It is a truth universally acknowledged that Horace wrote his poems in order to provide posterity with quotations for any circumstance. A particularly well-known example of quoting Horace is the story of Patrick Leigh Fermor and the German general who bonded over Horace during the Second World War.Footnote 1 In 1944, Fermor abducted the German commander of Crete, General Karl Heinrich Kreipe. As they climb up Mount Ida, General Kreipe looks at the mountain and quotes the beginning of Horace, Odes 1.9: Vides ut alta stet niue candidum Soracte (‘do you see how Mount Soracte stands there glistening with deep snow?’). Fermor overhears the quotation and responds by quoting the rest of the poem. According to Fermor, he and his prisoner looked at each other ‘as though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist’.Footnote 2 As Kreipe and Fermor quote Horace’s carpe diem poem and form a strange bond between enemies in the middle of the Second World War, they resemble Diomedes and Glaucus, who meet on the battlefield before Troy and discuss how leaves that are green turn to brown.
If we wish to understand the appeal of the carpe diem motif, which created an Iliadic encounter in the Second World War, the two most common interpretations of the motif will not do: neither if we regard this motif as a banal call to drinks nor if we regard it as Epicurean will we understand carpe diem. In Chapter 1 as well as in the Introduction I showed in detail why the carpe diem motif is not Epicurean, and it is unnecessary to repeat the arguments here.Footnote 3 Rather, it seems profitable to focus on the ways through which Horace’s carpe diem creates effects of presence. Fermor claims that, after the quotation of the poem, ‘for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist’. Carpe diem thematises precisely such present moments in time. In the Soracte ode, Horace thus tells his addressee to focus on the banquet in the present and to leave everything else to the gods, who will at some point calm the storm that rages outside (C. 1.9.9–12). So, too, for Fermor and the German general the intense present moment that the poem evokes makes them forget the storm of war that rages through the world. If, then, the poem is about a moment in time, it is equally important that such a moment is repeatable: Mount Ida can stand in for Mount Soracte. Memory makes moments repeatable. Thus, Fermor notes that he and the general ‘had both drunk at the same fountains long before’.Footnote 4 For Horace, however, it is a different drink that triggers the recollection of the past: not water from clear fountains, but wine.
Time and carpe diem have been recognised as crucial themes of Horace’s poetry.Footnote 5 In this and the next chapter I will analyse the concept of time we find in Horace’s carpe diem poems. I will argue that we can find the essence of his carpe diem in wine and words. This in itself may be hardly surprising, but I hope to show how Horace’s treatment of wine and words allows him to write carpe diem poems which could have never been created in early Greece. I argue that it is precisely through his choice of wine and words that Horace thematises presence, present time, enjoyment, performance, and reperformance in his carpe diem poems. Thus, in the Soracte ode, Horace addresses a certain Thaliarchus and asks him to ‘serve the four-year-old wine more generously than usual from its Sabine jar’ (C. 1.9.6–8): benignius | deprome quadrimum Sabina, | o Thaliarche, merum diota. This is the exhortation to carpe diem in the poem. Horace evokes the present moment through his usage of wine and words; a wine from four years back points to the ever-changing nature of the year, and its presence at the symposium spreads enjoyment. The Greek word Horace uses to describe the jar, diota, is an informal word, which underlines the intimate setting and Horace’s concern for the immediate present.Footnote 6
This chapter analyses wine in Horace – hardly, of course, an overlooked topic.Footnote 7 Yet the connection between wine and time has received less attention, though Ernst Schmidt and Courtney Evans made valuable contributions to this aspect of wine.Footnote 8 In this chapter, I will analyse wine as a key element in Horace’s carpe diem poems. The chapter falls into four sections. In the first section, I will show how Horace’s old wines can paradoxically create effects of presence and contribute to enjoyable moments in the present time. In the second section, I turn to reperformance and show how old wines repeat occasions of the past. The third section argues that wine storage places function as a drinkable consular calendar in Horace. The fourth section shows how wine can preserve the taste of old words. I will pay close attention to Roman wine labels, painted inscriptions on amphorae, so that this chapter does not fully leave the epigraphic territory of the preceding one.
2.1 Wine O’Clock: The Present Moment in Horace, Epodes 13
Before Horace made carpe diem poems one of the leitmotifs of the Odes, he already wrote a poem of this kind in the Epodes (for carpe diem in the Sermones, see Section 2 of Chapter 5).Footnote 9 In Epodes 13, a raging storm prompts the poet to reflections on mortality and to drinking while it is still possible (I quote the first eight lines).
A chilling storm has given the sky a gloomy appearance, and the god of the sky is overcast by rain and snow. Now the sea, now the forests resound with the Thracian North Wind. Friends, let’s snatch the opportunity from the day! And while our legs are vigorous and it’s proper, let the old wrinkles relax on the overcast face. You, get wine that was pressed in my birthyear when Torquatus was consul. Don’t talk of anything else; perhaps a god will bring a welcome change and let this turbulence settle.
