This commentary gathers up the efforts of decades, in fact the better part of a lifetime, spent pondering and learning to appreciate the crafty ways of Horace's poetry. Although the odes of Horace's third book have been especially well served by commentaries both recent (David West (2002), Nisbet-Rudd (2004)) and recent enough (Gordon Williams (1969), and Kenneth Quinn (1980)), Woodman's Green and Yellow does far more than collect the best of what they have proposed. Fresh insights and new points of comparison are introduced on nearly every page, even as the literary and historical contexts are fully explored, and the difficulties of Horace's Latin are carefully explained.
In the Preface (ix), W. says that his principal endeavour in the book has been ‘to try to understand the Latin and logic of each ode and to convey to readers such understanding as I have acquired’. That is exactly what the book contains, and the claim well captures the experience one has in working through the odes with W. in hand: confusions and inconsistencies are identified and explored; hidden logics are proposed; poems are rendered sensible.
We see this on full display already in the first poem of the book (Odes 3.1) where Horace, in the guise of a public-facing uates, launches into a discussion of the inherent hierarchies that separate those who crave and wield political power (1–16), then has us consider a man who sleeps well at night because he has none of a rich man's worries (17–32). As the poem concludes, the poet's stance shifts from public address to personal reflection. How does one explain the logic of these transitions?
In his introduction to the poem, W. does an excellent job of piecing these separate strands of thought together, providing a possible (and to my mind perfectly sensible) hidden logic for all that the poem leaves us to work out for ourselves. Many of the direct address poems of Book 3 present difficulties like the ones just described, as do the miniature situation dramas that fling us in medias res as overhearers rather than as addressees. It is in explaining these dramatic poems that W. sometimes seems to demand and derive too much clarity from clues too subtle and too few. It is much to his credit that he leaves the mysterious switch of 3.2 (from the praise of youthful martial valour in 1–24 to the praise of discretion in 25–32) a mystery. With no solution to offer for the sudden change of focus, he lets Horace keep things out of reach, and he avoids the trap that ensnared David West when he went rummaging for conspiracies in the political world of the late 20s b.c.e. (West 2002, 28–9).
In producing his updated text, W. is not averse to imposing the clarity he seeks via textual emendation and/or re-punctuation. The changes he proposes are all painstakingly justified, and a good number of them are likely to take hold in subsequent of editions of Horace. Among the best of these revisions one encounters the introduction of quotation marks enclosing 4.42–64, thus to reassign these lines from Horace to a muse. This is a brilliant move. Not only does it explain the odd shift from first person singular to plural address in line 42, it helps make sense of certain strange points of emphasis within the lines, giving them a specific motivation, and it serves to centre the poem within a three-poem set, each featuring a large inset speech of a mythological/exemplary moralizer (Juno in 3, the deep-remembering Muse in 4, and Regulus in 5).
Among the bolder of his emendations W. introduces Apriles for Decembres in 18.10, and at 20.8 W.'s an magis makes far better ‘literal’ sense than maior an of the MSS, though I am not sure that readers of the poems either are, or ever were, much put off by (let alone stymied by) the logical imprecisions that these emendations clear away. At 24.4 I persist in preferring Tyhrrenum … Punicum (Nisbet-Rudd) to W.'s terrenum … publicum because it is consistent with the naming of foreign regional locales in the first twelve lines, and it neatly suits the unusually dour Catonian tone of the poem — naming a distant ‘Punic Sea’ that might not (because it need not) actually go by that name.
The two biggest textual fixes come in the book's last poem (3.30), with aptius for altius in 2 and Aeolios … Italum for Aeolium … Italos in 13. A solid case is made for the latter, but the former, for me, is a Bridge Too Far because ‘higher than’ is easily the most pressing desideratum when it comes to outdoing the pyramids (the tallest built structures of antiquity, and famous as such) and because the real problem with the second line has always been the situ (‘decay’) of the pyramids that Horace claims to rise above. When pushed to make sense, the claim proves stubbornly uncooperative: a collection of odes likened to a monumentum that soars ‘higher than the mouldering pyramids’ (taking pyramidum as a definitional genitive, as many do). Though problematic as a ‘literal’ assertion, the text as received is rich in further implications. To my mind, it should be left alone — no matter that the poetic work being described includes much unlofty material (W., at 374) and that the pyramids of Horace's day were in remarkably fine shape for their age (373). For it is precisely in such well-crafted illogicalities (carpe diem) where Horace gives us things to think about that require new ways of thought.
