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HORACE
poet's imagination moves through Hades it comes to rest on the daughters of .
Danaus. These girls had rejected marriage in the most violent way by murdering
their bridegrooms, and are now paying the penalty by filling a leaky barrel.
Here is a story Lyde ought to hear; so Horace tells it, very economically,ending
with the words of the noble Hypermnestra who alone deceived her father
(splendide mendax) and allowed her husband to escape. Although the ode may
be in some way related to an actual situation, Lyde should not on that account
receive too much attention. It is equally wrong, however, to assert that she is
there simply to introduce the story of Hypermnestra. The two girls come from
different poetic neighbourhoods. It was Horace's clever idea to bring them
together and let them interact.
Another hymn begins with a solemn address to a deity, recalling the circumstances
of her birth and the various ways in which she controls the life of
men. Horace then begs her to come down and join her devotees; he rehearses
the numerous blessings she confers, and promises that she will be the centre
of a joyful celebration. The diction is reverent and ceremonious, but it is also
shot through with double meanings, because the deity in question is a wine-jar.
The whole piece (3.21) is a delightful parody of a cleric hymn. 1
High and low are brought together for a rather different purpose towards
the end of Epist. a.i. Horace is addressing the Emperor: poets, he says, like
artists and sculptors, can commemorate a ruler by portraying his achievements;
Virgil and Varius have performed this service for you. I too, instead of composing
' conversation-pieces that crawl on the ground' (sermones. . . repentis
per humurri), would prefer 'to tell of your exploits, of distant lands and rivers,
of castles on mountain-tops, and barbaric kingdoms, of warfare concluded
under your inspired leadership throughout the world, of the bars that enclose
Janus the guardian of peace, and of the terror brought to the Parthians by your
imperial Rome'. Hardly a specimen of the low style. Horace then continues:
'. . .if only my desires were matched by my abilities. But a small poem is not
appropriate to your exalted state, and I in my diffidence am not so rash as to
attempt a task too heavy for my strength.' Thus, with a neat manoeuvre, the
poet is back again on his usual level.
The most interesting example of recusatio (a refusal to write a more ambitious
type of poem) is found in the first half of Odes 4.2. There Horace states in the
sapphic metre that he cannot hope to write a Pindaric ode; he fashions his poems
in the painstaking manner of a bee; not for him the swan's flight or the rushing
torrent of Pindar's eloquence. But as that great periodic sentence sweeps
through five stanzas displacing caesuras and submerging line-divisions, and as
Pindar's lyric forms come past us one by one from dithyramb to dirge, celebrating
gods, heroes, and men, we become aware that Horace has achieved some-
1
I.e. a hymn in which the god is called on to appear: see Norden (1913) I43ff.
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