August Meineke said that the whole poem exhales the spirit of a Greek model. The wine with the consular date, however, reeks of pure Romanness:Footnote 11 the dating of vintages according to consular dates is a decidedly Roman custom, which this chapter will discuss in some detail. In Rome, the names of consuls were visible on amphorae as part of some sort of wine label. These are often referred to as tituli picti in scholarship, while ancient sources call them pittacia (Petron. 5.34), notae (Hor. C. 2.3.8), or tituli (Juv. 5.34). There is ample evidence for wine labels and the practice of naming vintage wines after consuls in both literary and epigraphic sources.Footnote 12 But while the careful blending of Greek symposia with Roman conuiuia is characteristic for Horace’s Greek-style Latin lyric,Footnote 13 the question arises as to why Horace mentions this particular wine, or, in other words: what is the significance of a wine that is as old as he is? Scholars have rightly argued that the age of the wine matters, but while some of their interpretations advance our understanding of the wine, other interpretations are rather elaborate.Footnote 14 In contrast, my interpretation is extremely simple: the wine is chosen because it is delicious, that is to say, it is the right moment to drink a wine of this age. This seems the most natural reason for choosing a particular vintage. Thus, we can infer from Cicero that a Falernian wine from the preceding year might be too young, and one from the consulship of Opimius or Anicius might be so old that it has lost its sweetness or is not even drinkable anymore (Brut. 287). When Horace specifies the vintage, he asks for a vintage between these extremes of first youth or excessive maturation, a wine that is at its prime for drinking.Footnote 15
If we accept that the wine is chosen because it is at the right age for being drunk, this neatly underlines the carpe diem motif of the poem in several ways. First, the wine is strongly identified with Horace; it is pressed in the year he was born, the year of his consul Torquatus: uina Torquato […] consule pressa meo. Horace’s year of birth and the wine are interwoven in the chiastic line. Wine and Horace are identified.Footnote 16 In the preceding lines, Horace stresses that now is the right time for him and his companions to enjoy themselves, before the advent of gloomy old age. Given the close temporal identification of Horace with his wine, the wine might be on the verge of becoming too old to be still drinkable, and the link between Horace and wine invites readers to transfer the feared prospect of grievous old age to the wine. Indeed, the description of old wine as a metaphorical old man is conventional and arguably would have made the connection between Horace’s age and the age of the wine easier.Footnote 17 Horace is the wine. The same moment calls them to enjoyment in Epodes 13.
There is one more side to the wine. Before Horace mentions the wine, he exhorts his companions to ‘snatch the opportunity from the day’ (3): rapiamus, amici, | occasionem de die. Horace here translates the Greek concept of καιρός, the opportune time or right moment. The expression exudes the Greek spirit that August Meineke discerned in the poem. The καιρός must be seized before it passes by. The divine allegory of Καιρός illustrates the point well: the young god Καιρός has a lock of hair in his front, which can be snatched, but he is bald on his back.Footnote 18 In Latin, occasio is the proper translation for καιρός, and the act of snatching also looks back to Greek models where expressions such as καιρὸν λαμβάνειν are common, as Alfonso Traina has observed.Footnote 19 Horace’s exhortation to snatch the right moment is followed by the exhortation to get hold of the particular wine. This suggests that the wine, too, is opportune, and that it is the right moment to drink it. As we have seen, the wine is as much a date, a unit of time, as it is something to drink. As Horace talks about time in Epodes 13, he blends a Greek concept of time with a Roman dating system.
The wine in Epodes 13 is opportune and should be drunk in this moment. This present quality of the wine needs stressing. It is perhaps natural to focus on the past when it comes to old wines, and this chapter will indeed also consider how vintage wines allow Horace to include the past in his banquets. But equally important is the present nature of wine: it can be drunk once and then it is gone. As we have seen in Epodes 13, a vintage wine can present an opportune moment in the present time, a wine that must be drunk now (cf. Hor. C. 1.37.1–6). In Horace’s exhortation to carpe diem in Epodes 13, the wine evokes the present time.
2.2 Drinking Again and Thinking of When: Reperformance in Odes 3.8
In this section, I wish to look in some more detail at vintage wines as a calendrical mechanism in Horace. Odes 3.8 already features a date in its incipit and might thus be well suited for an analysis of wine as a dating mechanism:
Although you are well-versed in both Greek and Latin discourses, you are puzzled what a single like me is doing on the first of March? And what the point of the flowers is? And why the boxes are full of incense? And why there are charcoals on the altar of fresh turf? The reason is, I had vowed to Liber a delicious meal and a white goat when a tree almost struck me and sent me six feet under. As the year comes round, this holiday will remove the cork that had been sealed with pitch from an amphora which was taught to drink smoke under the consulship of Tullus.
Raise a hundred toasts, Maecenas, to the rescue of your friend and keep the lights burning till daylight. Here’s no place for shouting and anger. Don’t worry about the domestic affairs of the city. The army of Cotiso the Dacian has fallen. The hostile Medes tear one another apart with weapons that bring themselves grief. The Cantabrian, our old enemy on the Spanish coast, is finally conquered and in chains. The Scythians have now unstrung their bows and are preparing to withdraw from their plains.
Stop caring if the Roman people is in trouble; don’t be too concerned: you’re not a politician. Be happy and take the gifts of the present hour. Let go of serious matters.
‘This ode begins with a parody of an aetiology’, Nisbet and Rudd state.Footnote 20 As they point out, this manner of aetiology is closely linked to the Roman calendar, and Ovid’s Fasti provides the best example for this type of literature. Indeed, the Fasti also includes an aetiology for the Calends of March (1 March), that is, the Matronalia, a holiday for Juno Lucina. Ovid asks Mars why mothers celebrate the first day of March (Ov. F. 3.170: dic mihi matronae cur tua festa colant). Questions about a celebration also prompt the aetiology in Horace, and his sequence of two indirect questions might point to the (mock-)didactic nature of the passage. Pointedly, the questions in the ode arise because Horace celebrates the first day of March as a bachelor, and is thus quite the opposite of Ovid’s celebrants.Footnote 21 The riddle – impossible to solve for Maecenas despite his Greek and Latin learning – is resolved when Horace reveals that he celebrates his delivery from a fallen tree with an annual holiday (C. 3.8.6–12. Cf. C. 2.13, 2.17).Footnote 22 Horace’s new aetiology leads to a re-attribution of the holiday; suddenly, Juno Lucina is not the honoured goddess anymore, but Bacchus (6–7): uoueram dulcis epulas et album | Libero caprum (‘I had vowed to Liber a delicious meal and a white goat’).Footnote 23 Bacchus takes over this holiday and, as the following stanza reveals, Bacchus also provides a system for measuring time in this ode.
