather more than Fraenkel

did: his "a poem fine enough to stand as he had written it"

becomes, in the concluding words of Nisbet and Hubbard in their introduction: "This is a great poem." Nisbet and

Hubbard are determined, however, that Horace "is not pro

fessing to describe something that really happened, or repre sent his emotions on any particular occasion"; for them this

is only make-believe occasional poetry. There is a reason for their view. The question which has

bedevilled interpretation of the Soracte Ode is how you get from the scene of the first three stanzas to the scene of the

last three; in the second half of the poem, the setting is

plainly Rome; not only that, as NH put it, "the weather has

changed marvellously since the beginning of the poem"?a good example, by the way, of the NH trick of discouraging sympathetic understanding by ironic paraphrase. NH have a traditional solution?it goes back to Pasquali, via Fraenkel: "to put it somewhat crudely," wrote Fraenkel, "the 'Hellen istic' ending to the ode and its 'Alcaean beginnings have not

really coalesced." That Horace is combining different tradi tions in a

single poem is evident enough. But that he should have stuck the two halves together, careless whether they matched (or perhaps not competent to make them match), is a different matter. For NH, however, this is the solution to the Soracte Ode.

For them, the ode is a kind a tapestry, "weaving together varied strands from reading and experience"; Horace did not take the trouble to visualize the imagery of his opening stanza:




. .. the modern tourist, as he surveys the horizon from the Gianicolo on a clear day, willingly imagines that

he is re-creating the poet's experience. But we should not suppose that Horace saw the mountain twenty miles away on a winter evening through the narrow

slit of an ancient window; he is simply giving local

colour to a Greek theme.

Behind this lies Fraenkel having a sly dig at Pasquali. But

in NH it becomes part of a demonstration that the opening stanzas are not at all what the unprejudiced, sensitive mod ern reader might take them for. There is nothing in the poem about windows, narrow or otherwise, and some indication

that, whatever the time of day, it is not evening. The sug

gestion that the setting is not in Rome, or the outskirts of

Rome, but in the country?close enough to Soracte for its mass to loom up before you (instead of constituting a fea ture of the distant landscape)?is summarily dismissed by

NH with the argument "there is nothing in the rest of the

poem [apart from the opening lines] which encourages us to

look for this kind of verisimilitude." The possibility that Horace is standing at the door of a country villa with an un

impeded view of the winter landscape, or that he and his

young companion are about to enter the villa?hence the in

junction to pile up the fire (two obvious enough explanations of the kind any modern poet would feel he could rely on his

readers to provide for themselves)?is not considered. Next Thaliarchus :

Horace's friend Thaliarchus does not belong to the real world of Horace's political friends; instead he

bears a Greek name, with associations of the sym

posium ... He is asked to put wood on the fire, though

in real life the menial office would have been per formed by a slave...

What about Sybaris in the preceding ode? The Roman set

ting throughout till the final stanza is clear enough, even

though NH seem to have missed the reference in it to the militia equestris of Augustus (on which see, for example,

Lily Ross Taylor, JRS 14 [1924] 158-9). How, except in the



Kenneth ?uinn 269

matter of name, is Sybaris any less set in the real world of

Horace's friends than Iccius in 1.29? In the one case Horace

has used a real name and an identifiable historical occasion

(as Catullus might have done), in the other an imaginary name and an unidentifiable occasion: it makes 1.8 more

philosophical (as Aristotle would put it); it hardly makes it less about the real world of Horace's experience. What

about Pyrrha for that matter? Because she has a Greek name

(with, like Sybaris and Thaliarchus, vaguely appropriate connotations), are we to suppose that 1.5 is not set in the

Roman world of Horace's friends? To return to Thaliarchus: can one seriously expect Horace to say (in a poem where

words count) "tell a slave to put some logs on the fire"?

Now the third stanza:

The third stanza also provides surprises for the over

literal reader. Horace implies, even if he does not

state, that a storm is raging . . .; this is inconsistent

with the clear, cold day at the beginning of the poem. In the first stanza the trees bend under their load of

snow; in the third they are shaken in the high wind.

