In the final lines of Cheiron's address to Achilles in Horace, Epode 13, the centaur advises his young charge to lighten with wine and song the cares that he will face while fighting at Troy. Scholars have emphasised the connections between these lines and the passage in the Iliad where Achilles is found by the ambassadors playing the phorminx outside his tent (Il. 9.185–9),Footnote ¹ but less attention has been paid to the relationship between Horace's appropriation and the scholarly debate that surrounded the Iliad passage in antiquity. Ancient scholars, like their modern counterparts, were perplexed by the passage and suggested numerous ways of interpreting it. In this article I shall argue that Horace draws on this scholarly debate in his construction of the poem's symposiastic speaker.Footnote ² In doing so, he implicitly comments on the scholarly nature of his authorial activity, and draws on the notion of the symposium as a site of literary exchange. His resulting projection of the symposium as a communal space forms a crucial part of the poem's discourse of consolation.

A comparison of the relevant passages reveals important differences. Horace's Cheiron stresses the specifically sympotic nature of Achilles' song (Epod. 13.15–18):

The representation of song in the Iliad passage is somewhat more oblique (Il. 9.185–9):

For Michèle Lowrie, Horace's lines are a generically inflected reworking of the Homeric passage:Footnote ³ both feature Achilles using music as a salve for his troubles, but the phrase uino cantuque ‘stands for the symposium just as κλέα ἀνδρῶν stands for epic’.Footnote ⁴ Lowrie sees this generic shift primarily in terms of the poem's argument; Horace's phrasing enacts his sympotic transformation of epic material.Footnote ⁵ I shall argue that this generic shift takes place in part through scholarly engagement with Homer's text.

Homer's Achilles ‘delights his heart with the phorminx’ at 186, and the repetition of the lexis at 189 (τῇ ὅ γε θυμὸν ἔτερπεν) precedes mention of his song's subject (κλέα ἀνδρῶν). As modern scholars have noted, Achilles' τέρψις is simultaneously simple and opaque: we recognise that he is taking pleasure in his activity, but the specific nature of this pleasure, its relation to his wider situation and the nature of his subject matter are not specified, and are all matters of debate.Footnote ⁶ Horace, however, uses terms of greater precision than those found in Homer, and arrogates to (his own) sympotic poetry a role that develops the one given to song in the Iliad. The injunction omne malum uino cantuque leuato is more specific than the Iliad's description in that it relates Achilles' future performance to a particular subjective experience (malum, deformis aegrimoniae) and gives it a more developed psychological function (leuato). Horace's description effectively fills in the gaps left by Homer's scene. Horace's text constitutes not just a generically couched ‘strong misreading’, but a supplementation of the Iliadic hypotext.Footnote ⁷

While the idea of song as a consolation for sorrows is conventional, especially in sympotic contexts,Footnote ⁸ a connection has been noted between Horace's alloquiis and the language used in a scholium on the Homeric passage,Footnote ⁹ which says that it is not ἀνοίκειον for Achilles to be singing: παραμυθία γὰρ τοῦτο θυμοῦ καὶ λύπης (‘for this [song] is a consolation for his anger and anguish’, ΣbT Il. 9.186). The scholium proceeds to justify Achilles’ behaviour further in relation to his status as a heroic figure: ἔστι δὲ νέος καὶ φιλόμουσος καὶ λάφυρον ἔχων τὴν κιθάραν· καὶ οὐ θηλυδριώδη μέλη, ἀλλὰ κλέα ἀνδρῶν ᾄδει (‘he is a young man and fond of music and the cithara is a spoil of war. And he sings not womanly songs, but “the famed deeds of men”’).Footnote ¹⁰ As scholars have pointed out, alloquium occurs here for the first time in extant Latin, and ‘is a calque on Greek παραμύθιον’.Footnote ¹¹ The morphological similarity between al-loquiis and παρα-μυθία is reinforced by the use of object aegrimoniae in the genitive, which follows the construction of the Greek but is not found with alloquium or alloquor elsewhere.Footnote ¹² I suggest that this verbal link is designed to be recognised as an allusion,Footnote ¹³ constructing ‘an intention-bearing authorial voice’.Footnote ¹⁴ The allusion underlines the different ways in which Horace and Cheiron are positioned in relation to the Iliadic material: Horace qua author looks backwards, transforming and commenting on the Homeric text, whereas Cheiron's prophecy anticipates the Iliad's events. Importantly, Achilles in Iliad 9 goes beyond what is suggested in Cheiron's paraenesis by singing of κλέα ἀνδρῶν. Whereas omne malum … leuato spoken by Horace the sympotic praeceptor rewrites the Iliadic φρένα τερπόμενον φόρμιγγι λιγείῃ, the same words spoken by Cheiron constitute a prolepsis that is exceeded by Achilles' generically inflected statement: the subject matter implied by κλέα ἀνδρῶν makes his song not only an alloquium but a marker of his engagement with his situation. In creating this contrast between speakers, Horace emphasises his own creative transformation of Homer, but also deftly stresses how the significance of previous texts is informed by their reception.

