‘[The] preoccupation with history in literary study has hindered our ability to account for and advocate for literature’s ontological propensity for futurity and therefore practice criticism as future-thinking. Literature makes in language something more than what already exists; it models futures possible.’
(Kornbluh Reference Kornbluh2019: 32)
‘The literary work is singular not because it is locked in a historical safe whose combination we can never be sure of finding but because it changes every time we read.’
(Attridge Reference Attridge2004: xii)
I Towards a poetics of conspiracy
The last decade of literary criticism has been obsessed with attempts to supersede the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. Perhaps this is appropriate for a generation working through the so-called ‘era of conspiracy’, inaugurated by the proliferation of conspiracy theories in response to 9/11 and more recently intensified by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Originally theorised by Paul Ricoeur in 1970, the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ posited a common mode of reading ‘against the grain’ shared by historicism, deconstructivism and psychoanalysis and respectively reliant upon the three ‘masters of suspicion’: Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.Footnote 1 Against the over-simplified assumption, shared by these methodologies, that the critic’s role is to bring to light ‘deeper’ or ‘hidden’ meanings, buried ‘behind’ or ‘under’ the surface of literary texts, queer and feminist theorists since the noughties, most notably Rita Felski in her influential The Limits of Critique, have proposed instead to practise hermeneutics of ‘attachment’, ‘love’ and ‘care’ as plausible alternatives to various forms of suspicious ‘critique’ or ‘symptomatic readings’ that attempt to diagnose the unwritten unconscious of literary texts.Footnote 2 In response to this call, English literature scholars have begun to refocus attention on the form and ‘surface’ of texts,Footnote 3 to give affective dimensions of reading their dueFootnote 4 and to reassess the importance of lay reading for the profession of literary criticism.Footnote 5 The success of Felski’s provocations cannot be overstated, and they have inspired contemporary literary theoretical projects that aim to address the politics of form and mesh aesthetic experience into today’s increasingly urgent societal concerns.Footnote 6 Significantly, however, Felski’s call to jettison both ‘context’ and ‘critique’ has also been met with resistance,Footnote 7 both from scholars who worry about the potential repercussions of a possible return to politically conservative types of formalismFootnote 8 and from those who warn about the risks of losing the crucial role that critique has played in defining the profession of literary scholarship, at a time when humanities departments are hard-pressed to defend their existence both in academia and across western societies more broadly.Footnote 9
While the post-critical turn has been more openly embraced in English and Modern Literatures,Footnote 10 Classics has also been participating in the debate, partly with a renewed enthusiasm for espousing affective reading while exposing attitudes of suspicion,Footnote 11 partly by bringing to the fore our signature methodology of ‘close reading’, originally conceived by I. A. Richards as a decontextualised practice of literary (un)critical engagement,Footnote 12 and lastly by a renewed engagement with the ‘politics of form’.Footnote 13 Given its remote and fragmentary nature, Greco-Roman literature provides a privileged laboratory where scholars can be observed as obsessing over contextual and intertextual questions, even in full knowledge that these are beyond any hope of recovery. Starting with the crux desperationis, classicists have rarely underplayed the variously ‘despairing’ attitudes with which we face our profoundly lacunose and fragmentary knowledge of the past; at the same time, we are also well used to having to sit with irremediable problems and embracing various forms of aporia or not-knowing. In our field, what is often perceived as a hindrance to historical knowledge and philological reconstruction is also a fruitful opportunity for reflecting about critique and its limitations. Just as it has proved relatively easier for the contemporary reader to be born from the ‘death’ and, in many cases, the anonymity of the ancient author,Footnote 14 absence of context creates an infinitely rewarding possibility for sustained attention to the productivity of form. While acting as an effectual spur for literary creativity and meta-historicist imagination, it also forces us to confront our scholarly impatience to fill in the missing gaps, calling for urgent methodological and meta-critical reflections.Footnote 15
In response to this recent turn away from critique and especially historicism, this paper takes the cue from an exemplary poem by Horace (Ode 2.10 or ‘the Ode to Licinius’) to defend a mode of historicist and suspicious reading that joins forces with close and surface readings. I argue that Horace’s poems teach us how to embrace the limitations of our knowledge while remaining attuned to the affective dimensions — at once highly frustrating and highly satisfying — with which we confront the enigmatic aesthetic and the contextual alterity of ancient lyric in particular, and of literature in general. I employ the label ‘conspiratorial’ both for this mode of reading and for the literature that spurs it for reasons that I expand more fully in the Conclusion. For now, I shall preface that I take the cue from a historical conspiracy that suspicious scholars have long supposed to be the context, irrecoverable and unspoken, of the poem that I have chosen as case study for this broader methodological reflection.
II An era of conspiracy
There are of course innumerable instances in Latin literature where scholars meticulously obsess on the historical context of a text that does not obviously yield it up. It might not be a coincidence, however, that some of the most famous examples belong to the literature of the age of Octavian/Augustus: suffice it to think of the mysterious puer of Virgil’s Eclogue 4, or the hidden nature of the error, the ‘mistake’ and ‘aberration’, that Ovid alleges caused his exile. Partly, these poems can and have been read as reticent or self-censored, in conjunction with the curtailing of freedom of literary speech at the turn from Republic to Empire.Footnote 16 But they are also suggestively obscure and playfully ambiguous, given the Augustan poets’ self-presentation as uates, which emphasises the close links that have always existed between poetry and prophecy, and the centrality of ‘form’ in the presentation of linguistic riddles.
The literature of the Augustan age summons all its best literary skills in the effort to present these years as a period of bonaccia after the long storm that characterised the last years of the Republic.Footnote 17 Historically speaking, however, civic instability was not quelled by the instauration of the Principate.Footnote 18 Indeed, resistance against Octavian/Augustus is recorded from the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Actium (with the discovery of an alleged plot by Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, son of the triumvir, and his subsequent executionFootnote 19 ), at least up to the conspiracy of Publius [Plautius] Rufus and Lucius Aemilius Paullus, which led to the exile of Paullus’ wife and granddaughter of Augustus, Julia the Younger, and possibly the poet Ovid in 8 c.e.Footnote 20 Several conspiracies and executions are recorded in the intervening years,Footnote 21 including those of the poet and praefectus of Egypt Cornelius Gallus, forced to suicide (26 b.c.e.),Footnote 22 senator Egnatius Rufus (19 b.c.e.),Footnote 23 Licinius Murena and Fannius Caepio (22 b.c.e.)Footnote 24 and Iullus Antonius (2 b.c.e.),Footnote 25 alongside many other unnamed actors.Footnote 26 Suspicious deaths within the imperial household, such as that of the nephew and son-in-law of the Princeps, Marcus Claudius Marcellus, concomitant with the conspiracy of Caepio and Murena,Footnote 27 or those of the adopted sons of Agrippa, Lucius (2 c.e.) and Gaius (4 c.e.),Footnote 28 arguably contribute to the overall impression of a climate of conspiracy and instability in the early imperial era, even if we should be cautious when reading the suspiciously retroactive narratives of a Tacitus or a Cassius Dio. The younger Seneca, reflecting upon how Augustus must have felt after dealing with the conspiracies of Caepio and Murena, Lepidus, Egnatius and ‘others who were sharpening their daggers against him’ (Dial. 10.4.5, aliorum in eum mucrones acuebantur), as well as with the exile of the two Julias, compares the emperor to a ‘body heavy with much blood’ (4.5, uelut graue multo sanguine corpus) that ended up ‘cutting away the limbs alongside the wounds, only for new wounds to grow elsewhere’ (4.5, haec ulcera cum ipsis membris absciderat: alia subnascebantur) so that it would always ‘break in one part or another’ (4.5, parte semper aliqua rumpebatur).
