In ‘this graceful poem’, say R.G.M. Nisbet and M. Hubbard in their commentary, ‘one of the most agreeable poems in the collection’, Horace ‘does not put a foot wrong’.Footnote ² Yet, on the usual interpretation of the first stanza, to which they and other commentators subscribe, the ode makes no sense.

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‘Who wrote the scurrilous iambic poems of the first stanza?’, asks David West at the start of his commentary on the ode. ‘The culprit’, he declares, ‘must be Horace.’Footnote ³ This answer accords with that to be found in other commentaries: ‘my scurrilous verses’ (Page), ‘my scandalous lines’ (Gow), ‘my scurrilous iambics’ (Wickham), ‘my abusive iambics’ (Shorey), ‘miei ingiuriosi giambi’ (Colamarino and Bo), ‘my libellous iambics’ (Nisbet and Hubbard), ‘my libellous iambic verses’ (Quinn), ‘miei giambi ingiuriosi’ (Fedeli).Footnote ⁴ What, then, are these iambic verses? Some earlier scholars suggested that Horace is referring to various of his epodes, such as those addressed to Canidia (5, 17); but our knowledge of Canidia (cf. also Serm. 1.8) indicates that she would scarcely make plausible the accent on beauty in the first line of the ode.Footnote ⁵ Most commentators, at least since the latter half of the nineteenth century, have believed that Horace is referring to some iambics which he had targeted at the ode's addressee but of which we now have no further knowledge: Kiessling and Heinze, for example, refer to ‘the satirical poems which Horace … has levelled at her’, while in the most recent commentary in 2012 Mayer says that Horace ‘assures an unnamed young woman that it rests with her to put an end to his vituperative attacks’.Footnote ⁶

The commentators’ unanimity on the matter of Horace's authorship is deeply mysterious, since the conviction on which it is based is plainly false. If Horace wrote the offending iambics which are mentioned in the first stanza, it follows ex hypothesi that, having read the stanza, readers know what the addressee of the ode—as victim of the iambics—has known all along, namely that Horace has written iambic poetry. It therefore makes absolutely no sense for Horace, some four stanzas later, to reveal to both addressee and readers ‘I too as a youth … was driven in a rage to write iambics’ (22–5).Footnote ⁷ Both addressee and readers already know that Horace is the author of iambics; the revelation is meaningless unless Horace is not the author of the iambics mentioned in the first stanza. When, a few odes later, Horace addresses a group of symposiasts and asks them whether they would like him too to partake of the dry Falernian (1.27.9–10 uultis seueri me quoque sumere | partem Falerni?), the words me quoque indicate clearly that Horace is not already a member of the symposium. Exactly the same is true of our poem. me quoque (22) proves unequivocally that Horace cannot be the author of the iambics to which he refers in lines 1–4.

Since the implication of me quoque seems so obvious, and so fatal to the usual understanding of the ode, it may be asked why successive commentators have acquiesced in an interpretation which makes no sense; and the answer seems to be that one of their ancient counterparts, pseudo-Acro, informs us that Horace is imitating a palinode of Stesichorus,Footnote ⁸ information which appears supported by the phrase recantatis … opprobriis at the very end of the ode (27–8): the idea, in the words of Syndikus, is that ‘The poet would like to be reconciled with a girl whom he had previously attacked in mocking iambics’.Footnote ⁹ Yet Nisbet and Hubbard argue that this interpretation ‘is entirely wrong’ and that the poem ‘is not a palinode’ at all;Footnote ¹⁰ but, so far from drawing the further conclusion that the iambics of the first stanza cannot have been written by Horace, they maintain his authorship at the expense of logic. Why? The reason is almost certainly the assumption that the situation in the ode is similar to that in Catullus 36 (3–8):

Here Catullus is evidently alienated from his girlfriend and is engaged in writing a series of fierce iambic poems which she wishes he would stop; if he resumes his relationship with her and stops writing his unpleasant poems, she (so the joke goes) will burn the poems on a bonfire. Horace ‘seems to be recalling’ Catullus’ poem, say Nisbet and Hubbard; Horace's ode ‘seems to be the same situation’, says West, while Mayer is even more definite (‘Similar is the situation in Catullus 36’). But there is not the slightest hint in Horace's ode that its context bears any similarity whatsoever to that of Catullus: in Horace it is the girl, not the poet, who is alienated; and it is the poet, not the girl, who seeks a reconciliation (lines 26–8). Scholars have simply assumed from each poet's references to iambi and fire that their circumstances must be identical, whereas in fact they are exactly the other way round.

