SOURCE: “The Horatian Ode” in Horace & His Lyric Poetry, The University Press, 1951, pp. 123-49.

Perhaps it will be best to clear the way for the study of what Horatian lyric is by recollecting what it is not. In the first place, it is rarely ‘lyrical’, being the product of meditation rather than immediate emotion. There are, of course, exceptions, in tone if not in inspiration—I, 19 (Mater saeua Cupidinum), I, 26 (Musis amicus) and IV, 3 (Quem tu, Melpomene), for instance—but they are not many.¹ Though Horace himself constantly speaks of his lyre and the Latin word ‘ode’ had not then been invented, the longer pieces are nearer in feeling to what we call ‘odes’ (our associations with the word being no doubt coloured by his work) than to what we call ‘lyrics’, while the shorter pieces are sometimes akin to hymns, sometimes to Miltonic sonnets.² And the fact that many of the poems are addressed to an individual gives them a hortatory turn which is alien to the free self-expression of lyric. It takes two to make a normal Horatian ode.

Again, the Horatian lyric is rarely suggestive or imaginative. The Roman mind was practical, not visionary, and Roman poetry, however intense the feeling that inspires it, is normally that of statement, not of suggestion.³

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
                    Nescio, sed fieri sentio, et excrucior.

That is simple, even colloquial, statement; but it is also poetry.⁴ In the poetry of Horace it is only very occasionally that the words suggest more than the literal meaning. There are glimpses, but only a few, that go beyond the picturesque:

Nuper in pratis studiosa florum et
debitae Nymphis opifex coronae
nocte sublustri nihil astra praeter
                    uidit et undas.(5)

Here and there an image, even a personification, may suddenly come to life:

Contracta pisces aequora sentiunt
iactis in altum molibus: huc frequens
                    caementa demittit redemptor
                                        cum famulis dominusque terrae
Fastidiosus: sed Timor et Minae
scandunt eodem quo dominus, neque
                    decedit aerata triremi et
                                        post equitem sedet atra Cura.(6)

What is no more than vivid fancy in the first stanza merges in the second into real imagination. We feel in this case that the poet visualised what he wrote. But his personifications have not always this quality:

Virtus recludens immeritis mori
caelum negata temptat iter uia.(7)

In the first line here Virtue seems to be a goddess opening the gates of heaven for her devotee, while in the second she represents the man of virtue entering them; the image is confused and unreal.

Metaphor too, which springs from the imagination, plays no great part in Roman poetry. The orators and critics, both Greek and Roman, were very severe in this respect, and their asceticism may have affected poetry.⁸ We must remember, however, that metaphors which seem tame to us, with our increased nimbleness of association, may have been exciting to them. Macrobius praises Virgil for examples we should hardly notice, such as ‘aquae mons’ and ‘ferreus imber’.⁹ In a well-known passage of the Epistle to the Pisos (46 ff.) Horace gives this advice:

In uerbis etiam tenuis cautusque serendis
dixeris egregie, notum si callida uerbum
reddiderit iunctura nouum.(10)

And he repeats it at line 240 ff., adding,

                                                            tantum series iuncturaque pollet,
tantum de medio sumptis accedit honoris!(11)

What was meant by ‘making a word new’? There is a passage in the treatise on rhetoric Ad Herennium which throws some light on this (IV, 42). The author quotes a sentence: ‘Postquam iste in rem publicam impetum fecit, fragor ciuitatis ruentis est auditus.’¹² ‘Fragor’ becomes a metaphor by being applied to ‘ciuitatis’, and it is referred to as nouum uerbum. So that those have been on the right track who have held that iunctura includes ‘metaphor-making’. It means the use of old words in such a context that they acquire a new aura of associations.

It might be said that in these passages Horace was only once more repeating the words of a Hellenistic writer. But even to-day we can detect phrases in his poems, such as diuites insulae at Epode XVI, 42,¹³ which illustrate this callida iunctura. And there is a remarkable piece of contemporary evidence which bears on the subject, a saying of Agrippa recorded in Donatus' Life of Virgil (180): ‘Marcus Vipsanius said that Virgil was suborned by Maecenas to introduce a new kind of affectation ..., neither turgid nor plain, but consisting of ordinary words, and therefore unnoticed.’ Marx has illustrated what Agrippa must have meant with regard to Virgil's diction, and shown how he might have included Horace as well.¹⁴ There must be many cases in which we fail to detect what sounded ‘new’ to an Augustan: more than we can recapture lies behind Quintilian's ‘uerbis felicissime audax’.

An element of suggestion is also introduced by the Augustan quasi-allegory to which I have already referred (p. 69), and in one particular trait which occurs several times in his lyrics and which deserves special attention, the depicting of natural phenomena as symbolic of human experience. This has become so common a feature of modern literature that there is a danger of our projecting it into ancient when it was not intended to be there;¹⁵ but as there are some cases in Horace which are generally acknowledged, there is no ground for initial scepticism. Take the opening stanzas of Odes II, 9:

Non semper imbres nubibus hispidos
manant in agros aut mare Caspium
                    uexant inaequales procellae
                                        usque, nec Armeniis in oris,
Amice Valgi, stat glacies iners
menses per omnes, aut Aquilonibus
                    querceta Gargani laborant
                                        et foliis uiduantur orni:
Tu semper urges flebilibus modis
Mysten ademptum.(16)

As Page remarks: ‘Throughout these two stanzas Horace selects illustrations from nature which admirably fall in with the idea of grief: “rain”, “disorder”, “storms”, “lifelessness”, “winds”, “groans”, “desolation”.’ Epode XIII provides another example. The poet exhorts his friends to drink because there is bad weather outside:

Horrida tempestas caelum contraxit, et imbres
                    niuesque deducunt Iouem; nunc mare, nunc siluae
Threicio Aquilone sonant. Rapiamus, amici,
                    occasionem de die … (17)

The simple idea is found in Anacreon (fr. 6 D). But the tone of what follows is unusually serious; lines 7-8,

Cetera mitte loqui; deus haec fortasse benigna
                    reducet in sedem uice,(18)

and the dirae sollicitudines of line 10 suggest something more than the sad reflections on human life which are the commonplaces of such poems. This epode is far from Archilochus and very near to Odes 1, 7 and 9, and is therefore to be placed among the latest. In that case it will belong to the late thirties, and the storm may be intended to suggest the political storm which blew up in 33-32 and burst at Actium.¹⁹

A less conventional example occurs, I think, in Odes 11, 3. The theme here is the familiar one, ‘We must all die, so enjoy life while you may’. After suggesting drinking in remoto gramine as a suitable occupation the poet continues (l. 9):

