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have just read, to discover hints of Alfius' character already peeping through. |
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One way of reading Epode 2, without Romantic Irony: but there is another possibility. A given for both the interpretations mentioned is that Horace's affection for the countryside, reflected in Maecenas' gift of a country seat alluded to in the first Epode, cannot be other than wholly serious: and that there has to be a contrast between Horace and Alfius. But if we look again at the opening of Beatus ille, we see another way of reading the poem: |
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Beatus ille, qui procul negotiis,
ut prisca gens mortalium,
paterna rura bubus exercet suis,
solutus omni faenore,
neque excitatur classico miles truci,
neque horret iratum mare,
forumque vitat et superba civium
potentiorum limina. |
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Happy the man who far from engagements, like the ancient race of mortals, works his father's fields with his own oxen, free of all debt, and is not stirred to become a soldier by the grim trumpet, nor stares with terror at the angry sea: avoids the forum, and the proud thresholds of powerful citizens. |
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This is like a parody both of Horace's life and of Maecenas', with whom, like Propertius in 3.9, Horace had in the previous epode insinuated a parallel (as Maecenas to Caesar, so Horace to Maecenas). When Horace imagines Maecenas' question (1.1516): |
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roges, tuum labore quid iuvem meo,
imbellis ac firmus parum |
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You may ask how I, unwarlike and infirm, could help your work with mine, |
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the reader is not going to miss the opportunity to ask the same thing about Maecenas and Imperator Caesar. Horace like his master lurks at the superba civium potentiorum limina, incurring debts to the great for their gifts of property, working fields not his father's with oxen scarcely his own: procul negotiis? solutus omni faenore? The irony in Epode 2 on this line of approach is much broader, and more disruptive: the reality of servile submission that is surfacing here is much less easily accommodated to a recuperation of the praise of country life. On this reading, the concluding gesture of Epode 2 does not help rehabilitate the poem's seriousness, nor does it draw a contrast between Alfius and Horace: rather it assimilates Horace and his money-grubbing surrogate (who seems to be an iambic poet, if we take 67 locutus seriously). What we do with that irony and in particular, how we relate our reading to our reading of the rest of Horace's work is of course up to us. We may wish to reintroduce Romantic Irony |
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