The poetry of the Augustan age acts dumb about these conspiracies, but it occasionally mentions some of their players. References to the events themselves, often relegated to the texts’ commentary history (as in the case of Virgil’s substitution of the Aristaeus epyllion for the laudes Galli at the end of the Georgics),Footnote 29 shroud them in mystery and suspicion, and exilic Ovid capitalises on the unspoken of Augustan poetry when teasing his readers with his inability to tell the historical circumstances of his exile, or give the names of friends and political enemies alike.Footnote 30 Horace’s lyrics, and his second book of Odes in particular, as we shall see below (Section V), advocate steering clear of the dangerous game of writing explicitly about history.Footnote 31 Even his more ‘triumviral’ compositions, the Epodes and the first book of the Satires, end up underplaying the seriousness and urgency of the historical topics they treat, especially downgrading Horace’s involvement in them by various poetic strategies, including complex double entendres, puns and jests, inaccessible references and an overall tone of mockery and bathetic downplaying of the subject matter.Footnote 32
In the Odes, ‘vatic’ Horace is often thought to assume an aura of prophetic wisdom and elegant tactfulness that is rarely treated in tandem with the mordant aggressiveness of the Epodes, or with the derogatory cast of the Satires.Footnote 33 However, it was still Horace the ex-satirist, steeped in a tradition both of ὀνομαστὶ κωμῳδεῖν (to ridicule or shame by naming) and of withdrawing significant names,Footnote 34 who wrote ‘the Ode to Licinius’(Ode 2.10): a brief lyric made up of six Sapphic stanzas that encourage a certain Licinius to practise moderation, programmatically inserted at a halfway point of Horace’s Book 2 in his three-book collection of Odes. This paraenetic poem, chock-full of proverbial clichés, sounds decisively satirical if we entertain the possibility that it was written in full awareness that contemporary and future readers would wonder whether its advice to ‘play it safe’ was addressed to the soon-to-be-executed, or already executed, conspirator Licinius Murena, whose failed conspiracy to overthrow the newly established Principate of Augustus was discovered at the same time as the supposed publication of Horace’s collection (23–22 b.c.e.). Ostensibly, there seems to be absolutely nothing in the poem to remind readers of the conspiracy: only the fleeting name of an addressee, Licinius, homonymous with one of the two conspirators, who could in fact be any Licinius, and who stands in for any lyric addressee, any contemporary or future reader who can use the poem’s advice to moderation and restraint. Yet the classic commentary to Horace’s Odes devotes almost eight pages to discussing the evidence for identifying him with the conspirator.Footnote 35 Where does this scholarly obsession come from, and what does it tell us about the ways in which we have been, and still are, encouraged to read literature produced in the early Roman imperial era?
In what follows, I argue that the patent vagueness of the common name ‘Licinius’Footnote 36 sets up Ode 2.10 to play a ‘conspiratorial’ game with contemporary, then future readers. A comparable example, which I discuss in the close of this paper (Section VI), is that of the Ode to a ‘Vergilius’ (Ode 4.12): in this case, the name cannot but evoke the poet Virgil, but the poem’s circumstances of composition, its commentary tradition and the poetic mockery displayed on the surface of the text encourage us to question the plausibility of the identification. Using these two poems as case studies for what ambiguous homonymity and a historically conspiratorial context do to and for the historicisation of lyric, I read Odes 2.10 and 4.12 as anticipating, and indeed provoking, historicist interpretations in their contemporary and future readership. Capitalising on a culture that is obsessed with homonymity and the potential parallels that it creates, the homonymous addressee is for Horace a crucial strategy of eliciting and at the same time deluding contextual historicisation. The ultimately frustrating search for historical identification becomes both a locus for pleasurably satisfying suspicious reading and a potent tool for ensuring the futurity of lyric, which is capable of speaking across the ages precisely because of its inherent propensity for being decontextualised.
Throughout this analysis, I wish to stress that the reasons why scholars have obsessed about historicising the Odes to Licinius and Virgil are contextual/historicist and formal/aesthetic in equal measure, and that the ‘Ode to Licinius’ perfectly exposes the false dichotomy in the metaphorical opposition between ‘deep’ versus ‘surface’ readings. It is true that the obsession with historical identification is partly born out of the paratextual, contextual, intertextual and commentary traditions; but a reading of the poem in the context of Horace’s Odes 2 and its engagement both with contemporary history and with ‘History’ as an analytical and aesthetic category will show that the text itself invites a potentially suspicious readership. Moreover, these lyrics also encourage us to feel pleasure in critique,Footnote 37 to engage in the suspicious hermeneutics stirred by an enigmatic encounter with their mysterious strangeness in a highly affective, rather than solely analytical or neurotic drive.Footnote 38
III The Ode to (a) Licinius (Ode 2.10): a conspiratorial context
The first three books of Horace’s Odes, presumably published and presented to Augustus as a collection upon his recovery from illness in 23 b.c.e.,Footnote 39 boast at their core a veritable enigma for historicist readers. The ‘poem in the middle’ of the ‘book in the middle’, is a six-Sapphic-stanza philosophical recommendation to hold a ‘middle’ course in life, addressed to an otherwise unspecified ‘Licinius’:Footnote 40
The poem was handed down, in a family of manuscripts dating from the ninth to the twelfth century, under the title ad Licinium Murenam: optimum esse medium statum uitae (‘to Licinius Murena: the best course of life is moderation’).Footnote 41 In their 1978 commentary, Nisbet and Hubbard followed SymeFootnote 42 in a not so cautious identification of the addressee with Varro Murena, whom Cassius Dio also calls Licinius Murena.Footnote 43 This Licinius Varro Murena, brother of Maecenas’ wife Terentia, led a major conspiracy against the Princeps together with Fannius Caepio. The plan was discovered at some point between the close of 23 and the first quarter of 22 b.c.e., with the ringleaders condemned in absentia and executed.Footnote 44 Ode 2.10 is an injunction to moderation and caution to a Licinius, an admonition to pursue the Aristotelian ‘golden measure’ (aurea mediocritas) which, as line 5 of the poem makes clear, is applicable to, and able to encompass, ‘anyone’ (quisquis).Footnote 45 For sure, the poem’s warning, as Ps.-Acro puts it, of how ‘dangerous’ it is to attempt ‘great enterprises’ (monens periculosum esse magna temptare), rings differently if we approach it while still thinking of Murena. Once we become privy to the conspiratorial context via the manuscript and commentary traditions, we cannot but read the poem with a suspicious, or conspiratorial, mind.Footnote 46
While the purpose of this paper is not to assess the plausibility of the identification, it is important to note that, if we were to accept both the identification and the traditional dating for the ‘publication’ of Odes 1–3, the poem would not just predate but intriguingly anticipate the future conspiracy. This means that we would end up in the position of either having to question, as has already been done, the traditional chronology for the collection,Footnote 47 or having to imagine a somewhat conspiratorial Horace, who was himself privy to the behind-the-scenes machinations. To solve this issue, Nisbet and Hubbard first posited an insecure identification between the conspirator and one Varro Murena, mentioned in the Capitoline Fasti (but in no other Fasti) as consul elect for 23 b.c.e. but soon replaced with Cn. Calpurnius Piso. Then, on the basis of this identification, they imagined Ode 2.10, with its injunction to Licinius to bear both fortune and calamity with moderation and strong heart, to allude not to the conspiracy but to a different phase of Murena’s downfall, when the consul designatus was supposedly removed from office in favour of Piso. This would fit with the Ode’s core message about our inability to know the future, as in lines 17–18 non si male nunc et olim/sic erit (‘it is not the case that if all now goes badly, one day too it will be so’). The poem should thus be read as a consolation to the addressee, offered, unbeknownst to both, before ‘further catastrophe’.Footnote 48
