I. SOUNDING BRASS AND MADNESS AT ODES 1.16.5–9

Most of the above text is straightforward. Horace is explaining that wrath – the reader may think at this stage either of Horace's own wrath expressed in the scurrilous iambi mentioned in 2–3 or that of the woman he addressesFootnote ² – resembles various other things. Thus in 5a wrath's effect is compared to that of the Magna Mater on her priests, the Galli (they were driven so far from their senses that they castrated themselves), and in 5b–6 to that of Apollo on the Pythia (the god interfered with her personality so that she could utter his prophecies). In 7a Dionysus’ effect on his maenads provides the analogy (one thinks of Agave and her sisters, who dismembered Pentheus under the delusion that he was a lion). These are good comparisons to the ruinous effects of anger.

But when we reach 7b–8, non acuta | sic geminant Corybantes aera, the analogy becomes decidedly obscure: ‘Not to the same degree do the Corybantes twinFootnote ³ their high-pitched bronze instruments’. Hitherto Horace has compared anger to a god and those who are affected by it to his maddened votaries. Here the Corybantes (worshippers of both Rhea and Dionysus) are the only candidate for maddened votaries. Nisbet and Hubbard say that the Corybantes ‘are not, as some editors believe, themselves maddened (κορυβαντιῶντɛς); like the other figures in this stanza they are producers of madness’, but the Plato passages cited below, Symposium 215e and Ion 536c, show – as indeed the verb κορυβαντιᾶν implies – that being mad is their normal role and the one they should have here. But since they are the subject, and the object of their action is the bronze instruments they play, any parallelism with the previous three cases is gone. What had been a clear programme now seems badly confused.

We could somehow muddle through by saying that these bronze instruments, called to life in the hands of the Corybantes, are being compared with persons possessed by anger (and are thus parallel to the Galli, the Pythia and the maenads). But the comparison is inept. Bronze instruments are not sentient,Footnote ⁴ and they undergo no real change. We might alternatively say that the comparison is oblique and unstated: ‘not to this degree do the Corybantes twin their cymbals [and thereby madden those about them]’. But such a feat of ‘subaudition’ seems like a last resort. Another hypothesis suggests itself, and it is an obvious one: the Corybantes are here in the same capacity as Attis, the Pythia and Agave, and they should be in the accusative, Corybantas,Footnote ⁵ with acuta aera as subject, not object. We thus get a parallel to the effect of anger upon human beings. Just as Attis, the Pythia and Agave are maddened, so the Corybantes fall into a trance because of the sounds they hear, whether cymbals or the double-reed aulos: see Plato, Symposium 215e and Ion 536c.

But what are we to make of geminant on this showing? The TLL provides no direct parallel, but Virgil's Cumaean sibyl, possessed by Apollo, is described as maior uideri (Aen. 6.49), and immanis at 6.77 surely refers in part to this increase in size. Austin on 6.49 cites Carmentis: she, when inspired, tanto | sanctior et tanto, quam modo, maior erat (Ov. Fast. 6.539–40). Bömer on Fasti 4.861 says, ‘Der überragende und gottbegeisterte Mensch wird auch körperlich größer gedacht’, and though most of his examples are of those who have died (like Virgil's Creusa) or are undergoing deification (like Hercules and Romulus), a similar conception, as he points out, lies behind expressions like caput efferre, sidera tangere and the like, which can be used of ordinary mortals (and by Horace of himself at Carm. 1.1.36). There may also be in geminant the suggestion that in cases of possession the human being is ‘doubled’ in that both his own personality and that of the god inhabit the same body. It may be relevant that possessed persons sometimes see double, like Pentheus at Euripides, Bacchae 918–19. A further indication that this is the right approach is Silius 10.513–14, quae postquam aspexit, geminatus gaudia ductor | Sidonius, etc., where geminatus describes someone in the transports of joy. We may translate ‘Neither she of Mount Dindymus nor he who keeps the Pythian shrineFootnote ⁶ shakes to the same degreeFootnote ⁷ the minds of their priests nor Liber those of his bacchants, nor do high-pitched cymbals so augment the Corybantes as does grim anger’. Analogy argues powerfully for accusative Corybantas, and the new application of geminant, though surprising at first, turns out on inspection to make sense on more than one level.Footnote ⁸

