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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014
As Catullus and Horace are invariably thought to be Rome's two supreme lyric poets, it is cause for some comment that, in all his writings, Horace mentions his predecessor only once, and then in an indirect and, to all appearances, uncomplimentary aside. In the tenth satire in the first book, recommending that those who would write well first immerse themselves in the literature of the past, Horace refers with plain contempt to a contemporary litterateur as ‘that ape who was clever at reciting nothing but Calvus and Catullus’:
simius iste
nil praeter Calvum et doctus cantare Catullum.
(Satires I.10.18-19)
How are we to explain this startling passage? We can say, with some older writers, that Horace is singling out for criticism only insensitive imitators of Catullus and Calvus; about Catullus himself he says nothing and, in the context, need say nothing. But more recent writers on the passage feel that it bears an at least implied criticism of Catullus and Calvus and the rest of the neoterics. Reasons why Horace need not have liked them are not hard to seek. The earlier poets paraded their learning (while Horace, in the ninth satire, tries to avoid a bore who is similarly doctus). They were ready to improvise in any meter (while Horace, in the Ars Poetica, insists the meter must fit the theme). They were handy with purple patches (and the two panni Horace objects to — Diana's altar smoking and a rainbow on the Rhine — sound like references to poems by neoterics Valerius Cato and Furius Bibaculus). Above all, they chose for lyric models the blasé Alexandrians (when they might have striven, as Horace did, to equal the much older, fresher, and more accomplished Aeolians, most especially Alcaeus and Sappho).
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2. Otis, Brooks, ‘Horace and the Elegists’, TAPA 26 (1945), 177–90Google Scholar; Fergusson, John, ‘Catullus and Horace’, AJP 77 (1956), 1–18Google Scholar; and Rudd, Niall, The Satires of Horace (Cambridge, 1966), 118–23Google Scholar.
3. See Ferguson, op. cit., 2–3, for this inference.
4. A Commentary on Horace: Odes Book I (Oxford, 1970Google Scholar).
5. Op. cit. (above, note 1).
6. Op. cit. (above, note 2).
7. Horace (Oxford, 1957), 213Google ScholarPubMed.
8. See Mendell, C. W., Latin Poetry: the New Poets and the Augustans (New Haven and London, 1965), 134–7Google Scholar.
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10. See Süddeutsche Monatshefte 28 (1930), 45Google Scholar.
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12. Op. cit., 184–8.
13. Fergusson, op. cit., 9.
14. ‘Integer Vitae’, CJ 5 (1910), 250–8Google Scholar. Some of Hendrickson’s views were challenged, not too seriously I think, by Shorey, Paul in ‘Integer Vitae Once More’, CJ 5 (1910), 317–21Google Scholar.
15. This view is advanced by Haywood, Richard M. in ‘Integer Vitae and Propertius’, CJ 37 (1941), 28–32Google Scholar.
16. Nietzche, in Götzendämmerung (1888), 175fGoogle Scholar., and Murray, in The Classical Tradition in Poetry (Harvard, 1927, rep. 1957), 149–50Google Scholar.
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18. See various publications by Franz Cumont, esp. Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans (New York, 1912Google Scholar).
19. In the parodos of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the men attempt to storm the acropolis and its temple of the virgin by using fire, and are routed by the women, who douse them with streams of water.
20. See ‘Marginalia: Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen’, Philologus 60 (1901), 2Google Scholar.
21. See Nisbet’s, R. G. M. chapter on Horace in Critical Essays on Roman Literature: Elegy and Lyric, ed. J. P. Sullivan (London, 1962), 183Google Scholar. Nisbet again advocates Zielinski’s, emendation in A Commentary on Horace (above, note 4), 79–80Google Scholar.
22. See Latin Explorations (London, 1963), 194Google ScholarPubMed, fn. 2. The volume also contains an illuminating section on Horace’s attitude stowards elegy: 130–66. Quinn’s, essay ‘Horace as a Love Poet’, Arion vol. 2, no. 3 (1963), 59–77Google Scholar, is an extension of these ideas with special reference to the Pyrrha ode.
23. On this point Williams, Gordon has written an incisive essay, ‘Truth and Sincerity’, in Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry (Oxford, 1968Google Scholar).
