Horace Moving, Horace Rising

Sara Nolan

The poet Horace lived circa 65–8 B. C. E.: to accept this as a totality is to have missed the door he purposely left open into his mystical, unfinished, ulterior existence. Horace sees his poetry as a means to push his “self” beyond normal measures: to unwind it from the normal demands of time and space and to deliver it to a place where immortality and freedom would sustain him. His poems are in motion: mirroring the natural world, Horace catches the energies of sea, wind and rain, coupled with the perfect stillness of the preserved moment, and produces the spume on which he rises to the stars. His selfhood is to be found in the method of self-extrication from the common sea in which man swims. His work is a precursor to Christianity in that he seeks Salvation in which to know himself truly. I wish to examine the ways in which Horace elevates himself, from the measured and exacting space of life and poetry, to a boundless, orgiastic, and transcendent alternative.

In Epodes 13 Horace is our seer and prophet. Storms approach from the northern country, “rain and snow bring Jupiter himself down on our heads”; a great weight suppresses us—the God, literally. Do not become cynical, he seems to warn, though “The Fates [. . . ] have cut your thread.” You must live in the space allotted to you, seizing the moment in the best way you. This space of self is a measured space—echoed in the process of measurement, which the poet practices within and upon his poem. In this epode and throughout his work, Horace advocates acceptance of this geometry, of this precise science of living within one’s portioned dimensions.

Yet his dialectic always involves motion. He is fascinated with exploiting dynamics of motion, both the vertical motion a man makes on the ladder between polarities of political and social favor and disfavor, and the horizontal temporal motion that indicates the life of man, containing for each individual a definite beginning and an inevitable end. The human desire to ascend the vertical axis is fueled by the false promise that somehow, bolstered by wealth and prestige, an individual can climb high enough to altogether escape the realm of termination of the horizontal axis. But these axes, which map the perimeters of human mobility, are washed into subservience by the permanent motions of Nature: its roaring seas, raining skies, and blowing winds that figure so prevalently in Horace’s poetry, and which scoop up Nature’s favored/loved ones towards the stars, unleashing its continuously-flowing steams through the earthly anxious existence of man, propelled by the mechanics of Fate. With this in mind—the flux of the world, the insecurity of life—Horace places himself as a steady hand, the advice-giver, yet is always himself ready to take flight with the changing winds of nature, amidst the commotion of human and natural elements. Horace’s relation to time is peculiar, engaged and erotic, in a constant dialectic with its boundaries.

Horace engages with the problem of time by raising the glass. He uses wine consistently in his writing as that which is preserved for years, and therefore serves as the enduring symbol of the particular local landscape from which it was extracted. Yet the wine also serves as that which is enjoyed in one evening as a medium to sensationalize the present moment: “Let’s seize the moment, friends.” In Epodes 13, Horace asks someone to bring forth the wine bottled in the year of his birth, “my Torquatus.” This is his special entrance into the horizontal, historical axis of man; the wine is both the marker of himself, a symbol of his own celebratory lifetime, and a fluid shared among men that fires their communal spirit. Horace is infecting his friends with himself both physically, in the form of wine, and mentally, in the form of his hortatory mood. He literally saturates his own physical space with wine, antidote to anxiety. Imitating the advice which the Centaur tutor gave to his hero and pupil Achilles, Horace—poet as prophet—prescribes the cure for his audience, which he will reiterate all through his writings: live lightly, paliate the pain (“lighten all your ills with wine and song, sweet comforts for the ugliness of pain”). Forgetfulness and levity are the medicines for the storms that plague us. Will the self endure?

Our destiny is bound to a particular land, Hades, just as our life is defined in large part by the lands on which we live. To greet this destiny, one must engage in a type of living flight. Even Achilles, “invincible in war,” traveled to his death. Thus Horace’s words are meant for potential heroes as well as the profane mob. He engages in a complex dialogue with the concepts of land, homelands, and region. The poet is a traveler as well as a leader, a man made by his homeland and dedicated to its versification. Yet through his construction of a verbal, transcendent space, he can distance himself and rest from the journey.

