Q. Horatii Flacci: Carmina Liber IV (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Q. Horatii Flacci: Carmina Liber IV Richard F. Thomas Paolo Fedeli and Irma Ciccarelli. Q. Horatii Flacci: Carmina Liber IV. Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 2008. Pp. 706. €48.00. ISBN 978-88-00-20802-4. The often-noted paucity of commentaries on the fourth book of Horace’s Odes is already a thing of the past. Fedeli and Ciccarelli’s 2008 commentary has been followed by my own “green and yellow” with CUP (2011), withP. D. Hills’ detailed OUP commentary currently in progress. Monographic studies of the fourth book—Michael Putnam’s Artifices of Eternity: Horace’s fourth book of Odes (Ithaca 1986) and Timothy Johnson’s Symposion of Praise: Horace returns to lyric in Odes IV (Madison 2004)—along with articles by Barchiesi, Breed, Clay, Hunter, Lowrie, and numerous others have brought Odes 4 out of the shadow cast by the brilliant and astonishing first three books that Horace had put out a decade before. All of this recent work in one way or another sees through the traditional fallacies surrounding Odes 4: Horace did not, in writing, gathering, and publishing these poems, put together disparate and second-rate poems he had lying around; nor did he put together a weary encomium for the princeps. Rather he published a complex, often contradictory book of poems, and that is how we should read them. A useful introduction by Fedeli covers the following: I. Horace from C. 1–3 to C. 4, pondering the abandonment of, then return to, lyric, rightly sensing the commissioning and composition of the Carmen saeculare as having played a role; II. the chronology and genesis of C. 4, starting as all discussions do with Suetonius’ explanation of the book as fleshing out the commissioned celebration of the exploits of Drusus and Tiberius (4.4, 14), a highly improbable proposition; III. a lengthy reflection on possible structural designs for the book; IV. the debt to Pindar and Callimachus, which is seen as theoretically consistent, whereas some readers will, for instance in 4.2, see more of a tension at work; V. Horace on Augustus and politics, a huge subject, and one that most complicates and informs a reading of C. 4; this leads to VI, the question of Horace’s servility in his last book of lyric. Is it propaganda or not? There will never be a single answer to this question, but the evidence and varying arguments are well set out here with skepticism of extremes, either Syme’s belief in outright collaboration, Fraenkel’s excessive optimism on Horace’s being the voice of the people in 4.2, or Lyne’s detection of resistance—the position to which my only commentary will come closest. In the body of the work, each Latin poem is followed by complete bibliographical references, a summary or paraphrase of the poem in question, an introduction, and a detailed commentary. There is a great deal of useful material embedded in the commentary itself, which, however, will not be to everyone’s taste. It takes the form of what seem like discrete essays of two, three, or four, sometimes as many as eight or nine, dense pages per sentence of Horace, treating textual, philological, literary, and other matters in the course of the essay. There are consequently no lemmata running through the commentary to serve as a guide for readers primarily concerned with progressing through the text. This style of commentary seems best suited to an approach that is almost separate from the text to which the reader might have recourse. Nor is the style mandated by the series; Barchiesi’s Heroides 1–3, Casali’s Heroides 9, Galassi’s Ex Ponto 2, and Perutelli’s Valerius Flaccus Arg. 2, to name just the few I consulted, all have Latin word lemmata throughout. In spite of that, this impressive work yields up a store of information and helpful commentary of Horace’s last book of Odes. The volume is quite affordable, but I should also say that one page—the very one arguing against the Virgilian identity of the Vergilius of 4.12 (a [End Page 142] position with which my own commentary will differ)—fell out when I opened...