1. Introduction
The study of classical reception, the influence of classical texts and culture in later times and works, has been one of the biggest growth areas in classical scholarship in the twenty-first century. There has been considerable discussion of how classical reception is to be defined: for some orientation see Hardwick 2003, Martindale and Thomas 2006, and Hardwick and Stray 2008. Most would now view it as a kind of dialogue between classical original(s) and later work(s) which use, appropriate, or modify the original(s), and emphasize the need to understand both cultural contexts as well as remembering our own situatedness. When we look at, say, Ben Jonson's reception of Horace there are three contexts involved: ourselves in our own period and culture, Jonson in his, and Horace in his, and we are in effect reading Jonson reading Horace. In a sense, all that classical scholars do is a form of reception, as they are always inevitably receiving classical texts in the particular light of their own culture and characteristics, whether or not they articulate this explicitly. One strand of classical reception is connected with translation: a translation is never a neutral rendering of a text but is always necessarily coloured by the culture and ideology of the translator. Another is connected with literary imitation or adaptation: classical works can be very effectively recast in a new cultural context. As we shall see, Horace has been richly received in both these ways, and in others.
2. Surveys
Among older works, Showerman 1922 provides a brief but wide-ranging survey which looks at receptions of Horace from antiquity to its own time, while the two volumes of Stemplinger (1906, 1921) are more ambitious accounts of Horace's European reception, especially of the Odes. The modern era of work begins with the bimillennium of Horace's death in 1992/3, which stimulated a number of important publications. These include the rich material on the reception of Horace from the medieval to the modern period and in different countries in the 1996–8 Enciclopedia oraziana Footnote 1 and the reception chapters in Ludwig 1993a; two useful collections are Krasser and Schmidt 1996, focusing particularly on reception in German, and especially Martindale and Hopkins 1993 on UK reception from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, in many ways the first application of modern ideas about reception to the poet. Two of the three current Horace handbooks have substantial sections on reception, now the most convenient points of departure on this topic;Footnote 2 a wide perspective is also offered by a recent conference volume which covers receptions of Horace from antiquity to the contemporary period.Footnote 3 A fine anthology of translations into English and some adaptations is to be found in Carne-Ross and Haynes 1996.
3. Antiquity and the Middle Ages
The reception of Horace in antiquity is a rich field, especially in terms of his influence on later lyric poetry: Tarrant 2007 maps out some of the territory, but an important link is that with the late antique Prudentius, the most extensive user of Horace's lyric metres in the new Christian context and a major channel from Horace to medieval hymnography.Footnote 4 For the hexameter poetry, Barchiesi 2001d (see also Ingleheart 2010) has made a fascinating argument that Ovid's long epistle to Augustus (Tristia 2) reacts to Horace's similar poetic letter (Epistles 2.1); Horatian satire is also naturally important for Persius and Juvenal, who react with and against their famous generic predecessor.Footnote 5
The Carolingian period (see again Tarrant 2007) saw copying of all the poems and imitations of Horatian lyric by some of its leading poets (Walahfrid Strabo and Paul the Deacon). In the later medieval period Horace could be referred to as ‘satirist’ by Dante (Inferno 4.89: Orazio satiro), but all his works seem to have been widely read.Footnote 6 A large range of introductions and accessus to the poet is available in manuscripts of the period, plus glosses by readers, which show clearly how and why Horace was read at the time,Footnote 7 and the use of Horatian imitation by poets such as the eleventh-century Alphanus of Salerno and the twelfth-century ‘Archpoet’ and Metellus of Tegernsee has been a topic of recent scholarship.Footnote 8 Petrarch wrote a brief Horatian ode in the second asclepiad stanza of Odes 1.5 (Carmina 23) and a splendid letter to Horace himself in 138 minor asclepiad lines (Familiares 24.10), the metre of Odes 1.1, 3.30, and 4.8.Footnote 9 Interesting too are the medieval texts of Horace presented with neumes (musical notation),Footnote 10 which have been argued by some to preserve a performance tradition which is continuous from antiquity.Footnote 11