Quo pinus ingens albaque populus
umbram hospitalem consociare amant
                    ramis? Quid obliquo laborat
                                        lympha fugax trepidare riuo?
Huc uina et unguenta et nimium breues
flores amoenae ferre iube rosae
                    dum res et aetas et sororum
                                        fila trium patiuntur atra.(20)

On nimium breues Page again remarks: ‘Notice the pathos of the epithet thus introduced in an ode on the short life of man; cf. “gather ye rose-buds while ye may …”’. But it has not been sufficiently noticed that there are suggestive overtones in the previous stanza also. Ostensibly the answer to the two rhetorical questions is simply, ‘to provide an ideal place for drinking’. The scholiast Porphyrion duly explains, ‘subaudiendum, “si ea non utimur”’. But Orelli alone, to my knowledge, has seen the further point. ‘Horace’, he says, ‘has attributed to the trees themselves the feeling of love, as with branches entwined they unite in forming a shade, so that the traveller may enjoy a single shade under the two trees.’ But he does not say why. Surely the picture of the tall pine and the white poplar intertwined, as well as the use of the words consociare amant, is meant to give a hint that Horace seldom omits when his theme is the brevity of life, that love-making as well as drinking should not be neglected. The second question suggests the other side of the picture, with the significant juxtaposition of laborat and trepidare, words that recall the feverish toil of worldly affairs, and fugax, which had some of the associations of our word ‘fleeting’.

There is one ode of which the appreciation is vitally affected by awareness of its nature-symbolism, 1, 9. The ostensible trend is as follows: ‘It is so cold outside, that we must do our best to enjoy ourselves indoors. Leave the rest to the gods. Enjoy yourself while young, not neglecting the pleasures of Campus and piazza.’ The change of scene between the beginning and end is certainly remarkable, or would be so in any other poet. Campbell's comment is this:²¹ ‘That the ode which begins with a picture of snow-capped Soracte should end with an account of outdoor sports that must be, at the best, highly inappropriate to such a season, is so characteristic of Horace's practice that we must regard it as intentional; and in point of fact the third stanza itself implies a transition from winter to spring; the advice thereafter becomes general.’ And in a footnote he attributes the change of mood to ‘the desire to give an appearance of spontaneity’. But there is, I think, another explanation. Let us turn to the poem:

Vides ut alta stet niue candidum
Soracte, nec iam sustineant onus
                    siluae laborantes, geluque
                                        flumina constiterint acuto?
Dissolue frigus, ligna super foco
large reponens, atque benignius
                    deprome quadrimum Sabina,
                                        O Thaliarche, merum diota.(22)

The idea, as is generally recognised, comes from Alcaeus (fr. 90 D) …

But of the details only the frozen rivers are common to both. Horace seems to envisage, not a storm, but a clear, icy landscape. Some suppose him to be describing a real winter at Rome of exceptional severity.²³ It may be so, though in that case the absence of any reference in contemporary writers is to be noted. But suppose, on the other hand, that Soracte is simply local colour, and that the whole scene is a fiction symbolic of old age. Everything falls into line: snow is used as a symbol for old age at Odes IV, 13, 12 (capitis niues); nec iam sustineant onus siluae laborantes recalls the symbolic use of querceta Gargani laborant at 11, 9, 7, and geluque flumina constiterint acuto the stat glacies iners of the same passage.

The second stanza follows Alcaeus closely; but the third introduces a new picture:

Permitte diuis cetera, qui simul
strauere uentos aequore feruido
                    deproeliantes, nec cupressi
                                        nec ueteres agitantur orni.(24)

Why does Horace choose this particular illustration of the power of the gods? Heinze says, rather lamely, that it is because their power is most strikingly displayed in the stilling of storms. But the stanza gains enormously in significance, and unites the whole poem, if we feel the storm to be the storm of life, and the calm the calm of death.²⁵

The thought of death then leads on naturally to the next stanza:

Quid sit futurum cras fuge quaerere, et
quem fors dierum cumque dabit lucro
                    adpone, nec dulces
amores
                                        sperne puer neque tu choreas,

when the snow-theme of the opening lines is picked up again and made explicit by

Donec uirenti canities abest
morosa … (26)

The poem, then, is not intentionally formless; on the contrary it derives a subtle unity of feeling from the undercurrent of naturesymbolism. The suggestive effect is: ‘Old age will come, so enjoy yourself now. Your life is in the hands of fortune. So before old age comes, enjoy yourself.’ And the poem is, after all, to use a simile of Campbell's, a circle and not a parabola.

Horace may have found such symbolism in Greek lyric poetry. (An elaborate example occurs in the sixth fragment of Ibycus.²⁷) One ancient critic at least thought he detected it in Virgil.²⁸ But I have only dwelt on it because it has been little noticed, not because it is at all common in Horace's work.

Nor does Horace summon to his aid a rich or rare diction. His epithets aim at being just (propria) rather than striking;²⁹ they help the artistic symmetry more than the sense. The magniloquent compound-words that enrich Pindar's odes were alien to the genius of the Latin language,³⁰ and ‘tauriformis’³¹ is his sole attempt at such coining. The Italian dialects were too remote from Latin for extensive borrowing, and there was no attempt, so far as we know, to interbreed them as Greek dialects were interbred by the Alexandrian poets. Ex noto fictum carmen sequar, said Horace, and his decision was wise.

Finally, Horace did not write what is now known as ‘beauty-poetry’.³² His object was to give the most lively expression he could to his thoughts and feelings, and everything was subordinated to this. Propriety (decorum) was his cardinal principle, and in this he followed the main stream of Graeco-Roman opinion. The very first section of the Epistle to the Pisos deprecates the irrelevant introduction of ‘purple patches’—Diana's grove an altar, swift streams winding through lovely meads, the Rhine or the rainbow:

sed nunc non erat his locus.(33)

Horace will describe with equal faithfulness the limpid beauty of the Bandusian spring or the unplesant symptoms of dropsy. If he sought to create beauty it was not through his choice of subject-matter, but rather through the perfection of his art.

So much for what Horatian lyric was not; now let us consider what it was. The absence of lyric spontaneity was compensated to some extent by the perfect control under which the poems were devised. They were cunningly contrived, and display to a high degree the quality of ‘wit’ in the seventeenth-century connotation of the word. That Horace had an unusually good sense of situation is apparent from some of the Satires, witness the encounter with a bore (1, 9), and the cross-examination of Agamemnon (11, 3, 187 ff.). One can well imagine that he loved the Comedy of Manners: we know that on one occasion he took the Comic poets Plato and Menander to the country to read,³⁴ and he adapted ten lines straight out of Terence.³⁵ This sense of situation served him well in many of the odes; as in the scene at a rowdy party (1, 27, Natis in usum), in the triangular love contest (111, 20, Non uides quanto), above all in the perfect dialogue-piece (111, 9, Donec gratus eram tibi). In these, and in many others, we see the satirist, the spectator of the human comedy, turned poet.