However, this identification between the poem’s Licinius, the consul designatus, and the conspirator is doubly doubtful. Surely, we must resist the temptation to merge homonymous characters into the same person in a culture where homonymity was so common, and it is hard to discredit the objection that we may instead be dealing with two, or even three, altogether different people, not least since Velleius gives the conspirator the praenomen ‘Lucius’,Footnote 49 whereas the consul seems to be named in the Fasti (where there is, however, a significant lacuna) as ‘Aulus Terentius’.Footnote 50 It is also telling that, a quarter of a century later, Nisbet and Rudd deny the identification between consul designate and conspirator, when commenting on the augur Murena mentioned in Carm. 3.19.10–11, who is perhaps the same Murena mentioned in the iter Brundisinum (Sat. 1.5.38).Footnote 51 Following the reconstruction of Jerome Arkenberg, they cautiously identify Horace’s Murena with A. Terentius Varro Murena, the designated consul, who was perhaps the brother of Licinius Varro Murena, the conspirator.Footnote 52
Be that as it may, the Licinius of Ode 2.10, to whom Horace recommends peripatetic moderation, continues to appear to historians as a tantalising double for Murena the conspirator, whom Strabo (14.5.4) reports as being friends with the peripatetic philosopher Athenaeus, and whom Cassius Dio describes as having ‘immoderate and unrestrained outspokenness’ (54.3.4, ἀκράτῳ καὶ κατακορεῖ τῇ παρρησίᾳ). Furthermore, the identification seems fitting in a collection that also mentions Murena’s half-brother Proculeius (Ode 2.2)Footnote 53 and perhaps alludes to Murena’s sister Terentia, whom commentators since Ps.-Acro have imagined as looming behind the fictional name of Licymnia in Ode 2.12.Footnote 54
This search for an irrecoverable identification with a Licinius, who ultimately stands for the quisquis of the unknowable reader, somewhat misses the very point of the function of the lyrical addressee. Fictional addressees might always tease future readers for historical identification (think of the mysterious identity of Shakespeare’s ‘Fair Youth’), but their function as lyric addressees is predicated precisely upon their capacity for abstraction. The poem’s mention of the Roman name ‘Licinius’ is at the same time historically pointed, insofar as it encourages a quest for identification,Footnote 55 and historically unspecified, precisely because Horace holds back the cognomen that would make the identification possible. While the conspirator was certainly not the only Licinius Murena in his family, he is referred to by all our prose sources as ‘Murena’ (or else Varro Murena, Licinius Murena, L. Murena), with the sole exception of Tacitus, who identifies him as ‘Varro’.Footnote 56 No other source refers to him solely as ‘Licinius’.
There is something satirically playful in the way in which the Ode’s maritime context seems to hint at the unspoken Murena. Sources agree that the Licinii obtained the cognomen from the murena fish (sometimes wrongly identified as the lamprey but likely to be the moray eel), either because of their excessive fondness of them,Footnote 57 or because the first of the Licinii who obtained the cognomen was the inventor of fishponds.Footnote 58 Nisbet and Hubbard humorously remind us that it is fitting for a murena to be advised to keep off the shore in the first stanza of this poem, since both Aristotle and Pliny report that this fish often ends up coming onto dry land and getting caught,Footnote 59 but they then immediately undermine the suggestion by stating instead that there is ‘a feeling that the occasion is inappropriate for such frivolities’.Footnote 60 Yet Horace clearly puns on the ‘fishy name’ in Satire 1.5, where Murena ‘the moray eel’ is accompanied by Capito ‘the mullet’, with the former furnishing the house and the latter the catering.Footnote 61 We may also add that the pseudo-Ovidian Halieutica describe the murena fish as ferox (Hal. 27) — so ferox that the Roman equestrian Vedius Pollio, supposedly friends with Augustus, is reported by Pliny to have sentenced slaves to death by throwing them into a pond of murenae.Footnote 62 The Halieutica also describe the murena as writhing and slippery when caught in the fisherman’s net, and damaging others by his example (30, exemploque nocet), a description that would be amusingly fitting if readers of this poem were meant to connect the fish with the famous conspirator.Footnote 63
Surely enough, this is nothing more than speculative historicist fiction, quite unhelpful in the concrete eventuality that this could be an altogether different Licinius. Horace could have mentioned the nickname Murena if he had wanted to, and other candidates have been proposed for the identification of this Ode’s Licinius: Porphyrio already identified Horace’s addressee with a Licinius Valgius, while the Cruquian scholia, which may equally include material earlier than the manuscripts that identify him with Murena, take him to be Marcus Licinius Crassus, grandson of the triumvir. This latter suggestion is revived by Stephen Harrison, with the observation that Licinius Crassus would have been appropriately recommended moderation given the controversy over his claim to the spolia opima in 29 b.c.e.Footnote 64
Ultimately, however, what is fascinating about the ‘Ode to Licinius’ is not so much the historicist question of whether or not it is addressed to the conspirator, and whether or not it alludes to the conspiracy, but the poetic mechanisms by which the poem actively teases but also simultaneously discourages its future ‘suspicious’ or ‘paranoid’ readings, because the text sets up hints and clues at its own historical context while eventually refusing us the key to access it. In an illuminating contribution from 2016, Alex Dressler carefully examines how this poem’s critical reception is always already implicated in its aesthetic form, which brilliantly reflects in its historicist ambivalence ‘the ambivalence of signification and interpretation in general’.Footnote 65 The Ode’s deceptive simplicity, the concept of the ‘mean’, allows it to pose as what Dressler after Paul Ricoeur dubs a ‘kerygma’ or ‘code poem’, which by its own existence comments on the limits of hermeneutics as a reading practice.Footnote 66 Building on Dressler, I capitalise on the hermetic and hermeneutic message of Ode 2.10 and read it as a programmatic declaration of poetics and a poignant meditation on the remits of lyric and history. The etymology of Licinius from licinus, meaning in-curved or bent backwards,Footnote 67 brought to the surface by the name’s juxtaposition with the poem’s opening adverb rectius, encapsulates the challenges that the poem poses to straightforward interpretation: ‘it declares that there are more ways to get from A to B than on a straight course, as every reader sailing on the lyric Aegean is to be reminded’.Footnote 68
IV The Ode to (a) Licinius: a conspiratorial surface reading
Ode 2.10 opens with a ‘twist’ on the adverb recte (1 rectius) denoting not just a ‘righteous’ course of action, but the possibility of the addressee ‘leading’ or ‘reigning over’ (regere) a potentially allegorical ‘ship of state’ with moderation under both prosperous and perilous circumstances.Footnote 69 Rather than twisting in a winding pathway between the shore and the open sea, the ship of the curved-in speaking name Licinius should strive to proceed on a straight course, at a safe distance from either. But is this desirable path ‘quite straight’, ‘as straight as possible’, or ‘straighter than’ Licinius’ previous one? The ambiguous form of the comparative rectius (absolute or relative) already invites us to wonder whether we are meant to read this poem against the historical archives.