In Epodes 16 Horace describes the journey he wishes to take to his safe, virtuous, and unreal space. In the wake of Roman civil war, each man’s identity has been left denuded, being based upon an original sin that must be expiated. The original sin literally grows in the ground of Rome. It is a physical sin, now belonging to the land in the remains of the “self” of Romulus. “[T]he sin is ours— / the hallowed bones of Romulus.” The sin is an unnatural death. It is freedom from this specific land that Horace advocates in his poem. “Perhaps you all are asking, or the best of you / how we can free ourselves from this harsh fate?” Horace’s own reply to this question speaks of freedom in the name of all his fellow citizens in a language of escapism and fantasy, seeking an imaginary locus of plenty. The place to which he offers guidance is indefinite, immeasurable, beyond the bounds of what language can contain. It is a land where presumably singing would take priority over writing, where growth and production would be incessant. The invitation is extended to only those “above the ignorant and common herd.” The time is ripe, Horace seems to urge (“while omens still allow”), and it is a journey for which one needs only one’s “feet”—metrical feet— one’s self, one’s imagination. Horace proffers and prefers an imaginative mind that truly has free reign. It is free to dwell in the uncharted and unfixed domain of the limitless and endless, where “the vines unpruned are never out of flower.” In this epode Horace does not say to bear up, as he recommends in other poems, but rather to flee. He has in his mind such a space of departure, a permanent imaginary residence, always simultaneously containing and awaiting him: “The shores were set apart by Jupiter for righteous men when he debased the golden Age . . . [F]rom these ills the righteous can escape and Is hall be their prophet.”

Horace engages in the question, “What is enough for me?” In Odes 3.16 he writes, “For those who ask too much, / much is wanting. A man is doing well / if God, with a thrifty hand, gives him enough.” Enough is a difficult term to manage for someone who advocates the simple life, and yet seems to project his existence to cosmic and almost boundary-less importance. In Odes 1.31, he writes,

What does the bard ask from Apollo?
[. . . ] I eat easily digestible
olives, chicory, and mallow.
Grant, son of Latona, that I may enjoy what I have
with good health and, I pray, with sound mind,
and that my old age may not be squalid
and not without the lyre.

He chooses the minimum of sustenance for himself—basic food, the absence of impurities, and the presence of his means of music-making and poetic influence. Yet is seems on all occasions Horace stands with one foot in another realm, ready to transcend, but unsure of the precise means, the correct space, the correct moment. The concept of “enough” is intimately related to satisfaction and fulfillment. Horace acknowledges that he gains this from many worldly things, such as his dearest friend, Maecenas, of the upper political circles of Augustus, of whom he states in Epodes 1, “Your kindness has already given me enough/ and more.” He derives similar satisfaction from his property, which Maecenas bestowed upon him, saying, “I am . . . blest enough / with the one and only Sabine country” (Epodes 18). Each man should not want more than is naturally given to him. Fortune delight in humbling, in exchanging one man’s lot for another’s. “Whoever loves the Golden Mean is safe,” Horace claims in Odes 2.10. He cherishes the Mean, and needs its safety for his peace of mind.

Horace articulates his theme of the impartiality of Death in Odes 1.4. The operations of Fortune that he illuminates and the undiscriminating nature of death are closely tied to his maxim of human moderation, and to our capability to understand what Horace might mean by “enough.” Horace has a special relationship to death, the province wherein the slate is re-wiped for each individual: “Pale death kicks with impartial foot at the hovels of the poor/ and the towers of kinds.” He is incessantly forewarning its advent. Fate is bound to rewrite our homes for us, whether one is an individual from Tibur or from Venusia. Clinging to those homes as our point of identity in our mortal existence, accruing or decrying wealth, we are socially and culturally defined by where we are and by how much we have. Horace presents poetry that invites readers to look beyond this material personality, to imagine ourselves beyond the present moment and our present placement, which Fate is bound to snatch. We can begin to understand what “enough” might mean if we understand that no matter how much we accumulate in our household, Fate levels all the decks. With this in mind, Horace concludes that the pursuit of materiality leaves absolutely nothing real or virtuous behind as a testament to the self, once the gates of Orcus have been crossed.

We can question the place of praise in Horace’s work, whether praise is only schematic, serving the form, or whether Horace’s selfhood is truly grounded within the mechanics of praising. In Odes 1.12 it is in emulation of great men who imitate great gods that Horace sings, beckoned by the gravitational pull of Clio’s will/whim, qualified by his own almost passive scripting of such venerated figures. “What can I do but follow custom?” Thus Horace is caught up in this cycle of homage to the gods and the political leaders of his country, which the artist is obligated to render as praiseworthy. We can read the cultural need for Horace to fill this position of praise-giver, to place Caesar aesthetically, literally, and hierarchically beside Zeus, whose wrath strikes out at the impure. Horace’s is a local muse. His poetic choice determines which of the “neighborhood” heroes will live beyond their present life to be the remnants of the Great Roman Culture.