4. The Renaissance to 1660
The renewal of learning and the invention of printing led not only to many learned editions of Horace's works, such as those of Christoforo Landino in Italy (1482) and Denys Lambin in France (1561 and 1567), but also to many more imitations of his poetry all over Europe, especially in Italy.Footnote 12 Until the middle of the fifteenth century, few had followed Petrarch's limited attempts to imitate the easier Horatian lyric metres: more serious imitation was a fitting challenge for the great humanists of the Quattrocento. The texts of many of these Neo-Latin poets are now becoming much more widely available, both via the fine I Tatti Renaissance Library series of parallel texts and translationsFootnote 13 and in online databases,Footnote 14 enlarging their readership beyond specialists in a period where the study of Neo-Latin itself is a growing discipline.Footnote 15
A major early figure is Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503), who wrote sixteen odes in Sapphics in Naples in the mid-1450s, later published in his Lyra (1501) and more Horatian in form than content (they include an ode to his wife and a pair of poems exchanged between Polyphemus and Galatea). Francesco Filelfo (1426–81) explored Horatian lyric in a wider range of metres in his fifty Odes in five books (one more than Horace), which seem to have been completed in the 1450s.Footnote 16 These often long lyric poems present a kind of autobiography, working through the concerns of Filelfo's career – just rule, war peace, love, the intellectual life; the first poems of the first, middle, and last books are addressed to Charles VII of France, and those in between address various individuals and topics significant to the poet and his career. Filelfo uses a good number of Horatian metres (including asclepiadic measures) but has not mastered the whole range; he is able to write in Sapphic stanzas but not in the more intricate Alcaics, and has a fair amount of (less ambitious) elegiacs and hexameters.
In the next generation, the great Angelo Poliziano (1454–94), a fine composer in hexameters, in his Odae likewise managed only Sapphics and some asclepiadic metres, including (following Petrarch) an ode to Horace himself (in asclepiads),Footnote 17 but not Alcaics. The three books of epigrams of his enemy Jacopo Sannazaro (1456–1530), author of the influential Italian Arcadia and another splendid Latin poet, similarly have only poems in Sapphics from Horace's metres, including one (2.36) to a spring at Mergellina which must echo the asclepiadic Odes 3.13.Footnote 18 The earliest master of the full spectrum of Horatian lyric metres is Sannazaro's friend Michael Marullus (1458–1500), the Greek-born, Italian-educated soldier and poet, who in the 1490s composed in Alcaics as well as Sapphics and some other complex measures, especially in the noble cosmic hymns of his 1497 Hymni naturales.Footnote 19
In the sixteenth century, polished imitations of Horatian lyrics were widely published across Europe. In the German-speaking countries Conrad Celtis (1459–1508) wrote four books of Odes, one of Epodes, and a Carmen saeculare (published 1513), brilliantly imitating Horace on a micro- and macro-level.Footnote 20 This initiated a series of German Horatian lyric poets in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote 21 In France, Jean Salmon Macrin (1490–1557) became known as the ‘French Horace’, publishing a wide range of Latin lyrics, especially in his Carminum libri IV of 1530, which included a Sapphic ode to Horace himself.Footnote 22 The works (1541) of the Dutch-born peripatetic Joannes Secundus (1511–36), best known for his Catullan Basia, contain a book of elegant Horatian odes.Footnote 23 Both Macrin and Secundus were influential on the major French lyric poets of the later sixteenth century. In Spain, the important vernacular poet Garcilaso de le Vega (1503–36) composed three fine Horatian odes,Footnote 24 while Jan Kochanowski (1530–84), often regarded as the founder of Polish vernacular verse, wrote a number of fine Horatian Latin odes in his Lyricorum libellus (1580).Footnote 25
One of the most able imitators of Horace was the Scot George Buchanan (1506–82), who spent much of his life in France and eventually returned to Scotland for a top-level academic and political career, including acting as tutor to both Mary Queen of Scots and James VI/I.Footnote 26 He composed both fine odes in Horace's manner on political events and a virtuoso and much-imitated set of psalm-paraphrases in the lyric metres of the Odes, with occasional elements from the Epodes, thus combining humanistic Horatianism with Protestant piety.Footnote 27 This led to a fine tradition of Horatianism in Scotland, evident in the anthology Delitiae poetarum Scotorum (1637), currently the subject of a major research project, which included Buchanan alongside religious Horatian odes by Andrew Melville (1545–1622).Footnote 28