He could also be dramatic in the commonplace sense of the word. Alcaeus' storm-scene³⁶ is an armchair piece compared with Horace's adaptation, and other poems, such as the seventh Epode, are vividly dramatic. One of the most important branches of the study of oratory was ‘actio’, which comprised a good deal of the histrionic art,³⁷ and we know that reciters of poems reinforced their words with a wealth of appropriate gesture.

The element of surprise plays a large part in some of the odes. Horace will lull us into security by a pretty picture of spring, to awake us suddenly with the knocking of death at the door (1, 4); or he will beguile us with an orthodox song of triumph which slips imperceptibly into a panegyric of the vanquished queen (1, 37). And indeed he loved contrasts for their own sake,³⁸ as in his apostrophe to Bacchus (11, 19, 17):

Tu flectis amnes, tu mare barbarum,
tu separatis uuidus in iugis
                    nodo coerces uiperino
                                        Bistonidum sine fraude crines,(39)

or where he sets the peace of rural life beside the turmoil of politics.⁴⁰

At first sight a few of the pieces seem to lack unity of subject and to go off at a tangent. But on closer inspection most will be found to have a single idea behind them, however inconsequent they may seem on the surface.⁴¹ An exception is the Europa ode (III, 27): the myth is ostensibly told as a cautionary tale for Galatea, but the happy ending is hardly consistent with this; it looks as though the situation, Galatea's departure, were simply a makeshift excuse for introducing the story.

But it is not the wit, the charm and the cleverness of Horace's mind that give the Odes their unique quality. That is due more to words than to thought, and for it we have ultimately to thank the Roman training in oratory. In virtue of this all educated Romans (and their Greek contemporaries) were connoisseurs in the artistic use of language, sensitive to sounds and rhythms and to the architectural construction of sentences as few other peoples have been. Even the uneducated were aware of rhythmical faults, and it is on record that when an orator fell into a monotonous series of cadences the audience began to shout the rhythm in anticipation.⁴² The perfection of the oratorical ‘period’,⁴³ which we often miss in Lucretius, was introduced by Virgil into Latin hexameter poetry and by Horace into lyric. Sound was even more important than it is in modern poetry, because Roman poetry was designed for recitation, and it is also worth remembering that such evidence as there is suggests that, even when reading alone, the Romans read aloud.⁴⁴

One result was that sentences tended to be limited so as to be easily uttered in one breath.⁴⁵ Cicero prescribes the equivalent of four hexameters as the normal limit for prose, and Virgil rarely exceeds this.⁴⁶ And within the sentence the ‘limbs’ (cola) were so weighted and arranged that the period became a work of art independently of the sense. There is a passage in Longinus about this which is most striking in a critic who lays such stress on the value of content: ‘Nothing is of greater service in giving grandeur to such passages than the synthesis of the various members. It is the same with the human body. None of the members has any value in itself apart from the others, yet one with another they constitute a perfect organism. Similarly if these elements of grandeur are separated, the sublimity is scattered to the winds. Whereas if they are united into a single system, and embraced moreover by the bonds of rhythm, then merely by being rounded into a period they acquire a living voice’.⁴⁷

The Odes of Horace are as carefully constructed as the periods of Virgil. In the shorter pieces at least I believe that, if a stanza could be removed without impairing the sense, we should still feel something to be lacking, even though we were unfamiliar with the poem. What Demetrius said of prose periods applies well to them: ‘The members in a period may be likened to the stones which press upon one another and hold together a vaulted roof.’⁴⁸ Each individual sentence or stanza in the ode is also arranged with careful art. Take the first stanza of 1, 21:

Dianam tenerae dicite uirgines;
intonsum, pueri, dicite Cynthium,
                    Latonamque supremo
                                        dilectam penitus Ioui.

This follows the principle familiar in music by which the last of three related phrases is longer than the other two and sums them up.⁴⁹ But detailed analysis of the periodising of the Odes would contribute no more to our enjoyment than the elaborate numerical schemes which have been extracted from Virgil's work. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

Another characteristic of the periodic style was smoothness.⁵⁰ Two things cause roughness, hiatus and agglomeration of consonants, and except when it was desired for special effects this was avoided by the orators from Isocrates onwards. Cicero enjoins that the junctures between words be neither ‘aspera’ nor ‘hiulca’, but such as to render the style ‘aequabiliter fluentem’.⁵¹ This, it may be said, refers only to prose; but Dionysius, in the fullest discussion of the subject that has come down to us, gives as his example of this smooth style a poem, Sappho's Hymn to Aphrodite (a circumstance to which we owe its preservation).⁵²

Horace's lyric poetry is certainly ‘aequabiliter fluens’, and it may be noted that he tended gradually to eliminate hiatus between lines,⁵³ while his consonants are hardly ever crowded.⁵⁴ He seems also to have taken some care that consonants which clashed at the end of one word and the beginning of the next were such as followed easily in the mouth.⁵⁵

The music of the sounds themselves, though again a detailed analysis would contribute little to our enjoyment, is an element of immense importance, and Horace's taste was no less exquisite in this. The natural assonance of Latin case endings can lead even to regular rhyme:

Terrarum dominos euehit ad
deos
hunc, si mobilium turba Quiritium
certat tergeminis tollere honoribus;
illum, si proprio condidit horreo
quicquid de Libycis uerritur areis.(56)

Alliteration too, an embellishment that abounded in a rather crude form in early Roman poetry and was, perhaps for that reason, less common in the Neoteroi, was restored with discretion by the Augustans.⁵⁷ Horace used these graces particularly in the opening lines of odes:

Angustam amice pauperiem pati
robustus acri militia puer …

and

Motum ex Metello consule ciuicum
bellique causas et uitia et modos …

are two examples of very similar pattern.

Quem tu, Melpomene, semel,

the opening line of IV, 3, is striking enough, but still more so is the ‘chiasmus’ of sounds with which the next ode begins:

Qualem ministrum fulminis alitem.(58)

Often, we may suppose, the choice of a particular word or name was influenced more by sound than sense. Why, asked Verrall, does Horace appeal to the Muse of tragedy at the end of the first three books?⁵⁹ Surely the answer is, not that they are a concealed tragedy, but that she of all the Nine had the name which created the most euphonious assonance:

                                                            et mihi Delphica
lauro cinge uolens, Melpomene, comam.

