Horace's Influence on Renaissance Epic

Abstract

While Horace's Satires were widely read and influential on European literature from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century, the Odes and Epodes did not have a major impact until the early sixteenth century. Allusions to Horace, especially the Odes, occur in many major episodes in the great epics, including the Orlando Furioso, the Gerusalemme Liberata, and Paradise Lost. Yet scholars have virtually ignored Horace's influence on epic poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This paper will examine an area in which Horace's poetry provided a highly suggestive model, the complex relations between male and female, for all three poetsAriosto, Tasso, and Milton-faced the problem of incorporating the female into the epic, not only to satisfy the popular interest in love stories, spurred by chivalric romance, but also to meditate on the question of balance and unity in male and female relations. In the Orlando Furioso, published in its final form in 1532, Ariosto shows a considerable familiarity with the Odes, not surprisingly for a poet who had already written a collection of satires bearing the stamp of Horatian sermones.l As well as recalling the Satires frequently in the self-reflective openings of his cantos, the Italian poet employs echoes of numerous erotic invitations and exhortations in the Odes in the portrayal of both the poem's characters and its narrator. While incorporating a great diversity of females, including the martial heroine Marfisa, Ariosto portrays his female characters most often as either objects or agents of erotic passion. He dramatizes the problem of carnal desire perhaps most vividly through episodes involving the much desired princess Angelica and the seductress Alcina. To impress more fully his ironic view of these characters, the poet employs several significant allusions to Horace, among other classical sources. Although many recent critics of the poem tend to underplay the cynicism and even misogyny in the narrator's treatment of women,2 the poet most often calls attention to the failure to control desire and to find one's desire reciprocated.