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to 'young people'; Schmidt moreover was by no means a leading classical philologist, but a preacher and a schoolmaster, as well as a poet and a critic of contemporary German literature.46 This suggests that as long as the history of classical philology is written as a history of the great philologists (or as the story of the 'growth of knowledge'), an important dimension is omitted: that of the history of reading, which depends less on scholarly 'discoveries' than on larger cultural developments. |
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Schmidt is concerned with the order (Ordnung) of the ode: a degree of disorder is permitted, is even considered to be particularly 'lyrical' (according to the poetics of the time), but here 'one believes one observes a real disorder'. The problem is that the depiction of the outdoor entertainments in the final strophes does not seem to be consistent with the winter setting. Schmidt's solution is that the poem is not about the winter at all (the traditional argumenta are therefore incorrect), but about 'the favourite thought of the poet . . . which is only occasioned by the winter'. In order to understand how this thought develops, one should be aware 'that nunc in verses 18 and 21 refers to puer in verse 16 and to donec, etc. in verse 17, but in no way to the winter time'. Schmidt does not explicitly ask in what situation the thought was expressed, but seems to provide an answer in his note on verse 8, where he maintains that Thaliarchus was 'a friend of Horace, who without doubt had a country house not far from Mt. Soracte, and whom the poet visited there'. Two years later (1778) Christian David Jani, another schoolmaster, explicitly states: 'It is probable that Horace composed this poem at the villa of Thaliarchus, not far from Mt. Soracte'; Jani also explains the connection of thought (connexio) and notes that nunc (18) refers to youth.47 In Mitscherlich's commentary of 1800 this interpretation then enters the mainstream of academic philology.48 |
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Nevertheless, many philologists have attacked the unity of the ode, most recently Eduard Fraenkel, who pronounced: 'This incongruity cannot be removed by any device of apologetic interpretation'.49 Of course Fraenkel's dictum has stimulated rather than stifled 'apologetic interpretation', because interpretation in the modern sense is not deemed successful if no unity is found. One reaction to Fraenkel was to re-instate the old interpretation of J.F. Schmidt and Jani. This was done by (among others) David West, who insisted on two things: a correct reconstruction of the setting (a country house near Mt. Soracte, not Rome) and a correct reconstruction of the train |
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46 See Johann Georg Meusel, Lexikon der vom Jahr 1750 bis 1800 verstorbenen teutschen Schriftsteller, vol. 12 (Leipzig 1812), 26972. |
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47 Jani (1778) 7479. On Jani see Meusel (as in the preceding note), vol. 6 (Leipzig 1806), 22829. |
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48 Mitscherlich (1800) 10411. |
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49 Fraenkel (1957) 177. |
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