We have only to substitute the alternatives he suggests as having been open to the poet, ‘Mnemosyne’ or ‘Musa precor’, to see how the music is destroyed.

The Romans liked the effect of Greek words interspersed with Latin,⁶⁰ and certainly there is a peculiar grace in lines such as

                                                            nec Polyhymnia
Lesboum refugit tendere barbiton.

It is the Greek names combined with the alliterative ‘d’s’ that tune what I have always found one of the most haunting of Horace's stanzas:⁶¹

Doctor argutae fidicen Thaliae,
Phoebe, qui Xantho lauis amne crines,
Dauniae defende decus Camenae,
                                        leuis Agyieu.

But the general euphony of the Odes is subject to the law of propriety. The letter ‘s’ has always caused discomfort from the time of Lasus of Hermione, Pindar's master, who wrote poems from which it was excluded altogether, to that of Tennyson, who in his revised version of In Memoriam cut out every case (save one) in which it occurred at the end of one word and the beginning of the next.⁶² When Horace speaks of dropsy his words are as ugly as his subject, and hiss with sibilants:⁶³

Crescit indulgens sibi dirus hydrops,
nec sitim pellit nisi causa morbi
fugerit uenis et aquosus albo
                                        corpore languor.

Ancient critics from Democritus⁶⁴ onwards were much interested in the aesthetic effect of the various sounds and letters. Without ascribing to Horace too much attention to theory we may suppose that he was fully conscious of the possibilities that the Latin language offered.

The law of propriety demanded also that language should be as far as possible imitative …, or, as we should say, onomatopoeic. Under this term I would include any device of sound or rhythm or technique that reinforces the sense. It is generally agreed that a good style is one which accommodates itself to the meaning, but although onomatopoeia is clearly a corollary of this principle, in modern times it has come to be regarded as at best a tour de force, at worst a childish trick. Now we may grant that when it is too obvious and self-conscious it may be tiresome by distracting our attention from the object to the poet's cleverness; but when it helps to present a relevant image to the inward eye, giving colour to what would otherwise be mere black and white, then it belongs to the realms of the imagination. In its subtler forms it merges into that pervading rightness and felicity of expression which characterises those poets to whom poetry is above all a means of communicating experience.⁶⁵

There is a remarkable passage in the Cratylus of Plato in which Socrates discusses the mimetic effect of various letters of the alphabet. … Of course the sounds cannot suggest the meaning in themselves, but they can reinforce it. To some this may seem fantastic; yet I believe that Plato is on the right lines, even when he finds that a sound suggests some quite abstract quality.⁶⁶ The matter is highly subjective, but if one reader points out examples which seem significant to him, it may at least awaken others to the possibilities and lead them to discoveries of their own.

In the art of onomatopoeia Virgil is outstanding among Latin poets, as Tennyson is among English.⁶⁷ As in the case of alliteration, he was reviving a popular trait of early Latin poetry which the Neoteroi had generally neglected, and using it with finer skill and sensibility. And Horace, though his poetry was less descriptive and so gave less scope for it, has also many striking examples.⁶⁸

In the hexameter poems he takes any obvious opportunity. Thus stammering is represented by repeated ‘p’s',

Infans namque pudor prohibebat plura profari,(69)

whispering by repeated sibilants,

Stridere secreta diuisos aure susurros.(70)

And perhaps we are meant to hear the whirring of the potter's wheel in

currente rota cur urceus exit?(71)

Horace drives lumbering up to the hills in his carriage in a line full of ‘m’s' and elisions,

Ergo ubi me in montes et in arcem ex urbe remoui.(72)

In a more complex example the rustic on the river-bank

                                        expectat dum defluat amnis, at ille
labitur et labetur in omne uolubilis aeuum.(73)

Not only do the repeated verb and the coincidence of ictus and accent suggest the steady flow of the river; we also wait, like the rustic, for the expected break in the line, the caesura,⁷⁴ and it never comes. This may seem far-fetched, but I believe it accounts for the effectiveness of the line. Virgil likewise slips a caesura when he wishes to represent a chariot out of control:⁷⁵

Fertur equis auriga neque audit currus habenas.

It is as though he were thinking of himself here, as he does explicitly in two other places,⁷⁶ as a charioteer driving a team of hexameters

with necks in thunder cloathed and loud-resounding pace.

In the lyric poems there are a few instances of simple sound-imitation. Like Virgil, Horace uses the letters ‘c’, ‘l’ and ‘i’ to suggest running water:

Mella caua manant ex ilice; montibus altis
                    leuis crepante lympha desilit pede,(77)

and again:

Me dicente cauis impositam ilicem
                    saxis unde loquaces
                                        lymphae desiliunt tuae.(78)

Coincidence of ictus and accent suggests a steady undulating motion, and the lingering double ‘l’s' suggest hovering, in the lovely image in the fifteenth Epode of the breeze fanning Apollo's hair,

Intonsósque agitáret Apóllinis aúra
capíllos.(79)

Such sound-imitation gives a pleasure which is appreciable, if not very important, like Tennyson's

Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn.

More interesting is the art with which Horace contrives to work rhythmic imitation even into the fixed metre of his stanzas. Addressing Iullus on the expected triumphal return of Augustus to Rome, he wrote in Sapphics:⁸⁰

Tum meae, si quid loquar audiendum,
uocis accedet bona pars, et ‘o sol
pulcher, o laudande’, canam recepto
                                        Caesare felix.

It was Heinze, I believe, who pointed out that ‘ó sol púlcher, ó laudánde’ suggests the trochaic rhythm of the popular verses shouted at triumphs. The love-sick poet in the eleventh Epode⁸¹ sets out resolutely for home, but soon his feet betray him:

Iussus abire domum ferebar incerto pede.

The elisions help to entwine the branches in the line

Umbram hospitalem consociare amant,(82)

since slurring runs the words together. The relentless pounding of the sea is well represented by the reiterated quadrisyllables of

Quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare,(83)

the stamping of feet by the repeated ‘ter’ in

Gaudet inuisam pepulisse fossor
          ter pede terram,(84)

and the faltering of the tongue by the slurred hypermetron of

                                        Cur facunda parum decor(o)
inter uerba cadit lingua silentio?(85)

In the Eleventh Aeneid Virgil has a vivid onomatopoeic picture of a tumult, in which he contrasts hot-headed youth and murmuring but powerless age:

Arma manu trepidi poscunt, fremit arma iuuentus:
flent maesti mussantque patres.(86)

But this is surpassed by Horace's description of the tyrant's fear of fortune's fickleness:

Iniurioso ne pede proruas
stantem columnam, neu populus frequens
                    ad arma cessantes, ad arma
                                        concitet imperiumque frangat.(87)

‘Aux armes, citoyens!’ cries the mob, but the moderates, the solid molossus of ‘cessantes’, hold it back at first, till with a second cry it sweeps them along in a torrent of dactyls. To put a comma before ‘cessantes’ and not after, as Vollmer does in the Teubner text, destroys the effect.