This day is a yearly recurring feast (9–11): hic dies anno redeunte festus | corticem adstrictum pice dimouebit | amphorae (‘as the year comes round, this holiday will remove the cork that had been sealed with pitch from an amphora’).Footnote 24 Such recurring feasts often offer a ritualistic reperformance of an original event on which they are supposedly based. Thus, Ovid’s Fasti explains in some detail that Romans run naked through the town and slap women on the Lupercalia (Ides of February = 15 February) because Romulus and Remus were naked when they once pursued cattle thieves (Ov. F. 2.267–380). Similarly, Horace also reperforms his delivery from the falling tree. In the second stanza, Horace mentions that Liber saved him from a tree falling on his head, and Nisbet and Rudd are right to point out that the literal meaning of Lyaeus, ‘the loosener’, suits the god very well in this context.Footnote 25 The following stanza deals with reperformance. This time, not a tree (arbor) but one of its constituents, namely rind (cortex), is the object that must be removed.Footnote 26 Cortex, the metonymic, ritualistic signifier, makes way for Bacchus, just as the tree made way for him. When Horace put an amphora into storage and destined it to be drunk on the anniversary of the tree incident, this marked the preparations for the ritualistic reperformance. In other words, ‘teaching’ the amphora to drink smoke in the storage place, Horace was already ‘inaugurating’ his celebrations, and this is exactly the double-meaning that is entailed in Horace’s use of institutus, as Nisbet and Rudd observe (11–12):Footnote 27 amphorae fumum bibere institutae | consule Tullo (‘an amphora which was taught [or inaugurated] to drink smoke under the consulship of Tullus’).
Odes 3.8 shows the significance of reperformance for Horace’s poetics of the present. The party Horace describes in the poem is a unique moment in present time. At the end of the poem, Horace makes this explicit, as he exhorts Maecenas to ‘gladly take the gifts of the present hour’ (27: dona praesentis cape laetus horae). This is the exhortation to carpe diem.Footnote 28 As we have already seen in Epodes 13, here, too, an exhortation to seize time is semantically linked with an exhortation to enjoy wine; Horace tells Maecenas earlier in the poem to ‘take a hundred cups’ (13–14) (sume, Maecenas, cyathos amici | sospitis centum).Footnote 29 Yet, the wine is not just the ‘gift of the present hour’. It also recreates the enjoyment of the present hour every single year, and in doing so looks back at the fall of the tree, an event from several years ago. Horace is drinking again and thinking of when the tree almost killed him. Removing the cork from the bottle creates a reperformance, a ritual, and Horace’s own religious calendar.Footnote 30 As Horace expresses time through wine, carpe diem materialises: enjoying time and enjoying wine becomes the same thing, though this notably entails a strange blend of past and present time.
Every time Horace uses the phrase dies festus in the Odes and the Epistles, he also mentions an old wine (C. 2.3.6–7, 3.8.9, 3.14.13, 3.28.1; Epist. 1.5.9–10). In Horace, a holiday or festival is more than a time of intense celebration of the present. In the perfectly cyclical Roman calendar in which any dies festus is identical to last year’s dies festus or that of any previous year, celebration of the present is naturally evocative of the past.Footnote 31 Vintage wine brings the time of the past to the symposium, and a clear distinction between past and present becomes impossible, as Horace’s book poetry conflates occasions of past and present.Footnote 32
The inauguration of Horace’s yearly ritual happened under the consulship of Tullus. At this point we encounter a second form of the Roman calendar. As Denis Feeney has reminded us, there existed two types of fasti: the calendrical fasti, an annual calendar of celebrations (which has concerned us so far in Odes 3.8), and the consular fasti, a list of Roman magistrates that denotes years.Footnote 33 The date ‘under the consulship of Tullus’ can refer to the year 66 ʙᴄ as well as to the year 33 ʙᴄ. While older commentaries generally favour the earlier date, with the somewhat artificial reasoning that Horace often mentions older wines, Nisbet and Hubbard as well as Ernst Schmidt have made the compelling point that consule Tullo gives us a date for the tree incident, so that 33 ʙᴄ is almost certainly the right date.Footnote 34 Indeed, since the storage of the wine marks the inauguration of Horace’s annual festival, this seems sensible: the cortex that Horace removes from the amphora dates back to the tree incident. Wood from that year is again removed, and wine from that year signifies freedom.Footnote 35
As Schmidt says, dating events by wine is typical for Horace.Footnote 36 Yet, this is a peculiar system of dating and deserves further scrutiny. For it is one thing to say that ‘1945 is the year that marked the end of the Second World War’, but it is an altogether different thing to say this: ‘Château Mouton Rothschild of 1945 is a stellar example [sc. of a truly great vintage] and to celebrate the Allied victory and mark the return of Baron Philippe to his estates, he [i.e., Baron Philippe de Rothschild] commissioned the artist Philippe Jullian to illustrate the wine’s label with the ‘V’ for Victory.’Footnote 37 In the latter case the Allied victory is contextualised through an outstanding wine vintage, and more specifically through a peculiar wine label: a unique moment in history becomes recallable through a wine, which some people still buy and drink today. In Rome, most wines were probably drunk after a minimal time of maturation.Footnote 38 Yet, vintage wines also existed and they took their names from the consuls of the year of the vintage, or of the year when the wine was transferred from the dolium to the amphora, or both. This is natural enough; after all, the names of consuls were the year, as Feeney says,Footnote 39 and a date ab urbe condita for wine would have been absurd.Footnote 40
In the case of Odes 3.8, the year 33 ʙᴄ would have been known to Romans as ‘Imp. Caesar Diui f. and L. Volcatius Tullus’. Wines sometimes took the name of only one of the two consuls.Footnote 41 For 33 ʙᴄ, the year in question, Tullus was the only sensible choice out of the two, as Augustus accumulated a total of thirteen consulships (eleven of them by the publication of the tribiblos), so that it seems impossible to put his name elegantly into poetry.Footnote 42 These practical considerations do not mean that Augustus is altogether absent: the date ‘under the consulship of Tullus’ refers to a year in which Augustus was consul, a year that was named after him. Thus, Augustus is present, however elusively. Horace’s worries and the danger to his life are gone, and when he marks this day Augustus is somewhere there.Footnote 43 But probably Horace would warn us not to ask where exactly Augustus is, just as he in fact warns Maecenas not to ask about the political state of the empire (C. 3.8.15–28): everything is taken care of and must not be mentioned at the banquet.