Two highly talented neo-Horatians were Jesuits. The German Alsatian Jakob Balde (1604–68)Footnote 29 like others matched Horace's four books of Odes in his 1643 Libri lyricorum (mostly on moralizing religious subjects)Footnote 30 and published a single book of Epodes,Footnote 31 as well as a book of Sylvae which included many poems in lyric metres.Footnote 32 The fluent moralizing Horatian odes of Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (1595–1640), known as the ‘Polish Horace’, many written in Rome in praise of Urban VIII, were widely read and much imitated in European vernacular literature, especially in English.Footnote 33 We have also recently been reminded that a limited group of women as well as men read Horace in this period.Footnote 34
English translations and imitations of Horace began to emerge in the mid-sixteenth century. The complete hexameter poems were translated by Thomas Drant (1567), while odd odes were translated by the major poets the Earl of Surrey and Sir Philip Sidney.Footnote 35 An important figure here is Ben Jonson, whose engagement with Horace encompassed translation, imitation, and presenting him as a character on stage in his 1601 play Poetaster.Footnote 36 Sir Richard Fanshawe's translation of selected parts of Horace (1652) was soon followed by the first complete English translation, by several hands, published by Alexander Brome (1666); notable imitations can be found in Marvell and Cowley.Footnote 37
5. 1660–1800
In the UK, this period saw the growth of English satire under Dryden and Pope, often departing from and using Horace's hexameter poetry: for recent useful surveys see Money 2007, Hooley 2012, and Sowerby 2012. Pope's detailed imitations of Horatian satires are particularly rich, and Dryden's splendid version of Odes 3.29 is notable.Footnote 38 Important translations of Horace were published by Thomas Creech (1684, much criticized) and Christopher Smart, whose prose translation of 1754 was a school standard for two centuries but whose verse translation of 1767 was long unjustly neglected;Footnote 39 the most durable from this period is that of Philip Francis (1749, much reprinted). Neo-Latin Horatian imitation remained strong in this period: Poetarum Scotorum musae sacrae (1739), a successor anthology to the Delitiae poetarum Scotorum (1637), included Horatian lyric metres in parts of verse paraphrases of the Song of Solomon by John Ker (d. 1741) and of the Book of Job by William Hog (d. 1702; better known for his 1690 translation into Latin hexameters of Milton's Paradise Lost), while the Oxford poet Anthony Alsop (d. 1726) produced some remarkable Horatian lyrics.Footnote 40 In general, the English literature of the eighteenth century, both prose and verse, is saturated in Horatian imitation.Footnote 41
Elsewhere in Europe, the key text of the French classicizing period was the expanded version of the Ars poetica by Nicholas Boileau (1674), which exercised much influence on Pope and Dryden (see above) as well as in France. In Germany, Friedrich von Hagendorn (d. 1754) was the best-known representative of a group of poets who used Horace to recreate lyric poetry in the eighteenth century; Christoph Martin Wieland's translation of Horace's hexameter poetry (1786) is also notable, while Herder wrote an essay (1802) on reading Horace and Lessing a defence (1754) of the poet's moral character.Footnote 42 In Italy, the dramatist and opera librettist Pietro Metastasio produced a version of the Ars poetica (1749).Footnote 43
6. 1800–1900
Though the English Romantics might revolt against the tyranny of being taught Horace at school, they still admired him, a tension which comes out well in Byron's famous lines, motivated by the sight of Soracte in Italy and consequent recall of Odes 1.9: ‘Then farewell Horace, whom I hated so, / Not for thy faults, but mine’.Footnote 44 The Romantic link of literature and landscape is also seen in Wordsworth's desire to explore ‘Sabine vales’ following ‘a wish / To meet the shade of Horace by the side / Of his Bandusian fount’, combining an allusion to Odes 3.4 with one to Odes 3.13 in his Memorials of a Tour of Italy (1837). Keats, generally more interested in Hellenic culture, could echo Horace in the opening of one of his most famous poems, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, I.1–4: ‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / my senses’ clearly echoes Epodes 14.1–4, in its initial position as well as in its theme. For some basic data on English poets' imitation of Horace across the nineteenth century see Thayer 1916.
