This volume, the product of a conference at Manchester University in 2012 and the sole Anglophone collection devoted to the Epodes, makes a welcome and much-needed contribution to scholarship on Horace's iambic book. The volume aims to inspire its readers to take a fresh look at the Epodes, at the ways in which they engage with the wider literary tradition, and at how later readers and authors (including Horace himself) respond to it. The stimulating readings which the volume offers certainly achieve these aims, illustrating the depth and variety of Horatian iambic and the potential for further research on the Epodes.
The first three chapters consider the Epodes in dialogue with earlier Greek and Latin literature. A. Morrison begins by confirming Callimachus as an iambic model who fundamentally informs the poetics of Horace's book. Morrison illuminates Horace's engagement with the Greek iambic, and ‘near-iambic’, tradition beyond Archilochus and Hipponax and with its reception in Hellenistic poetry, and demonstrates that Horace engages closely with this wider tradition, using it to establish his own reworking of iambos and to both challenge and cater to his audience's expectations of this poetic style.
I. Goh moves from Greece to Rome to investigate Horace's dialogue with Lucilius through detailed analyses of Lucilian elements in Epodes 9 and 4; the engagement with Archilochus common to Horace and his Roman predecessor; and the motifs of wolves, motherhood, belts and sorrel. Though one or two points in this chapter seem slightly stretched, Goh demonstrates the ways in which recognising the ‘traces’ of Lucilius in the Epodes can deepen our understanding of the political as well as the literary dimensions of this book.
M.B. Sullivan explores the influence of fable on the Epodes, focusing on animal, particularly avian, imagery in Epode 1. Sullivan examines a range of intertexts for the simile of the mother bird (1.19–22) – Hesiod, Works and Days 202–12, Callimachus, Iamb 2, fr. 192 Pf., and Aes. 227 – which are all based in the tradition of fable. These intertexts work together to define Horace's poem in relation to Archaic and Hellenistic traditions of poetry and scholarship, and contribute to making a programmatic statement about the themes of ‘vatic’ poetry, friendship and justice appropriate to a collection born against the background of civil war.
The civil war backdrop to the Epodes links the three middle chapters. This context is central to E. Gowers’ groundbreaking approach to gender in Horace's book. Through a perceptive analysis of the themes of motherhood and birth and of the misogynistic vitriol of Epodes 5, 8 and 12, Gowers demonstrates that Horace's repellent old women, including Canidia, can be fruitfully read as cinaedi whose ambiguous gender illustrates the breakdown of masculinity among Roman men during civil war. Through the confusion of male and female, Horace is able to direct his invective against prominent citizens with impunity, and to comment on the disjuncture between male aggression towards and fear of women which characterises iambic poetry, and on the production of the Epodes under Maecenas’ questionable eye.
E. Guisti continues to discuss ‘blurred identities’ in the Epodes through an examination of Bacchus, the ‘god of dissolution’, in Epode 9. Giusti argues that the poem's Bacchic frame underlines the confusion between foreign and Roman generals in the central narrative of Actium and the confusion between friend and enemy engendered by civil war; this confusion is reinforced by the arrangement of the Epodes and by thematic links between Epode 9 and poems 7 and 16, which treat the destructiveness of civil war in full. Similarities between the ‘Dionysiac poetics’ of the lyric Odes 1.37 and Epode 9 suggest that we should read Epode 9 as the earliest example of Horace's use of Bacchus to negotiate his relationship to Augustan ideology in the Odes.
S. begins with the figure of Hannibal and his connection with animal imagery in Epode 16 and Odes 4.4 to investigate how recalling the world of the Epodes in Horace's ‘panegyric’ for Augustus can inform our understanding of the later poem, including the question of who speaks the final lines, and of Horace's continuing engagement with the changing political landscape and his own earlier work. In a clear and convincing argument, S. explicates Hannibal's connection with prophecy, dark portents and Rome's self-destruction in Epode 16, and reads Odes 4.4 as inverting the earlier poem: whereas Rome in the 30s b.c. was doomed and required its destructive citizens to leave, Rome under Augustus has regained its past glory and can expel ‘ill-omened’ foreigners like Hannibal. While recalling the Epodes highlights the positive change wrought by Augustus, the ‘monstrous’ imagery Hannibal uses to characterise Rome does not let Horace's audience forget the foundations on which Augustus rebuilt the city and offers a warning for the future which alludes to the horror that lies beneath the new Rome.
The final chapters treat later responses to the Epodes. T. Hawkins explores Ovid's reception of Horatian iambic in the Ibis. Hawkins focuses on key points of contact between the Epodes and the Ibis – the prominence of ibis; engagement with Archilochus, fr. 1 W.; the motifs of sea-travel and disgusting odours – to argue persuasively that Ovid presents his poem as an inversion of Horace's text. Ovid draws attention to the changed climate of Rome between the end of the civil war and Augustus’ later years by connecting his own ‘Romanized iambus’ with open hostility and aggression rather than with friendship and good-humoured or carefully anonymised invective.
B. follows this with a reading of Petronius’ engagement with Horace at Satyricon 130. B. asserts that Epodes 8 and 12, more than Ovid, Amores 3.7, which itself draws on both of these poems, should be understood as key intertexts in Encolpius’ encounter with Circe: Petronius combines allusions to these Epodes with allusions to Horace's promotion of a moderate way of life in Satires 1.2 and Epistles 2.1, juxtaposing the contradictory strands of moderation and excess in Horace's corpus and playing Horace off against himself to comically undermine his moral stance with the debauchery in his iambic. B. ably demonstrates the rich literary tapestry of Petronius’ episode, though the question remains of how the Ovidian intertext may work together with its Horatian models to inform Petronius’ text, particularly in relation to gender.
E. Oliensis closes the volume by illuminating the canonical status of the Epodes and their enduring popularity in Anglophone society prior to the twentieth century, countering the view that the book had lacked the ‘afterlife’ enjoyed by the rest of Horace's corpus. Within her survey of individual responses to the Epodes and of broader trends in their reception, Oliensis highlights the applicability of Horace's collection to English and American poets and audiences during their own periods of civil war, humorous translations of the book and its popularity as a school-text, and the continuing appeal of Canidia (virtually ‘a household name’) across the centuries.
The volume is well produced. The comprehensive and highly useful introduction gives informative background to Horace and his work and to modern scholarship on the Epodes, making it a valuable resource for all students of this text. The detailed indexes (a general index and an index locorum) support the reader in navigating specific passages, individuals and themes, and the full bibliography provides a useful starting point for anyone wishing to explore Horace's collection further. The chronological arrangement of the chapters is conducive to a selective approach to the book. When read from beginning to end, the contributions reveal many interesting points of contact, and the volume as a whole offers a thought-provoking journey through the Epodes and their rich literary history.
