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Fact, Imagination, and Memory in Horace: Odes 1.9

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Laurence Catlow
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Extract

Horace's Soracte Ode is a difficult poem. It begins in winter, apparently in the countryside, and concludes with the sketch of an urban incident in summer (or spring). This seeming inconsistency has provoked widely divergent critical comment. E. Fraenkel sums up one approach:

We like the Ode because it contains several passages of great beauty, among them some happy adaptations of Alcaean motifs. But we have to admit that as a whole the poem falls short of the perfection reached by Horace in many of his odes. Its heterogeneous elements have not merged into a harmonious unit. Line 18, nunc et campus et areae and what follows suggest a season wholly different from the severe winter at the beginning. This incongruity cannot be removed by any device of apologetic interpretation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , April 1976 , pp. 74 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1976

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References

NOTES

1. Horace (Oxford 1957), 176–7.

2. Horace and his Lyric Poetry (Cambridge 1945), 129–31.

3. Cf. Shields, M. G., Phoenix 12 (1958), 166–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rudd, N., AJPh 81 (1960), 386–92Google Scholar; Cunningham, M. P., CPh 52 (1957), 98–104.Google ScholarCommager, S. in The Odes of Horace (New Haven and London 1962), 269–74Google Scholar, adopts and modifies the symbolic approach.

4. Reading Horace (Edinburgh 1967), 2–12, esp. 10–12.

5. WS 79 (1966), 365–83. This is the finest treatment of our poem, to which I am frequently indebted.

6. Op. cit. 176.

7. Cf. Alcaeus, Fragments Z 14 LP.

8. Cf. Nisbet, R. G. M. and Hubbard, M., A Commentary on Horace Odes I (Oxford 1970)Google Scholar, ad loc.; ‘It is too often assumed that in spite of the literary allusion Horace's opening scene is drawn primarily from life. Horace is “simply giving local colour” to a Greek theme.’

9. Phoenix 8 (1954), 23 ff.

10. Op. cit. 4–6.

11. Nisbet and Hubbard, ad loc.

12. Cf. Nisbet and Hubbard, ad loc.

13. This is meant to be a tentative suggestion only.

14. Nisbet and Hubbard, ad loc.

15. But cf. Ep. 1. 20. 24–5, where Horace describes himself as grey before his time: ‘corporis exigui praecanum, solibus aptum.’

16. Cf. Pöschl, , op.cit. 374–6.Google Scholar