2.3 Horace’s Fasti: Wine Storage Places at C. 3.8 (again), C. 2.3, C. 3.28
Consular wines are a synonym for vintage wines. This is exactly the punchline in the following epigram of Martial (13.111):
Massic wine has come from Sinuessan presses. You are asking under which consul it was put to storage? There wasn’t any.
The hyperbole is telling. A wine that predates the existence of consuls is an absurd impossibility in more than one sense; it is not only unrealistic but also subverts the whole system. A wine that predates the Republic also predates Roman time and, in particular, Roman oenological time.Footnote 44
As we have seen, wine labels, which were painted on amphorae, are commonly mentioned in literary sources, and just over 160 such labels are known to have survived.Footnote 45 Among the existing wine labels, we also have a label for the wine Horace mentions in Odes 3.8, the vintage dating back to 33 ʙᴄ (CIL xv 4566):Footnote 46
FVN. P.
L. TULL. L. AUT
COS
The abbreviations stand for Fun(danum). P(asianum) | L. Tull(o). L. Aut(ronio) | co(n)s(ulibus), so that the label refers to a wine from Fundi from the year when L. Volcacius Tullus and L. Autronius Paetus were consuls, the latter a suffect consul.Footnote 47 As wine labels were most commonly written in ink, they faded over time. At Odes 3.8.11–12, Horace says that his wine bottle was taught to drink smoke: amphorae fumum bibere institutae | consule Tullo (‘an amphora which was taught to drink smoke under the consulship of Tullus’). ‘Drinking smoke’ refers to a Roman way of storing wine; Nisbet and Rudd note that Romans sometimes stored wine in an apotheca under the roof, where smoke supposedly improved its taste.Footnote 48 Whether or not this was the case, at any rate the smoking process changed both the taste of the wine and the appearance of the amphora. The older an amphora is, the darker its label, so that the past becomes gradually more illegible.Footnote 49 The taste of the wine becomes smokier as well as stronger, while the liquid diminishes.Footnote 50 When Horace serves a wine which has ‘drunk smoke’ in Odes 3.8 he and Maecenas will be able to taste the past gone by.
Some wealthy Romans owned thousands of amphorae (Varro De uita populi Romani fr. 125a Riposati apud Plin. Nat. 14.96 and fr. 125b apud Nonius 544 Mercier, Hor. S. 2.3.115–17, Galen Ant. 2.15 = xiv.25–6 Kühn).Footnote 51 Seneca therefore speaks of ‘storehouses filled with the vintages of many ages’ (Epist. 114.26): aspice ueteraria nostra et plena multorum saeculorum uindemiis horrea: unum putas uideri uentrem cui tot consulum regionumque uina cluduntur? (‘Look at our grand crus and the storehouses that are filled with the vintages of many ages. Do you think that the wines of so many consular years and so many regions were put into storage for the enjoyment of a single belly?’). Elsewhere he notes that old wines were stored according to taste and age (Nat. 4B.13.3: ueteraria per sapores aetatesque disponere; ‘to store vintage wines by type and age’). The sight of such storage places, then, resembled a huge, drinkable consular calendar, possibly no less spectacular than Augustus’ famous Fasti Capitolini. Consular calendars were essentially lists of past consuls: an orderly sequence of yearly dates denoted by the names of the consuls for each year. We can also discern in other contexts the underlying grid of the consular calendar; the best-known example is arguably Roman annalistic historiography, which charted the past on a calendrical grid.Footnote 52 Wine storage places are another such calendrical structure, as the wines were arranged according to consular years. The sequence of consular names that a wine storage place displays is the sequence of such names in the fasti. Entering the storage space, one could slowly make (or drink) one’s way further into the past, while reading the names of consuls in ink on the amphorae, which gradually recalled an ever more distant past. Wine storage places thus offered a spatial visualisation of time.Footnote 53 Indeed, the physician Galen made his way through the emperor’s wine storage place, reading the consular years, and drinking his way from old bitter wines at the back of the storage place to younger wines that lack this bitterness at the front (Galen Ant. 2.15 = xiv.25–6 Kühn):Footnote 54
κομιζομένων γὰρ τοῖς βασιλεῦσι τῶν ἀρίστων ἁπανταχόθεν, ἐξ αὐτῶν πάλιν τούτων τὸ κάλλιστον αἱρήσεται, ἔγωγέ τοι τῶν οἴνων τῶν Φαλερίνων ἑκάστου τὴν ἡλικίαν ἀναγινώσκων ἐπιγεγραμμένην τοῖς κεραμίοις, εἰχόμην τῆς γεύσεως, ὅσοι πλειόνων ἐτῶν ἦσαν εἴκοσι, προερχόμενος ἀπ’ αὐτῶν ἄχρι τῶν οὐδὲν ὑπόπικρον ἐχόντων.
For the best things are brought to the emperors from everywhere, and from these again the best will be chosen. Thus, I read the age written on the jars of each of the Falernian wines, and had a taste of all those which were more than twenty years old and from these I went further until the wines had no bitterness in their taste.