The alternation of wide ‘a’ sounds and obscure ‘u’ sounds at the opening of the Archytas ode⁸⁸ struck me as somehow suggesting the contrast between his wide ambitions and his obscure and common fate long before I found that Scaliger had attached such associations to those letters:

Te maris et terrae numeroque carentis harenae
                    mensorem cohibent, Archyta,
Pulueris exigui prope litus parua Matinum
                    munera.(89)

Propriety of metre is a more complicated subject. It would be fascinating to know why Horace chose the metre he did for each particular piece, for it would reveal how he conceived his poetry. Sometimes an ode had its germ in a line or a poem of some Greek lyric poet, and the metre naturally, though not inevitably, followed suit.⁹⁰ But the majority have no such literary associations. The Alcaic soon established itself as the most weighty and serious medium at the poet's command; it is interesting to note that the earliest specimen (I, 26, Musis amicus)⁹¹ is a light poem of only three stanzas, whereas those written later are nearly all much longer.⁹² Conversely the Sapphic soon established itself as the lightest medium, capable even of doing the work of the short Greek epigram;⁹³ and while one early specimen, I, 2 (Iam satis terris), is a long and serious poem, most of the later odes in this metre are not. But why a poem so slight as III, 26 (Vixi puellis) should be in Alcaics, or one so weighty as I, 12 (Quem uirum aut heroa), in Sapphics, is hard to say. The stately Alcaic is used in II, 19 (Bacchum in remotis) for the simulation of Bacchic frenzy, which seems to be more suitably conveyed by the headlong Second Asclepiad, as in III, 25 (Quo me, Bacche, rapis). The love-poems are nearly all in the graceful Asclepiadic metres. It may be that in some cases odd lines or stanzas tended to form themselves spontaneously in Horace's head and that he later constructed poems round them, so that a large element of chance would enter in; a phrase like ‘quid leges sine moribus uanae proficiunt’, or ‘O fons Bandusiae splendidior uitro’, flashing across the mind, might well be the starting-point of a poem whose metre it would determine.

The metre once chosen, Horace knew well how to exploit its possibilities:

Tutus bos etenim rura perambulat;
nutrit rura Ceres almaque Faustitas;
pacatum uolitant per mare nauitae;
                    cuipari metuit fides;
Nullis polluitur casta domus stupris;
mos et lex maculosum edomuit nefas;
laudantur simili prole puerperae;
                    culpam poena premit comes.(94)

So he counts on his fingers the blessings of Augustan rule, each in a single line. Everything is regular, orderly, peaceful, in the rhythm as in the land.⁹⁵ Of all his metres only the Third Asclepiad⁹⁶ could achieve just this effect. It requires a stanza in which all the lines are alike. (The Glyconic fourth line is not different in rhythm from the three lesser Asclepiads that precede it.) Sapphics would not do because the short Adonic fourth line is incapable of bearing a self-contained idea, besides being rhythmically different from the three it rounds off.⁹⁷

In I, 3 (Sic te diua potens Cypri) he accustoms us for twenty-eight lines to a rhythm in which the stop comes after the second, longer line of the metre (Second Asclepiad); then he continues:

Post ignem aetheria domo
                    subductum macies et noua febrium
Terris incubuit cohors
                    semotique prius tarda necessitas
Leti corripuit gradum.(98)

The metre, like death, has caught up a line—corripuit gradum.

It is not surprising that there are many who value the Odes chiefly as a storehouse of memorable phrases, ‘jewels five words long’ whose economy and perfection would be impossible in most languages—miseri quibus intemptata nites—non sine dis animosus infans—debitae Nymphis opifex coronae—munitaeque adhibe uim sapientiae—spes animi credula mutui. They are so clean-cut, so free from the fussy little words that blur our uninflected English. The terseness of which Latin was capable had to be discovered; what Sallust did for prose, Horace did for verse, long after the other outstanding quality of the language, its sonority, had been recognised and exploited by writers. For every phrase of Catullus that sticks in the memory there are a score from Horatian lyric.

I need not discuss at length the various rhetorical devices which helped to create the artistic harmony which the Romans called concinnitas’.⁹⁹ Horace, like Virgil,¹⁰⁰ had them all at his fingers' ends, and we may note, for instance, how he uses anaphora in the short ode I, 26 (Musis amicus) both to bind the poem together and to impart swiftness.¹⁰¹ But in him they never seem unnatural, recalling what Cicero well remarked of ‘color’ in prose, that it should be diffused in the blood, not plastered on as ‘make-up’.¹⁰²

There was one artistic effect which Latin, with its flexible word-order, could achieve, while in other languages it is scarcely possible—the arrangement of words in grammatical patterns.¹⁰³ As I know of no English term for this, let us call it ‘word-placing’. It consists chiefly in the separation of nouns from their epithets. In hexameters the most conspicuous example is ‘that verse which they call Golden, of two substantives and two adjectives with a verb betwixt to keep the peace’.¹⁰⁴ This arrangement has a monumental effect, and was generally reserved by Virgil for special purposes, such as the summing up of a period, while by lesser artists its value was frittered away through over-use.¹⁰⁵ Horace rounds off the second Satire of Book II with a brave Golden Line,

Fortiaque aduersis opponite pectora rebus.

He also uses the type twice running for mock-grandiose effect in describing the impressiveness of the house entered by the town mouse and the country mouse:

                                                            Rubro ubi cocco
tincta super lectos canderet uestis eburnos
multaque de magna superessent fercula cena.(106)

And with a splendid example,

Nobilis ut grandi cecinit Centaurus alumno,

he lifts the thirteenth Epode from the contemporary atmosphere of the beginning to that of the Heroic Age.

