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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
In the past most scholars held that at Odes 1.16. 5–21 Horace is making excuses for his own anger. More recently, however, Commager (The Odes of Horace: A Critical Study, p. 138) and Nisbet and Hubbard (A Commentary on Horace: Odes I, pp. 202–3) maintained that in this passage the poet is referring to the addressee's ira and trying to dissuade her from being angry with him. In my opinion both interpretations contain part of the truth, but both fail to grasp the essential point that the passage is in fact yet another instance of an Horatian tease.
1 At this point I should perhaps mention that L. A. MacKay, AJPh 83 (1962), 298 f., and M. Dyson, AUMLA 30 (1968), 169 ff., have suggested that contrary to general opinion the composer of the criminosi iambi (2 f.) was not Horace but the woman addressed in the present ode. However, in the opening lines here one automatically assumes that Horace, poet and in particular author of the Epodes, was responsible for these criminosi iambi, and this assumption surely becomes certainty at 22 ff. (esp. in celeris iambos | misit furentem, picked up by tristia and then opprobhis), where clearly the poet means that the initial impulse to write the lampoons in question came to him in his youth and he has continued to produce them until the present poem, by which time his anger has abated somewhat. The objections of MacKay and Dyson to this attribution of authorship are, I believe, adequately refuted in respect of language by Nisbet and Hubbard and in respect of tone and situation by this article and common sense.
2 See Nisbet and Hubbard on line 3, Porph. on line 24, Ibis 53 f., 521.
3 Of course, the vast majority of Horace's readers had and have no way of knowing whether or not 1.16 was concerned with a real situation, but even if it was, and even if one assumes that the lady was in reality angry, this latter observation still holds good, and, as will become clear, the ode will have teased her as well as other readers.
4 The positioning of this poem after the serious 1.15 may well be intended to reinforce subtly the impression (until 22) that 1. 16 is also serious.
5 cf. the similar remarks on compesce mentem and me quoque by Nisbet and Hubbard (p. 203), who rightly censure the way in which the conventional interpretation ignored this point. But the reader is, of course, ignorant of the content of line 22 when he encounters the earlier part of the poem and would not otherwise suspect that Horace has in mind the addressee's ira at 5 ff. Kiessling-Heinze (Berlin, 1930) claim that compesce mentem shows that at 5–21 the poet was really thinking of the woman's anger as well as his own and that those lines are partly a warning and partly an apology. However, with this view compesce mentem is still unacceptably bald and abrupt, while a genuine apology at 5 ff. is at variance with Horace's tone elsewhere (see below).
6 To take amica and animumque reddas (see Pichon Index Verborum Amatoriorum s.v. animus, and cf. Plaut. As. 141, Ovid Her. 19. 18) in a specifically amatory sense (bearing in mind line 1) increases the effrontery.
7 This note was written in June 1980, before a copy of Williams, G., Figures of Thought in Roman Poetry (Yale, 1980), had reached me here. Consequently, until informed by the editors of CQ, I was unaware that Williams's interpretation of the Ode (pp. 1–5) seems to be on the same general lines as my own.Google Scholar