It is also telling that Horace does not frame this maxim as an injunction or an exhortation (he could have used an imperative or an exhortative subjunctive), but as the certain apodosis of what will happen in the future if Licinius’ leadership fulfils certain conditions. He does so by having the comparative adverb immediately followed by a future that is startling in its direct address to the reader: uīuēs, ‘you will live’ (1). This is a sudden temporary intrusion into our own lifespan as readers, diffracted by the mediation of the poem’s explicit addressee, on whose anapaest we linger for a short caesura (1 rectius uiues, Lĭcĭnī). The final movement of the first line lifts us towards hubristic heights (neque altum),Footnote 70 before we realise that this is not an upward- but a downward-facing height, with altum denoting the bottomless depth of the open sea.Footnote 71 This effect of being uplifted towards the ὕψος only to be plunged back, bathetically, towards the ground is re-enacted in the poem’s third stanza, which similarly opens on another comparative adverb (9 saepius),Footnote 72 to remind us, and Licinius, that high pine trees and towers fall ‘more often’, and with a ‘heavier fall’ (10 grauiore casu).Footnote 73
The two options for Licinius to avoid are expressed in the timeless and continuous present of two synonymous paired gerunds (2–3 neque …/urgendo neque …/premendo) that invite him to putting some ‘urgent’, and perhaps political, ‘pressure’.Footnote 74 The ‘gnomic’ quality of this eternal present is reinforced by the enjambed adverb semper (‘always’) in the second line, and it anticipates the gnomic presents of the ode: diligit (6), caret (6, 7), agitatur (9), decidunt (11), feriunt (11), sperat (13), metuit (13), reducit (15), summouet (17), suscitat (19), tendit (20). At the fringes of the poem, the future tense of line 1 is repeated in ring-composition in the penultimate line (23 contrahes), along with an injunction in the imperative, directed simultaneously to us as unknown readers and to the (ironically) equally unknown Licinius to ‘show ourselves’, to ‘appear’ (22 appare) — although that injunction comes with the specification to appear ‘strong’ (22 fortis) and ‘spirited’ (21 animosus, an adjective that plays with the breeze of the wind in the poem’s nautical metaphor) in ‘dire straits’ (21 rebus angustis), or a situation whose constriction and anguish (angor) is difficult to navigate.
In Ode 2.10, the gnomic present is both ‘the dominant tense of lyric’Footnote 75 and an Aristotelian ‘mean’ between past and future.Footnote 76 All tenses appear in the core sententia of lines 17–18 non si male nunc et olim/sic erit, which employs the ambiguity of olim (meaning ‘once’, either in the past or in the future) just before the enjambed future erit to suggest, again, that historical — or historicised — past and future can be pitted against the generalised nunc of the lyric event. To an extent, these future tenses elicit a quest for historicisation: they break the spell of the lyric hic et nunc and invite us to pin down the poet’s or addressee’s historical present onto a chain of chronologically ordered events — to contextualise it within (its) H/history. And if we attempt to do so, it is hard to shake off the irony of the vatic sententiousness with which Horace declares that the namesake of the executed, or soon-to-be-executed, conspirator ‘will live’. The Ode assumes even more the form of a coded message to Licinius if we entertain the idea of an acrostic across the only two joined stanzas of the poem, since the first letters of lines 13 to 17 read as the word sapis (‘you are wise’), echoed both by the adverb sapienter in line 22 and perhaps also anticipated by saepius in line 9.Footnote 77 Often found in conjunction with the conditional particle si, the coded acrostic reads like the sous rature protasis of the opening future: ‘you will live, Licinius’ (‘if you are wise’ or ‘if you know how to handle yourself’).Footnote 78
Iterability, another main characteristic of lyric,Footnote 79 is evoked by generic images of the cyclicity of nature, which are attributed to one single figure, Jupiter, standing as the pivot of the only two stanzas that merge into one another in this poem (14–17 informis hiemes reducit/Iuppiter, idem/summouet).Footnote 80 Jupiter is pitted against Licinius in the echo of idem in line 22: Licinius must be ‘the same person’ (22 idem) able to withstand both prosperity and adversity, which are both sent by the ‘same deity’, Jupiter (15 idem). Suspicious readers have long been alert to reading figures of imperial power in the whimsical deities in this poem,Footnote 81 both in Jupiter and especially in Apollo, who is said to ‘not always stretch his bow’ (19–20 neque semper arcum/tendit Apollo) — a phrase that has been read as a veiled encouragement to the earthly Jupiter/Apollo to show mercy to the potential conspirator.Footnote 82
Apollo is also said to be ‘sometimes’ (another unstable historical referent) able to elicit ‘the’, or ‘a’ ‘silent Muse’ ‘with’ or ‘from’ the lyre (18–19 quondam cithara tacentem/suscitat Musam). The ablative cithara is ambiguous, and Bentley, followed by Nisbet and Hubbard, preferred the manuscript variant in the genitive citharae to indicate ‘the Muse of the lyre’ in imitation of the musa tragoediae of Carm. 2.1.9. Nisbet and Hubbard, maintaining the genitive, write that the reference is to the muse/music which is ‘latent in the lyre itself’ so that ‘the lyre when played is like a sleeper awakened’.Footnote 83 There is perhaps a deliberate use of the present participle tacentem to indicate duration of action in contrast to the perfect participle tacitam, which Horace refers again to the lyre in Ode 3.19 (Carm. 3.19.20, cur pendet tacita fistula cum lyra?) — a poem that celebrates the augurate of none other than (one) Murena. Reading suspiciously, tacentem in Ode 2.10 would point to what Horace’s lyre is leaving unspoken throughout the duration of the poem (not least the name ‘Murena’), and which may only be voiced if prompted by ‘his’ Apollo.Footnote 84 Musa tacens works both as a comment on the poet’s self-censorship in a climate of political instability, and on the poetry’s restraint from providing readers with contextual information.
The ‘Ode to Licinius’ employs all main characteristics of lyric identified by Jonathan Culler (present tense, iterability, a fictional addressee with an unplaceable singularisation) to allow for its almost ritualistic repetition, generalisation and applicability to different situations. Mention of the common name Licinius without further specification of praenomen or cognomen allows the poem to perform that double effect of ‘singularization and iterability’ that is ‘central to lyric’ and its ‘striking deictic effects … where the you … remains unlocated’.Footnote 85 From the point of view of a theory of the lyric, the double thrust of Ode 2.10, which encourages a search for an identification of its addressee while simultaneously transforming Licinius into a ‘type’, a quisquis, or an anonymous reader, is part of the fabric of the poem. From beginning to end, its surface both mimes and frustrates the historicist search and the quest for a deeper meaning by pondering metaphors of height and depth and almost enacting the caricature of a suspicious search to look behind the letter of its text. From the very first line, Licinius is discouraged from ‘pressing’ (2–3 urgendo, premendo) for a ‘height’ (1 altum) that then turns into ‘depth’ once we suddenly find ourselves out at sea. The third stanza, with its focus on the fractured heights of trees (9–10 ingens/pinus), towers (10–11 celsae/turres), and mountain tops (11–12 summos/montes), employs three enjambments to enact the sudden surprise of the fall following the hubristic search for a sublime flight — a fall that repetition makes eventually trite, and therefore no longer sudden or surprising, in line with its caricature found in the close of Horace’s Ars Poetica.Footnote 86 As Dressler suggests, the ‘vacuity’ of the poem ‘may be deliberate’ in the light of the conspiracy: the lack of evidence found by suspicious readers echoes the lack of evidence about Licinius’ involvement in the plot. No matter how hard one might look for clues, the poem has no indictment to report.Footnote 87
V A parade of literary historians
I have argued that the ‘Ode to Licinius’ simultaneously invites and frustrates a search into the archives of history, both sporting the possibility of a universalising and decontextualised philosophical reading and encouraging contemporary and future readers to take delight in the unsatisfiable quest for deeper, contextual and historicised meanings. This is, of course, not a characteristic solely of this poem, nor solely of Horace, but I propose that Ode 2.10 is to be taken as exemplary in the way it performs the relationship between the ungraspable present and future of the lyric utterance and the supposedly fixed past context of ‘history’ in its literary guise of ‘historiography’. As we have seen, its non-identifiable addressee turns the poem into a historicist riddle, whose enigmatic qualities are enhanced by its posing as a generalising philosophical maxim. When read within the second book of Odes, which opens with three poems addressed to historians, the ‘Ode to Licinius’ becomes even more crucial for understanding how Horace envisions the relationship between history and poetry as literary discourses.
