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Rescuing Horace, Pyrrha and Aphra Behn: A Directive
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014
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The question before us at the turn of both century and millennium is how one determines whether Horace is a dangerous love-poet (unrecognised because we read badly). Or a panderer, playing to our delight in the comedy of manners. Or a serious analyst of communication between the sexes—even a prophet for our time. The choice varies from villain to vates, the extremes reminding us how certainly the past exists, as Robert Frost laments in ‘Directive’: ‘Back in a time made simple by the loss/Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off,/Like a graveyard marble sculpture in the weather.’
Recently, a Classical scholar, writing about what she termed ‘Horace's detachment as a love poet’, asserted that his readers ‘remain trapped, perhaps by necessity, in male assumptions about desire that they are unable to question.’ She believes that there is a ‘disturbing picture of love and desire’ which critics have missed because we read, almost all of us, with half-closed eyes, ignoring ‘erotic subterfuge’ in the love-odes. We overlook, she insists, ‘the overpowering desire’ of the male ‘poet/lover’ because, in ‘unacknowledged identification’ with Horace, we put on Horatian eyes. This charge raises disquieting questions about distinctions between speaker and poet, persona and historical figure, art and life.
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References
1. This article grows from a paper delivered at the Inaugural Meeting of the Society for the Classical Tradition, March 1991, Boston University, and reflects ideas from a shorter paper on Behn’s ‘In Imitation of Horace’ given to the Classical Association of the Canadian West in February 1988.
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34. On the fashionable ‘new sexual freedom’ exercised by her Restoration circle, see Goreau (n.8 above), 163–206, esp. 203–6. Sackville-West, Victoria, Aphra Behn: The Incomparable Astrea (London 1927)Google Scholar, cites a ‘contemporary commonplace book’:‘ “Mr. Hoyle was an atheist, a sodomite professed, a corrupter of youth, and a blasphemer of Christ”’(52); no longer in love with him, Behn sent Hoyle a letter admonishing him to reform, including in it a copy of ‘The Disappointment’ entitled there (ibid. 53) ‘An Imperfect Enjoyment’.
35. Summers (n.10 above), vi.363.
36. Cf. Horace, Odes 1.22.20; Caesar, B.C. 2.25 and 26; Cicero, Q.Fr. 3.9.1.
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41. Moers, Ellen, Literary Women (New York 1977), 257–259Google Scholar, raises the question of ‘a female landscape equivalent for “phallic symbol”’, rejecting Mons Veneris and suggesting ‘light delicate foliage … in horizontal layers … a strange appearance as if the whole wood were faintly vibrating’ in Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, and similar scenery in Willa Cather.