Horace and the Dialectic of Freedom: Readings in Epistles 1

by Walter Ralph Johnson

Informal in tone and seemingly effortless in movement, Horace's Epistles have haunted and delighted readers for two millennia. W. R. Johnson offers an extraordinarily suggestive new interpretation of Book 1 of the Epistles , an interpretation not only of the poems but of the poet they reveal Johnson regards the Epistles as the fruit of the poet's search for freedom, clarity of perception, and inner harmony in a complex society. He portrays Horace as a paradoxical combination of sophist and gardener, working both nature and culture within a terrain bounded on the one side by chaos and on the other by technocracy. Resisting any linear, progressive reading, he traces the key themes in the poems, such as Horace's relationships with his father and with Rome, his adoptive city, and the conflicts between urban vitality and rustic serenity and between inner freedom and outer freedom. While in the end Johnson maintains that the Epistles uphold the possibility that the individual can achieve a dynamic balance of heart and soul, he demonstrates that what nourishes the poems are the suffering and fear, resentment and anger that underlie their carefully controlled surface. Horace and the Dialectic of Freedom will engage and challenge classicists, students of Latin literature, and others interested in satire and in the history of poetry.

172 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1993

Reviews

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

If the test of good criticism is that it makes you want to go back to the subject author and keep reading him, then this is very good criticism. Johnson is a wonderfully deft critic and a very sensitive reader. He portrays the dilemma Horace found himself in--the son of a former slave, with a checkered military career on the wrong side of history, who became what many modern critics would call the "kept" poet of the emperor Augustus--producing laudatory poems and propaganda for the regime. Johnson rightly says this is too coarse. He discusses and rediscusses the first book of the epistles, coming at it from six different angles, each demonstrating an aspect of Horace's groping for a form and style that would express his many attitudes towards his own work and its success or failure. My only complaint about the book is the digressive style--but sometimes the digressions contain the best nuggets. The only way to show this is to quote at length. Horace had a fairly luxurious villa given to him by his patron (an example both of his freedom and lack of it), where he loved to get away from the noise and bustle of the city, but where he also could reflect on how much he enjoyed that noise and bustle. Here is Johnson on gardens and gardening a la Horace: "In the Roman version of the garden, there is no more question of nature's being mastered than of its being outwitted or circumvented. Nature is being struggled with or cooperated with, as the occasion requires, is being cajoled and placated, as we see in the great prayers of Roman farmers...But it was also being--what?--not tamed, not used, not manipulated, not transformed (and not destroyed)...Persuades takes us perhaps in the right direction. A gardener persuades by rearranging, by transplanting, by grafting, clipping, weeding, watering. He reorders what he has been given...in terms of his own complex and various needs and desires and purposes; he depends on what nature gives in the way of soil and seeds and weather. By following nature's lead the gardener creates and sustains a kind of harmony or balance, a kind of spiritual equity between himself and the natural world which is at once (mysteriously) outside of him and also (not less mysteriously) inside of him. Slowly learning and never forgetting that neither failure nor success is very likely to be permanent, any good gardener will discover something about the dialectical relationship between luck and work, between contingency and freedom, between rule and whim, between nature and culture, that even the most gifted logician or the most adept historian might never quite come upon." But(he goes on) it's what Horace was able to come upon with his poetry.