This form of artistry, already familiar in dactylic verse, was transferred by Horace to lyric. His words are often so interwoven that the pattern is only complete at the end of the clause or sentence, and the whole is subtly bound together, as in

Nunc et latentis proditor intimo
gratus puellae risus ab angulo(107)

or

                                                            Qui fragilem truci
                                        commisit pelago ratem
primus … (108)

We are so familiar with the word-placing of Latin poetry that it is hard to realise how much rarer it is in Greek. Gorgias, the great experimenter, had attempted such effects in prose, but no one had followed him. In the whole of the Anthology there is scarcely a couplet that attempts the intricate Roman style.¹⁰⁹

The flexibility of Latin word-order also enabled the poet to arrange his ideas exactly as he would:

Truditur dies die
                    nouaeque pergunt interire lunae.(110)

How perfectly the sequence of words brings out the relentless passing of time! And how well the alternation of words in the line

Inuicte mortalis dea nate puer Thetide(111)

suggests Achilles' double nature, half human, half divine, and the dilemma that was his tragedy! Nietzsche was right in holding that it is the cunning arrangement of words that is the chief cause of the inimitability of the Odes.¹¹²

I make no apology for having given so much space to details of form and technique. Few modern critics—Robert Bridges is a conspicuous exception—have cared to discuss such matters. But the ancients were far more interested in them, and if we try to see ancient poetry through their eyes, we are more likely to achieve a full understanding of their work. I will conclude this chapter by taking a single ode and trying to analyse the secret of its charm, one which displays many of the typically Horatian characteristics. I have purposely chosen a poem which seems to me to rank high in beauty and perfection without having any of that conventional ‘importance’ of subject-matter that some consider to be essential to Horace's best work.¹¹³ It is Odes III, 28:

Festo quid potius die
                    Neptuni faciam? Prome reconditum,
Lyde, strenua Caecubum
                    munitaeque adhibe uim sapientiae.
Inclinare meridiem
                    sentis, ac ueluti stet uolucris dies
Parcis deripere horreo
                    cessantem Bibuli consulis amphoram.
Nos cantabimus inuicem
                    Neptunum et uirides Nereidum comas;
Tum curua recines lyra
                    Latonam et celeris spicula Cynthiae;
Summo carmine quae Cnidon
                    fulgentesque tenet Cycladas, et Paphon
Iunctis uisit oloribus
                    dicetur, merita Nox quoque nenia.(114)

This is, of course, a light occasional poem. Horace's humour peeps through in the idea of wine besieging wisdom, in the choice of Bibulus' suggestive name for its vintage-year, and in the word ‘cessantem’ that makes the jar itself reluctant to leave its dignified seclusion at the back of the shelf. But there is also, I fancy, an overtone in the second stanza of a kind we have noted before;¹¹⁵ Horace gives a warning like Herrick's:

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
                    The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run
                    And nearer he’s to setting,

but he is too delicate to point the moral explicitly, ‘Then be not coy … ’. He leaves Lyde in no doubt, however; for the final song is to be of Venus, and Night is to deserve her hymn. Yes, this is a love-poem, but the poet's tact is perfect.

Perfect, too, is his art. The design is of the favourite type—two equal units (in this case the first two stanzas), completed by a longer third (the remaining two);¹¹⁶ and this form is repeated within the final unit—but not mechanically; for the third colon breaks off, and with a quiet coda—merita Nox quoque nenia—the music dies away; the sparkling brightness of the islands of Greece gives way to the dusk, and the lovers are left together. The sounds are beautiful too, with the responsive alliterations, each pair divided by a word, which tune the verse like rhyme—sentis—stet, ueluti—uolucris, cessantem—consulis, Neptunum—Nereidum, celeris—Cynthiae, carmine—Cnidon, Nox—nenia. As Giorgione throws over a simple landscape with figures a strange, indefinable beauty, so Horace has made of a simple occasion a poem which has the subtle significance of a consummate work of art.

Notes

1. Occasionally the true lyrical note is heard in the hexameter poems; e.g. in the outburst of enthusiasm for country life at Sat. II, 6, 60-7: ‘O rus, quando ego te aspiciam. … ’

2. ‘Horace elaborated a form of ode which it is easier to recognise than in few words describe; and a number of Milton's sonnets may be referred to this ode form. If we compare, for example, his Cyriack, whose grandsire with Martiis caelebs or Aeli uetusto, there can be no doubt that Milton was deliberately using the sonnet form to do the work of Horace's tight stanzas.’ Robert Bridges, Keats (Collected Essays, Vol. I), p. 136. Cf. Campbell, op. cit. p. 11. A. Quiller-Couch, Studies in Literature, pp. 61 f.

3. On the distinction see E. M. W. Tillyard, Poetry Direct and Oblique (1934).

4. Walter Headlam once wrote: ‘The Athenians were Ionian, and the quality they inherited and developed was lucidity; an admirable quality, and by its help the Athenian mind expressed itself eventually in admirable prose; but the defect of it is that by leaving nothing to the imagination, by abolishing suggestion, it becomes the death of poetry’ (C.R. XVI, 1902, p. 439). There is, nevertheless, a poetry of statement, and it is not hard to think of examples of the highest quality.

5. Odes, III, 27, 29-32: ‘But lately intent upon flowers in the meadows and designer of a bouquet owed to the Nymphs, in the glimmering night she saw nothing but stars and billows.’

6. Odes, III, 1, 33-40: ‘The fishes feel the sea shrink as the piles are thrown into its depths: into it the contractor with his crowds of slaves and the owner tired of the land pour their rubble: but Fear and Foreboding climb where the owner climbs, and black Care forsakes not the bronze-plated trireme and sits at the horseman's back.’ Horace seems to have been pleased with these images, for he uses them again, less successfully, at Odes, II, 16, 21 f.

7. Odes, III, 2, 21-2.

8. In Aristotle's day it was considered extravagant to call the Odyssey ‘a good mirror of human life’. Cicero would not allow the Senate to be called ‘orphaned’ by the death of Cato without a ponderous ‘ut ita dicam’. Arist. Rhet. III, 3, 4; Cic. de Orat. III, 41, 164 and 167. Cf. Longinus, On the Sublime, XXXII.

9. Sat. VI, ch. VI, 7.

10. ‘Subtle and wary in combining your words too, you will have used them excellently if clever combination has made a well-known word new.’

11. ‘Such is the power of arrangement and combination, such the distinction imparted to ordinary words!’ The context shows that, as Rostagni insists, the second passage also refers to choice of words for their meaning, not for their concinnitas.

12. Compare Horace's own phrase (Odes, II, 1, 31), auditumque Medis Hesperiae sonitum ruinae. …

13. A play on the normal ‘beatae’, which was misused to mean ‘rich’, like our ‘prosperous’.

14. Rhein. Mus. LXXIV (1925), pp. 184 ff. Agrippa's tone of hostility does not concern us here; but it is surprising that he should have accused Maecenas whose own poetic diction, to judge by the fragments, was flamboyant, of introducing this particular subtlety.