The significance of this scholarly allusion becomes clearer when we recognise that numerous different ways of understanding Il. 9.185–9 were current in antiquity. Beside the scholium cited above, another pair of interpretations are offered (ΣbT Il. 9.186):

These interpretations offer an alternative to song-as-consolation. According to the first, Achilles sings as he does in order to avoid giving an impression of levity that would risk undermining his opposition to Agamemnon. According to the second, he attempts to give the impression that he does not care about the Greeks. Both readings see his song as designed to project an image of himself to the ambassadors. Another scholium sees Achilles' performance as the aesthetic equivalent of training for war: οὐκ ἤθελε δὲ ἀργῶν σώματι καὶ ψυχῇ ἀργεῖν, ἀλλ’ ἡτοίμαζεν αὐτὴν πρὸς τὰς πράξεις καὶ ἐπ’ εἰρήνης τὰ τοῦ πολέμου μελετᾷ, ὡς καὶ οἱ Μυρμιδόνες (‘he did not wish being idle in body to also be idle in his soul, but he directed it to actions and even in peace took care of the matters of war, just like the Myrmidons’, Σ bT Il. 9.186).Footnote ¹⁵

It is likely that some if not all of these views were current in Horace's time.Footnote ¹⁶ If this were the case, at least some of Horace's readers would have recognised that leuato … dulcibus alloquiis presents a picture of Horace adjudicating on a scholarly debate and picking out the ‘correct’, or at least most productive, way of interpreting the Iliad passage.Footnote ¹⁷ This picture is complemented by several other points in the poem's final lines where allusions to Homer and engagement with Homeric scholarship combine. One such is the phrasing of nec mater domum caerula te reuehet (16). This line modifies its Iliadic model (18.59–60), where Thetis says that she will not convey Achilles δόμον Пηλήϊον εἴσω. Whereas Thetis specifies not returning to Peleus’ house, Horace's Cheiron associates Thetis with the sea by metonomy,Footnote ¹⁸ and does not mention Peleus. This modification references a scholarly quibble with Thetis’ δόμον Пηλήϊον εἴσω recorded by ΣA Il. 18.60, which claims that ‘Homer did not know, as later poets did, that Thetis did not remain with Peleus after Achilles was born’ (ὅτι Ὅμηρος οὐκ οἶδεν, ὡς οἱ νεώτεροι ποιηταί, κεχωρισμένην τὴν Θέτιν ἀπὸ τοῦ Пηλέως ὑπὸ τὴν Ἀχιλλέως γένεσιν). By omitting mention of Peleus and referring only to (Thetis’) domum, Horace playfully (and somewhat pedantically) makes the point that it would not have been ‘Peleus’ house’ to which the prospective return would have been directed, and hints at Cheiron's having a more precise knowledge of the future than Homer's Thetis, and even Homer himself. Another scholarly reference is at work in the depiction of Cheiron and Achilles’ relationship, again to a passage where Homer's supposed ignorance is at issue. ΣT Il. 9.486, glossing Phoenix's account of Achilles’ youth, asserts that Homer did not know of the tradition in which Achilles was brought up by Cheiron, although later poets did (οὐκ οἶδεν ὁ ποιητὴς παρὰ Χείρωνι τραφέντα αὐτόν, ἀλλ’ οἱ νεώτεροι). Positioning Cheiron as a foster parent by referring to Achilles as his alumnus (11) nods to this reading, underlining that Horace's use of Cheiron is a deliberately un-Homeric gesture. Taken together, these lines constitute a nexus of scholarly allusions that allows readers to understand Horace's text as both a creative appropriation of Homeric material, and a corrective, critical engagement with the Iliad.