The contradiction may be derived from Horace's sources ...

You might suppose NH had misread the Latin, which says

plainly enough that the trees are not shaken in the wind.

The explanation is that NH are sticking to their view that

Horace is remembering tags, not visualizing a scene. Accord

ing to this way of looking at the stanza, Horace backs up his

advice to leave to the gods all except the cares and pleasure of the present with a general assertion (cast admittedly in

the form of an image); the present tense, therefore, because

the present tense is the tense used in generalizations. To those who are content to take the words as they come, aided

perhaps by a little knowledge of how poetry works, it might seem more likely that Thaliarchus is being invited to accept the evidence of his own eyes: days of calm cold are often

preceded by days of wild storm, and so it is in the present instance: the calm now can be pointed to as evidence that the gods can

safely be trusted to prevent the cosmos from



27O THE NEW NISBET-HUBBARD HORACE

getting out of hand. This, however, involves assuming that,

though Horace begins with a reminiscence of Alcaeus, he de

parts from his source, to put his storm into the past: he be

gins, in other words, with a reminiscence of Alcaeus, but he

makes the reminiscence his own. NH prefer to believe that

Horace has mixed his sources, built in a reminiscence (un identified ) from "sympotic poetry," in which "the storm out

side is contrasted . . . with the snugness inside," even though this clashes with his opening tag from Alcaeus.

Nor is the reference to the storm at sea, it seems, some

thing Horace observed, or visualized in his imagination:

The seething sea also seems to be a traditional motif . . ., and may also come from Alcaeus; though Rome

is so close to the Mediterranean, the ancient Romans, unlike their modern counterparts, were hardly aware

of it.

One should perhaps turn on a page or two in the text of

Horace before accepting this observation, to the wonderful

image in the eleventh ode:

ut melius quidquid erit pati, seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam,

quae nunc oppositis d?bilit?t pumicibus mare

Tyrrhenum...

But of course, if we are to believe NH, that isn't something observed or visualized either: "Horace includes an Italian

place-name, as often, to add local colour" says the note.

This is not the place for me to offer my own interpretation of the Soracte Ode. I have argued elsewhere that the prob lem of the transition from the first three stanzas to the second

three ceases to be a problem if the ode is taken as an example

of dramatic monologue, in which the train of thought has a

psychological unity, not the unity of a logical argument: the

speaker's thoughts unwind in a suitable setting, until often in real life he will pause to ask, "How did we get to talking about this?" My present object is to establish the sad truth that in this new commentary on the Odes, Quellenforschung still contaminates interpretation. True, the job of collecting



Kenneth Quinn 271

Horace's Greek sources is well done, really well done, per

haps, for the first time, and the value of the commentary as a work of reference gains greatly as a result, though the

reader should be warned that the task of gathering Horace's

reminiscences of earlier Latin poetry and the evidence they

provide, not so much for literary allusion, as for the forma

tion of Horace's style (and the style of Augustan poetry

generally) seems to have interested NH less, so that very obvious echoes (for example, the echo in 1.37.14 "mentem . . .

lymphatam" of Catullus 64.254 "lymphata mente") are

left unnoticed.

In the main, the line by line commentary is also com

petently done (though one is surprised to find it so sketchy by comparison with Heinze), if somewhat old-fashioned in

its view of what should be discussed. No comment, for ex

ample, on 1.9.9-11:

qui simul

strauere uentos aequore feruido

deproeliantis...

where the latent metaphor in "deproeliantis" elicits ( and is

in its turn revived by) the ambiguity of "aequore": real battles too are fought on an aequor (level ground), but this

is a different kind of aequor, the expanse of the sea, boiling ("feruido," as a cauldron might boil) with a rage of its own,

whipped up by the winds.

This is a commentary on a monumental scale. Like Jebb's Sophocles, the Nisbet-Hubbard Horace is going to mean that the task of the commentator will have to be regarded as

done for a long time to come. One is grateful and one is

genuinely impressed. I am even inclined to concede that a

commentary on this scale should be a plain man's Horace.