15. Shakespeare, in his 104th Sonnet, uses the words:

                                                                ‘Three winters cold
    Have from the forests shook three summers' pride’,

    where the context is about the passing of human beauty. They are strikingly reminiscent of Epode XI, 5-6:

    ‘Hic tertius December ex quo destiti
                        Inachia furere siluis honorem decutit’,

    but I doubt if we should here attribute a symbolic intention to Horace.

16. ‘Not for ever do showers stream upon the shaggy fields or gusty storms vex the Caspian sea unceasing, nor throughout the year, friend Valgius, does the ice stay motionless on the Armenian shores, or the oaks of Garganus labour in the wind and the ashes stand bereft of their leaves. You for ever pursue in mournful strains your lost Mystes. … ’

17. ‘The sky is lowering with a rough storm, and showers and snow bring down the heavens; here the sea, there the woods are loud with the Thracian North Wind. Let us snatch our chance, friends, from the day. … ’

18. ‘Of the rest be silent; God perhaps will right these things with a merciful change.’

19. So Campbell, op. cit. p. 143. It is noteworthy, in view of ‘Threicio Aquilone’, that oρηίκιοζ Boροεαζ was used symbolically for a storm of love by Ibycus (fr. 6D) and that Alcacus (fr. 73) uses Boreas as a symbol for the political trouble caused by the Thracian-born tyrant Pittacus.

20. ‘To what end do the tall pine and the white poplar love to entwine their branches in hospitable shade? Why does the fleeting water strain to hurry down its twisting course? Bring hither wine and unguents and the petals of the lovely rose that die too soon, while means and age and the dark threads of the three sisters permit.’

21. Op. cit. p. 224.

22. ‘You see how Soracte stands deep in snow, and the labouring woods can now scarce bear their burden, and the rivers are halted with ice. Melt the cold, piling logs generously on the fire, and fetch out a mellower vintage, four years old, Thaliarchus, in a Sabine jar.’

23. Pasquali, op. cit. p. 78.

24. ‘Leave the rest to the gods; when they have stilled the winds that do battle over the raging sea, neither the cypresses nor the old ashes are shaken any more.’

25. For this symbolism see Housman, A Shropshire Lad, XXXI:

    ‘The gale it plies the saplings double,
                        It blows so hard ’twill soon be gone:
    To-day the Roman and his trouble
                        Are ashes under Uricon.’

26. ‘What to-morrow will bring do not stop to inquire, and each day that fortune grants you, count it gain, nor despise sweet loves and dancing while yet you are young, while yet your green youth is free of gloomy white hairs—.’

27. C. M. Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry, p. 272.

28. See Servius on Aen. XI, 183. His name was Asinius Pollio, and he may be the great Augustan. (See, however, Ribbeck, Prolegomena, p. 116; Fronto, Ep. 1, 6 fin.) Cf. Heinze, Vergils Epische Technik, pp. 366 ff.

29. A notable exception is splendida arbitria at Odes, IV, 7, 21. Vollmer unnecessarily shrinks from it, and reads with Hartman, ‘et de te, splendide, Minos’, etc.

30. Quintilian remarked on this fact (1, 5, 70; cf. 1, 6, 28).

31. Odes, IV, 14, 25.

32. The idea that certain subjects are peculiarly poetical appears in Demetrius (On Style, 132-3), though he disclaims it to some extent (135).

33. Ll. 14-19. A strange exception occurs in his own earliest known work, Sat. 1, 7, 27, where we are told that the voluble Persius

                                                                ‘ruebat
    flumen ut hibernum, fertur quo rara securis’.

    It is hard to see how the romantic afterthought is appropriate to the ribald context.

34. Sat. II, 3, 11.

35. II, 3, 262. He also refers explicitly to a scene in Terence. Sat. 1, 2, 20 ff.

36. Fr. 30D; Odes, 1, 14. Alcaeus' poem has too many particles to be truly dramatic … Cf. Longinus, On the Sublime, XXI.

37. So pronounced were the gestures employed that Quintilian had to tell orators how theirs should differ from those of actors. Cicero (Or. 55) called actio ‘quasi corporis quaedam eloquentia’ …

38. The exploitation of contrasts was a particular feature of the poets of the Parnasse. As Cicero remarks of metaphor (Or. 134), ‘swift transition of thought is in itself pleasant’.

39. ‘Thou dost sway rivers, thou the foreign sea, thou tipsy on the sequestered mountain-ranges dost confine in a knot of serpents the hair of the women of the Bistones without harm.’

40. III, 29, 21-8; IV, 5, 25 ff.

41. I have already cited instances in Odes, I, 9 (pp. 129 ff.) and III, 4 (pp. 70 ff.). See Campbell, op. cit. pp. 6-7.

42. Cic. de Or. III, 197; Demetrius, On Style, 15.

43. On the ‘periodic’ style see Aristole, Rhet. III, 9; Cic. Or. 204 ff. Aristotle stresses the pleasurable effect of inevitability which it gives.

44. Most of the evidence is derived from exceptions that prove the rule. See J. Balogh, Voces Paginarum, Philologus, LXXII (1926-7), pp. 84-109, 202-40. Cf. Norden, Kunstprosa, p. 6.

45. Arist. Rhet. III, 9, 5; Cic. de Or. III, 175.

46. De Or. III, 181 f.; Or. 222. Lucretius has a sentence of no less than 16 lines (I, 935-50). Norden, Aeneis, VI³, p. 376.

47. On the Sublime, ch. XL. The rhythm, weighting and grouping of the petitions in the Anglican Litany provide an excellent illustration.

48. On Style, 13. Compare Nietzsche's characterisation of the Horatian ode (p. 4).

49. This principle is stated by Demetrius, On Style, 18. On ‘tricola’ in general see Norden, Aeneis, VI, App. II, p. 370 f.

50. For the connection see Dion. Hal. De Comp. XXIII. (To him this style embraces all the virtues of good prose.)

51. De Or. III, 172; cf. Part. Or. 21; Auctor ad Her. IV, 18.

52. Ibid. He finds only seven rough junctures in the 28 lines. Dionysius was in Rome at the time when Horace began to write his Odes.

53. To this rule of ‘synaphia’ there are only six exceptions in the Alcaics of Books I-III, and none in the Sapphics of Book IV. Cf. Verrall's observations, Studies in Horace, pp. 179 ff.

