The works of Horace : with English notes, critical and ... - Cristo Raul

Xl LIFE OF HOKACB. '>
By a careful examination of each ode, -witli a fine critical peroeptiou,
and some kindred congeniality with a poetic mind, much might perhaps
be done to separate the real from the imitative, the original
from the translated or transfused. This would, at least, be a more
hopeful and rational work of criticism than the attempt to date every
piece from some vague and uncertain allusion to a contemporar)
event. Some few indeed, but very few, bear their distinct and undeniable
date, as the ode on the death of Cleopatra (Carra. i., 37).^
According to the rigid chronology of Bentley, this poem must
have been the first, or nearly the first, attempt of Horace to write
lyric poetry. But it is far more probable that the books of odes contain
poems written at very different periods in the life of Horace,
finished up for publication on the separate or simultaneous appearance
of the first three books. Even if written about the same time,
they are by no means disposed in chronological order. The arrangement
seems to have been arbitrary, or, rather, to have been made
not without regard to variety of subject, and, in some respects, of
metre. In the first book, the first nine and the eleventh might seem
placed in order to show the facility with which the poet could command
every metrical variety, the skill with which, in his own words,
he could adapt the Grecian lyric numbers to Latin poetry. The
tenth, the Sapphic ode to Mercury, is the first repetition. There is,
likewise, a remarkable kind of moral order in the arrangement of
these odes. The first is a dedicatory address to his friend and patron
Mascenas, the object of his earliest and of his latest song. The second
is addressed to the emperor, by his new title, Augustus. The
third relates to his dear friend and brotlier poet, Virgil ; then comes
the solemn moral strain to Sestius, followed by perhaps the most
finished of his love songs, to Pyrrha. Throughout the whole book,
or, rather, the whole collection of odes, there seems this careful
study of contrast and variety; the religious hymn to the god of
mercurial mon is succeeded by the serious advice to Leuconoe.
The just estimate of Horace, as a lyric poet, may be more closely
his MythologuB, and translated in the Philologiqal Museum, vol. i., p. 439, segg.
Buttmaim carries out to the extreme his theory, that most of the love-lyrics are
translations or imitations &om the Greek, or poems altogether ideal, and without
any real ground-work.
1. Within a few years there have been five complete chronologies of the whole
works of Horace, which pretend to assign the true year to the composition of every
one of his poems : I. Kirschner, QuEestiones Horataanee, Leipzig, 1834. 11, Franke
Fasti Horatiani, Berlin, 1839. III. Histoire de la vie et des FoSsies de Horace, par
M. le Baron Walckenaer, 2 vols., Paris, 1840 ; a pleasing romance on the life and
times of Horace. IV. Quintus Horatius Flaccus, als Mensch und Dichter von
T). W. E. Weber, Jena, 1844. V. Grotefend. The article Horatius in Ersch -and
Gniber's Encyclopaedie. Besides these, there are, among later writers, the lives
of Horace by Passow and by Zumpt; the notes in the French ti-anslatioTi of ihe
odes by M. Vanderbourg ; the notes of Heindorf on the satires ; and o' Bchmid
on the epistlHfl The Irreconcilable discrepancies among all these ingenious authors
show thu futility 3f the attempt; almost every one begins by admitting th*
impoBsibility of success, and then proceeds to &ame a new scheme.