I THE CHARIOTEER (PINDAR)

The order in which the nine Greek lyric poets were presented in antiquity was variable, with one important exception: Pindar always stood at the head of the list.Footnote ⁹ As Quintilian reports, ‘of the nine lyric poets Pindar is ranked first by far … on account of which Horace rightly considers him inimitable’.Footnote ¹⁰ Here the rhetorician clearly means to adduce Pindarvm qvisqvis (Carm. 4.2), a work whose irony was lost on him;Footnote ¹¹ but Horace had already much more subtly invoked this tradition of Pindaric pre-eminence by commencing his programmatic priamel with the figure of the Olympian charioteer (Carm. 1.1.1–6):

While Olympian chariots are by no means absent from the works of other Greek lyric poets, the specifically Pindaric character of these lines is widely acknowledged.Footnote ¹² The usual comparandum is a fragmentary priamel which may have partially inspired Horace's entire composition (Pind. frag. 221 Maehler):Footnote ¹³

But an even closer Pindaric parallel is to be found in Horace's apostrophe to Maecenas, which clearly echoes the Theban poet's characterisation of the Sicilian tyrant Theron following the latter's victory in the Olympian chariot race of 476 b.c. (Pind., Ol. 2.5–7):

To be sure, tutelage, glory and breeding are not uncommon attributes for a poet to praise in a patron, but the echo of Pindar's ereisma (‘bulwark’) in Horace's ‘praesidium’ is unmistakable, and ‘decus’ is as close a Latin equivalent to the similarly polyvalent — and notably Pindaric — aōtos (here translated ‘glory’) as one is likely to find.Footnote ¹⁴ Indeed, Pindar himself twice couples this noun with the adjective glykys (‘sweet’), just as Horace calls Maecenas his ‘sweet source of glory’ (Carm. 1.1.2: ‘dulce decus’) here.Footnote ¹⁵ The Roman honorand's pedigree from ‘ancient kings’ (Carm. 1.1.1: ‘atauis … regibus’) similarly recalls Theron's lineage ‘from noble fathers’ (Ol. 2.7: εὐωνύμων … πατέρων), thereby strengthening the Pindaric intertext. And of course, Pindar's praise of the Sicilian tyrant ‘for his victory-bearing chariot’ (Ol. 2.5: τετραορίας ἕνεκα νικαφόρου) provides a smooth transition from Horace's initial apostrophe to his own description of the Olympian charioteer. In sum, by virtue of their pre-eminent position and conspicuously epinician language, the poem's dedicatory couplet and first allusive icon get Horace's programmatic priamel off to a markedly Pindaric start, thus paving the way for his eight subsequent representations of the remaining lyrikoi.Footnote ¹⁶

II THE DEMAGOGUE (STESICHORUS)

From the sublime heights of Olympian athleticism, we pivot to the inglorious struggle for power at Rome (Carm. 1.1.7–8):

As Nisbet and Hubbard note, the sudden shift of scene is emblematic of Horace's entire poetic project; as so often in his work, the poet adapts a Greek tradition to his contemporary Roman context through conspicuous juxtaposition of foreign and native vocabulary.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet even when describing a scene as quintessentially Roman as a politician's manipulation of the mob to his own advantage, Horace also manages to evoke the character of a second canonical antecedent, in this case the first lyric luminary of Magna Graecia, Stesichorus.

