GARLANDS AND KNOTS

This essay explores some of the aesthetic and erotic effects produced by hair as a closural motif in Horace's poetry. In taking up this somewhat recherché topic, I take encouragement from the fact that Horace chose to make ‘hair’ the last word of his collected Odes 1–3 (comam, 3.30.16, revising the ‘crown’ of Horace's head, uertice, from the end of 1.1). The closural appeal of hair is no doubt connected with the ultimacy of its position at the body's edge and top. And yet there is also something inconclusive or even anticlosural about this substance. In the Ars poetica, Horace faults the maker of bronzes who knows how to represent ‘fingernails’ (unguis, 32) and ‘soft hair’ (mollis … capillos, 33) but not how to fashion a whole (ponere totum, 34). Though the main antithesis here is between part and whole, decorative detail and encompassing design, Horace's pairing of hair with fingernails is instructive. Like the nails, hair is a peculiar thing: not exactly part of the body, but a detachable extension of it; essentially lifeless, nerveless and insentient, but also curiously alive in its ability to continue growing after the body's death. At the margins of the body, hair blurs the difference between subject and object, life and death. It may have a similar effect in the final line of Horace's collected Odes, in a poem so much taken up with the question of the poet's afterlife.