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Another celebrated example of Romantic Irony is Horace Epode 2, with its praise of country life and shocking conclusion: |
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haec ubi locutus faenerator Alfius,
iam iam futurus rusticus,
omnem redegit Idibus pecuniam,
quaerit Kalendis ponere. |
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Having said these words, moneylender Alfius, always on the point of becoming a farmer, calls in on the Ides all his money, and looks to place it again on the kalends. |
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Like Ovid's aubade, beatus ille qui procul negotiis has a rich posterity, and this one suspects is a further element in dissuading people from seeing the first part of it as simply undermined by the concluding revelation that this is all the hypocritical musing of faenerator Alfius. So Fraenkel suggests28 'that Horace seized upon the final surprise which he found in Archilochus because this turn enabled him to mix the strong expression of what he really cared for with a dose of that self-mockery without which he would not, except in a moment of deepest emotion, feel that he was entirely true to his own mind' a classic exposition of at least one aspect of Romantic Irony, in which, as he notes, Fraenkel is in substantial agreement with W. Y. Sellar.29 More recently, Stephen Heyworth30 has joined Fraenkel in endorsing the sincerity of the poem, particularly coming as it does immediately after Horace's thanks to Maecenas for his rural retreat at the end of Epode 1: 'are we to believe that he arranged his book of Iambi so that a satire on love of the country should follow his expressions of thanks for the very act which has enabled him to fulfil his own deeply felt love?' His solution to the problems posed by the final couplet is to see Alfius speaking the truth malgré lui, and criticised only for not acting on it: the poem is thus an interesting combination of a description of the joys of country life and a satirical attack on Alfius. |
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This will not do, because of the imbalance between the attention given to the idyllic description and that devoted to the satire. Had they been more equally balanced, we might talk of combination, but the four lines of satire are insufficient in themselves, and can only function through their effect on the first part. That is indeed how a coda employing Romantic Irony would work, but I am afraid that again I am inclined to see Epode 2 rather differently. Again it is possible to see the cynical criticism of the coda anticipated in the body of the poem, albeit much less directly than in Ovid. At first we may take the piece straight, but looking back we may see how Alfius continually returns to images of wealth, from the bubus . . . suis of line |
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28 Fraenkel (1957) 60. |
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29 Sellar (1892) 130. |
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30 Heyworth (1988) 74. |
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