For while the poetry and biographical traditions of his esteemed colleagues engage with contemporary politics to varying degrees, Stesichorus is unique among the lyrikoi for having supposedly intervened directly in affairs of state as an orator.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, no less an authority than Aristotle cites Stesichorus’ speeches twice in his Rhetoric, most notably to demonstrate the poet's exemplary use of the Aesopic fable of ‘The Horse and the Stag’ in addressing a public assembly at Himera.Footnote ¹⁹ That Horace knew this story about Stesichorus is all but certain, since he retells the same fable in Epistles 1.10 to encourage the urbanite Aristius Fuscus to forsake the political and financial stresses of Rome for the countryside's simple pleasures (Epist. 1.10.34–41); other adaptations in Conon, Phaedrus, Babrius, Plutarch and Theon attest to the anecdote's wide and lasting currency.Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, so great was Stesichorus’ reputation for demagoguery in antiquity that even almost a millennium after his death, the pseudepigraphical Letters of Phalaris portray the poet as a leading political opponent of the tyrant,Footnote ²¹ who in one letter accuses Stesichorus of disgracing the Muses by meddling in affairs of state ([Phalar.], Ep. 92 Hercher):

And in another epistle, Phalaris goes so far as to label Stesichorus a demagogue outright ([Phalar.], Ep. 109 Hercher):

Thus, among all the lyrikoi Stesichorus was a prime candidate for political typecasting well into Late Antiquity.

For a reader alert to this potential biographical identification, two further details confirm Stesichorus’ presence behind Horace's demagogue. First, there is the unusual number of honours accorded to him by the Quirites, which Nisbet and Hubbard dubiously interpret as ‘reiterated applause’ rather than ‘triple magistracies’ on the grounds that ‘it is hard to see why Horace should talk of successive victories; these are a sign of the crowd's consistency, not of its fickleness’.Footnote ²² But if Horace's politician is indeed a Stesichorean stand-in, this odd numerical specificity finds ready explanation in the fact that ‘Stesichorus’ three’ was a byword for basic poetic knowledge in antiquity, and ignorance of them (whatever they were) earned the proverbial opprobrium ‘you don't even know Stesichorus’ three’.Footnote ²³ By allotting triple honours to his iconic statesman, Horace thus issues a playful challenge for his readers to perceive the poet behind the politician. And indeed, his lyric predecessor is effectively hiding in plain sight, since the collocation ‘turba … tollere’ not only approximates the nominal and verbal elements of Stesichorus’ name,Footnote ²⁴ but also, in a ‘reverse signature’ analogous to Virgil's ‘translation’ of Aratus at Georgics 1.1–2,Footnote ²⁵ playfully inverts both their literal order and grammatical relationship: whereas Stesichorus was supposedly the first poet to establish a chorus accompanied by the cithara,Footnote ²⁶ Horace's demagogue becomes established in Roman politics by playing up to the crowd. In the space of just two lines, Horace thus manages to evoke Stesichorus’ reputation for demagoguery, the triad for which he was proverbially known, and even his very name.

III THE GRAIN-IMPORTER (BACCHYLIDES)

For his third lyric icon, Horace transports us from Forum to Emporium (Carm. 1.1.9–10):Footnote ²⁷

Like his figure of the politician, Horace's wealthy middleman superficially conforms to a common Roman stereotype.Footnote ²⁸ But for a reader approaching his programmatic priamel with an eye to prior canonical catalogues, Meleager's botanical emblem for Bacchylides readily springs to mind (Mel., Anth. Pal. 4.1.33–4):

Meleager seems to have assigned this peculiar posy at least partly on account of one of the two or three epigrams attributed to Bacchylides during the Hellenistic period, a poem which the anthologist doubtless included as an exemplary specimen in his Garland (Bacchyl., Anth. Pal. 6.53):

Horace's hyperbolic periphrasis ‘all the sweepings from Libya's threshing-floors’ (Carm. 1.1.10: ‘quidquid de Libycis uerritur areis’) thus doubly associates his figure of the grain-importer with Bacchylides by recalling not only Meleager's symbolic sheaves, but also the lyric poet's (probably pseudepigraphical) commemoration of Eudemus’ winnowing.

