Horace Odes I.24

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Scribo
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Horace Odes I.24

Post by Scribo »

What do you guys think of this? I'm reading through the odes because, naturally I hate myself. I've read this twice now and I'm still not sure if I actually like it? (though I like the asclepiads).

It is a consolatio on the death of one Quintillius. I have no idea who that is, is it the same guy mentioned in the AP? Maybe, but it seems like a common enough name. I decided to pay attention to it since it's addressed to Virgil (nulli flebior quam tibi Vergili).

It seems very, very, formal, in the sense that it's almost written to type. I guess this would be a great example of how form, occasion, tradition, and innovation meet in the hands of a master.

I managed to skip Horace outside of the Epistles, Satires, and the AP as a student and feel I owe him my time but god these odes are making it hard.
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Re: Horace Odes I.24

Post by donhamiltontx »

Mary Beard speaks to the difficulties of Horace when responding why even an Oxford (Cambridge?) don can't just sight read any old thing in Latin. If you want a source for this, beats me :oops: , but has to be in one of her better known essays.
I'm reading through some of Horace's odes myself, but I can't help you with 1.24 cause I'm not there yet. If it helps, and I'm sure it doesn't, 1.4 is one of my favorite poems of all time in any language. But not going to hijack your thread with that. Good luck. :)

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Re: Horace Odes I.24

Post by mwh »

Funny, my experience was just the opposite. I always loved the Odes, but I struggled with the hexameter stuff and still do. At least it’s not Persius.

“I am the very model of a modern consolatio.” As you say, it’s very formal. Nothing wrong with that, but I find the slick moralizing weak and off-putting. And the repeat of pudor is horrid.
But ergo Quintilium perpetuus sopor | urget is perfect.
I’m not sure what I think of the closing durum/levius opposition.

Quintilius has traditionally been taken to be the Varus of 1.18, linked by the AP, but there’s little reason to believe it.

There's a great by-the-numbers consolatio in Callimachus' Hymn 5, Athena “consoling” a mother devastated by the goddess’s blinding of her son by telling her how very lucky she is.

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Re: Horace Odes I.24

Post by Scribo »

donhamiltontx wrote: Mon Aug 26, 2019 5:19 pmIf it helps, and I'm sure it doesn't, 1.4 is one of my favorite poems of all time in any language. But not going to hijack your thread with that. Good luck. :)
Feel free! Happy to expand thread to the entirety of the odes or even Horace more generally, I just refrained in initio since I find these threads work better with finite beginnings and I certainly don't feel up to discussing them all right yet.

If it makes you feel better, I am not sight reading them (yet) either, but using a student commentary (Nisbett and Hubbard).

mwh wrote: Mon Aug 26, 2019 6:42 pm Funny, my experience was just the opposite. I always loved the Odes, but I struggled with the hexameter stuff and still do. At least it’s not Persius.

“I am the very model of a modern consolatio.” As you say, it’s very formal. Nothing wrong with that, but I find the slick moralizing weak and off-putting. And the repeat of pudor is horrid.
But ergo Quintilium perpetuus sopor | urget is perfect.
I’m not sure what I think of the closing durum/levius opposition.

Quintilius has traditionally been taken to be the Varus of 1.18, linked by the AP, but there’s little reason to believe it.

There's a great by-the-numbers consolatio in Callimachus' Hymn 5, Athena “consoling” a mother devastated by the goddess’s blinding of her son by telling her how very lucky she is.
I swear I am not being contrarian for the sake of it, but I rather remembering liking Persius. At least the first satire. I think the second iirc devolves into stoic philosophical wrangling and I stopped caring. Read him as part of a Satire course where we were encouraged to read from Lucillius to Julian. Predictably, Juvenal stole the day...I can still reel of waaaay too many of his hexameters.

I'm glad I'm not the only one annoyed by that use of pudor! The first usage threw me for a second. I do think that line is made wonderful by use of ergo.

durum..levius could be a great apposition, I mean its clearly one much aped by modern poets, but the line somehow strikes me as banal and bland: Durum: sed levius fit patientia/ quidquid corrigere est nefas. I mean...ok? Seems very luke warm to a friend who seems to genuinely be suffering?

I feel as if I must continue. I am a philistine when it comes to Latin poetry (I love Catullus, Juvenal, and the Aeneid....I dislike Ovid outside of the Fasti etc etc).
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donhamiltontx
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Re: Horace Odes I.24

Post by donhamiltontx »

Okay, here I go. Fools rush in and all that.
I can see the use of "pudor" because it at least fits in with three strands of repeated sounds in the first stanza.
(1) the p's of pudor capitis Praecipe Melpomene pater (maybe also the b of lugubris?)
(2) the d's of desiderio pudor modus in the first line tying in with dedit of the last line of the stanza.
(3) and the most important of these, the c/q's of
Quis cari capitis Praecipe cantus cui liquidam vocem cum cithara,
which sound ties into the subject of the piece in the second stanza's
Ergo Quintilium (and + the p of perpetuus sopor Pudor and parem)

This use of language is one of the factors that makes me like 1.4 so much.
The sound of the lame heavy-footed Vulcan, "gravis Cyclopum Volcanus" (ll 7-8),
and especially the foot-pounding of
"Pallida Mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas" (l 7)

Some one or some book showed me this about 1.4 so long ago that I have no idea what or who it was, but at least the lesson stuck for 1.24. Unrelated is the fact that it makes me at least remember the porter scene in Macbeth.