Bentley, it should be noted, saw the problem and also came to the conclusion that aera was subject, not object. But he preserved Corybantes as subject of geminant by writing non acuta, | si geminant Corybantes, aera, i.e. neither the Magna Mater nor Apollo nor Bacchus shakes their votaries as much as anger does, nor do shrill bronze cymbals [shake those around them as much] when the Corybantes twin them. Bentley's suggestionFootnote ⁹ is acute, but there is an objection to it that I find insuperable, that it eliminates sic, necessary to the comparison. The sentence continues tristes ut irae, and with Bentley's text we must take the ut-clause with non aeque. But aeque ut is not found in poets of the Classical period, who use atque/ac, quam, cum, and other expressions instead.Footnote ¹⁰

II. FAITH, HOPE, THE VULGUS AND THE MERETRIX AT ODES 1.35.21–8

Shackleton Bailey's Teubner text of these lines contains two emendations that for a long time seemed to me both necessary and plausible: they treat real problems by assuming corruptions that are not hard to imagine. I suggest, however, that neither is a satisfactory solution and that both had better be abandoned in favour of a single and slighter alteration that renders both of them unnecessary.

I begin with the problem at 25. The faithless mob deserts those in misfortune, but if we read et with the manuscripts, this mob and the prostitute make an odd pair. Garrison, who prints et, suggests that the meretrix was a standard fixture in the houses of the great, but he gives no evidence. Unless it can be shown that a meretrix is somehow expected in the great man's entourage, it will be hard to explain why Horace can assume that he has one (and will be deserted by her). Cunningham's ut has this to be said for it, that it is much easier to think of a meretrix as part of a simile: people have as little loyalty to a fallen grandee as a prostitute does to a client who cannot pay. One problem, though: Shackleton Bailey's commas around ut meretrix surely mark off the limits of the comparison, yet uulgus infidum on that showing would be modified by periura, impossible because of the difference in gender. Simply leaving the commas out, as Rudd does, fails to address the difficulty. Changing et to ut thus exchanges one problem for another.

In a subsequent edition Shackleton Bailey treats the problem by upending the typesetter's comma tray. He writes at uulgus infidum, ut meretrix, retro, periura, cedit. This means that the words up to and including infidum belong to the main clause, ut meretrix to the comparative clause, retro to the main clause, periura to the comparative clause, and cedit to the main clause. Interlacing that strikes modern readers as difficult certainly occurs in Latin authors,Footnote ¹¹ but I have looked in Horace's non-hexameter poems at every comparative clause, introduced by ut, uelut, tamquam, sicut and ceu, without finding a word belonging to the comparative clause sandwiched in among words belonging to the main clause. I conclude that Cunningham's cure is worse than the disease.

In 22 Peerlkamp's alteration of nec to sed likewise addresses a problem. The at of 25 suggests that the faithless mob are being contrasted with another person or persons loyal to the house Fortuna has deserted. Yet there is no one, in the text as transmitted, to fill that role. We are told that Spes and Fides attend on Fortuna, and the only reasonable interpretationFootnote ¹² of the following words is that Fides (joined presumably by Spes) does not refuse to accompany Fortuna when she turns enemy and deserts a powerful house.Footnote ¹³ That is to say, they desert the house along with Fortuna, and there is thus no one with whom the uulgus infidum can be contrasted. With Peerlkamp's alteration, by contrast, Spes and Fides refuse to accompany Fortuna and remain with the house she has deserted, thereby forming a contrast with the faithless mob, who depart when the wine runs out.