54. This is partly due, of course, to the comparative scarcity of consonants in the Latin language. Sapphics in German, scanned by stress, have not the Horatian flow. In the Oberammergau Play I noticed one stanza which ended with a rare mouthful of consonants:

    ‘Schmeïchělnd zur Schäu träagt.’

55. An Australian doctor who knew his Horace by heart remarked to me that he had noticed this trait, without being aware that the ancients had discussed such matters. Dionysius (loc. cit.) gives instances of smooth and rough collocations and shows an amazing degree of fastidiousness.

56. I, 1, 6-10. Cf. the many internal rhymes in Ovid's pentameters. See J. Marouzeau, Horace artiste de sons (Mnemosyne, IV, 1936), 85-94.

57. Norden, Aeneis, VI, p. 416, surprisingly belittles the amount of alliteration in Horace.

58. Cicero seems to have been experimenting in assonance in his much-abused lines

    ‘O fortunatam natam me consule Romam’

    and

    ‘Cedant arma togae, concedat laurea laudi’.

59. Op. cit. p. 5.

60. Sat. I, 10, 20; Quint. XII, 10, 33.

61. IV, 6, 25-8.

62. Cf. Dion. Hal. De Comp. XII; Longinus, On the Sublime, XLIII. Norden, Kunstprosa, p. 58 n. It should be remembered that the Latin ‘s’ was hissed. Euripides was wrongly abused for the ugliness of a line spoken by Medea to Jason (Med. 476). …

    The sibilants represent the hissing of her hatred.

63. II, 2, 13-16.

64. … See Norden, Kunstprosa, I, pp. 57 ff.

65. On the subject of onomatopoeia in ancient poetry see C.Q. XXXVI (1942), pp. 121-33. For some curious examples from English poetry see A. Platt, Nine Essays, pp. 178-9. …

66. The state or configuration of the mouth when the sound is made seems to play almost as much part in the suggestion as the sound itself. See Sir Richard Paget, Human Speech, esp. pp. 174-5, on the origins of language.

67. See R. Maxa, Wiener Studien, XIX (1897), pp. 78 ff., for examples from the Aeneid (the Georgics would be still more worth study); Norden, AeneisVI³, App. VII, pp. 413-24.

68. Norden surprisingly belittles the amount of onomatopoeia, as of alliteration, to be found in Horace; ib. p. 421.

69. Sat. I, 6, 57.

70. Sat. II, 8, 78.

71. A.P. 22. See J. Marouzeau, op. cit. pp. 85-94.

72. Sat. II, 6, 16.

73. Ep. I, 2, 42 f.

74. I.e. the regular 4[frac12] as well as 2[frac12] in lines with no 3[frac12] caesura.

75. G. I, 514.

76. G. II, 540; III, 17-18.

77. Epodes, XVI, 48.

78. Odes, III, 13, 14-10.

79. Epodes, XV, 9.

80. Odes, IV, 2, 45-8.

81. L. 20.

82. Odes, II, 3, 10.

83. Odes, I, II, 5.

84. Odes, III, 18, 15-16.

85. Odes, IV, I, 35-6. Cf. the boiling over of the cauldron in Georgics, I, 295: ‘Aut dulcis musti Volcano decoquit umor(em).’

86. Ll. 453-4.

87. Odes, I, 35, 13 ff.

88. I, 28.

89. The inferior reading ‘latum’ for ‘litus’, accepted by Vollmer, incidentally mars this fine effect.

90. As in I, 9; 10. But I, 14, in the Fourth Asclepiad, is modelled on a poem in Alcaics (Alc. fr. 30D), and I, 27, in Alcaics, was probably suggested by an Anacreontic poem (Anac. fr. 43 D).

91. See pp. II ff.

92. In Tripos Latin Verse papers at Cambridge eight lines of English are usually set for Lyrics. Many candidates compose an Alcaic poem of two stanzas, but it is safe to say that such a poem could never be an artistic success as a whole.

93. As in I, 30; III, 22.

94. IV, 5, 17-24: ‘For in safety the ox treads up and down the fields; Ceres nurtures the fields, and benign Prosperity; over a peaceful ocean the sailors fly; loyalty keeps clear of reproach; no scandal stains the chaste home; custom and law have purged away the taint of guilt; mothers are praised for children like their fathers; punishment treads on the heel of crime.’

95. The asyndeton helps this effect. The mind is relieved of all effort, even that of following a constructed period.

96. With the possible exception of the First Asclepiad.

97. Something of the same effect is, however, achieved in Sapphics at Odes, III, 8, 17-24.

98. ‘After fire was purloined from the halls of heaven, wasting and hosts of fevers unknown before descended upon the earth, and what was formerly the slow necessity of distant death quickened its pace.’

99. See Cic. Or. 80-4.

100. Macrobius (Sat. IV) analyses passages from Virgil, giving each sentence its rhetorical label.

101. Quis—quid, necte—necte, hunc—hunc. For this binding effect of anaphora cf. Landor's poem:

     ‘Ah what avails the sceptred race?
                         Ah what the form divine?
     What every virtue, every grace?
                         Rose Aylmer, all were thine;
     Rose Aylmer … ’

102. De Or. III, 199. Cf. II, 149-209 for a detailed discussion.

103. On the whole subject see Norden, Aeneis, VI, App. III. In elegiac poetry this word-placing often gave something of the effect of rhyme, balancing the halves of the lines.

104. Dryden, Preface to Translations. (Prepositions, etc. are disregarded.)

105. It is a sign of the immaturity of Epode XVI that no fewer than six of the last nine hexameters are of this or similar construction, recalling the monotonous rhythm of Cutullus' Peleus and Thetis.

106. Sat. II, 6, 102-4.

107. Odes, I, 9, 21-2.

108. Odes, I, 3, 10-12.

109. Norden, ib. The only significant exception, in VI, 165, he attributes to a Roman, Statilius Flaccus by name.

110. Odes, II, 18, 15-16.

111. Epodes, XIII, 12.

112. See p. 4.

113. See p. 2.

114. ‘What better can I do on Neptune's day? Quick, Lyde, bring out the treasured Caecuban, and storm the fortress of wisdom. You know the sun has passed its zenith, yet as though the fleeting day stood still, you hesitate to pull down from the store the loitering wine-jar of Bibulus' consulship. We will chant in turn of Neptune and the Nereids' sea-green tresses; then to your curved lyre you will sing again Latona and the shafts of swift Cynthia; in our final song she who is queen of Cnidos and the shining Cyclads and visits Paphos with her swan-drawn car shall be sung, Night too in a hymn deserved.’

115. See p. 131.

116. See p. 136.