Horace is the poet who mentions wine storage most frequently. Thus, Horace mentions at one point a Sabine wine that he had ‘stored away’ at a special occasion (C. 1.20: conditum), and at another point a ‘stored away Caecuban wine’ (C. 3.28.2–3: reconditum […] Caecubum). The verb Horace uses, condo, appropriately describes the process of storing away wine for future use. Yet, Horace’s usage of this verb goes further. At one point Horace speaks of ‘times that are stored in the public records of the fasti’ (C. 4.13.13–16):Footnote 55
Neither purple dresses from Cos nor precious gems can any longer bring back the years once winged time has stored them away and locked them up in the public fasti.
To be sure, the comparison in this passage is made with tongue in cheek; the aging Lyce is made aware of the flight of time, and the evocation of the public consular fasti, which record time, strongly contrasts in register with her licentious love life.Footnote 56 And yet, the mention of the Roman calendar system of the fasti in Greek-style lyric is striking. Denis Feeney thus says about this passage that ‘no Greek lyric poet could have thought or written in such manner’.Footnote 57 Jörg Rüpke notes that the fasti appear in Horace as an ‘authorised form of collective memory’.Footnote 58 Significantly, Horace strongly links calendars with wine storage places; thus, time is ‘stored away’ in the fasti as if they were a wine cellar.Footnote 59 This is an apt choice of words, since wine cellars in turn also act as fasti, which preserve the names of consuls. Another significant usage of condo is noted by Michael Putnam; Horace uses the word also for writing poetry, and at one point says that he composes and stores up what he might soon again remove from storage, in words that are wholly evocative of wine storage (Epist. 1.1.12): condo et conpono quae mox depromere possim (‘I’m storing and putting away what I may soon bring forth again’).Footnote 60 What I wish to stress is that storing wine, storing dates, and storing poetry are semantically interwoven realms in Horace’s book poetry: all this can be stored and accessed later. As Horace says farewell to lyric and begins to write literary letters, he proclaims to ‘put away’ his lyric, but we might wonder if he does not merely put it into storage (Epist. 1.1.10): nunc itaque et uersus et cetera ludicra pono (‘so now I put away poetry and other trifles’).Footnote 61 At any rate, ten years after the publication of the tribiblos Horace returns to lyric again in Odes 4 and he accesses his self-storage facility: at the beginning of Odes 4.11, he mentions that he has kept a jar of Alban wine for over nine years.Footnote 62
Horace’s wine storage place is closely linked to Augustan forms of memorialising. Thus, Augustus’ deeds in war and peace are perhaps virtually preserved in wine bottles for future ages (Epist. 1.3.8): bella quis et paces longum diffundit in aeuum? (‘who disseminates his [i.e., Augustus’] deeds in war and peace for long time to come?’). Nisbet has suggested that diffundo may be a wine metaphor here: ‘the poet bottles up the great deeds of the present for the delectation of future generations’.Footnote 63 Just as wine storage places preserve the tituli (‘wine labels’) of numerous vintages, so library catalogues or indeed Horace’s poetry preserve the tituli (‘titles’) of numerous poems.Footnote 64 Appropriately, Horace envisages in Odes 4.14 that Augustus may be kept in eternal memory through tituli (here: ‘commemorative inscriptions’) and fasti (‘public records’, but also ‘calendars’);Footnote 65 but it is of course also his own poetry that inscribes Augustus and numerous other people and events upon tituli and fasti.
While the act of storing wines and dates in calendrical order is important in Horace’s poetry, the act of accessing this calendar is equally important. This is the message of carpe diem: if the wine is not taken from storage for enjoyment, only an heir will profit after death (C. 2.14.25–8). Time and time again, Horace asks for wines to be brought forth from storage places. One such instance can be found in Odes 2.3, a carpe diem poem. Horace begins the poem by telling Dellius to keep an even-minded disposition in all circumstances (C. 2.3.1–8):
Keep this in mind: be level-headed when things are arduous; likewise in good times tone done your excessive joy, Dellius. For you are sure to die, whether you spend every moment of your life in misery or at each holiday you lie down in a secluded meadow and enjoy yourself with a Falernian vintage wine from the back of your cellar [literally: ‘treat yourself to an interior label of Falernian wine’].
These lines show some awareness of the spatial dimension of wine storage places. Horace speaks of the ‘interior label of a Falernian wine’ (interiore nota Falerni). As Porphyrio informs us, this expression refers to the custom that the youngest wines were stored at the front of the storage place and the oldest at the back, that is, its most ‘interior’ place.Footnote 66 We can observe the same spatial structure that we saw when Galen drank his way through the emperor’s wine cellar: the past is a place far away at the back of the cellar. Yet, Horace strongly links the past with the present: he says that Dellius may drink old wines ‘at each holiday’ (per dies festos).Footnote 67 The old wine with ‘the interior label’ becomes part of the present feast. This is indeed what we have seen in Odes 3.8, in which Horace serves a vintage wine for a peculiar holiday. Odes 2.3 thus explicitly comments on Horace’s method of blending old wine with present festivities. But the ode also puts this theory into practice, when Horace asks for some wine (C. 2.3.9–16):
Why do the huge pine and the white poplar love to join their branches and create inviting shade? Why does the quick-flowing water bother to rush along the river’s twisted course? Tell them to bring wine here and perfumes and the all-too-short-lasting blossoms of the lovely rose, while matters and your age and the black threads of the three sisters of fate allow it.
