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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2009
Odes 1.8 takes the form of a series of questions addressed by Horace to Lydia on the subject of her lover Sybaris. Why is she bent on destroying him through love? Why has he abandoned the manly athletic activities at which he was once pre-eminent, but of which he is apparently now frightened? Why is he hiding, as Achilles, disguised as a girl, hid before the Trojan war?
2. The name appears in an inscription: T. Marcius Subaris, a freedman (C.I.L. 6.33273). Greek personal names at Rome are in real life commonly derived from place names, and also from words denoting moral characteristics: cf. Solin, H., Die griechischen Personennamen in Rom (Berlin, 1982), 1. 566–647, 2.782–7Google Scholar. Horace combines both ideas in choosing the traditionally luxurious city of Sybaris as his young Roman's name, characterizing the recent behaviour of one hitherto noted for toughness. Horace is perhaps developing a hint of Terence, who at Ad. 915 has an indulgent guardian castigated as Me Babylo. The name Lydia also suggests luxury, but may be chosen more precisely to suit an ambiguity in virilus cultus (15–16): Lydia changes Sybaris' manly ways as Thetis changed Achilles' male garments – and that is what the Lydian Omphale did to Heracles. For Omphale as Lydia, cf. Prop. 3.11.17–18; for the ambiguity see n. 18 below.
3. For the Augustan background see Taylor, L. R., JRS 14 (1924), 158–61Google Scholar, and Last, H., CAH, 10.462–4Google Scholar. Horace elsewhere gives athletics a Roman colour, e.g. c. 3.7.26; c.3.12.7; c.4.1.39. But in our poem militaris is precise; Horace laments the lack of equestrian skills among young nobles at c.3.24.54–55.
4. Latin Explorations (London, 1963), pp. 137–41Google Scholar, somewhat modified in his edition Horace, The Odes (London, 1985), p. 139Google Scholar. Also responsive to the tone of the description of training and of the Trojan allusion is Dietz, H., Latomus 34 (1975), 746–53Google Scholar; cf. especially 750–1.
5. West, D., Reading Horace (Edinburgh, 1967), p. 122Google Scholar.
6. Several commentators remark that Sybaris' retirement will be short-lived: cf. Kiessling-Heinze, , Horaz, Oden und Epoden ed. 8 (Berlin, 1955) on v. 14Google Scholar; Syndikus, H. P., Die Lyrik des Horaz (Darmstadt, 1972), 1. p. 109Google Scholar; Cairns, F., QUCC 24 (1977), 134–8Google Scholar; Cl. Echinger, and Maurach, G., Ada Classica 27 (1984), 71–82Google Scholar.
7. Bib. 3.13.8.
8. Ach. 1. The story starts with the intuitive foreboding of Thetis as Paris' ship passes over her in the sea (20ff.). At vv.271ff. Achilles refuses to don girl's clothes, but the sight of Deidamia makes him less uncomfortable at the idea of dressing to make her acquaintance better (317ff.).
9. 13.162–71.
10. Philostratus Jun., Imag. 1; Hyginus, , Fab. 96Google Scholar (the motive is the fear of Thetis, though the device of the disguise is due to Lycomedes); the Scholiast on Il. 19.326 has Achilles' father Peleus foresee his son's death and send him for safety to Skyros – the variant of father for mother only reinforces the essential element of parental anxiety. There are, of course, other references to the episodes where the motivation is left unmentioned.
11. Nisbet, R. G. M. and Hubbard, M., A Commentary on Horace Odes 1 (Oxford, 1970), p. 115Google Scholar. In the occurrence of the same phrase filius… Thetidis marinae at c.4.6.6 the access of heroic dignity is very much to the point: Achilles was no match for Apollo despite his pedigree; similar is invicte, mortalis dea natepuer Thetide (ep. 13.12), with a clear contrast between Achilles' divine origin and his mortality. The correct view on our passage is taken by F. Cairns (n. 6), 137.
12. Kiessling-Heinze (n. 6) in the introduction to the poem describe it as ‘a poem of reprimand and admonishment of a young man… disguised as questions addressed to the beloved’. So Commager, S., The Odes of Horace (New Haven, 1962), p. 143Google Scholar; H. Dietz (n. 4), 748.