But we need not rely on Bacchylides’ reception alone for evidence of his commerce in corn. Take, for example, a passage quoted by Athenaeus on the effects of too much wine (Bacchyl. frag. 20B.6–16 Snell-Maehler ap. Ath., Epitom. 2.10):

While arousal, delusions of grandeur, aggression and acquisitiveness are common enough consequences of a good tipple, grain importation as drunken fantasy is idiosyncratic, to say the least. But it is in the very first word of his ‘most prestigious commission’,Footnote ²⁹ Ode 3 in honour of the chariot victory of Hiero I of Syracuse at Olympia in 468 b.c., that Bacchylides’ frumentary fixation figures most significantly (Bacchyl. 3.1–4 Snell-Maehler):

Possibly read programmatically by Hellenistic scholars and poets, Bacchylides’ hapax aristokarpos (‘corn-rich’) obviously caught the ear of Meleager, whose own hapax melistaktos (‘honey-dripping’) describing the Muses in the couplet quoted above playfully caps Clio's rare epithet glykydōros (‘sweet’) here;Footnote ³⁰ whether it also inspired the Eudemus epigram is less certain. What is clear is that, by amassing all these intertextual grains in just two verses — Meleager's botanical emblem, Eudemus’ winnowing, the oversea shipment, and perhaps even the critical kernel of the lyric poet's hapax — Horace subtly sows a small crop of connections between his third allusive icon and Bacchylides.

IV THE FARMER (ALCMAN)

From horreum we segue naturally to farm (Carm. 1.1.11–14):

Both the citizen-farmer's pride in his family plot and the sailor's fear of the sea are of course well-known Roman commonplaces, as is the contrast between them.Footnote ³¹ But why ‘Attalicis condicionibus’, ‘trabe Cypria’ and ‘Myrtoum … mare’? While the Attalids were justly famous for their affluence in Horace's time,Footnote ³² other paragons of wealth were surely available. As for ‘Cypria’ and ‘Myrtoum’, commentators note that these toponyms add ‘colour’ or ‘vividness’,Footnote ³³ but as the work of Richard Thomas in particular has shown, such epithets are seldom purely ornamental in Augustan poetry, especially in contexts as prominent as a collection's opening poem.Footnote ³⁴ And indeed, for a Greek lyric poet divided between his ‘ancestral fields’ (Carm. 1.1.11–12: ‘patrios … agros’) and Attalid Asia Minor by the Myrtoan Sea, we need look no further than the Spartan Alcman.Footnote ³⁵ An epigram by Horace's contemporary Antipater of Thessalonica neatly summarises the dispute over his birthplace (Antip. Thess., Anth. Pal. 7.18; Alcm. T 4 Campbell):Footnote ³⁶

Indeed, according to the Suda, it was precisely the Pergamene librarian Crates of Mallus who under Attalid patronage wrongly promoted (if not originated) the idea that Alcman was born a Lydian at Sardis and not a Spartan at Messoa.Footnote ³⁷ Thus, Horace's conceit that his farmer cannot be dislodged from his native lands ‘for an Attalid price’ (Carm. 1.1.12: ‘Attalicis condicionibus’) implies that no matter how much the Pergamene rulers spent to convince the world otherwise, Sparta's claim to Alcman's legacy remained secure in the Roman poet's estimation. Nor is the provenance of his farmer's hypothetical boat unrelated to this attempted expatriation, since Crates’ own hometown of Mallus was located at the mouth of the river Pyramus, whose silt according to a famous oracle would one day link the Cilician mainland directly to Cyprus.Footnote ³⁸ Thus, in Horace's nautical analogy, Crates himself can be construed as the very ‘Cypriot bark’ (Carm. 1.1.13: ‘trabe Cypria’) which is the vehicle of the voyage refused by his thalassophobic farmer.