Who, then, is the author of the ‘accusatory iambics’? The only possible alternative is the unnamed girl whom Horace is addressing.Footnote ¹¹ There is certainly nothing surprising in the notion that Horace addresses a female poet. Not only is a list of such poets provided conveniently by Lyne but Tyndaris, the admirer of Anacreon who is addressed in the very next ode, may be another (1.17.18–20 fide Teia | dices …).Footnote ¹² The ancient commentators in fact identified our addressee with Tyndaris, although not on the grounds that each is a poet.Footnote ¹³ Nisbet and Hubbard regard this and other similar identifications as ‘fantasies’ and argue that the identity of the girl is ‘irrelevant’;Footnote ¹⁴ but it is nevertheless worthwhile to see what, if anything, can be elicited from Horace's description of her. In addition to her authorship of iambic poems, the girl is identified by means of her mother, who was evidently famous for her beauty and with whom the addressee is contrasted by means of a comparative polyptoton (O matre pulchra filia pulchrior). This combination of characteristics is suggestive of Sappho, arguably the female poet, who wrote iambic poems and was especially noted for her comparative expressions,Footnote ¹⁵ including those involving polyptoton (111.6 ἄνδρος μεγάλω πόλυ μέζων, ‘much greater than a great man’, 156.2 χρύσω χρυσοτέρα, ‘more golden than gold’): Sappho's mother, whose name actually suggests fame (Cleis), features prominently both in Sappho's own poetry and in the biographical tradition about her.Footnote ¹⁶ Therefore, although we cannot assign an actual identity to the daughter more beautiful than her beautiful mother, the terms in which Horace addresses her suggest that he is complimenting her, elaborately but obliquely, as a second Sappho, much in the way that Ovid, albeit more directly, complimented Perilla (Tr. 3.7.20 sola tuum uates Lesbia uincet opus). The compliment comes well from one who in the last stanza of the ode expresses his need for the girl's affection (26–8).

If we return to the first stanza of 1.16 without any of the misconceptions engendered by the ancient scholiast or Catullus, we might naturally assume that the subject of the main verb, pones, is the author of the accusatory iambics;Footnote ¹⁷ but in that case, it may be asked, why does Horace tell the girl to put an end to her iambics by throwing them onto a bonfire or in the sea? Would it not be more natural for him simply to say, as Lesbia is represented as saying to Catullus (36.5), ‘put down your pen and stop writing’? The answer to this question is that Horace is referring to a collection of iambics which is already in existence; it is even tempting to imagine that Iambis refers to its title, which Horace names in the same way as he does the Amores of Valgius in a later ode (2.9.11). As is clear from the many parallels, destruction by fire and/or water is a conventional fate wished upon poems that either come to be regretted by their authors or are disapproved of by their readers, and in a significant number of cases the destruction is made the responsibility of the authors themselves.Footnote ¹⁸ There is wry humour in Horace's command to a Sappho-like girl, since Sappho herself famously boasted that her poetry would be immortal (147, 193; cf. 55).Footnote ¹⁹

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This reinterpretation of the first stanza not only removes from the ode a fundamental illogicality but also eliminates a contingent difficulty. If Horace is the author of the iambics mentioned in the first stanza, it is natural to assume that the subsequent disquisition on anger, which takes up the central body of the poem (lines 5–21), is relevant to the poet himself: there was a conventional relationship between anger and iambic poetry.Footnote ²⁰ Yet it transpires afterwards that it is the addressee to whom the disquisition on anger is relevant, since it is she who in line 22 is told to control her temper (compesce mentem). Admittedly this seeming non sequitur can be explained if we assume that the girl's anger is her response to the iambics which an angry Horace has directed at her; but it has to be acknowledged that the argument is at best convoluted and unexpectedFootnote ²¹ and at worst completely out of proportion: it seems misconceived to devote more than four stanzas to the anger of the recipient rather than to that of the author whose criminosi iambi caused all the trouble in the first place. On the different interpretation proposed above, however, there is no difficulty at all: lines 5–21 relate to the girl and in line 22 she is told to control the temper which led her to compose the accusatory iambics mentioned at the start.

