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THE CRAFTSMEN ON THEIR CRAFTS
to judge from the pointed hostility he displays towards grammatici 1 — among
them, it seems, 'the pretty Hermogenes' (i. 10.17—18; cf. 1.4.72) and 'the wellknown
ape whose learning extends only so far as singing Calvus and Catullus'
(1.10.18—19) — Horace had been genuinely nettled by academics' attempts to
laugh off the new satire as inferior to Lucilius', just as, maybe, they saw the
Odes as inferior to the Neoterics. And he falls back on the favour of a few
friends, Varius, Maecenas, Virgil, and some others ('it's their approval I want':
1.10.82) because those who formed literate taste in the schoolroom were
unready to be favourable. Poets after all can hardly welcome being read by the
few, even if, in face of the fact, they make a virtue of it.
This conclusion is reinforced by the observation that a similar defensiveness
underlies the famous letter to Augustus. Unlike Augustus, Horace says, poets
are not appreciated till they are dead. The Greeks had launched out, after their
wars, into a period of inventiveness and experiment, and it is natural that the
Romans, after theirs, 2 should do the same. Yet as far as popular taste goes there
is a stubborn reluctance to approve higher standards; if Plautus was of inferior
quality, the modern theatre is corrupt beyond redemption. We know that
Augustus himself enjoyed the theatre, and we may speculate that he cannot
have agreed with all that Horace says here. But Horace was surely casting his
net wider. He was trying to influence, even to annoy, the philistine Roman
public, whose tastes were formed by having Livius Andronicus and the other
antique classics beaten into them, as they were into Horace, at school: the sort
of people who formed the juries to which Cicero habitually quoted passages
from poetry no more recent than Plautus and Terence, and in front of which he
had to spend most of a speech defending Archias for being, purely and simply,
a modern poet. Horace pleads that the latest generation should not be left out of
account. They are trying to improve on the past, and to introduce new standards
of craftsmanship. And in any case, a point Cicero made about Archias,
poets have their patriotic uses.
Against this background we can also set the most famous of all Horace's
critical pronouncements, the so-called Ars poetica. There is perhaps no hope of
finding in this poem a structure on which all will agree; here, more than elsewhere,
Horace makes transitions of bewildering abruptness or subtlety, circling
around points and reverting to them with no apparent plan. Nor, maybe, does
the structure matter unduly; more important, rather, to decide where the
emphasis should lie.
The celebrated parts of the poem, those that have exercised an almost
accidental but nevertheless profound influence on later theory and practice,
1
In Epist. 1.19.39—41 Horace attributes his lack of popular acclaim to his refusal to 'canvass the
tribes of grammarians' (see also Epist. 2.Z.103).
2
This is, I think, the implication. This may be another Aristotelian view; compare Aristotle's
doctrine on the rise of oratory, used by Cicero in Brut. 45—6 (above, p. 47).
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