While allusions to historians and history-writing abound throughout the Horatian corpus,Footnote 88 the cluster of references to historians and history-writing in the opening triad of Odes 2 is striking in a collection that boasts a lack of concern with contemporary ‘history’ and a move towards an almost Epicurean withdrawal from public life. The book kicks off with the so-called ‘Ode to Pollio’ (Ode 2.1), addressed to a recognisable public figure, setting the tone for further identification in subsequent poems. This is a tragic reperformance in Alcaics that mixes Asinius Pollio’s historiography of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey with his tragic production. In the final stanza, the poem announces a ‘retreat’ (Carm. 2.1.38, retractes) from both tragedy and history-writing in favour of a seclusion and containment into the supposedly safer space of lyric.Footnote 89 In accordance with this promise of a withdrawal from the tragic history of the civil wars, the ‘Ode to Pollio’ is followed by a brief philosophising denunciation of material riches in Sapphic stanzas, which nevertheless maintains both the tragic and historiographical connections with the poem immediately preceding: Ode 2.2 opens with a maxim (Carm. 2.2.1–2, nullus argento color est auaris/abdito terris, ‘silver has no colour while hidden in the greedy earth’) that is ‘complicated by an apparent allusion to a Greek tragic line’ preserved by Plutarch and conjecturally attributed to Euripides.Footnote 90 Moreover, this tragic maxim is addressed to a Gaius Sallustius Crispus, the homonymous great-nephew and adopted son of the historian Sallust, whose Historiae were the literary predecessor of Pollio’s, and whose hypocritical greed was not unknown in antiquity, not least in his maladministration of Africa Nova.Footnote 91 This great-nephew was also renowned for his wealth and luxus Footnote 92 and was said to have owned not silver, but copper mines.Footnote 93 Finally, as third in this triad, there comes a sympotic poem, Ode 2.3, addressed to yet another historian, Quintus Dellius, who had written a history of Antony’s Parthian campaigns and who was perhaps emissary of Antony to Cleopatra at Tarsus before changing side to Octavian.Footnote 94 To this man, who had been nicknamed ‘horse-hopper of the civil wars’ by Messalla, as attested by the Elder Seneca (Sen., Suas. 1.7, desultor bellorum ciuilium), because of his several changes of side, Horace directs a generalisable recommendation to keep an aequa mens, ‘equanimity’ and ‘indifference’, however circumstances may change — a veritable anticipation of the message to Licinius, whose satirical irony is grasped only by reference to historical contextualisation.
It is hard not to read this cluster of historical addressees and amici of Augustus as deliberate in the opening of a book of poems whose distinguishing characteristic has been found in its interest in philosophical themes and in its thematising of a private dimension to lyric, in striking contrast with the public opening of Odes 3. Odes 2 revolves around the ‘Ode to Licinius’ both as a literary-philosophical ‘middle’ and as a historicist crux desperationis, which the three opening poems anticipate both in terms of its philosophical message and in teasing readers with potential clues to decode historicist riddles. We have seen that the ‘Ode to Dellius’ similarly opens with an exhortation to a kind of moderation, or equanimity (Carm. 2.3.1, aequa mens) in difficult circumstances (2.3.1, rebus in arduis, re-echoed by Carm. 2.10.21, rebus angustis), even though, in the place of Licinius’ prospective future life, we have, for Dellius, a more pessimistic memento mori (Carm. 2.3.1, memento; 2.3.4, moriture). Ode 2.2 similarly anticipates the theme of moderation and the philosophical instructions,Footnote 95 but it also contributes to recalling the (hi)story of the conspirator, since it mentions Murena’s half-brother Proculeius, joining him with precisely the same indicative future applied to Licinius:
Just as Licinius ‘will live’ (Carm. 2.1.1, uiues), the half-brother of Licinius Murena will ‘live on to distant ages’ (2.2.5, uiuet extento Proculeius aeuo).Footnote 96 The line is a clear reference to Proculeius’ posthumous fame, which will lift him up in the air in her winged personification, postponed until the stanza’s adonium (8, fama superstes).Footnote 97 The stanza compares Proculeius’ notoriety to Horace’s own capacity for memorialisation: the ambitious but cautious fama of Proculeius, which ‘fears the loosening of its wings’ (2.2.7, penna metuente solui) anticipates Horace’s trumping of Icarus in the shape of a swan in the sphragis that closes the second collection (cf. 2.20.13, iam Daedaleo notior Icaro, and 2.2.6, notus). In Ode 2.20, Horace’s flight to new heights on feathers that do not need refinement nor moderation to avoid being hackneyed and banal (Carm. 2.20.1–2, non usitata nec tenui … pinna) reads like a disavowal of that moderation recommended to Licinius and practised by Proculeius. But while Ode 2.2 suggests that it is Horace’s poetry that will grant fame to Proculeius, the stanza also reads as an injunction to readers to look directly into the historians’ records for making sense of Proculeius’ fame, given that this will be granted by virtue of ‘his paternal spirit towards his brothers’ (6, notus in fratres animi paterni). Porphyrio and Ps.-Acro explain that Proculeius shared his patrimony with his brothers Scipio and Murena after they lost theirs during the civil wars,Footnote 98 but we have no other record of such an episode, and Horace’s words would instead sound dramatically ironic after the conspiracy, since we read in Dio that Proculeius was of no help to his brother Murena when the latter was condemned.Footnote 99 Certainly, the historical records that are available to us are not the same as those available to Horace’s scholiasts, but it is telling that Horace’s invitation to historicise ends up making this line rather inappropriate when read against supposedly historical information.