Horace's appeal is not only to those who respond to what seem to them the subtle techniques of a very subtle poet; he

has a firm following among what one might (with no offense

intended to Mr. Wilkinson) describe as the Patrick Wilkin son audience ( the school-master, the civil servant on Sunday, the country parson on Monday, the don who has specialized in another department of the Classics ). The latter group is

very likely the larger, and it is, I suppose, this audience that




NH have in mind when they speak of the popularity of

Horace and the need to rescue him from "undiscriminating

praise" and to throw light on the "wider issues." It is perhaps a good thing that a commentary whose aim is the thorough

accomplishment of this relatively humble objective should

be conservative, and should stick to providing assistance

freely, while leaving it to the reader to work out his own

interpretation, or modify shallow enthusiasm into something more like understanding.

My complaint is that NH have not done this. They have

ventured into criticism?at some length and with consider

able assurance?despite their prefatory protestation that

they lacked the confidence and the time. It is not a matter of

the odd passing remark, like Housman's famous blurted-out

pronouncement on "Diffugere niues": I am speaking of de

ta?ed appraisal that has the air of authority about it, sup

ported by argument and analysis. If this is not "serious liter

ary criticism," I think many will take it for that.

Often what NH have to say is sensible, sound, acute.

Their introduction to "Tu ne quaesieris" ( 1.11), for example, strikes me as admirable. Where they understand a poem, or a passage, their understanding is accurate and penetrating, and refreshingly unsentimental?of more use than much

that passes for literary criticism in classical studies. But that

hardly excuses two major weaknesses. The first is that, where they don't understand or like ( and

sometimes where they do), the drily urbane manner which

they affect throughout tends to descend to the cheap crack: I have quoted examples; another is the observation which

begins their discussion of the Sybaris Ode (1.8): "It was

generally recognized in the ancient world that love and ath

letics are incompatible pursuits." There are even occasions

where I should describe the attempt at wit as sheer bad taste. For example, having made the point that the name

Telephus was perhaps chosen by Horace for the young lover

in 1.13 because the legendary Telephus was cured by the

spear that wounded him, they feel compelled to add "Per

haps . . . some Hellenistic poet gave the name

Telephus to a love-lorn youth because he would be cured by 'a hair of the dog that bit him'." This sort of thing is all right for the



Kenneth Quinn 273

lecture-room; in cold print it makes the reader uncom

fortable.

I much prefer wit to stodginess in a commentary and

should be among the first to deplore that one finds it so

rarely. I am prepared to argue that irony is almost an indis

pensible tool of the interpreter of poetry. I have tried to use

that tool fairly freely in my commentary on Catullus, in the

hope that it will sharpen the edge of the reader's mind and

help him in his effort towards sympathetic understanding of

the text he is asking me to help him with. It is, at any rate, better than blunting his response by heavy-handed exposi tion of the obvious. A kind of osmotic process is often pos sible, permitting the critic's understanding of the text to seep into the thoughts of his consultant across the barrier of lan

guage. But if wit and irony are to help, they have to be

handled with tact, or they will line the reader up against the author that the commentator is trying to interpret,

or

against the commentator himself, instead of bringing all

three together. A second, graver weakness is that the authors' diligence

in gathering sources has led them to see, or suspect, sources

everywhere. In a sense this new commentary takes us back, if on a massive scale, to the sort of school commentary on

Horace we used in our youth?James Gow, for example, but there were a number of them, written to meet the needs

of the English public-school industry at the turn of the cen

tury. How well one remembers the brief, curt dismissal of

odes which seemed to the editors to lack proper seriousness,

"Obviously a translation of a Greek poem, now lost." Perhaps

we were guilty of this sort of thing ourselves when we began

teaching. NH are more sophisticated: they have learnt from

Giorgio Pasquali's great study of Horace's sources ( Orazio

lirico, 1920) that Horace often combines different traditions

(early Greek lyric and Hellenistic lyric) in a new tension

and a Roman setting. But the interest of the authors of this new commentary in Horace's sources has led them, I am

afraid, to place an emphasis on what the Odes are made out

of that limits their perception of what they are made into.

To many it will seem that the result, too often, is to deny Horace?not merely originality, but competence as a poet.



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