And indeed, much like Horace's agricultural icon, Alcman himself seems to have possessed both rustic roots and a profound distaste for the sea. According to a tradition preserved in both the Suda and a fragment of Heraclides Lembus, the lyric poet was born into slavery, but subsequently manumitted on account of his talent.Footnote ³⁹ Although exactly what is meant by an oiketēs in a Spartan context is now a matter of some debate, Horace's older contemporary Cornelius Nepos explicitly equated the majority of Spartan slaves with helots who tilled the land.Footnote ⁴⁰ If Nepos’ opinion can be taken as representative of his era, there is no reason to think that Horace would have viewed Alcman's early servitude any differently. At the very least, like many farmers, the Greek lyric poet himself appears to have advocated giving the sea a wide berth. In a tantalising gloss on the phrase ‘the neighbourhood is briny’ in an oration by Aelius Aristides,Footnote ⁴¹ a scholiast reports (Alcm. frag. 108 PMG):

While such fragmentary evidence must be handled gingerly, Alcman's fear of the sea seems to have pervaded Greek consciousness to the point that this formulation remained current even in the lexicon of the Second Sophistic. Thus, by embedding a select series of details both biographical and intertextual in his characterisation of the sea-fearing farmer, Horace reaps a fruitful harvest of links between his fourth lyric icon and the staunchly Spartan former helot, Alcman.

V THE MERCHANT (SIMONIDES)

While the farmer refuses to sail at any price, the merchant will endure even shipwreck for material gain (Carm. 1.1.15–18):

The contrast with the previous figure is both elegant and effective: the Icarian clashes with the Myrtoan Sea, the merchant's hollow praise of his native countryside supplants the farmer's genuine delight in his ancestral fields, and the relationship between greed and fear is entirely upended. But Horace's intrepid trader is more than a mere foil for his agricultural antecedent, since both avarice and shipwreck loom large in what is perhaps the richest biographical tradition of a Greek lyric poet to come down to us, that of Simonides of Ceos.Footnote ⁴² Both elements are present already in Aristophanes (Ar., Pax 695–9; Simon. T 22 Campbell):

A scholiast explains the joke (Schol. V ad Ar. Pacem 695–9; Simon. T 23 Campbell):Footnote ⁴³

Already in the fifth century b.c., then, the itinerant poet-for-hire Simonides was closely associated with nautical mercantilism and its attendant risks. And indeed, as the poet's biographical tradition evolved, the threat of shipwreck implicit in Aristophanes’ ‘raft of rushes’ (Ar., Pax 699 ῥιπός; cf. Carm. 1.1.17: ‘rates’) developed into a much more elaborate tale of Simonides’ salvation from a watery grave through the intervention of a ghost whose corpse he laid to rest. The Palatine Anthology lemmatist preserves the story along with two epigrams Simonides supposedly composed in commemoration of his saviour (Schol. ad Anth. Pal. 7.77; Simon. frags. 128–9 Bergk; Simon., Anth. Pal. 7.516, 7.77; Simon., Epig. 84–5 Campbell):

This version of the story was well known at Rome during Horace's lifetime, as Cicero attests.Footnote ⁴⁴ But perhaps even more significant for the interpretation of Horace's fifth allusive icon is an alternative version told just a generation later by Phaedrus, who attributes Simonides’ actual deliverance from a sinking ship not to the poet's burial of the exposed corpse, but rather to his (proto-)Stoic sagacity (Phaed. 4.23; Perry, Aes. 519):

Whether Phaedrus’ version preserves otherwise unattested elements of Simonides’ biographical tradition already available to Horace or was invented by the fabulist in response to his predecessor's priamel is difficult to say.Footnote ⁴⁵ What is certain, however, is that Phaedrus’ Simonides perfectly matches the description of Horace's iconic merchant: both figures undertake the hazards of a sea voyage explicitly to escape poverty (Carm. 1.1.18; Phaed. 4.23.3); both are conspicuously fond of their native lands (Carm. 1.1.16–17; Phaed. 4.23.6–7); both regain their wealth after the foundering of their ships (Carm. 1.1.17–18; Phaed. 4.23.23–4); and most crucially, both are shipwrecked on the northern shore of the Icarian Sea, where the Horatian trader would logically be driven by ‘the Southwest Wind wrestling Icarian waves’ (Carm. 1.1.15: ‘luctantem Icariis fluctibus Africum’), and where in Phaedrus the Greek lyric poet and his companions find that ‘the ancient city of Clazomenae was close by’ (Phaed. 4.23.16–17: ‘forte Clazomenae prope | antiqua fuit urbs’).Footnote ⁴⁶ As with the Myrtoan Sea in the case of Horace's land-lubbing farmer, therefore, the Icarian Sea here provides a useful geographic index of his iconic merchant's allusive identity as the prototypical poet-for-hire, Simonides.