The larger question that this poem, and Ode 2.10, invites us to ponder is nothing short of what use history and historiography might have, or will have in the future, for the interpretation of lyric poetry. This is of crucial importance in a book that opens with a kind of emulation of, or competition with, the historian and tragedian Pollio (Ode 2.1). The ‘Ode to Pollio’ plunges us immediately into a lyric present that is made more vivid by enargeia: Pollio is ‘writing’ and ‘touching’ history right now (Carm. 2.1.7, tractas), and the effects of his writing are vividly translated in the rendition of Horace’s present reception (17, iam nunc … perstringis … strepunt). It is unclear, however, whether this effect of perceiving historical events as if they were happening in an iterable present is a feature of Pollio’s histories, of Pollio’s tragedies, or of Horace’s lyric rendition of both: the ambiguity between sound and spectacle that marks a major difference between tragedy and lyric is underlined by the aural/visual synaesthesia of line 21, audire … iam uideor, ‘I already seem/am seen to hear’.Footnote 100 That is, Horace joins the dots between these three supposedly different literary ‘genres’ (historiography, tragedy and lyric) and highlights what they have in common in their capacity to turn history into literary discourse. Moreover, the role of autopsy in Pollio’s narrative, as well as in Horace’s civil war poems, is the central point where Pollio’s first person historiography and Horace’s lyric ‘I’ converge in having witnessed the events of the wars and in being entrusted to preserve them in writing. At the same time, however, just as he does for Licinius, Horace historicises his addressee Pollio, in the third and fourth stanzas, by means of a joint use of future and past tenses:
With this historicising parenthesis, which gives us the unequivocal name of the addressee, Horace singles out how historical writing may differ from what lyric has to offer precisely in relation to its temporality.Footnote 101 The perfect (16, peperit) places the Ode at a time in history where Pollio’s Dalmatian triumph has already happened, while the future (12, repetes) guesses that soon (mox) there will be a late tragic production from Pollio. The present of this Ode, and Pollio’s present writing, is contextualised as right in the middle between these two events. With the use of the syncopated future perfect (11, ordinaris, which Harrison notes as ‘prosaic, reflecting the prosaic genre of history and perhaps the language of Pollio’s preface’),Footnote 102 a further chronological clue is given to what is now a future, but will soon be past from the viewpoint of Pollio’s future tragic production. Just as may be the case in the ‘Ode to Licinius’, Horace here is explicitly attempting to compose poetry in foresight of future historical events, and future literary works. Interestingly, it is precisely in this rare attempt of Horatian lyric to settle the chronology of Pollio’s achievements that history-writing is itself described as an ‘ordering’, no doubt in chronological, annalistic form, of ‘public matters’ (10–11, publicas/res) — an activity that has a political active dimension that Horace instead pretends to deny to supposedly ‘private’ lyric.Footnote 103
In short, Horace’s historiographical parade at the beginning of Odes 2 contributes greatly to our sense that the ‘Ode to Licinius’ includes a meditation on historicist interpretation and historiographical writing in relation to the nature of lyric poetry and the lyric event. Among scholars who have surveyed Horace’s engagement with history and history-writing, Denis Feeney has suggested, in relation to Odes 4, that Horace’s conscious lack of intertextual engagement with Livy signals an open competition between lyric and historiography in the preservation of Rome’s historical past.Footnote 104 This is somewhat in line with Tony Woodman’s reading of Horace’s allusions to historians as a call to scholars for a shifting of the focus of critical attention ‘from Poetry to History’.Footnote 105 In this section, I have suggested instead that the apparent competition staged by Horace between lyric and historiography over the ‘form’ and ‘rhetoric’ of history-telling can also be read in a playful rather than competitive guise, and that Horace can be seen as engaged in teasing both Roman historiographers and future historicist readers when luring them into the game of historicising lyrics that are by nature non-historicisable because of their atemporal and iterable features. As we have seen, both the fictional addressee and a sustained use of the present tense are recognised by Culler as two main characteristics of lyric, which turn the lyric poem into an iterable event, with the fictional present of the poem’s composition becoming one and the same with the iterable present of the poem’s future receptions.Footnote 106 In Michèle Lowrie’s words, ‘lyric time is the hic et nunc’,Footnote 107 meaning that in lyric poetry the linear temporality that is also proper of history-as-narrative must be abandoned in favour of a different, ritualistic temporality of the poetic event, whose chronology does not necessarily map onto the chronology of history and history-writing. When viewed in the light of the historicist mystery lyrically set up by Ode 2.10, the cluster of poems to historians at the beginning of Odes 2 becomes a playful literary game: Horace invites us into the historians’ laboratory only to highlight the specificities of lyric as a peculiar kind of history-telling, and by doing so he encourages us to shift our attention — yes, ‘from poetry to history’ at first, but then again ‘from history to poetry’.
VI Homonymity as conspiratorial practice: the Ode to (a) Virgil (Ode 4.12)
As Mario Citroni argues, the ability of Horace’s lyrics to ‘transcend the contingent experience’ is a defining characteristic of his poetry, which makes it substantially different from the more intimate and more historically contextualised compositions of the neoterics.Footnote 108 Thus, Horace’s de-historicisation of the single poetic occasion serves to endow the lyrics with a totalising and future-oriented strategy. Among the several potentially recognisable addressees presented in the Odes, Licinius is perhaps the most enigmatic example of a name that works as bait for future suspicious historicist readers, but he is by no means the only one.Footnote 109 There are other cases in lyric Horace where homonymity creates ambiguity for the historicist reader, sometimes with a surprising recollection of a famous historical name,Footnote 110 others with a conflation of more than one historical actor.Footnote 111
In this final section, I single out a comparable example of how Horace plays with future readers on the terrain of homonymity in a poem belonging to his later production, and with a clear Catullan intertextual background. This is the famous ‘Ode to (a) Vergilius’ (Ode 4.12), a composition in seven third Asclepiadean stanzas,Footnote 112 all self-contained in their grammatical periods, and each forming an enclosed micro-poem in itself:
The same family of manuscripts that identified Licinius with Murena reads this poem as addressed ad Vergilium quendam unguentarium, ‘to a certain merchant of perfumes called Virgil’.Footnote 113 Ps.-Acro calls him simply a negotiator, a ‘tradesman’, to whom Horace suggests that spring is the right time for navigation.Footnote 114 However, this interpretation goes against Porphyrio’s certainty that this is instead Vergilius poeta, whose death predated the publication of Odes 4, but may not have predated the composition of this particular poem.Footnote 115 Furthermore, as Jenny Strauss Clay argues, the poem might have been composed after and à propos Virgil’s death, as an invitation to Virgil to a kind of symposium in death.Footnote 116
The situation mirrors that of Ode 2.10: in the ‘Ode to Licinius’, the poem’s content matches the context of the unmentioned Murena; in the ‘Ode to Virgil’, the content is instead a bad fit for a glaringly conspicuous name, whereas the style and language of the first three stanzas is especially reminiscent of Virgil’s poetry.Footnote 117 In both cases, we are similarly called to interpret allusions to the possibility that we might be dealing with an address in death of a conspicuous contemporary Roman individual. As in the comparable case of an allusion to the death to the young Marcellus in Ode 1.12, where Nisbet and Hubbard thought that it would have been ‘hardly possible’ for Horace to allude to Marcellus in the way he does in this poem if it was written after his death,Footnote 118 Horace’s lyric delicacy and tactfulness are again weaponised by commentators to deny a plausible identification. For Eduard Fraenkel, it is unthinkable that Horace, ‘the most tactful of poets’, should turn into ‘a monster of callousness’ by addressing Virgil as a ‘client of the young nobility’ (15, iuuenum nobilium cliens) and ascribing to him ‘desire for profit’ (25, studium lucri).Footnote 119 Since then, however, even Horace’s first address to Virgil in the Odes, the propempticon of Ode 1.3, has been seen to display ‘none of [Horace’s] usual tact and charm’,Footnote 120 and to include perhaps a well-informed but tongue-in-check Callimachean demeaning of Virgil’s epic enterprise which would fit with the more satirical tone of Horace’s address to Virgil in the missed propempticon of Ode 4.12.Footnote 121 Here Virgil, perhaps mindful of the warnings of Ode 1.3, is eventually encouraged to come to Horace’s house for lyric drinks rather than setting out onto the epic sea.
Besides its posing as a failed propempticon, the ‘Ode to Virgil’ is more obviously a patchwork between a spring and an invitation poem, and specifically a contaminatio between two Catullan compositions: Catullus’ goodbye to his comrades in Bithynia (Catullus 46) and his invitation to dinner to Fabullus (Catullus 13). The use of the tenses to mark the difference between the two halves of this poem provides a formal point of comparison with the ‘Ode to Licinius’, also in conjunction with the epiphany of the fictional addressee. If Licinius is suddenly historicised by the force of the future indicative uiues against the present tenses of the rest of the poem, Vergilius is also suddenly historicised by the sudden and unexpectedly remote perfect adduxere that Horace inserts at the turning point of Ode 4.12 (line 13),Footnote 122 just after three stanzas have engaged with the ritualistic cyclicity of the lyric present as in line with the cyclic temporality of the seasons (1, iam … temperant; 2, impellunt; 3, iam nec rigent; 3, (iam nec) strepunt; 5, ponit; 9, dicunt; 11, delectant; 12, placent). The tempora preceding Virgil’s mention in line 13 serve as a connective between the poem’s two Catullan halves, acting both as the historic-political circumstances that brought Virgil and Horace ‘thirst’ (13, sitim) for profit (25, studium lucri) — as well as, we might surmise, poetic glory — and as the ritualistic tempora of the lyric, a continuous flowing present where chronologies overlap and spatial-temporal coordinates are lost in the ‘desire’ of the moment (25, studium, 15, si gestis, 28, in loco).