13. In vv. 3–4 amando could refer to the love felt by either Lydia or Sybaris for the other, and although initially one might take it to be the latter, the ambiguity allows the former meaning to emerge at the end of the poem. Perdere cannot here mean ‘to make die of love’ (cf. Nisbet and Hubbard (n. 11), ad loc.) as this meaning would be intolerably feeble in view of the ensuing catalogue of Sybaris' failures. The prime meaning must be ‘ruin’ in a moral sense, which is unobjectionable even in an erotic context: ‘cur perdis adulescentem nobis? cur amat? cur potat? cur tu his rebus sumptum suggeris?’ (Terence, Ad. 61–63).
14. Critics have been here before, of course, notably Dietz (n. 4), 747 and Cairns (n. 6), 137, but have not, in my view, applied the parallel between Thetis and Lydia to the whole situation properly. Dietz takes Sybaris’ fear of training to be a fact, explicable by a psychological mechanism whereby Lydia's worries infect her lover (749–51): but this, I think, leaves the absence of Sybaris from the poem unexploited, and this factor strongly suggests, as I argue, that the fear must belong to Lydia alone. Cairns thinks the purpose of making Lydia responsible, like Thetis, is to focus censure on her, so as to avoid directly imputing disreputable feelings to Sybaris: this view, I think, treats the love of both women too lightly by ignoring the tragic tone of the myth, for if Horace hopes, as Cairns supposes, that Sybaris will leave Lydia to ‘enter the army of Augustus’, then the analogue would be Achilles going ‘to fight at Troy’. But this last phrase is hopelessly inadequate to express the object of Thetis' fear.
15. Wars are matribus detestata (c. 1.1.24), but, if we need examples, an endangered prince is watched in terror by his fiancee as well as by his mother at c. 3.2.6–12. Lydia is not presumably a prospective wife, but the respectable do not have a complete monopoly of fine feelings. It is too dismissive to ask, with Syndikus (n. 6), p. 107, how an hetaira could feel her conscience pricked by complaints that she is making her lover soft. For firstly, it is far from clear that women such as Lydia, in Horace and in other writers, need to be seen as prostitutes working for profit. Chrysis in Menander's Samia has a permanent relationship with Demea who cannot marry her because she is not an Athenian citizen. It has recently been pointed out by Cameron, A. (Foley, H. P. (ed.), Reflections of Women in Antiquity (New York, 1981), pp. 274–302)Google Scholar that ‘very few of the women described by Asclepiades fit the stereotype of the hetaira’. Simaetha in Theocritus Idyll 2 has a status hard to define but certainly not that of an hetaira. Horace's own Asterie is urged to stay faithful to Gyges, and not be seduced by Enipeus, who, like Sybaris, excells at swimming in the Tiber and at riding on the Campus (c.3.7): cf. c.3.9, c.3.15. And even if she should be seen as in some sense a meretrix, which I do not wish to dispute seriously, it does not follow that Lydia is incapable of generous motives. Menander was famous in later antiquity for presenting at least some hetairas who were ‘decent and responded to love with love’ (αἱ χρηστα κα ντερσαι): Plutarch, Mor. 712c. Habrotonon in Epitrepontes might be an example: cf. v. 985. The love between Philematium and her lover in Plautus' Mostellaria is mutual and survives the end of the play, yet she is a meretrix; Terence's Thais in Eunuchus, and still more so Bacchis in Hecyra, behave well in such a way that they feel entitled to contrast their behaviour with that typical of their class. Though Horace provides no parallels for Lydia in our poem, he may in several odes at least be said to require his readers to take seriously the feelings of women presented sympathetically: e.g. 1.16; 1.17; 1.37 (Cleopatra); 3.12; 4.11; and perhaps 4.13, apart from the odes referred to above.
16. The structure of the ode allows pauses after questions at lines 7, 8, and 12, and at 4 and 6 as well, if we read equitat and temperat, for which see Nisbet and Hubbard (n. 11), ad loc. The series would mark the growing eloquence of Lydia's silence.
17. The sombre mood of the myth seems to me incompatible with the subtle interpretation of Echinger and Maurach (n. 6), 78: the ode is partly a reminder to Sybaris of his duty, partly a warning to Lydia that she will lose her lover shortly when he returns, as he must, to his proper course, and partly a hint to Lydia that Horace will still be available when Sybaris has gone. However, it seems to me that Sybaris is not merely a ‘sporting hero’ but a trainee soldier, and this, together with the colouring of the Trojan reference, makes it impossible to describe the comparison of Sybaris with Achilles as ‘a cheerful note on which to close after the agitation of strophes 1–3’.
18. Kiessling-Heinze (n. 6), ad loc, see both meanings applying to Achilles; Quinn, , Horace, The Odes, p. 139Google Scholar suggests that the second sense, that of ‘behaving like a man’, provides the parallel for Sybaris.