VI THE DRUNKARD (ANACREON)

While the merchant risks wreckage at sea, the drunkard gets smashed on shore (Carm. 1.1.19–22):

Although the detail of the vintage Massican lends these lines an undeniably Campanian flavour, Horace's description otherwise perfectly distils the sympotic character of the most notorious toper of all the lyrikoi (if not all antiquity), Anacreon of Teos.Footnote ⁴⁷ Indeed, bibulousness was widely regarded as the Greek lyric poet's dominant attribute from the earliest period of his reception. Pausanias describes a prominent portrait (Paus. 1.25.1; Anac. T 10 Campbell):

Regardless of whether this statue is to be identified with a widely disseminated type best known from a full-length Roman copy now in Copenhagen, its presence on the Acropolis all but ensured this portrait's fame;Footnote ⁴⁸ Horace himself almost certainly would have seen it during his early scholastic sojourn in Athens (Epist. 2.2.43–5). But of course, Anacreon was represented in this manner for good reason: both his authentic poems and the pseudepigraphical Anacreontea practically overflow with references to wine.Footnote ⁴⁹ Indeed, by the Hellenistic period Anacreon's status as the archetypal tippler among the Greek lyric poets was unshakable, as exemplified by Leonidas of Tarentum's epigram on what is probably the same portrait type described by Pausanias (Leon., Anth. Plan. 16.306; Anac. T 11 Campbell):Footnote ⁵⁰

Drunkenness remained Anacreon's dominant attribute well into the Augustan period, as Ovid attests.Footnote ⁵¹ Indeed, Horace's contemporary Didymus even wrote a treatise sifting the sympotic strains of Anacreon's character, much to Seneca's dismay (Sen., Ep. 88.37):

That Didymus decided the question in favour of ebriosior may be inferred not just from Ovid's aforementioned characterisation, but also from Athenaeus’ later assessment (Ath. 10.429b; Anac. T 18 Campbell):Footnote ⁵²

Regardless of whether this rather diluted portrait originated with Didymus or represents Athenaeus’ own muddled attempt to rehabilitate Anacreon's reputation, by the late imperial period the burden of proof clearly lay with the claim that the Tean was not a sot.Footnote ⁵³

Still, dipsomania is not the only aspect of Horace's sixth allusive icon which evokes the figure of Anacreon. Indeed, probably out of his association with the free flow of liquor there arose in the Hellenistic period a parallel tradition connecting the poet with sacred springs of various liquids. Take, for instance, an epigram by Dioscorides (Diosc., Anth. Pal. 7.31):

Here everything flows: marrow, tears, wine, nectar, and ultimately the dancing limbs of Anacreon as they move to embrace Eurypyle and begin the cycle anew.Footnote ⁵⁴ But most crucially, the Greek lyric poet is situated in an idyllic setting ‘beside the soothing source of a sacred spring’, in Horace's phrase (Carm. 1.1.22: ‘ad aquae lene caput sacrae’): Dioscorides locates Anacreon not just anywhere along his streams of wine and nectar, but precisely where they ‘bubble up unbidden’ from their divine fountainheads.Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed, the Hellenistic poet may well have had a very specific locale in mind, since as Diodorus Siculus reports, the people of Teos justified their claim to Dionysus’ birthplace by pointing to the existence of just such a miraculous fountain of wine within their city precincts.Footnote ⁵⁶ Thus, while sacred springs are by no means associated solely with the Tean bard in Greek literature, the presence of one alongside Horace's iconic hedonist serves to strengthen the identification of Roman poet's sixth allusive icon with antiquity's archetypal tippler, Anacreon.Footnote ⁵⁷