Far from being merely a parade of scholarly knowledge, however, these nods to Homeric scholarship contribute to the projection of Horace's poetic persona within the poem's sympotic setting. The symposium was, among other things, a space for literary discussion, often specifically relating to comparisons of texts: Plutarch records a tradition that Alexander the Great and his companions ‘[compared] Homeric verses as a way of passing the time or at symposia’ (τῶν Ὁμήρου σύγκρισις ἐπῶν ἐν ταῖς διατριβαῖς ἢ παρὰ τὰ συμπόσια, Plut. Mor. 331c), and Aulus Gellius pictures a group of friends comparing passages in Theocritus and Virgil's Eclogues at a dinner party (NA 9.9.4).Footnote ¹⁹ While such texts reflect real-life practice,Footnote ²⁰ there is also a tradition of literary symposia, going back at least to Plato's Symposium, in which close readings of poetic texts, and the quotation of poetry to support one's argument, play a crucial role.Footnote ²¹ Therefore, while the poem's engagements with the Iliad have generic force, they also help to articulate Horace's poetic role as symposiarch.Footnote ²² The function of Epod. 13.17–18 in pointing to a scholarly interpretation and drawing on that interpretation to support the exemplary use of Achilles can be read as an intertextual equivalent of the discussions and interventions that took place in symposia and sympotic texts. As such, the text blurs the distinction between author and internal speaker: the internal audience is implied to be sensitive to Horace's scholarly aside (as persona loquens) in the same way as the reader.

In relation to the various interpretations of the Iliad passage quoted above, Horace's use of alloquiis is agonistic, suggesting that Achilles’ song in the Iliad should be read as a form of self-consolation as opposed to the other ways of interpreting it. This intervention, seen in the light of the other interpretations’ emphasis on deception (σοβαρεύεται, προσποιεῖται), has a moralising edge: Horace's implied reading sees Achilles as a more honest character than the one pictured by those that see his performance as an act. At the same time, however, the phrasing of omne malum … leuato … alloquiis marginalises the readings of the Iliad passage that emphasise the content of Achilles’ song as connected to his status as a martial figure. In figuring song as an alloquium/παραμυθία, Horace aligns his picture of Achilles with a scholarly interpretation that supports his sympotic agenda. We can now also see more clearly that Epode 13 bears different relations to the text of the Iliad itself and the scholarship on it. Whereas Horace's consolatory reading adds detail to the Iliad by imputing a particular psychological aim to φρένα τερπόμενον φόρμιγγι λιγείῃ, it operates selectively with regard to the scholarly debate on the lines. By means of this double manoeuvre, Horace underlines his credentials both as a sympotic praeceptor and as a scholarly reader engaged in learned response to the literary canon.

This scholarly engagement also has wider consequences for the poem's consolatory discourse, implicitly asking readers to adjudicate the validity of the poem's ‘interpretation’ of the Iliad, and to reflect on how their reading is influenced by the cultural situation in which it occurs.Footnote ²³ Much of the debate about Epode 13 has concerned the question of whether the emphasis on Achilles’ death at lines 15–16 serves or subverts the poem's consolatory rhetoric, and scholars have proposed various answers to this question. For some, Achilles’ fate serves as a positive foil: no matter how bad the situation faced by Horace and his friend(s), they have more hope for the future than Achilles does,Footnote ²⁴ while others have asserted that the exemplum has a more pessimistic force.Footnote ²⁵ What I want to stress here, however, is the social aspect of Horace's text in contrast with its Iliadic model. Although Patroclus is present in Iliad 9, Achilles’ song is not in any obvious sense an act of communication with him, and was certainly not explained in that way by the scholiasts. For some ancient commentators, as we have seen, the song was a deceptive mode of communication intended to inflect the ambassadors’ response to him, while on the παραμυθία-based reading, the song is directed inwards towards Achilles’ own feelings. By contrast, Horace figures song as a productively communicative act, with Cheiron communicating to Achilles, the speaker to the internal audience, and the author to the reader. Whether or not one accepts the amici of the manuscripts in line 3,Footnote ²⁶ the poem's positioning of its readers expands Achilles’ situation, broadening the dialogue between Cheiron and Achilles into a reading situation in which an individual's understanding of the poem is filtered through the situation of the internal speaker and symposiasts, and through the historical community of readers and commentators gestured to by Horace's scholarly allusion.

Although the poem's setting emphasises the contextual instability and the contingency of the interpretative moment, poised between the storm and the uncertain future,Footnote ²⁷ the horrida tempestas … niuesque of the opening give way to the scholarly reflection implied by the final lines.Footnote ²⁸ By positioning readers as part of a cultural dialogue that includes Homer and Homeric scholarship, as well as numerous other models,Footnote ²⁹ Horace creates a reading community, a virtual symposium that reaches beyond the hic et nunc. The process of leuare … pectora is also extended in terms of individual readerly experience, as the intertextual density of the poem's final lines reminds the readers of previous literary experiences (of Homer, CatullusFootnote ³⁰ and other sympotic poetry) that mediate their interpretative activity. The poem therefore situates readers’ understanding of the injunction uino cantuque leuato against a historical background of concrete interpretative acts,Footnote ³¹ and prompts reflection on the social, textual and scholarly negotiations by which such understanding is sustained and made meaningful.