Vision and Response in Horace Odes III.13

Nancy Jones

Brown University

The seasonal rites of the locus amoenus provide the occasion for one of the central odes of Book III. From this privileged site of poetry emerge a vision and response to the cultural and psychological paradoxes of sacrifice. In the sacrifice of a kid to the spring of Bandusia, the concepts of crisis and magic assume new meanings as Horace probes the potential for despair, self-illusion, and regeneration represented by the act of spilling warm blood into the chilly waters of the spring.

The impending death of the kid in the first stanza introduces the theme of mortality. The key word frustra acknowledges the contrast between the mortality of man and animal, and the superhuman powers of the spring. Yet frustra is a word supplied by the poet, which discloses his privileged position vis-à-vis the human condition by virtue of his ongoing discovery of the transforming powers of language. If the sacrifice of the kid implies a culture’s awareness that man cannot experience the spring’s immortality, the poet succeeds, through language, in bringing the spring (addressed as an interlocutor) into the realm of human exchange.

The kid’s potential sexual explosion corresponds to pressures within the psyche which give rise of the demonic self evoked in an earlier poem in Cleopatra (Odes I.37). In III.13 Horace makes us witness the transformation of physical energy into artistic energy, as he moves us from a thematic sense of beauty to the beauty of assonance ad meter. Furthermore, if the self-consciousness implied in the poet’s contemplation of the sparkling spring poses the threat of narcissistic illusion, the poem confronts this threat by linking the fiction of self to the fiction (or denial) involved in the rite of sacrifice. Much as a society contains its capacity for violence by masking it in ritual form, the poet masks the inner contradictions of the self within poetic form. This revelation emerges in the final stanza, where ablative absolute me dicente points to language as the cause, condition, and limitation of the human condition made visible through the poetic acts of vision and response. Me dicente also marks the poet Horace’s own intransitive presence in the poem, implicitly identifying his as vates, a title he openly claims elsewhere.