The books in the Oxford series of Very Short Introductions are normally excellent exemplars of their kind. I have profited from a number of them. So, when I was offered the chance to review M.'s Horace volume, I leapt at the chance. Horace has long been one of my favourite Latin authors.
In many ways this book is typical of the series. It covers a large range of materials – all of Horace's work with a chapter on his reception – in a short compass with a minimum of citations and bibliography. The style is brisk and uncluttered. M. treats most of the necessary topics, and there are some nice illustrations. There are few actual readings of poems, and little is said about the Latin aside from some brief remarks on sound and metre.
One exception is the chapter on the Odes, which is the strongest in the book. It starts off with a fine intertextual reading of the so-called ‘Cleopatra Ode’ (1.37), in which M. notes first that Horace's famous opening nunc est bibendum, ‘Now we must drink’ is a belated response to Epode 9's ‘When shall I drink with you, Maecenas’ (p. 51). This is not only a nice example of close reading but also aptly symbolises the shift from the unsettled thirties to the triumph of the twenties, and hence from iambic aggression to lyric calm. At the same time, as M. notes, Horace, in this line, quotes Alcaeus’ fr. 332 (nun khrē methusthēn). This gesture is at once programmatic (Alcaeus is one of the acknowledged models for the Odes) and politically salient, since the Greek poet too is celebrating the death of one of his longtime foes (the defeat of Cleopatra of course meant the death of Antony). Horace, as M. observes, not only explicitly hoped to be included among the nine canonical Greek lyric poets, as a Latin master in this most complex of genres, but he also, by imitating all nine poets within the first three books of the Odes and by opening with a virtuoso succession of nine poems in nine different metres, sought to subsume them within this Roman collection. In doing so, Horace both casts himself as the tenth poet of the lyric canon and transforms Greek song into a Roman literary pièce de résistance, a feat of which he alone is capable.
It is clear that M. has a genuine fondness for Horace and wants others to share it. There is, especially in the chapter on the Satires, an endearing love of a good poet disseminating moral instruction in memorable phrasing. It hearkens back to an earlier time, when love of the ancients seemed more straightforward, less in need of apology and more to be taken for granted than it is today. M. is, of course, aware that Horace's sensibilities are not quite our own: his views on slavery and women can be shocking. Nonetheless, this is very much a book that could have been written and published in the 1950s.
Indeed, it opens with a rather remarkable anecdote for a book published in the twenty-first century:
In the winter of 1900 the archaeologist and explorer Aurel Stein was surveying at high altitude in Chinese Turkestan (modern Xinjiang). Conditions were challenging, the landscape barren and unpopulated, and it was bitterly cold. But his spirits rose when he came across some ‘still warm sunshine and a lively stream’ where he could camp, and here he pondered his environment with the aid of his favourite author:
‘It was pleasant to read in the tiny seventeenth century edition of Horace, which always travels in my saddlebag, of the springs that gave charm for the poet to another mountain region far away in the West. And then the question touched my mind: What is this vast mountain world in human interest compared to the Sabine Hills? It has no past history as far as man is concerned, and what can be its future?—unless destiny has reserved the prospects of another Klondyke for the auriferous rivers of Khotan’. (p. 1)
There are many problems with this opening. First, the books in this series are aimed at an audience that has little if any knowledge of the subject at hand, and hence need a ‘very short introduction’. In our multicultural and global world, where the significance of Western Classics can no longer be taken for granted, if the teaching of Latin and Greek are to survive outside institutions like Oxford and Harvard, then Classics must appeal to a diverse pool of people, many of whom see it as the embodiment of elite, white, privilege. Who, then, is the intended audience for opening with the image of the intrepid European explorer in the wild deserts, pulling out his Horace? Surely such conjured images of pith helmets and daring exploits appeal more to those who already have accepted some of the West's most pernicious myths than those in need of a short introduction to Horace.
Second, let us consider the implications of the European ‘explorer’. Is this region really ‘unexplored’? By the people who live there? Did the millions of Turkic-speaking Uyghurs who have inhabited Xinjiang for the last millennium really need to wait for an ‘explorer’ to be ‘known’? Do not such orientalist assumptions deny either the existence of a long-established population or their humanity? For whom and for what purpose was Stein ‘exploring’ this land? This is much like the myth that North America was ‘largely uninhabited’. These are rationalisations for colonialism. The fact that the setting is Xinjiang is ironic in the extreme.
Third, the answer to the question ‘for whom and for what’, is, of course, for Europeans to make money through extraction. Looking at the stream Stein has found, Horace in hand, the ‘explorer’ asks: ‘What is this vast mountain world in human interest compared to the Sabine Hills? It has no past history as far as man is concerned, and what can be its future?’ Now ‘man’ here not only means ‘men’ (women have no part), but it means ‘Western men’, and because Western men have not known about it, this mountain has no past, and therefore it has no future, effectively erasing a people and culture. But wait! They might yet be saved, just like the native populations of the ‘Klondyke’, if the river should prove ‘auriferous’, if it might produce gold and make a faraway white world wealthy.
M. seems blissfully unaware of the racist and colonialist assumptions with which the book opens and is untroubled by the way he has inscribed them within Horace and his reception for the reader. It is impossible to imagine assigning such a book to any class I teach at the University of South Carolina or at Ewha Womans University. M. does recognise that Horace's ethical values are no longer our own. But his response is not to think seriously about ethics, aesthetics or historical change, but blandly to argue that we need to ‘separate the ethical from the aesthetic as objects of [our] attention’ (p. 13). How this is to be done is never specified, nor are these regions defined or how they could exist apart from one another. At the same time we are assured that Horace owes his ‘moral authority’ to his ‘memorable expression of the ethical imperatives of existence’ (p. 3), thus conflating the very realms we are asked to keep apart.
In sum, while this book is clearly written and betrays a palpable affection for its subject matter, it is problematic. It offers little new for the scholar. Its assumptions render it inappropriate for a contemporary student audience. And its foundational arguments lack clarity and definition.