This focus on the ritualistic iterability of the present and its interaction with the nostalgia for past time is emphasised by the lyric’s mimetic interpretation of time passing in the anaphora of iam in lines 1 and 3. This is epigrammatic and Catullan: it recalls the use of ἤδη in a similar epigram by Marcus Argentarius,Footnote 123 and the same (and double) anaphora of iam in Catullus 46, where the single use of iam (‘already’) projects nostalgia for the comrades that will soon belong to the past, while its repetition iam iam (‘right now’, or ‘come on!’) denotes the impatience and desire to start a new life and a new poetic journey, especially if we read pedes meta-poetically in the sense of metrical units, of feet getting ready to dance:
In Ode 4.12, the anaphora of iam transports us into a temporal dimension where the memory of things ‘already’ passed (iam) coexists with the impatient desire of a present that can only be caught in repetition (iam … iam). This temporal difference mirrors the division of the poem between its description of seasonal time passing and its hurried carpe diem invitation. Similarly, Catullus 46 is divided between a description of the iterability of the seasons and a second half focused on the hic et nunc of a personal autobiographical event, marked instead by the force of desire as it presents itself in the moment: this is both the impatient yearning for wandering in Catullus’ mind, and Horace’s guessing of his addressee’s desire to join him in drinking in the momentary event of the Ode, which is both the temporal interval and the graphic space of the carmen (28, in loco).
Catullus’ autobiographical farewell to his comrades in Bithynia is initially translated by Horace into a generalising au revoir to the cold season in an address to spring and nature: the comites of the neoteric poet (Cat. 46.9, o dulces comitum ualete coetus) become here the ‘companions’ of spring (4.12.1, ueris comites), specified as the ‘breezes’/‘souls’ (2, animae) that calm the stormy sea. Yet echoes of both Catullus and the iter Brundisinum, where animae is used to refer to Tucca, Varius and Virgil as Horace’s own companions (Sat. 1.5.41, animae … candidiores), contribute to the suspicion that these lines might hide a more autobiographical farewell to Virgil as a poetic comrade, previously addressed by Horace, humorously or not, as ‘half of my soul’ (Carm. 1.3.8, animae dimidium meae).Footnote 124 Moreover, the metonymy of animae for ‘winds’ is thought to be a Virgilian innovation, connected by commentators since Porphyrio to the same usage at Aen. 8.403.Footnote 125
Intertextually suspicious readers have found several further reasons why Virgil’s shadow looms over the first three stanzas of Ode 4.12, which are not only interspersed with Virgilian echoes,Footnote 126 but have also been read as imitating Virgil’s poetic career in reverse: the first stanza would allude to the sea of epic, both by a recollection of the propempticon of Ode 1.3, and by the aforementioned Virgilian epic use of animae for winds. The second includes a pointedly Georgic move: here, the violent disruption from the atemporal world of nature to a contextual situation of myth/history/tragedy in the reference to Procne/Philomela’s revenge on Tereus is expressed by a perfect whose inverted word order (8, est ulta) alerts us to its unexpected strangeness. The stanza opens with a natural image whose future projection is reversed in the evocation of the gruesome myth: the nest (5, nidum), which the mother bird builds in the expectation of chicks, immediately metamorphoses into nothing but an empty container for the negated futurity of her lost offspring; a potent symbol of the double temporal movement of the Ode, caught between its impatient and desirous expectation of the future and nostalgia for time past, and things lost. The ambiguity between swallow and nightingale and the holding back of the name (Procne or Philomela?) in the identification of the infelix auis of line 6 could also be, as Richard Thomas points out, ‘an artful reference to Virgil’s treatment of the myth and to the tradition of confusion’.Footnote 127 In the Georgics, the wife of Tereus is now Procne as swallow (G. 4.15), now Philomela as nightingale (G. 4.511–12), while Philomela might be either nightingale or swallow in Eclogue 6, where she is also referred to as infelix (Ecl. 6.81). This echo of Eclogue 6 transports us more explicitly into the pastoral world in the poem’s third stanza, which includes the only mention of Arcadia in the whole of Horace’s poetic production, beside the Virgilian expression dicere carmen, attested for the first time in Eclogue 6 (Ecl. 6.4–5), alongside pingues oues (Ecl. 6.5–6; cf. Carm. 4.12.9–10) and the characteristically Virgilian melancholic use of nigri to describe the shades made by vegetation on the hills (Ecl. 6.54 ilice sub nigra, with Carm. 4.12.11–12).Footnote 128 In line 13, therefore, the name Vergilius comes as a confirming epiphany for those intertextually suspicious readers who have already spotted a great number of allusions to his poetry in the preceding stanzas. Moreover, just as the ‘Ode to Licinius’ seems to hide the acrostic sapis,Footnote 129 Ode 4.12 includes wordplays on Virgil’s name in the phonetic evocation of Vergilius Maro in the uer(is) and mar(e) of line 1, perhaps also reevoked in the second half of the poem in the (a)mar(a) and uer(um) of lines 19 and 25,Footnote 130 which would further reinforce the identification with the poem by possibly evoking Virgil’s signature acrostic Ma-Ve-Pu- in the Georgics (G. 1.429–33).Footnote 131
The re-evocation, perhaps in death, of the entirety of Virgil’s poetic production in the first three stanzas of the ‘Ode to Virgil’ turns the second half of the poem into a more poignantly competitive poetic challenge and exchange. In a strategy similar to that of Ovid’s writing of a ‘mini-Aeneid’ towards the end of his Metamorphoses,Footnote 132 Horace here has condensed each of Virgil’s major works into the microcosm of an Asclepiadean stanza. This Callimachean game anticipates in reverse the different dimensions proposed by the gift-exchange of the second half of the Ode, where Virgil’s tiny box of nard (17, paruus) is said to have the same value as Horace’s large flask of wine (19, largus). Horace’s poetry is therefore envisaged as the opposite of what he has just displayed: copious and Bacchic, identified with the god of wine himself in the Latin form of Liber (14, Liberum). Here, there is an etymological pun with the Greek version of Bacchus’ name: Lyaios ‘the loosener’, evoked by eluere in line 20, where the metrical elisions (20, curarum‿eluere‿efficax) phonetically indicate the inebriation of the wine and of Horace’s poetics, with its blurring of temporalities, identifications and poetic genres.Footnote 133 But Latin Liber can also be read, in a more historicist vein, and against the musa tacens of the ‘Ode to Licinius’,Footnote 134 as indicating Horace’s freedom of expression in the lyric sphere, contrasting with the ideological straitjacket imposed on Virgil by his connections, as a ‘client of the young nobility’ (15, iuuenum nobilium cliens) who is now invited to set himself free in this fictional, or post-mortem, symposium.