The transition between these two stanzas and the two preceding ones is difficult. In the first two stanzas Horace made a general statement on the good life: keep your nonchalance, Dellius, whether times are difficult or you are enjoying a banquet with old wine on a remote meadow. But there is no suggestion yet that the poem’s setting is this very banquet on the meadow.Footnote 68 Horace characteristically embellishes one part of the doublet and gives us an attractive vignette of the banquet, while the description of the sad life remains colourless.Footnote 69 Nonetheless, his words are gnomic and do not seem to refer to a particular situation in the present:Footnote 70 the tenses in the second stanza are future-perfects, and they describe the balance of a life when it is over, not the present situation. In the third stanza, however, Horace seems to move from a general statement to a particular place. Attempts have been made to ease the boldness of the transition by adopting different readings in the third stanza.Footnote 71 This will not do. For the beginning of the fourth stanza is even bolder. Rather than adopting different readings, we should appreciate with Nisbet and Hubbard the ‘immediacy’ and ‘urgency’ of Horace’s lyric here.Footnote 72 The strongest sign of this immediacy is the first word of the fourth stanza: huc. This opening of the stanza is striking, and meant to be so. For the deictic huc, ‘here’, points to the hic et nunc of the banquet.Footnote 73 With this word we have left behind the generalising statements of the poem’s beginning. The timeless banquet from the beginning is transformed into a banquet of the present moment. This inner movement of the poem mirrors the movement of wine: as Horace asks for wines to be brought to the banquet and be made present (huc), so the poem becomes present.Footnote 74
Wines have to be ‘moved’ to the symposium (Epod. 13.6: tu uina Torquato moue consule pressa meo; ‘you, get wine that was pressed in my birthyear when Torquatus was consul’), or ‘brought forth’, as they had been ‘put away’ (C. 3.2.2–3: prome reconditum, | Lyde, strenua Caecubum; ‘Lyde, quickly bring forth the Caecuban wine, which has been stored away’);Footnote 75 or in a mock-hymn the wine jar has to ‘descend’ from its storage place (C. 3.21.7: descende).Footnote 76 Vintage wines in Horace leave the apotheca, something of a storehouse of memory, and enter the intense presence of the symposium. The incarnate date, an amphora with a consular year, thus enters the present time of the symposium. This concept of dates and past time, which can be carried around, is possibly comparable to the concept of language among Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputians. In Gulliver’s Travels the Lilliputians do not use spoken language but carry objects around with which they communicate. In Horace, we can observe a moveable feast: in the form of wine bottles, past feasts and occasions are literally moved to the present moment. The manifest date is brought from its place in the calendar to the banquet. This also allows Horace to move his celebrations to unusual dates: as Horace gets the appropriate wine, he moves the feast for Bacchus to the first day of March in Odes 3.8.
Using consular dates is a dating system that comes with some peculiarities. When Pliny mentions the age of the well-known Opimian wine from 121 ʙᴄ, the date ‘Opimius’ immediately evokes political events that are associated with the consul (Plin. Nat. 14.55): anno [sc. claritas] fuit omnium generum bonitate L. Opimio cos., cum C. Gracchus tribunus plebem seditionibus agitans interemptus est (‘one year was distinguished as it was excellent for all types of wine; this was the year when Lucius Opimius was consul and when Gaius Gracchus, the tribune of the people, was first causing civil discord and was then killed’). Pliny’s passive verb interemptus est (‘he was killed’) may be slightly obscuring: it was Opimius who promised to give anyone bringing him Gracchus’ head the equivalent weight of gold. Pliny’s way of recalling history through a wine vintage in this passage is very similar to the case of the Allied victory and the Mouton Rothschild quoted above.Footnote 77 In Horace we have already seen a possible allusion to politics in his mention of Tullus in Odes 3.8: the co-consul Augustus is latently lurking behind that date. In other odes the mention of consular dates seems to serve different purposes.Footnote 78 In Odes 3.28, Horace tells a certain Lyde to celebrate the feast day of Neptune together with him and bring some wine from the consulship of Bibulus (C. 3.28.5–8):
You can feel that the midday sun is about to enter its downward course, and yet – as if the winged day were standing still – are you hesitating to snatch from storage the sluggish amphora from the year that Bibulus was consul?
The consulship of Bibulus marks the year 59 ʙᴄ, when Julius Caesar and M. Calpurnius Bibulus were consuls. Suetonius, however, asserts that Romans jokingly referred to the year as ‘Julius and Caesar’ instead of ‘Caesar and Bibulus’, as Bibulus was notoriously inactive (Suet. Jul. 20.2).Footnote 79 Bibulus attempted to prevent his co-consul Caesar’s legislation by procrastinating. Some people even used this date jokingly in testamentary documents, according to Suetonius. Moreover, the following verses were supposedly common knowledge at that time (Suet. Jul. 20.2):
An event recently happened not in the year of Bibulus but in the year of Caesar. For I do not remember anything to have happened in the year of Bibulus.
Horace’s choice of dating the wine seems strange at first sight: while Romans have wittily asserted that such a thing as a consulship of Bibulus does not exist, Horace nonetheless asks for a wine from that time. In Odes 3.8 above we have already seen how Horace’s mention of one consul, Tullus, provokes his readers to think of the absence of the other consul, Augustus. In the case of Bibulus and Odes 3.28, incompleteness and absence is very much the essence of the date. This serves different purposes; for once, the hesitant amphora is evocative of the consul Bibulus, who famously procrastinated Caesar’s legislation, as David West notes.Footnote 80 Indeed, Horace’s interlocking word order keeps the ‘consul Bibulus’ neatly embedded between (or inscribed on?) the ‘hesitating amphora’.