Horace was a key part of UK elite education in the Victorian period and served as a model for the English gentleman in various ways.Footnote 45 Among translations, John Conington, the Corpus Professor of Latin at Oxford, produced versions of the Odes (1863) and the hexameter works (1870), the former showing the influence of Sir Walter Scott, while Sir Theodore Martin, biographer of Prince Albert, translated both the Odes (1860) and then the complete works (1881). The translation of Horace seems to have been particularly favoured by retired statesmen, perhaps imitating the poet's famous literary otium or leisure: Lord Lytton's version of the Odes of 1869 was reprinted several times, and the Odes were also translated by W. E. Gladstone at the end of his life (1894). The undoubtedly central place of Horace in Victorian literary culture did not prevent criticism. Matthew Arnold in ‘On the Modern Element in Literature’ (1857) sees the ‘gentlemanly’ Horace as ‘inadequate’, lacking key Victorian virtues and representing the middlebrow taste of the Philistine bourgeoisie whom Arnold hoped to direct to the superior joys of Hellenism. Nevertheless, the younger Arnold had indulged in Horatian pastiche in his ‘Horatian Echo’ (1847), which addresses a friend advising him not to worry about politics in a clear echo of the opening of Odes 2.11. Arnold's friend Arthur Hugh Clough likewise made some use of both the Odes and the Epistles in his epistolary Amours de voyage (1858), which ends with an envoi plainly echoing the closing poem of Horace's Epistles 1 (1.20).
The practice of Horatian pastiche, like that of Horatian translation, became extensive in the nineteenth century, with some interesting adaptations to Victorian social and intellectual contexts. The most distinguished example of these vers de société is Tennyson's ‘To the Rev. F.D. Maurice’, which, like Arnold's ‘Horatian Echo’, neatly inserts real current affairs into the literary frame.Footnote 46 Thackeray's version of Odes 1.38, Horace's address to his wine-pourer urging simple party practices, neatly replaces the dubious boy with an address to ‘Lucy’, perhaps a maid. The enormously (and deservedly) popular ‘version’ of the medieval Persian Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859) by Tennyson's friend Edward Fitzgerald, ‘the Bible of Victorian agnosticism’, has more than a touch of Horace about it, using Horatian-style quatrain stanzas and a first-person, world-weary, ageing narrator.