At the same time, Horace’s self-expression offers protection from the viciousness of destruction in Rome: “The gods are guarding me. My piety and my muse / are near to their hearts” (Odes 1.17). His praise, like his moderation, is a method of salvation. He praises the gods to gain access to hat they have; he praises his friends as being similar to the gods. In Odes 3.25 Horace is full of the god Bacchus, desiring his perspective on the world, begging that his speech be nothing small or ordinary or humble. Instead, with a drunken, infused eye that patrols the mountain range, scouring Nature in inebriation and revelry, he desires that he be permitted to go beyond mortal limits in his pursuit of the god (immortality). It is through invocation of Bacchus, the Greek god whose wine infuses the spirit of the most uncontainable human creatures, that Horace implores the power of the word, of song. He implores the power of a uniquely Bacchic song, disconnected from human consciousness, to take him where no one has been, to a new “dangerous” earth in the vast territory of language and music. The motions in the poem are of chase and of surveillance, of praise and of fluidity, which is sweet. He desires this intoxication with what is present and available to him, using praise to obtain it, in order to transcend the boundaries of his selfhood.

From the diverse physical places we inhabit, our various lives ultimately amount to the same journey when the day closes—to Orcus and the afterlife. In Odes 2.3 Horace writes,

We are all gathered to the same place. All our
lots are turning in the urn, and sooner or later
they will be shaken out, and put us
on the boat for an exile that never ends.

What is left of us then? When we depart, never to return, what stands behind as our marker? Exile was the worst punishment known. It erased the self. When a man was exiled from Rome, his property was confiscated, and thus he had nothing to return to, nothing to make him a “citizen.” Horace dwells in many of his odes and epodes on the descriptions of property and land, the names and harvest of those lands, as part of what makes a man who he is. Our signature landscape lives on without us—the poet may emulate them, but they will never die. However, men die despite emulation. We are all banished in the end. This inevitability of death makes the poet’s work that of a space-cultivator, who etches an expansive home for the select men who will inhabit his deathless imaginary province of poetry. Exile is a motion particular to the human condition. Many of Horace’s poems lead to and culminate in the realm of the dead, reiterating the idea that poetry is the medium through which we will move to foreign lands, particularly the ahistorical land of the underworld in which all the characters who have both made the music and been its subjects—Sappho, Alcaeus, Pindar—are present. For Horace, it is a boon that poetry can embrace so many subjectivities in its protective wing, in the course of its flight. Poetry has rustic roots, in the field and in the river, this art of his, and it is to that pastoral scene that poetry returns the righteous in the end.

Horace’s view of the world and his view of the self is encapsulated in a dynamic physics. The scenes of his poems are full of motion, be it of rivers or wind or oceans or time. The self is caught in the constant flux of natural bodies, and his world is organized by this energy. In Odes 2.7 he describes how his friendship with Pompeius has been affected by such motions as the Fates decreed, now offering this respite from the wearying activity to Pompeius,

So pay to Jupiter the feast you owe him,
under my laurel lay down your body
worn out by long campaigning, and have no mercy
on the casks I have laid down for you.

“Swift” Mercury, giver of the lyre, has saved Horace from the battle lines in a tide of motion—a natural force of “dense mist”—propelling him to his rightful lyric career. Another natural body, a wave, sucked his friend Pompeius into the tumult of battle, into the “boiling straits,” and thus Fate decreed his prolonged absence. In Odes 1.7, while Horace lingers on the impression on his poetic mind of “Anio, Albunea and Tiburnus,” he fixes them within the stanza near “swiftly flowing streams,” “a bright south wind” and the sea, which swiftly sweep up all that lies in their path. So too this life is swept up—Horace’s poetry is filled with images of wind and sea and storm—and his advice is to go where fortune takes us: “Drive away your cares with wine. Tomorrow we shall set out again upon the broad sea.”

Horace’s world is fluid, and humans are caught in its rush. His praise is always one of the ages; the voice of tradition is like a strong tree holding Horace solid. From a sturdy trunk, his branches reach far above the turmoil of human concerns into the constellation of the eternal, pinpoints of light. His roots provide anchor for those (s)elect men who can confront their lives with simple acceptance. Praising Maecenas in Odes 3.29, Horace advises,

Make sure you deal calmly
with what is here. Everything else
flows by like a river, now gliding peacefully in mid-channel
down to the Tuscan sea,
now rolling down uprooted trees . . . as the wild spate whips up
its peaceful flow. A man will be happy and in control
of his life if he can say at each day’s end, “I have lived.”

