Connections of Meter

In the famous closing poem to Odes 1-3, Horace proudly predicts that he will receive undying acclaim as the first person to have adapted Greek lyric forms into Latin:

Crescam laude recens, dum Capitolium scandet cum tacita uirgine pontifex. dicar, qua uiolens obstrepit Aufidus et qua pauper aquae Daunus agrestium regnauit populorum, ex humili potens princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos deduxisse modos.

I will flourish, ever fresh in my glory, for as long as the priest climbs the Roman Capitoline with the silent Vestal by his side. In Apulia, where the rushing Aufidus thunders and where Daunus, poor in water, once ruled over his peasant subjects, I will be spoken of: I, once a nobody, now a great man. I, the first one to have brought the Aeolian song into Italian strains. (Hor. Carm. 3.30.8-14; edition Wickham)

In delivering this ringing statement in his final lines, Horace effectively encompasses all the poems in the collection, rendering Odes 3.30 as the sphragisor signature poem to his monumentum aere perennius (‘‘monument more lasting than bronze,’’ 30.1). And indeed Odes 1-3 represented a stunning tour de force when it was published in 23 bc. Carefully arranged into three books, the work comprised 88 poems in 13 Greek lyric meters, the majority of them never attempted in Latin before. Such was the magnitude of Horace’s achievement that most of these meters were never tried again, apart from the ones that appear in his own fourth book of Odes (ca. 12 Bc) and a few scattered experiments by authors in later generations (notably Stat. Silv. 4.5 and 4.7).

However, Horace’s outright claim to be ‘‘the first’’ is problematic. Catullus, after all, had written poems in a number of Greek lyric meters some thirty years before, and had adapted at least some of these into Latin for the first time. Horace, of course, knew this full well, as becomes clear when we examine the full range of meters used by the two poets across their complete range of works.

Table 19.1 reveals several intriguing elements of contrast and comparison. First, Horace worked in nearly twice as many meters as Catullus over the course of his career: 20 as compared with 12. Both Catullus and Horace seem to have tried out

Table 19. 1

(Continued)

Table 19. 1 {Continued)

Certain meters as one-time experiments, albeit in different proportions (9 of 20 for Horace, 5 of 12 for Catullus). Above all, it is striking that very little overlap occurs between the two poets. Horace never employs Catullus’ most frequently used metrical forms (the hendecasyllabic and the elegiac couplet), while his own primary lyric meter (the Alcaic strophe) appears nowhere in the Catullan corpus.

Nevertheless, in three instances Horace returns to meters that Catullus had used before (leaving aside the dactylic hexameter in Catullus 62 and 64 and Horace’s Satires and Epistles): the iambic trimeter, closely associated with Archilochus, in Catullus 52 and Horace Epodes 17; the greater asclepiadean, an Aeolic meter used by Sappho and Alcaeus, in Catullus 30 and Horace Odes 1.11,1.18, and 4.10; and the Sapphic, famously used by Catullus in 11 and 51, and Horace’s second favorite choice, appearing 25 times in the Odes as well as in the Carmen Saeculare. Out of the three, Horace’s use of the Sapphic meter is the most intriguing, since his handling of it frequently suggests not only a full appreciation for the original Greek model, but also a careful assessment of Catullus’ earlier innovations in adapting it. For example, in c. 51 Catullus uses the Sapphic’s fourth line adonic as an evocative if sometimes ungrammatical distillation of the sentiment of each stanza (cf. Sappho 31, although a similar technique is perhaps identifiable in Sappho 1.4, 8, 20, and 28):

Ille mi par esse deo uidetur, ille, si fas est, superare diuos, qui sedens aduersus identidem te spectat et audit

Dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te,

Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi <uocis in ore>

Lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus flamma demanat, sonitu suopte tintinant aures, gemina teguntur lumina nocte.

That man seems to me to be equal to a god. He seems (if I may say so) to surpass the gods, who sits across from you and again and again watches and hears you laughing sweetly - the very thing that tears all the senses from me in my suffering. For as soon as I have caught sight of you, Lesbia, there is nothing left of my voice on my lips, my tongue goes numb, a thin flame runs down under my limbs, my ears ring with their own sound, and covered with a double night are my eyes. (Catull. 51.1-12; edition Thomson)

Horace appears to follow Catullus’ example in several of his Sapphic poems, as here in these individual stanzas from Odes 1.2:

Iam satis terris niuis atque dirae grandinis misit Pater et rubente dextera sacras iaculatus arces terruit urbem. . .

Audiet ciuis acuisse ferrum quo graues Persae melius perirent, audiet pugnas uitio parentum rara iuuentus....

. . . siue mutata iuuenem figura ales in terris imitaris almae filius Maiae patiens uocari Caesaris ultor.

The Father has already sent enough snow and awful hail down upon the earth, and striking the sacred citadels with his red hand has terrified the city... They will hear of battles, how citizens sharpened swords that should have been used against the harsh Persians. Because of their parents’ crimes they will be a sparse generation.... Or if perhaps with changed form you might assume the guise of a young man, winged son of kindly Maia, and allow yourself to be called avenger of Caesar. (Hor. Carm. 1.2.1-4, 21-4, and 41-4)

It would appear, then, that Horace was at least partly responding to Catullus’ earlier recognition of the potential that lay within the Sapphic stanza for the creation of novel poetic expressions in Latin.

In any case, the overlap of Catullus and Horace in the use of specific Greek lyric forms is clear and undeniable. What, then, are we to make of Horace’s claim in Odes 3.30 to be princeps deduxisse Aeolium carmen? ‘‘Aeolian song’’ refers to the poetry of Sappho as well as Alcaeus, and it cannot be the case that Horace is thinking here solely of his compositions in Alcaic strophes, especially since the influence of Sappho as well as Catullus can be detected throughout the Odes (Woodman 2002). It has been proposed that Horace may have felt justified in ignoring Catullus’ earlier Sapphic poems because there were only two of them (Nisbet and Rudd 2004), or even that Catullus didn’t think of himself as a lyric poet and therefore required no recognition (Mendell 1935), but these suggestions are in themselves troubling; the attendant implication is that 11 and 51 somehow ‘‘don’t count,’’ whereas they clearly stand forth as masterful poetic creations in their own right. At first glance, Horace’s apparent refusal to point to Catullus openly as his generic and stylistic forerunner appears to confront us with something of a problem. The solution to this mystery will depend upon further examination of some of the deeper currents of their literary relationship.