Horatian influence was so general that it could reach into the most unlikely literary corners of Victorian England.Footnote 47 The most famous poem of the 1890s, by Ernest Dowson (1867–1900), shows Horace transposed into the perhaps notably un-Horatian arena of low and haunting obsessive physical passion: Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae (published 1896) appropriates Odes 4.1.4 as its title (‘I am not the man I was under the sway of the kindly Cinara’). A rather more conventional version of Horace, though perhaps with some erotic undertones, is to be found in the well-known version of Odes 4.7 published almost simultaneously by A. E. Housman in 1897.Footnote 48
7. Modern Horaces
Quite different was the use of Horace in the Edwardian/Georgian period by Rudyard Kipling and Sir Henry Newbolt, showing the enlistment of Horace in British imperial ideology. Kipling wrote perhaps the most famous English parody of Horace's Odes in ‘A Translation’ (1917), while the story ‘Regulus’ (1917) in the school collection Stalky and Co. examines the imperial lessons of Odes 3.5.Footnote 49 Newbolt, poet of empire, produced a version of Odes 1.7, ‘Laudabunt alii’ (1907), in which Horace's Tibur is metamorphosed into Newbolt's native Devon. At the zenith of the British Empire, Horatian imitation was a natural vehicle for nationalistic poetry. This was famously undermined in the next generation by Wilfred Owen, who in ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (1917) cited in a poem's title and refuted in its climax Horace's famous declaration (Odes 3.12.13: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori) that death for one's country was both sweet and glorious.
The continuing central role of Horace in Anglophone elite education until the 1960s ensured further allusion and appropriation in modern British and American poetry. Both in the 1930s and at the end of his career, W. H. Auden was clearly interested in both the themes and the metrics of the Horatian ode,Footnote 50 while Louis MacNeice produced some interesting translations of individual odes and a poem addressed to the poet, ‘Memoranda to Horace’ (1962).Footnote 51 In the US, Robert Frost as poet of nature has sometimes been aptly compared with Horace, especially in the early ‘Hyla Brook’ (1916), which seems to echo Horace's poem to the fons Bandusiae (Odes 3.13).Footnote 52 Ezra Pound published at the end of his career a few striking translations from the Odes, especially his version of 3.30, while Basil Bunting, an English protégé of Pound, produced some lively versions of Horatian lyric.Footnote 53 Other poets from this generation who have produced interesting versions of Horatian odes or other poems are the Americans Robert Lowell and J. V. Cunningham, and the Briton C. H. Sisson, whose modernization of the Carmen saeculare is especially notable. For surveys of the landscape see Tomlinson 1993 and Ziolkowski 2005, and the relevant parts of the Enciclopedia oraziana.Footnote 54
8. Living Horace
Translations of Horace remain popular in current poetry in English. The US poet and translator David Ferry has produced lively and expansive complete translations of the Odes (1997) and of the Epistles (2001), while thirty-six poets from either side of the Atlantic collectively translated the Odes for McClatchy 2002. The English classical scholar Guy Lee produced a neat verse version of the Odes in metres mirroring those of the originals in 1998. Sydenham 2005 and Lyons 2007 give further English versions in a traditional style, while interesting US poetic translations of the complete Odes can be found in Krisak 2006 and Kaimowitz 2008, and of the Satires in Juster 2008.
Versions of Horatian poems are also widespread. The Northern Irish poet Michael Longley, well known for his brilliant lyric miniaturizations of Homer, has in ‘After Horace’ and ‘The Mad Poet’ in The Ghost Orchid (1995) juxtaposed witty, brief versions of the beginning and the end of the Ars poetica which combine translation with ironic commentary. Seamus Heaney wrote a striking version of Odes 1.34 as his response to 9/11, ‘Anything Can Happen’, adding a pointed reference to the overturning of ‘the tallest towers’.Footnote 55 In The Strange Hours Travelers Keep (2003), the US poet August Kleinzahler presents several pastiche Horatian epistles, including one addressed to Maecenas (‘Epistle VIII’) which ironically attacks Horace's favoured country life in his own voice. The New Zealander Ian Wedde, in The Commonplace Odes (2003), has produced a collection of updated Horatian odes which embed the poet in everyday modern life, while Rough Translation, a 2012 collection by another US poet and classical scholar, John Talbot, sets elegant versions of Horatian odes in a New England village. In the UK, the Epodes, relatively neglected in Horatian translation generally, have been brilliantly transposed to 1950s working-class steel-town Teesside by Maureen Almond as part of her collection The Works (2004), while her Chasing the Ivy (2009) sets the first book of Odes in the often colourful world of competing modern poets.