There is a way of avoiding Peerlkamp's conclusion: we could take at as continuative, not adversative.Footnote ¹⁴ But there are problems with this. First, we do not have here a succession of two events, where at as ‘thereupon’ could be expected to function, but the passage from allegory to actuality. Second, neither the allegory of 21–4 nor the actuality of 25–8 describes an event taking place at a particular time: both are what generally happens. So this way of rescuing the sense seems a long shot. Nisbet and Hubbard, it should be noted, dismiss continuative at here as a non-starter.

But although the supposition of continuative at does not succeed in defending the passage, Peerlkamp's conjecture still must be rejected, for just like Cunningham's ut it exchanges one difficulty for another. If Fides attends (colit) Fortuna, that is prima facie a statement of general validity, like the claim (17) that Necessitas always goes before her. The refusal to accompany Fortuna when she leaves a house is prima facie incompatible with it. Furthermore, Fortuna is always deserting someone to favour someone else (that is her nature),Footnote ¹⁵ and if Fides always refused to accompany her when she left, there would be few occasions if any where she could attend her. It may be urged that the allegory is not to be pressed, and it is perhaps inevitable that an allegory has to be ignored from time to time. But an allegory that is never or almost never accurate lacks credibility, and Fides on this showing would seldom have a chance to cultivate Fortuna and would become a cultrix infida of Fortuna. This might have been a pretty paradox, but it is clearly not Horace's. The conceit that Spes and Fides accompany Fortuna is a curious one, to which I return at the end of this paper, but Peerlkamp's idea that they or she are only part-time attendants on Fortuna seems, on reflection, to be too complicated to be accepted into the text, particularly if there is any reasonable alternative.

We can eliminate the need for both Cunningham's ut and Peerlkamp's sed – addressing the difficulties they were intended to solve without exchanging old trouble for new – if we emend at in 25 to ut, elsewhere retaining what is transmitted. The text of 21–8 now reads:

Now there is no adversative to suggest that someone remains by the side of Fortune's ex-favourite: everyone departs, both Fides and friends (and presumably Spes as well). The meretrix is once more part of a simile, as she must be, but she is joined in this role by the Roman mob, which provides a good example of fickleness toward favourites (cf. Carm. 1.1.7, mobilium turba Quiritium) and hence is nicely paired with the venal prostitute as an emblem of inconstant friendship. As frequently happens in Horace, two subjects joined by et or -que govern a singular verb, and modifiers that might have gone with both subjects agree grammatically only with the nearer one.Footnote ¹⁷ A further advantage is that we get rid of a puzzling asyndeton in 26. In the main clause (as opposed to the simile) there is only one subject and one verb (diffugiunt … amici), not two (the rabble doing one thing and friends, in asyndeton, something else). Both of the problems we started with are cured by a single alteration, and we have not merely exchanged new problems for old.

I have argued that nec is correct in 22. On this view Spes and Fides attend on Fortuna and go off with her when she deserts powerful houses. What is the meaning of this conceit? A man in prosperity may well be said to have Hope hovering about him. It is not only the great man himself who has hope: his followers too will be affected by hopes not only for him but for themselves. Though one could imagine Hope lingering on even after good fortune has departed, it is also plausible to portray Hope as deserting the once fortunate.

But what is the meaning of Fides’ departure? And why does Horace wrap Fides’ hand in a white cloth,Footnote ¹⁸ in the manner of her priests when they performed their office? Perhaps the purpose of so describing her is to make it plain that Horace is talking about the goddess Fides. What is the aspect of the common noun fides that the Romans personified as a goddess and whose temple stood in the Forum from 250 B.C.? Older scholarshipFootnote ¹⁹ takes it as axiomatic that she is the goddess who personifies the Romans’ sworn word, the reliability of their oaths and promises. According to a more recent view the goddess represents ‘Loyalty to, and trust in, our social superiors’.Footnote ²⁰ If this latter is correct, it explains the departure of Fides when the great man meets with disaster: the loyalty and trust of his dependants depart when his fortune changes.Footnote ²¹ The goddess who personifies such ‘loyalty’, which attaches to prosperity and not to persons, is tartly and cynically described by the phrase rara Fides.Footnote ²² The next stanza moves from the allegorical to the actual and describes in concrete terms what her departure means.