VII THE SOLDIER (ALCAEUS)

The drunkard's idle pleasure then yields to the grim business of the soldier (Carm. 1.1.23–5):

Like the farmer and the merchant before them, Horace's drinker and soldier strike a potent contrast. But once again, more than mere rhetorical antithesis is at issue here. For just as bibulousness was generally perceived as Anacreon's dominant attribute in antiquity, so too was patriotic bellicosity in defence of his native Mytilene widely considered Alcaeus’ essential character trait.Footnote ⁵⁸ This characterisation had become entrenched already in the Hellenistic period, as exemplified by the anonymous epigram praising the ‘sword of Alcaeus, which often shed the blood | of tyrants, defending the laws of his fatherland’ with which we began.Footnote ⁵⁹ Quintilian, too, ranks Alcaeus’ blows against tyranny as the Lesbian poet's strongest lyric achievements (Quint., Inst. 10.1.63; Alc. T 21 Campbell):

Athenaeus likewise emphasises Alcaeus’ militancy above all other aspects of his character, dubbing him ‘warlike to a fault’ (Ath. 14.627a; Alc. frag. 357.1 Lobel-Page):

But most importantly of all, Horace himself repeatedly and consistently underscores Alcaeus’ belligerence whenever he describes the life and work of his most prominent lyric predecessor in the Odes. This combative characterisation of Alcaeus begins in Poscimvs si qvid (Carm. 1.32), where the Lesbian ‘citizen’ (Carm. 1.32.5: ‘ciui’, with attendant patriotic undertones) sings of love only in the intervals afforded by the more tempestuous affairs of war on land and sea (Carm. 1.32.5–12). This pugnacious portrait continues in Ille et nefasto (Carm. 2.13), where Alcaeus’ songs of martial hardship (Carm. 2.13.28: ‘dura belli’) overpower Sappho's lovelorn complaints in the estimation of their underworld audience, who prefer his tales of ‘battles and banished tyrants’ (Carm. 2.13.31: ‘pugnas et exactos tyrannos’).Footnote ⁶¹ Even Alcaeus’ sources of inspiration are markedly ‘aggressive’, as Horace would later inform us in Ne forte credas (Carm. 4.9.7–8: ‘Alcaei minaces … Camenae’).Footnote ⁶² Thus, while it was primarily Alcaeus’ poetic range that earned him pride of place among Horace's lyric predecessors,Footnote ⁶³ from the standpoint of the biographical tradition the Lesbian poet was always a citizen-soldier first and foremost, and thus ideally suited for deployment as Horace's seventh allusive icon.

VIII THE HUNTER (IBYCUS)

From the soldier keen on war, Horace trains his sights on an unuxorious huntsman (Carm. 1.1.25–8):

As the poet's audience knew perfectly well, the chase was an almost exclusively masculine pursuit in Roman antiquity.Footnote ⁶⁴ So why home in on his iconic sportsman's conjugal neglect? This seemingly superfluous detail is in fact quite significant, since whereas in Augustan poetry heterosexual lovers normally go hunting precisely in order to forget their amorous cares,Footnote ⁶⁵ in homosexual circles such outings regularly provide cover for quite another kind of sport.Footnote ⁶⁶ And indeed, as we have already seen, for a Greek lyric poet renowned above all for ‘pluck[ing] the sweet bloom of persuasion and boys’,Footnote ⁶⁷ we need hunt no further than the most elusive of Horace's predecessors, Ibycus. Cicero, too, awards the Rhegian first prize for pederasty (Cic., Tusc. 4.71; Ibyc. T 12 Campbell):Footnote ⁶⁸