Now back to 1.24:
I understand but do not follow "creditum . . . Quintilium" in ll 11-12. In what sense has Virgil made a loan of Quintilius?
In line 14, how are the trees hearing the lyre (or whatever the musical instrument is)?
"auditam moderere arboribus fidem? " I do understand it is figurative, but why trees?

I also looked at Callimachus Hymn 5, which mwh mentioned, and I thank you for that, mwh, but it's a another kettle of fish for me, but will get to it. Suggestions like this from the senior members, or perhaps I should say merely the seasoned members, are invaluable. Finally, I confess to getting help from a translation for 1.24. :oops:

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Re: Horace Odes I.24

Post by Aetos »

donhamiltontx wrote: Tue Aug 27, 2019 4:57 pm In line 14, how are the trees hearing the lyre (or whatever the musical instrument is)?
"auditam moderere arboribus fidem? " I do understand it is figurative, but why trees?
Because when Orpheus played the lyre, even stones, trees, and animals were moved by it.
Virgil mentions his skill in Georgics, Book 4, line 510:
mulcentem tigres et agentem carmine quercus;
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/tex ... card%3D494
Ovid in Book 10 of the Metamorpheses has a great deal to say of his singing (virtually the whole book!)
http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Meta ... #484521421

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Re: Horace Odes I.24

Post by donhamiltontx »

Thanks, Aetos. I don't know my Georgices or my Metamorphoses very well, so the line from the Georgics fits in nicely here.

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Re: Horace Odes I.24

Post by Hylander »

Just to put in my two cents/tuppence worth.

I love Horace's metrical mastery and his concision -- his ability to pack in a lot of meaning into just a few words and, in the Odes, short verses, using the resources of Latin poetry: the choice and artful collocation of words. Some of his short poems are as near-perfect as any poem can be (Persicos odi) and I love the way his longer odes unfold from stanza to stanza (like Pindar).

I detest his fascist (i.e., Augustan) politics and his commonplace and uncritical ideology (dulce et decorum). I detest his fawning on the rich and powerful, which I find dripping with transparent insincerity.

Several years ago, I read through the Satires and the Epodes. It wasn't a happy or uplifting experience. The Epodes, in particular, are just plain nasty. I can admire their artistry and their Archilochean vitriol, to be sure, but they really put me off.
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Re: Horace Odes I.24

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https://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.c ... ester.html
The Emperor's Chubby Court-Jester

Theodore Ziolkowski, "Uses and Abuses of Horace: His Reception since 1935 in Germany and Anglo-America," International Journal of the Classical Tradition 12.2 (Fall, 2005) 183-215 (at 184-185):
This was the culture that also produced Wilfred Owen's virulent antiwar poem, "Dulce Et Decorum Est" (1917), which takes as its title and subtext the familiar lines from Horace's Second Roman Ode (3.2.13) proclaiming the sweet propriety of death for one's country—a sentiment that Owen calls "The old Lie."7 Two years earlier, required to write a school essay on the same passage, the seventeen-year-old Bertolt Brecht ridiculed "the emperor's chubby court-jester" ("des Imperators feister Hofnarr") who had run away at Philippi, and slighted his poem as "applied propaganda" ("Zweckpropaganda").8 And in the opening section of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)—"Ode pour l'élection de son sepulchre iv"—Ezra Pound denounced war, lamenting those who, misled by spurious motives, die "pro patria, / non 'dulce' non 'et decor'" (sic).9

7. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. C. Day Lewis (London: Chatto and Windus, 1963), 55.

8. O. Müllereisert, "Augsburger Anekdoten um Bert Brecht," in Erinnerungen an Brecht, zusammengestellt von H. Witt (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam jun., 1964), 18; cited here by Peter Witzmann, "Bertolt Brecht, Beim Lesen des Horaz," Das Altertum 14 (1968): 55-64.

9. As recently as 1957/58, students at the University of Munich demanded (successfully!) that the same quotation be removed from a decorative window in the main hall of the university. See Werner Suerbaum, Q. Horatii Flacci Disiecti Membra Poetae (University of Munich, 1993), Beiheft 1:24. For further examples see Martin M. Winkler, "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori? Classical Literature in the War Film," International Journal of the Classical Tradition 7 (2000): 177-214.
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

Joel Eidsath -- jeidsath@gmail.com

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