The date on the wine label in Odes 3.28 also serves another purpose. Victor Pöschl stresses, in a wonderful interpretation of the poem, that Lyde is only characterised through her hesitation, and he notes that her hesitation finds a parallel in the hesitating amphora.Footnote 81 Horace attempts to overcome Lyde’s hesitation, and Pöschl is arguably right to see a lover’s pleas in Horace’s urging.Footnote 82 This is a common situation in carpe diem poems; thus, Horace urges Leuconoe to seize the day in Odes 1.11, and several Greek epigrams urge women to submit to their lovers’ pleas before time runs out. Indeed, the word parco (‘to spare, be sparing’), which expresses Lyde’s hesitation, may point to Greek models where φείδομαι (‘to spare, be sparing’) is used in exactly this context.Footnote 83 As Horace mentions the midday sun, he introduces a sense of urgency; this is the reminder of time passing by, possibly pointing to the approaching evening of life in the typical fashion of a carpe diem poem.Footnote 84
When Horace urges Lyde to submit to his pleas, he tells her not to hesitate to ‘snatch’ (deripere) an amphora from the year of Bibulus. The word for getting hold of the amphora, deripio, is a comparatively violent term. Elsewhere Horace uses more neutral (moueo, fero, peto) or technical vocabulary (promo, depromo). The exhortation to snatch the wine rapidly and violently is an attempt to overcome Lyde’s hesitation.Footnote 85 But this also points again to the peculiar calendar Horace uses. We have seen how Horace exhorts his companions in Epodes 13 to ‘snatch’ (rapio) the occasion and to ‘move’ (moueo) some wine to the banquet. As Horace addresses Lyde, he conflates time and wine: Lyde is asked to snatch an amphora as well as an elusive moment in time. Just as Bibulus’ consulate is a fleeting date, so the amphora is hesitant to be brought from storage. The moment in past time, 59 ʙᴄ, which is difficult to locate but promises ‘bibulous’ enjoyment,Footnote 86 finds some parallel in the moment in present time: here, Horace’s date with Lyde promises enjoyment if only he can convince her to seize the day (and the wine).
Feeney has stressed that the consular fasti served a symbolical purpose, while ‘the utilitarian dimension […] is less clear’.Footnote 87 At first sight wine labels may offer such a utilitarian dimension; identifying the right wine is, after all, quite useful. Closer inspection, however, has revealed that Feeney’s statement also holds true for amphorae: it is the symbolic value of consuls on wine labels that Horace exploits with his drinkable calendar.
2.4 Memories of Linguistic Wars: Tasting Language in Odes 3.14
The oldest wine Horace mentions in his poetry appears in Odes 3.14. In this poem, Horace celebrates Augustus’ happy return from Spain (C. 3.14.13–28):
19 uagantem codd. : uagacem Charis. GL i.66
This is a real holiday for me as it will banish my dark worries: I will not fear civil strife or violent death, because Caesar controls the world. Slave, come and get perfume and garlands and a cask that remembers the Marsian feud, if anywhere a jar was able to elude marauding Spartacus.
And tell Neaera with her clear voice to hurry and to tie her myrrh-scented hair with a band. If the detested doorman makes you wait, just give up and come back. My hair is turning white and that’s softening my temper; I used to welcome altercations and violent quarrels. I would not have put up with this in my youth when I was hot-blooded and when Plancus was consul.
Augustus returns victorious from Spain, and Horace celebrates. The ode thus seems a good example for a celebration of the present moment in typical lyric fashion. On closer inspection, however, much of the ode deals with the past as a foil for present celebrations; as Horace praises Augustan peace, he recalls the civil wars of the past (14–15: tumultus and uis). Parts of this recollection of political unrest in Rome are also the Social War (18), Spartacus’ revolt (19–20), and Plancus’ consulship that marks the year of Philippi (27–8).
When Horace asks a slave to bring a wine jar to the symposium, the wine also provides a historical date (17–20): i pete unguentum, puer, et coronas | et cadum Marsi memorem duelli, | Spartacum siqua potuit uagantem | fallere testa (‘slave, come and get perfume and garlands and a cask that remembers the Marsian feud, if anywhere a jar was able to elude marauding Spartacus’). The wine dates back to the Social War of 91–87 ʙᴄ (or even precedes it), a revolt of Rome’s Italian allies.Footnote 88 This date makes it of course an old and therefore choice wine, thus befitting the occasion.Footnote 89 Yet, apart from these concerns for the symposiasts’ enjoyment, the vintage also makes the wine a historical fact.Footnote 90 Horace’s instructions to his slave are generic for a symposium, and they are common in early Greek lyric. The wine jar, however, which is firmly placed in Roman history, is distinct from the usual commands at a Greek symposium. As we have seen in Odes 2.3, again an old wine enters the present moment of the banquet and marks a holiday. This time the wine had to escape from the dangers of wars of the past in order to make it to the banquet. Wines were indeed easy victims in war; Polybius tells us that Hannibal washed his horses in old wine in order to cure them of scabies as he marauded through Italy.Footnote 91 Horace’s wine escaped the notice of Spartacus’ marauding hordes. The wine thus evokes Roman history; in fact, it is even said to remember it (18): cadum Marsi memorem duelli (‘a cask that remembers the Marsian feud’).Footnote 92
As Ellen Oliensis notes, remembering is an odd activity for wine, the proverbial agent of oblivion.Footnote 93 In Odes 3.14, however, the wine jar remembers the past not just as a fact but even recalls a past style of speech. My first piece of evidence for this must be tentative, as it is based on a doubtful reading in the text. Nisbet raised a number of textual issues in the ode and one of his suggestions was that uagacem may be a reasonable alternative for uagantem in line 19.Footnote 94 While the manuscript evidence supports uagantem, the reading uagacem is preserved in a quotation of the Horatian line by the grammarian Charisius (GL i.66). Although the word is not elsewhere attested in Latin, Nisbet thought that the word, supposedly meaning ‘rampageous’, might be ‘an archaism with a period flavour, or perhaps a whimsical coinage of Horace’s own’.Footnote 95 This suggestion is attractive. The wine jar then not only remembers historic events, but recalls them in the language of their time, speaking in archaisms. While the fact that uagacem has no parallel in Latin may seem to diminish its likelihood, the question utrum in alterum offers some support for the reading: it is not unlikely that uagantem appeared in the manuscripts as a normalisation of the unusual uagacem.Footnote 96
Admittedly it would be shaky scholarship if my argument rested on one doubtful reading, but the passage contains at least one more archaism that is certain (18):Footnote 97 cadum Marsi memorem duelli (‘a cask that remembers the Marsian feud’). The term duelli is of course an archaism for belli.Footnote 98 Ovid, for instance, uses the term duellum as he talks about a war in Rome’s far history (F. 6.201). In Horace, the wine ‘remembers the Marsian feud’, and thus remembers a bygone war as well as a bygone word. The certain presence of the archaism duelli offers further support for the reading uagacem. Nisbet and Rudd say that duelli, ‘with its suggestion of “old unhappy far-off things”’ makes a contrast with the delights of the symposium.Footnote 99 Possibly so, but at least as important is the point that the archaism makes wine a device that brings the past to the symposium. As the wine jar recalls inter-Roman wars, so poet and poem also recall them: as has long been noted, the consulship of Plancus, which Horace mentions at the end of the poem, marks the year of Philippi. Oswyn Murray says that ‘the date is carefully placed in the sympotic context, as if it were a mark of vintage’.Footnote 100 In this year Horace was fighting under Brutus and Cassius against Octavian, the later Augustus. Horace, much like the curious wine he serves, is a survivor of inter-Roman wars.Footnote 101 Before this background of near-death, Horace exhorts to the enjoyment of the present in his carpe diem poem.
Odes 3.14 is not alone in recalling wars through old wine and words. In the so-called Cleopatra ode, Horace celebrates Augustus’ victory over Mark Antony and the end of the civil wars. After the well-known call to drink, nunc est bibendum, Horace says that ‘previously it was a sacrilege to bring Caecuban wine from ancestral cellars’ (C. 1.37.5–6): antehac nefas depromere Caecubum | cellis auitis. Horace might be thinking of a wine predating the civil war here, a wine worthy of being opened now. As Horace approaches the ‘ancestral cellars’, he again brings back not only an old wine but also an old word. The word antehac is an archaism, as Roland Mayer notes.Footnote 102 Again, in Epodes 9, in which Horace also celebrates Augustus’ victory at Actium with a banquet, he begins his poem by asking when the time would come to drink ‘a Caecuban wine that had been put into storage (repostum) for a banquet of celebration’ (Epod. 9.1). The word repostum, which describes the storage of wine, is another archaism.Footnote 103 In Odes 2.3, which I discussed above, Horace tells Dellius that he may have made himself happy (bearis) with an old Falernian wine with its interior label. The verb bearis has been described as an archaism.Footnote 104 Finally, as Horace speaks of a ‘jar of wine’ in the Epistles he uses the expression cadum temeti, in which temetum is an archaism and cadum perhaps another one (Epist. 2.2.163).Footnote 105 The identification of Latin words as archaisms is notoriously difficult, and not every one of my examples might be as clear clear-cut as the example of the wine that remembers the Marsian feud. Nonetheless, the cumulative force of these examples is clear enough – old wine preserves the taste of old words in Horace. Horace’s storehouse is not just a thesaurus of wine but also a thesaurus of words. This need perhaps not surprise us; in the Epistles, Horace tells us that ‘the jar will long keep the fragrance of what it was once steeped in when new’.Footnote 106 The link between old wine and old words, styles, and texts is not unique to Horace. Cicero compares the old style of Thucydides’ rhetoric to wines of old consular dates, and new oratory to a wine from the preceding year (Brut. 287). It is suggestive that Horace finds obsolete words in a storage place: in an influential study, Aleida Assmann identified a cultural phenomenon which she calls ‘storage memory’ (‘Speichergedächtnis’).Footnote 107 This describes a type of cultural memory that preserves obsolete information, as archives do, for instance. Horace’s storage places seem to work in comparable ways.
Wine as a mechanism of remembering past moments is particularly well suited for lyric poetry. One obvious reason is the presence of wine at the symposium, one of the essential spaces for lyric poetry.Footnote 108 The other reason, which strikes me as more interesting, is the uniquely timely quality of vintage wines. Wine is a product of the season, since grapes are harvested every autumn and wine is produced. Similarly to flowers or grain, this makes wine an innate part of the natural cycle of the year. Yet, wine is distinct from most other seasonal products in that it can be preserved. Horace’s own poetry, too, was always destined to be preserved, as he makes clear in the last poem of the tribiblos, Exegi monumentum. As Horace projects a future life of his momentary poems, wine bottles become the ideal vessel for his poetry. While wine is a product of the season and is enjoyed in a particular moment, this seasonal point in time can be preserved for a considerable period.Footnote 109 When wine drinkers open a bottle of old wine in our time, they often will have informed themselves previously about how the weather of that year influenced the vintage. Similarly in Martial, even the legendary Opimian, around 200 years old by Martial’s time, bears the signs of a fortunate autumn (13.113): Haec Fundana tulit felix autumnus Opimi. | expressit mustum consul et ipse bibit (‘The fruitful autumn of Opimius has brought forth this wine from Fundi. The consul himself pressed out the must and drank it’).Footnote 110 Drinking wine can then provide a direct sensory experience of a past season. This flavour of the past leads us back to Odes 3.14.
The wine in Odes 3.14 is some truly strong stuff from the Marsian war, and the alien, stronger taste is reflected in the archaisms that the wine ‘memorises’. In this ode and elsewhere, wine preserves archaisms that have been out of season for decades. The metaphor ‘out of season’ is indeed appropriate for words in Horace, as he regards the lexical development of words as cyclical, comparable to the seasonal change of leaves (Ars 45–72). Horace repeatedly compares words to vines that the poet has to cultivate. Thus, he says in the epistle to Florus (Epist. 2.2.122–3): [sc. poeta] luxuriantia conpescet, nimis aspera sano | leuabit cultu, uirtute carentia tollet (‘The aspiring poet will cut back excessive (otiose!) foliage verbiage, he will smoothen what is too rough with beneficial attention, and he will uproot those words that lack dignity’). The archaisms in Odes 3.14 are words that have not been pruned, and it is fitting that they are preserved by a wine jar. Yet, these thoughts on the seasonal quality of words in Horace are already branching into the next chapter, where I will look in more detail at the eternal cycle of leaves and words in Horace’s poetry.
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