Moreover, the sole occurrence of the name Ibycus in the Horatian corpus refers to the impoverished husband of a Roman matron who evidently feels neglected by him to the point that she scandalously goes chasing after much younger men in Vxor pavperis Ibyci (Carm. 3.15),Footnote ⁶⁹ a poem whose nexus of spousal inattentiveness, cynegetic imagery and Ibycus is too expertly woven for it to be unconnected to Horace's eighth allusive icon: mark, for instance, how its striking doe simile recalls the ‘hind’ (Carm. 1.1.27: ‘cerua’) stalked by the priamel's iconic hunter.Footnote ⁷⁰ Nor is the sportsman's anticipated wild ‘boar’ (Carm. 1.1.28: ‘aper’) without precedent in Ibycus: indeed, despite the highly fragmentary state of his corpus, we know from a reference in Diomedes the grammarian to ‘Meleagrid Althaea, as Ibycus the Greek called her’ that the Rhegian poet seems to have treated the myth of the Calydonian Boar Hunt in some detail.Footnote ⁷¹ But most importantly of all, we also happen to know that ‘the vast nets of Cypris’ feature prominently in an Ibycan poem which Horace would later emulate in Intermissa, Venvs (Carm. 4.1) quite conspicuously (Ibyc. frag. 287 PMG):Footnote ⁷²

Like Bacchylides’ corn at the outset of his Ode 3, Ibycus’ ‘vast nets of Cypris’ may well have been regarded as emblematic of the Rhegian poet's work: indeed, Horace's choice of the Latin adjective teres to describe his sportsman's snare nicely catches Ibycus’ similarly unusual apeiros of Eros’ hunting nets, since both terms essentially connote circularity, the former by way of Greek kykloterēs, and the latter by way of infinity.Footnote ⁷³ Thus, through careful concatenation of the chase, conjugal neglect and intertexts both internal and external, Horace's eighth allusive icon cleverly captures the character of the Greek lyric pederast par excellence, Ibycus.

IX THE LESBIAN LYRE (SAPPHO)

Finally, before issuing the bold request to be enrolled among the lyrikoi with which we began, Horace presents his intellectual and social bona fides for inclusion in the canon, with one critically important proviso (Carm. 1.1.29–34):

As we have seen, each of the eight figures preceding this climax represents one of Horace's male lyric forebears through intertextuality, biographical tradition, or both. But Sappho posed a special challenge for Horace's programmatic priamel: however ‘masculine’ his sole female predecessor may have been (Epist. 1.19.28: ‘mascula Sappho’), the Roman poet's commitment to the principles of elegance and decorum obviously precluded any gender-bending in his iconic catalogue, grammatical or otherwise. And so he devised a climactic solution which ironically and iconically effects the very insertion he requests in the poem's final couplet. For as Gisela Richter has meticulously documented, in each and every surviving portrait of Sappho in which her hands are depicted — and even on the reverses of coins from Mytilene and Eresos which portray her bust in profile — the Lesbian poetess is universally accompanied by the lyre (usually the distinctive Lesbian barbitos) which is her formal attribute.Footnote ⁷⁴ In this respect, Sappho is unique among ancient adepts of this instrument.Footnote ⁷⁵ For while her Lesbian compatriot Alcaeus is likewise depicted with a barbitos on a famous kalathoid krater now in Munich, his less renowned portrait on a second-century a.d. bronze coin from Mytilene is struck in more characteristic opposition to the tyrant Pittacus.Footnote ⁷⁶ Sappho, conversely, is distinguished solely and without exception in pre-Augustan portraiture by her poetry as emblematised by the Lesbian lyre. By placing the barbitos at the climax of his programmatic priamel, therefore, Horace allows Sappho's musical attribute to speak for her, and his own penultimate position in his iconic catalogue to speak for itself.

