The Odes of Horace

Until Steele Commager's The Odes of Horace is published next week, it will still be possible to say that the best work on Horace is Reuben Brower's study of Alexander Pope's ancient models. Commager is the first classical scholar to attempt a close reading of the odes along modern lines, and he has succeeded brilliantly. (I omit from consideration Collinge's turgid and mechanical new book on structure in the odes.)

Traditionally, classicists have spent the bulk of their time collating manuscripts and compiling commentaries they have labored valiantly to reestablish a buried literature written in tongues no longer spoken. The value of this enterprise is unquestioned, but it is, after all, a preliminary exercise. Once a text has been purified and explicated, then it should be read, as a work of art, not merely an antiquarian construct, or a repository of ancient ideas. Latin is no deader than any other language that is written down; all literature is unchanging, but it dies when it is only studied and not read.

Commager's book presupposes a reader, and it leads him to a fuller and more enlightened understanding of Horace's style. Solidly based on the research of previous generations, The Odes of Horace incorporates the critical methods of such men as I. A. Richards and Reuben Brower, men who believe that poetry should be approached on its own terms. As Commager remarks: "The ideas work not merely 'with' but 'in' and 'through' Horace's specific language. If we change any element of his language a different idea remains--or no idea at all. To speak of a lyric poet's 'message' is meaningless, except in terms of the forms in which he creates it."

All this may not startle anyone connected with English, but the classical world is almost totally barren of such discussion. It is, in fact, the last field for which the New Criticism is still new. Commager's technique, however, is not that of a neophyte, for he moves with ease from the world of scholia and emendations to that of tone and imagery. At one point he combines the two methods quite neatly, when he uses Horace's consistent seasonal metaphor as evidence to correct a reading suggested by the magisterial Bentley.

Critics, says Walter Jackson Bate, are most fond of authors with complex styles. By this standard Horace is the perfect subject, since an inflected language gave him almost total liberty with word placement, and an ingrown poetic tradition furnished him with limitless chances for allusion. Commager nimbly unravels the syntax and shows how it functions artistically, indeed visually, throughout the odes. He is extremely alert to Horace's sophisticated manipulstion of such literary conventions as the pastoral and the spring song. Horace, as Commager proves, used these stock patterns as the basis for subtle and ambivalent statements about love and death, nature and art.

If subtlety means a talent for seeing one thing in many ways at once, or for speaking in a tone of voice that defies simple interpretation, then Horace is a paragon of subtlety. His doctrine of the golden mean may seem to be a call to moderation; but, by a careful analysis of this recurrent theme, Commager forces us to see that Horace advised not moderation, but rather decorum, a sense of the fitting act, thought or word.

This view ties in beautifully with the great majority of the odes. It explains the love poems, which so often comment on lovers ill-suited by age; it enriches our understanding of the tensions of the fourth book, written when Horace had lived past the age of decorous love (by his earlier standard) but still had the same desires; furthermore, it reveals that the recurrent seasonal metaphors are cyclic reminders of the need to conform decorously to life's changing demands. Hence, carpe diem is not a simple invitation to license, but a complex call for infinite attention to each day's new proprieties.

To discover these large designs, Commager had to pay infinite attention himself to Horace's constant changes in tone, and to his continual use of literary convention as a mask. In a single poem of thirty odd lines, Horace may shift many times between elegiac intensity and utter detachment. The pleasure of reading Horace is the pleasure of sensing these transitions; Commager has smoothed the road to Elysium.

Since he has provided translations of everything, his book is accessible to any reader, and, although his own style sometimes lacks the "Horatii curiosa felicitas," Commager should be read by everyone interested in poetry or its criticism.