getting started with Horace

Latin Learning Latin
1

Horace, Odes, Book 1, no. 6

I comment on the 3rd stanza, which follows two stanzas in which Horace explains that his poetic muse does not reach to large-scale epic grandeur. This is why, says Horace, some other dude has sung the recent exploits of Agrippa. I’ll do the grammar first, because that’s where I had the most trouble. After that I’ll hazard a translation.

. . . tenues grandia, dum pudor
inbellisque lyrae Musa potens vetat
laudes egregii Caesaris et tuas
culpa deterere ingeni.

tenues grandia: grandia, neut. pl., used substantively, in apposition with earlier nos, “we”, i.e. Horace. The idea is something like “insufficient greatness”.

pudor . . . vetat: “modesty . . . forbids”.

inbellisque . . . Musa potens: “a peaceful . . . and mighty Muse”, in apposition with pudor. “modesty, a peaceful but powerful muse”.

lyrae: dative singular, indirect object of vetat. The lyre here is a metaphor for Horace, who writes verses fitting to his own powers.

laudes egregi Caesaris et tuas: this phrase is the direct object of deterere in the next line.

culpa deterere ingeni. “by fault of genius to wear away the praises of great Caesar and yours (i.e. Agrippa’s)”

Attempted translation:

So slender my powers! Due modesty
(A mighty but a peaceful muse)
Won’t let my defect of genius
Rub away the praises of Great Caesar, or Yours.

I think Horace deploys pretended modesty in the interest of self-praise, and means to flatter the readers who catch this, so that such readers will think themselves clever fellows, worthy readers for a worthy poet.

2

[non] conamur tenues grandia

This means something like “we do not attempt large-scale themes (such as those mentioned in the previous stanzas) because our skill lies in short, refined lyric poems”. All of that is implicit in tenues. The juxtaposition tenues grandia is characteristic of Horace. This isn’t really modesty–it’s an announcement of the poet’s allegiance to the anti-epic aesthetic shared by the Augustan poets who came of age in the middle of the first century, the so-called neoterici, including Vergil in the phase of his career in which he wrote the Bucolics. Eclogue 6.3-5:

Cum canerem reges et proelia, Cynthius aurem
vellit, et admonuit: “Pastorem, Tityre, pinguis
pascere oportet ovis, deductum dicere carmen.”

When I started writing about kings and battles, Apollo tweaked my ear and admonished me: "A shepherd should graze fat sheep and sing a slender song.

Other poets expressed the same sentiment. The Civil Wars raging in the 40s and 30s may have had something to do with this stance, but ultimately it derives from Hellenistic poets, especially Callimachus, who rejected epic in favor of shorter poems, and whose aesthetic was embraced by poets of Horace’s generation, or at least by those whose works have survived (apart from Vergil).

In the generation following Vergil, Horace, Tibullus and Propertius, Ovid, at the beginning of his Amores, develops this theme playfully–it’s Cupid who insists that the poet should abandon epic subjects in hexameters and devote himself to erotic elegy. Ovid is parodying the posture of his illustrious predecessors.

inbellisque lyrae Musa potens – imbellis means unwarlike–she’s a Muse who doesn’t inspire epic poems about wars. But she’s powerful: _imbelli_s and potens are joined in an oxymoron.

lyrae the lyre stands for lyric poetry.

3

Thanks for the erudite reply, Qimmik, especially the literary-history context.

4

The (somewhat disingeuous) disavowal of poetic skill needed to write an epic or long poem: the word for this is recusatio. Here are some on-line references:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recusatio

This gives citations to Horace, Vergil and Propertius, but the rest is behind a paywall:

http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/brill-s-new-pauly/recusatio-e1019700?s.num=75&s.start=60

lyrae probably depends on potens – “wielding power over the lyre”. Veto generally takes an accusative complement–me is understood.

Lewis & Short veto:

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.20:725.lewisandshort

5

Recusatio: very helpful. I was confident that something more than artless self deprecation was involved.

lyrae: I see your point here. I take it that veto is not used with dative of the person vetoed, and the infinitive of the action not to be performed. I could not find an example of this, but resorted to it because I couldn’t think of any other reading.

6

I hope you’re paying some attention to Horace’s meters. Most editions usually print the metrical patterns, and you might try marking the long and short syllables based on the pattern shown in whatever edition you’re using for the first stanza or two and then try working out the following stanzas for yourself. This pattern is based on choriambs (long short short long)–there are two in each of the first three verses and one in the last. There is a strong caesura between the two choriambs of the first three verses–this is a very important element of the pattern.

If my memory is correct, these stanzas are referred to as the “second Asclepiadean” stanza. The first three lines are “lesser asclepiadeans” (a “greater asclepiadean” has three choriambs). The last line is a “glyconic.” These meters are Latin transformations of the “Aeolic” Greek meters used by Sappho and Alcaeus. Catullus was the first Roman poet to experiment with Aeolic meters, but Horace brought these to a high level of perfection.

7

I hear you on metrics Qimmik, but for the time being I have to read Latin verse with little attention to metrics, if I’m to read verse at all. It’s just too daunting to learn in the abstract, from printed rules, without a human guide actually present.

So, I’m not resisting your message, I’m just powerless to carry it out.

8

Are you reading Horace from a book? If so, it should show the patterns–better than a human guide. You can apply them to the text easily enough.

9

I’m reading the Loeb Horace. There’s information in the introduction concerning the metrics, but the text itself looks exactly like the text in perseus: just characters and spaces. One has to know for sure which syllables are long by nature, and which are long by position, and so on.

10

Unlike the hexameter, the Aeolic meters are generally isosyllabic–no confusing substitution of two shorts for a long. So all you need to do is follow the pattern in marking the lines. You don’t even need to know which syllables are long by nature, long by position or short. The patterns will tell you.

You can find the metrical patterns on-line here (if they aren’t shown in your Loeb–the new Loeb shows them):

http://www2.cnr.edu/home/araia/Horace_meters.pdf

Once you get the rhythm down, you won’t need to refer to the metrical schemes on-line or in the book.

The stanzas in 1.6 are: three lesser Asclepiadeans followed by a Glyconic.

11

That’s very helpful Qimmik. I didn’t know about the difference between Horace’s metrical patterns and the ones in the hexameters.

My Loeb has the patterns designated in the introduction.