Horace's transition from the girl's iambics (A: 1–4) to the anger which caused them (B: 22)—a transition which he effects by way of his humorous disquisition on tristes … irae (5–21)—is repeated chiastically in the following lines, where he passes from his own youthful anger (B¹: 22–4) to the iambics which resulted from it (A¹: 24–5). Here again it is tempting to regard Iambos as referring to a title, so that his collection of poems—in this case the Epodes—matches hers at the beginning.Footnote ²² Indeed the whole point of lines 22–5 is to align his past with her present and, by criticizing his former self, to indicate diplomatically that she would do well to take seriously the instruction issued in humorously extravagant language in the first stanza. The moral standpoint from which Horace issues this advice would be entirely undermined if it were his attacks on the girl which started the cycle of anger. Although Horace's description of his iambics as celeres (24) is due primarily to the fact that the iambic metre was conventionally regarded as ‘swift’, nevertheless there is also the suggestion that Horace was ‘hasty’ to resort to such verses,Footnote ²³ and hence that the girl would be well advised not to continue making the same mistake. Likewise, Horace's reference to his youth (23 iuuenta) not only distinguishes his past self from his present but places him in the same situation then that the girl is in now (filia in line 1 suggests youth); his description of his youth as ‘sweet’ (dulci) implies that, even though youth is traditionally a time for hot-headedness (pectoris | … feruor), the bitterness of anger (9 tristes … irae) was out of place, a lesson which the girl should take to heart.Footnote ²⁴

Horace begins the final sentence of all (25–8) by continuing to dissociate himself from his past (nunc ego …) and by explaining that he now writes mellow verses instead of bitter (mitibus … tristia); but this claim is saved from self-righteousness by the dum-clause with which the ode concludes and which reveals amusingly that the change in the poet is provisional upon the behaviour of the girl: unless she changes too, Horace leaves it to be inferred that he will change back to the bitter verses which he had abandoned.Footnote ²⁵ opprobriis (28) looks back to criminosis … iambis in 2–3, as is generally recognized, except that on the present interpretation the reproachful verses are those composed by the girl, not by Horace; indeed, her authorship seems confirmed by recantatis, which, whatever its precise meaning, is embedded in a clause framed by two verbs whose subject is the addressee (fias … reddas).Footnote ²⁶

The second of these verbs appears in an expression whose meaning is unclear.Footnote ²⁷ Nisbet and Hubbard on animum … reddas note ‘sc. tuum. animum here means “affection”’, and they contrast the meaning of the same phrase at 1.19.4, which they translate as ‘to surrender my heart once more’; Mayer, on the other hand, agrees that the noun means ‘affection’, but implies that the meaning at 1.19.4 is the same. Shorey opts for ‘my peace of mind’ and compares Ter. Andr. 333 reddidisti animum, but Kiessling and Heinze go out of their way to deny this parallel and, like Nisbet and Hubbard, insist that one should supply tuum rather than meum. Footnote ²⁸ West agrees: ‘give me back your heart’. But, since this seems to add little, if anything, to the reference to the girl's emotions that was already present in fias … amica, a case can be made that the animus is that of Horace and that the meaning is something like ‘give me back my life’.Footnote ²⁹ A brief but expressive suggestion that her alienation has brought about his metaphorical death, and that he needs her if he is to live again, brings the ode to a powerful conclusion and complements perfectly the deft humour and tactful advice of the poem as a whole.

This poem entirely bears out the statement of Nisbet and Hubbard that Horace does not put a foot wrong; it simply features another iambic poet from the one whom they and other commentators have imagined.