In short, like the ‘Ode to Licinius’, the ‘Ode to Virgil’ can also be read suspiciously as a reflection on freedom of speech in lyric poetry written under Augustus, in a political climate that has become even more authoritarian, and more conspiratorial, since the publication of Odes 1–3. The end of line 22 (non ego te meis) repeats a line from the previous ‘Ode to Lollius’, whom Horace promised not to leave ‘unadorned and passed over in silence in his papers’ (4.9.30, non ego te meis/chartis inornatum silebo). The irony of this praise of Marcus Lollius as a man of integrity, given that he is otherwise described by Velleius as greedy and highly corrupted,Footnote 135 is underscored by Horace’s actual silence on the famous clades Lolliana, Lollius’ disastrous defeat, as a legate in Gaul in 16 b.c.e., against the Sygambri, Usipetes and Tencteri.Footnote 136 In a collection of Odes that Suetonius imagined to have been imposed by the emperor in celebration of the victories of Tiberius and Drusus over the Rhaeti and the Vindelici,Footnote 137 the question of freedom of speech and poetic licence remains a crucial contextual background against which to measure these poets’ actual Liberty to abandon the advice to Licinius to ‘be wise’ and instead ‘lose their mind’ (28, de-sipere, a negation of Licinius’ acrostic sapis), even if only for the momentary and fictional space afforded by, and in, a lyric poem.
VII Conclusion: the erotics of conspiracy
In both Odes 2.10 and 4.12, the sudden chronological reference to a time (future or past) that exists in relation to the present of the poem anticipates the mention of an addressee (Licinius or Virgil) whom Horace’s future commentators and critics will attempt and fail to historicise and identify. In more general terms, the Odes encourage us to enter the timeless present of the lyric event, only to disrupt such atemporality by inserting specific references to ‘history’ — by which I mean not just references to history’s events and actors, but references to history’s own ordered, narratological temporality vis-à-vis the ritualistic and iterable present of the lyric. On the one hand, Horace makes us so accustomed to the lyric present that he can use past and future tenses in such a way as to highlight the text’s invitation (despite its eventual resistance) to historicisation. On the other, Horace’s lyric temporalities have important effects on our conceptualisation of the historical context itself, for their temporal disruptions end up casting the shadow of a doubt upon history’s own capacity to keep true to such chronological ordering, when history is after all not so easy to distinguish from the linguistic discourse of historiography. As John Michael puts it, ‘the historicization of lyric reminds us that history itself has a lyrical aspect’.Footnote 138 In other words, interpretation of poetry against the backdrop of its historical context is always undermined by recognition that contexts, too, can only be expressed through discourse (specifically, but not solely, through the discourse of historiography) — a discourse that may employ different strategies from lyric, but whose ‘meanings’ are similarly dependent upon the variables of its enunciations, receptions and interpretations.
I argue that this game can be perceived throughout Horace’s lyric poetry, but specifically in Odes 2, which is especially interested in the limits of historicisation. Licinius can be seen as paradigmatic in showing how Horace activates the suspicion of a secret message that is left to readers to uncover, while also simultaneously warning its readers that such decoding is destined to remain a by-product of our own delusions. In response to post-critique, therefore, the ‘Ode to Licinius’ thematises both the limitations of a purely ‘surface’ reading and the realisation that surface is, after all, the only certainty available to the critic. As such, and not least because its unmentioned background may in fact be a historical conspiracy, Ode 2.10 is the most intriguing specimen of Horace’s ‘Poetics of Conspiracy’, to borrow the expression that Stephen Hinds used for Ovid’s exilic poetry.Footnote 139 Similarly to what I have done in this paper, Hinds reads Ovid’s exile elegies as poems that consciously play with their readers and incite them to investigate their historical contexts. He does not hide his debt to historicism when commenting that it is the (historical) event of the exile that ‘has created an atmosphere of reticence, suspicion, and obsessively paranoid reading’,Footnote 140 but such a concession to historicism becomes problematic against the admission that a conspiratorial attitude is the cipher not just of Ovid’s exile poetry, or of Augustan literature, but of literature as a whole:
Literary critics are always abnormal readers. To be a literary critic is to spend six months, or six years, or sixty years poring over the meaning of a text — or of an event, which is a kind of text — and this is an obsessive activity, not a normal one. And it is a kind of obsessiveness which we apply to all our poetic texts, not just to texts charged with the particular kinds of secrecy which the texts of Ovid’s exile are charged. (Hinds Reference Hinds and Heyworth2007: 219)
Hinds, therefore, accepts ‘conspiratorial reading’ as a hermeneutic drive which can be subsumed within an overall deconstructive methodology of reading. But while ‘conspiratorial’ for him seems to be broadly synonymous with the ‘suspicious’ reading theorised by Ricoeur and with the ‘paranoid’ reading opposed by Sedgwick and Felski, I wonder whether the metaphor of conspiracy might offer something different to literary criticism in a post-critical era, showing a clearer ‘middle way’ between ‘deep’ and ‘surface’ readings, historicisms and formalisms. My attempt in this article has been to combine surface reading and critique as activities that are not mutually exclusive (pleasurable engagement with the text as opposed to a deluded neurotic drive to crack an unsolvable puzzle), but rather two indissoluble facets of the reading experience which need each other in order to bring out, in Susan Sontag’s formulation, the ‘erotics of art’.Footnote 141
I have tried to tease out the playfulness and seduction with which the ‘Ode to Licinius’ lures its suspicious readers, and a potentially erotic form of longing in the reader’s obsession to grasp and uncover the poem’s unspoken context, which is no less self-fulfilling than it is unsettling. In this sense, by ‘Poetics of Conspiracy’ I mean something slightly different from Hinds, positing conspiratorial readers as the poem’s co-ringleaders in a conspiracy to destabilise the certainties of historicist interpretations. Although conspiratorial readers, just like suspicious readers, acknowledge the centrality of context for poetic interpretation,Footnote 142 they do not believe that there is ‘truth’ or ‘uniqueness’ in the poem’s hidden message.Footnote 143 Unlike suspicious or paranoid readers, they do not treat the surface of texts as a hindrance for the discovery of content, imagining that the critic’s role is to decode or decipher it; rather, they embrace the pleasurable and destabilising process of trying to solve a historicist enigma in full acknowledgement that ‘it is impossible for poetry to make arguments about history’.Footnote 144 Conspiratorial readers are obsessed with (the) text with the obsession not of a jealous or paranoid partner, but with that of a faraway lover who revels in yearning; they love not only for consumption (implied in the act of interpretation), but for attentiveness and contemplation.Footnote 145 They read the poem in awareness of their necessary collaboration with poem and author in the co-creation of the poem’s sense, not with the narcissistic ego of someone who believes they have been entrusted with the difficult task of unlocking a hidden meaning.Footnote 146 To echo the etymology of conspirare, conspiratorial readers ‘breathe together’ with the poet while reading and performing the poem for the duration of its utterance.Footnote 147 As such, the form and surface of the lyric — together with, and not against, inter- and con-textual information — are embraced in a hermeneutic practice which can and should be conceived not as a prescriptive and neurotic quest for a stable meaning, but as a journey whose rewards are unpredictable and open-ended. These include the pleasure and comfort afforded by the hermeneutic moment of recognition, but also that unsettling state of unknowing that makes us envisage a potentially infinite ramification of meanings with an affective circularity (or Barthesian jouissance) where joy and pain, satisfaction and frustration, come as an indissoluble pair.
To conclude, context only ‘stinks’Footnote 148 if we conceive it as a fixed, rigid grid against which to measure the word of poetry, not if we embrace it in its own capacity to be re-conceptualised as equally ungraspable discourse. The ‘Ode to Licinius’ and the ‘Ode to Virgil’, just like any other poem, come to us in an open-ended intertextual dialogue with a wide variety of literary texts (from poetry to historiography to commentary, ancient and modern) to which they relate by means of their inherent propensity for literary futurity. What they leave us with is a powerful message about why we keep reading Horace’s lyric, and poetry in general. And they remind us that in all things, but especially in literary interpretation, ‘moderation’ is a practice to stretch and exercise, not a strict rule to abide by.Footnote 149
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