And indeed, what little remains of Sappho in the literary record accords perfectly with this picture, since it was the Lesbian poetess herself who first bade her lyre speak in a poem whose incipit is preserved by Hermogenes of Tarsus (Sappho frag. 118 Lobel-Page ap. Hermog., Id. 2.4, p. 334 Rabe):Footnote ⁷⁷

As with the attributes of the other lyrikoi, this essential feature of Sappho's iconography was picked up and played upon by Hellenistic epigrammatists, for instance in yet another anonymous example from Book 9 of the Palatine Anthology (Anth. Pal. 9.189; Sappho T 59 Campbell):Footnote ⁷⁸

But most importantly of all, in Sappho's sole personal appearance in the Odes, Horace himself depicts the Lesbian poetess ‘complaining on Aeolian lyre about her fellow girls’ in Ille et nefasto (Carm. 2.13.24–5: ‘Aeoliis fidibus querentem | Sappho puellis de popularibus’), where the phrase ‘Aeoliis fidibus’ surely designates the same instrument as the ‘Lesboum barbiton’ (Carm. 1.1.34) at the priamel's climax — an icon which reappears resoundingly in Horace's retrospective catalogue of poetic predecessors in Odes 4.9, where ‘still the love breathes, and passions live which were confided to the Aeolian girl's lyre’ (Carm. 4.9.10–12: ‘spirat adhuc amor | uiuuntque commissi calores | Aeoliae fidibus puellae’).Footnote ⁷⁹ Thus, in both the Roman poet's own lyric oeuvre and the material record, Sappho is never depicted without the instrument which functions as her formal attribute at the climax of Horace's programmatic priamel, where the songstress finally assumes her proper place among her sisters.

For indeed, now that the Roman poet has taken the liberty of occupying the ninth place in the canonical list of lyrikoi, Sappho has been elevated to the tenth position in his iconic catalogue alongside the Muses Euterpe and Polyhymnia, which according to tradition is of course precisely where she belongs (Pl., Anth. Pal. 9.506; Sappho T 60 Campbell):Footnote ⁸⁰

In this manner, Horace takes advantage of an opening provided for him in the second of the two epigrammatic catalogues of the nine Greek lyric poets with which we began (Anon., Anth. Pal. 9.571):Footnote ⁸¹

Just as Pindar is conventionally the first of the lyrikoi, so too is Sappho traditionally the tenth Muse, a fact that Horace wittily exploits to usurp the Lesbian poetess’ prior position as ‘the ninth among men’ even as he elevates the lyric songstress to her proper place among her divine sisters in the form of her iconic attribute, the barbitos.

* * *

Thus, in a consummate masterstroke, Horace resolves two discordant numerological traditions about the canonical nine Greek lyric poets even while pluckily inserting himself among them, thereby harmonising Archaic matter and Hellenistic method in a manner which sets the tone for the entire poetic project to follow. In so doing, he prospectively lays claim to a victory garland of ivy, ‘the prize of learned brows’ (Carm. 1.1.29: ‘doctarum hederae praemia frontium’) of which he boasts in his programmatic priamel, and with which he will again retrospectively crown himself (albeit with myrtle and laurel, respectively) in the closural Persicos odi (Carm. 1.38.5: ‘myrto’) and Exegi monvmentvm (Carm. 3.30.16: ‘lauro’). Just as the apodosis of Horace's concluding couplet will be fulfilled by the editorial placement of an asteriskos beside his written ‘crown’ (Carm. 1.1.36: ‘uertice’),Footnote ⁸² so too has its protasis already been realised in the preceding catalogue of lyric icons, where the Roman poet has ironically and emphatically inserted himself (Carm. 1.1.29–30: ‘Me … me’) as the penultimate figure. The ninth among men is the tenth Muse: long live the ninth among men!