The present should be our concern, only so far as we are truly inhabiting it, with Epicurean flavor. “I praise her while she stays,” says Horace of Fate. When misfortune arrives, Horace claims he will not implore the gods to keep his material possessions above the encompassing mass of a stormy sea. Rather, denouncing such artlessness, Horace knows that Castor and Pollux, his protectors, will guide him safely through the raging elements in his “two oared dinghy.” Praise for Horace is a means of diving into the present—the past, by virtue of being the past, is always safe from Fate’s unpredictability and fancy. Honoring another speaks to the moment of present, which is barricaded from harm by the virtuous history of that individual.

Horace opens the ode by placing Maecena amidst a sensual experience: the taste of wine, the scent of peaking roses, the softness to the touch of oiled hair. In the immediacy of these sensations, he wishes to cherish his friend and his friend’s noble lineage, and he urges Maecenas to forget the anxiety of politics and warfare and the luxury of the city of Rome for the contemplation of these momentary pleasures. But by the end of the poem, he has left his friend behind. The closing stanzas find Horace alone but for the stars. He urges Maecenas, “Tear yourself free.” Horace writes and rewrites that freedom to keep it in his possession, a freedom always approaching, but not entirely here, a freedom that Horace preaches with absolute faith. Horace practices motion away from the present, from the entirety of existence, seeking the energy he needs to make this leap from the fluid images he has gathered in his poems. Only as individuals do we escape death.

In Odes 3.30, Horace claims to have “built a monument” that cannot be undone by wild wind or rain. He needs his poems to be such indelible structures, like the constellations. Horace states with brevity how he has been his own salvation—how his song has been his salvation and he knows that his is a name which will be yoked to the land as long as the land survives. Land belongs to the realm of Nature, long before humans put a name to it and called it their own, and the land survives us. It is in the spinning of that land into our verses, into ourselves, that we wed ourselves to the present moment for eternity. In Odes 4.3, Horace draws his connection to the land: “the waters which flow past fertile Tibur / and thick tresses of forest foliage / will make him [Horace] famous for Aeolian song.” He weds himself to something far more enduring than human life. Horace captures the essence of what it is to be permanent in his poetry, saying, “I shall not wholly die.” The circling of the laurel, in Odes 3.30, and the twining of the “green tendrils” of the vine, in other poems, represent the Greek tradition, which bears him through the waves as a dolphin (a gracefully speaking creature), saving a swimmer from drowning. The vine is also a metaphor for Horace’s mental state interwoven with the country scene. It is the last symbol of his glory and fame, and he is by himself at this essential moment, crowned by the muse. She is the one who awards him with immortality: “When a man / deserves praise, the Muse forbids him to die. / The Muse grants the sky.”

Horace, in Odes 20, calls himself “half-bard half-bird,” leaving the city behind. He has metamorphosed into a swan, let free from the bonds of the earth into flight. The dimensions of Horace’s escape are always a bizarre penetration into spaces where man is normally not invited. His means of harmonizing with the elements is to join in their pace. He propels himself forward and above by praising Augustus’ conquests; his particular birth-blood and his beloved Maecenas are his impetus to soar. Horace’s escape makes the functions that mark death in the world into hollow occurrences—what is worthy of praise is not what remains behind in the material grave and ground, but the fame that accompanies the “self” to the skies. Horace asks, “What exile has ever escaped himself?”

I believe it is the bitterness of this question, coupled with Horace’s desire for the mystical transcendence that he hopes to achieve, that makes his poetry urgent, even in his complacency. He turns away from the mob and the crowd in principle. He carefully cultivates a self that is in tune with the present moment simply by riding the tide of the motion of life at a steady pace. Yet his poems rub against a dissatisfaction when taken in their totality, and this dissatisfaction is what is satisfying to us, the reader. Horace’s self, present at the moment of writing, is yet unsure of what that Fate may bring, though he senses her proximity at every pen stroke. His concept of self is closely tied to an idea of being “the chosen one.” If this is so, it is for the harmony that he exudes in his lifestyle, never straining too harshly against the current of the water of life, which rushes us along and never turns back upon itself. Horace plays gently on his lyre—he does not resist what is given to him. He devotes himself wholly to the singing and writing, and therefore wholly to himself. He finds himself as a man located in time, and writes himself through praise and pastoral images, through wine and indulgence in the moment, into an atemporal space, where his self knows no limit, and no change threatens to steal the security he has garnered in his verse.

References

Horace. 1997. Horace: The Complete Odes and Epodes. Trans. David West. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The Arch of Constantine in Rome.

Photograph by George Kaufman. Used by Persmission.

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