Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T00:56:04.272Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Fuscus the Stoic: Horace Odes 1.22 and Epistles 1.10*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

S. J. Harrison
S. J. Harrison
Affiliation:
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Our information on Horace's friend Aristius Fuscus, whom he addresses in Odes 1.22 and Epistles 1.10, is neatly summed up by Nisbet and Hubbard: ‘he was a close friend of Horace's (serm. 1.9.61 ‘mihi cams’, epist. 1.10.3 ‘paene gemelli’). He wrote comedies (Porph. on epist. 1.10) and seems to have had a sense of humour: it was he who refused to rescue Horace from the ‘importunate man’ in the Sacra Via (serm. 1.9.60ff.). Horace says elsewhere that he was a town-lover, who disliked the countryside (epist. 1.10); here he amuses him with an account of the perils of his Sabine estate. Fuscus was a schoolmaster by profession (Porph. on serm. 1.9.60 ‘praestantissimus grammaticus illo tempore’); in epist. 1.10.45 Horace teases him for his stern discipline (‘nee me dimittes incastigatum…’: cf. CQ 9 [1959], 74f.). Fuscus is mentioned with Asinius Pollio and others as a critic who approved of Horace's poetry (serm. 1.10.83ff.). He may also have written on grammar; cf. gramm. 7.35.2 ‘Abnesti Fusti (Aristi Fusci Haupt, Aufusti Usener) grammatici liber est ad Asinium Pollionem’. The purpose of this note is to add a further piece to this picture, consonant with Fuscus' grammatical interests, namely to argue that Fuscus was also a Stoic, and that his philosophical loyalties are played on in the two poems addressed to him by Horace.

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , December 1992 , pp. 543 - 547
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Nisbet, R. G. M. and Hubbard, M., A Commentary on Horace: Odes, Book I(Oxford, 1970), pp. 261–2.Google Scholar

2 On Stoic interest in grammar cf. Rawson, E., Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic (London, 1985), pp. 117–31.Google Scholar

3 Nisbet and Hubbard, op. cit., pp. 265–6.

4 Nisbet and Hubbard, op. cit., p. 263.

5 Cicero can poke fun at Epicureans and Epicureanism in letters to Atticus (Att. 5.11.6, 7.2.4, 14.20.5, 15.4.2), but sets Atticus up as Epicurean spokesman in De Finibus and De Legibus; Atticus' Epicurean sympathies are not in doubt, though he was probably not doctrinaire – cf. Horsfall, N. M., Cornelius Nepos: A Selection (Oxford, 1989), pp. 97–8.Google Scholar

6 So the Stoic Odes 2.2 and the Peripatetic Odes 2.10: see the commentary of Nisbet and Hubbard on both poems.

7 Cf. SVF iii.81.31, 158.35, 241.36.

8 Cf. SVF iii.3.4–7.12.

9 Macleod, C. W., Horace: The Epistles (Rome, 1986), p. 27.Google Scholar

10 Cf. Macleod, loc. cit.

11 Contrast with the humorous treatment already observed the positive presentation of Stoic views on suicide in Ep. 1.16.73ff.

12 Cf. Harrison, S. J., CQ 38 (1988), 473–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar