Finagling an inheritance is one time-tested way of resolving a money shortage: just flatter your way into the good graces of the aged and rich. In Satires 2.5 Horace parodies the Roman version of this vice, known as captatio or ‘legacy-hunting’; with baroque imagination, he presents Odysseus, the mythological hero, consulting the prophet Tiresias in the Underworld and learning how to increase his fortune by amassing inheritances. Odysseus asks: tu protinus, unde | diuitias aerisque ruam, dic, augur, aceruos (‘tell me forthwith, prophet, where I can dig up riches and heaps of money’, 21f.). Tiresias responds: captes astutus ubique | testamenta senum (‘cleverly snatch on all sides the testaments of old men’, 23f.). Social critique naturally looms large in this poem about venal dishonesty. In major studies, Niall Rudd and Klaus Sallmann have examined the poem's criticism of contemporary Roman society, and later scholars have taken a similar line, often reading the poem as a send-up of flattery.Footnote 1 All true, but there is more to say. Even as it treats of wills, money, and flattery, the satire also shows a quiet concern with aesthetic issues, especially the state of contemporary poetry.
Satires 2.5 was likely published in 30 BC, shortly before the most famous decade in Latin literature, that of the Georgics (c. 29 BC), Odes (late 20s BC), and Aeneid (19 BC). There is reason to think that the satire offers a wry commentary on the ambitions of Horace and Vergil as they look ahead to their mature works. This paper argues three points. First, that the satire is an anticipatory parody of Vergil's Georgics, probably published the following year. Tiresias teaches the art of legacy-hunting by deploying the Hesiodic didactic devices that Vergil will also use to teach farming. Second, that the satire contains metaliterary terms that correlate legacy-hunting and poetry, and so likens Vergil and Horace to money-grubbing flatterers. Third, and looking ahead, that Ovid's reception of the satire in the Ars amatoria responds to its specifically aesthetic concerns. Presaging with puckish humor a decade for the ages, Satires 2.5 makes no attempt to be a serious manifesto. What it is is a gaudy, self-deprecating send-up of the burgeoning ambitions of the soon-to-be Augustan poets.
I. Another Works and Days
Horace writes a good deal of mock didactic poetry, joking and teaching in the same breath.Footnote 2 Not all didactic is the same, however, and in Satires 2.5 we find a specific version of it—the Hesiodic version.Footnote 3 The satire parodies the hypothêkai genre of Hesiod's Works and Days, the original, proto-didactic poem in Greco-Roman literature. In doing so, it anticipates Vergil's forthcoming Georgics. The Hesiodic parody narrowly beats the great Hesiodic poem of Rome.Footnote 4
The first indication of Hesiodic allegiance is formal. Satires 2.5 is a consummate example of a hypothêkai poem—a poem of ‘instructional commands’. Thus Tiresias spouts a characteristically immoral instruction:
This could almost be by Hesiod. The lines are a hypothêkê, an instructional command, according to the archaic pattern. The passage is in hexameters. It instructs through an imperative, the main verb being adrepe, ‘slip’. Surrounding the imperative is an apparatus of further information: a situation in which to perform the command (‘say someone has a sickly son’), and a concluding explanation or defense of the command (‘not often does this gamble fail’), which fills the paroimiac verse. The only thing missing from this hypothêkê is an apostrophe, but Hesiod often omits the apostrophe as well.Footnote 5
Passages like these—instructional commands with surrounding apparatus—are the dominant form of much of Hesiod's Works and Days. Hesiod stacks his imperatival instructions one upon the other. The pattern also appears on a smaller scale in certain Homeric wisdom speakers (Mentes, Nestor, etc.), whose resemblance to Hesiod has often been recognized.Footnote 6 By adopting the hypothêkai form for Satires 2.5, Horace is probably making a literary-historical gesture—he is doing didactic in the archaic, preeminently Hesiodic style. Though other didactic poets will scatter a command here, a command there, Hesiodic didactic is built almost entirely out of commands, and so is Horace's satire. There are ten discrete hypothêkai in the satire, amounting to nearly the whole of Tiresias' instructional speech; they are interrupted only by an oracle (2.5.59–69) and Odysseus’ naïve interjections.Footnote 7
The reader may wonder, of course, whether Horace is only engaging in vague archaic pastiche,Footnote 8 not specific didactic parody. But consider the previous poem in the book, Satires 2.4. This satire is also mock didactic—2.4 proffers cooking advice—but formally very different. Its instructions are couched not as commands but as declarative, indicative statements.Footnote 9 Do you want to know where to find good cabbage? cole suburbano qui siccis creuit in agris | dulcior (‘cabbage grown in dry fields is tastier than cabbage from around Rome’, 15f.). The advice is declaratory, not imperatival. Again, Picenis cedunt pomis Tiburtia suco (‘fruit from the Tibur region is inferior in its juice to fruit from Picenum’, 70). There are exceptions,Footnote 10 but the speakers are basically consistent. If Tireisas in 2.5 teaches through commands, Catius in 2.4 teaches through declarative statements. One way to understand the formal contrast is through literary history.Footnote 11 If hypothêkai, or imperatival instructions, are characteristic of Hesiod, indicative didactic is characteristic of Aratus.Footnote 12 In the Phaenomena Aratus generally uses imperativals only to move on to a new subject (e.g. 75, 96), not for substantive instructions; for those he prefers declarative statements. Comparably few commands pop up in Nicander's Alexipharmaca and Lucretius’ De rerum natura;Footnote 13 although Nicander's Theriaca exults in commands, the poem (10–12) also acknowledges a special debt to Hesiod.Footnote 14 It seems likely, then, that Satires 2.4 and 2.5 form a diptych, juxtaposing a Hesiodic didactic poem (2.5) with an Aratean or more broadly Alexandrian one (2.4).Footnote 15 The fact that 2.5 takes place in the Homeric Underworld and features mythological characters while 2.4 is set in contemporary Rome, with Horace and his friend Catius as speakers, reinforces the distinction: one poem is contemporary, the other old or mythical. Kirk Freudenburg has already associated the stylistic preciosity of 2.4 with Alexandrian aesthetics.Footnote 16
Apart from the formal contrast, there are other differences between Satires 2.4 and 2.5 that reinforce the idea of a didactic diptych, Aratus facing Hesiod. A major contrast is authority—what gives the teachers the right to teach? In 2.4, didactic authority is indirect. The speaker Catius offers no instructions in his own name; he merely reports advice he heard at a lecture.Footnote 17 Catius is the interpres, the ‘go-between’ (91); he intends to ‘write down’ (ponere signa, 2) the teachings he heard but not contribute any of his own.Footnote 18 Indeed, the satire makes rather elaborate hay of not revealing who the cooking teacher is (10f., 88–95), thus drawing attention to the hidden source of authority.Footnote 19 This hands-off approach has specific connotations—Alexandrian ones. So we hear in one of Cicero's dialogues:
etenim si constat inter doctos, hominem ignarum astrologiae ornatissimis atque optimis uersibus Aratum de caelo stellisque dixisse; si de rebus rusticis hominem ab agro remotissimum Nicandrum Colophonium poetica quadam facultate, non rustica scripsisse praeclare: quid est cur non orator de rebus iis eloquentissime dicat, quas ad certam causam tempusque cognorit?
(De or. 1.69)For if learned persons agree that a man with no knowledge of astronomy, Aratus, spoke about the sky and stars in wonderfully elaborate verses, and that a man who lived nowhere near a farm, Nicander of Colophon, wrote superbly on farming topics, using his poetic rather than agricultural skill—then why should an orator not speak with high eloquence on topics he has prepared for one time and one case?Footnote 20
Learned opinion is clear: Aratus’ didactic poem on the stars was written from a position of astronomical ignorance. Same with Nicander on farming: both poets relied on technical sources rather than conduct original research. It is this tradition that Catius of 2.4 follows.Footnote 21
No such remove is found in Satires 2.5. Teacher Tiresias spouts instruction upon instruction in his own voice; authorized by the gods to speak, he does not rely on any other expert authority.Footnote 22 When he declares accipe qua ratione queas ditescere (‘listen to how to get rich’, 10), he cites no sources. A uates (‘prophet’, 6) and augur (‘seer’, 22), Tiresias has divine warrant to speak. He is consulted as an oracle (responde, ‘tell me’, 2), and goes into full-dress oracular mode halfway through the speech (62–9). If Catius’ ventriloquy associates him with Aratus, Tiresias’ confidence puts him in line with the hypothêkai genre. Instructions in the Works and Days come from Hesiod, not an extraneous expert.Footnote 23 So too, hypothêkai speakers in Homer speak on their own authority,Footnote 24 sometimes reinforcing that authority with an assertive first-person ὑποθήσομαι (‘I will instruct’).Footnote 25 Although divine inspiration is not a major part of the hypothêkai genre—Hesiod is a farmer, not a prophet—there is a passage in the middle of the Works and Days that rather suddenly claims divine inspiration:Footnote 26
This statement has formal similarities with a claim made by Tiresias in Satires 2.5, also occurring unexpectedly in the middle of his speech:
Both claims are couplets, with close correspondences between the second lines.Footnote 27 Infinitives switch places with gods, verse-end ἀείδειν becoming verse-initial diuinare, verse-initial Μοῦσαι becoming verse-end Apollo. Footnote 28 The pronoun-verb combination μ’ ἐδίδαξαν leaps to the other side of the caesura as mihi donat. But the γάρ stays in place as etenim, and ἀθέσφατον (‘inexpressible, prodigious’) probably corresponds to magnus, also at the start of the paroimiac verse. Two stable elements allow for a mirroring effect among the rest. Corresponding to the formal reversal is parody in the sense: Tiresias declares tautologically that his prophecies will always be true (‘either it will be or it will not’), and turns Hesiod's ‘mind of Zeus’ into a louche quidquid dicam. If Satires 2.4 offers a cartoonish parody of Aratean didactic authority, 2.5 does the same for Hesiodic.
In addition to form and authority, there is also a difference in content. Satires 2.4 teaches cooking, 2.5 legacy-hunting—by no means commensurable domains in terms of moral importance. Modern readers acknowledge a difference between the subject matter of Hellenistic didactic which is technical, scientific, sometimes abstruse (think astronomy and snake bites), and the moral and political focus of Hesiod.Footnote 29 Horace dramatizes a similar distinction in 2.4 and 2.5.Footnote 30 For 2.4 flaunts an ethics of triviality. It purports to talk about the happy life, uitae praecepta beatae (‘precepts of the happy life’, 95)Footnote 31—but as Emily Gowers has suggested, it is hard to see that the happy life would consist in choosing eggs that are prolate spheroid instead of spherical (12–14).Footnote 32 In contrast, 2.5 is anything but trivial. However perversely, the satire touches on issues of justice, economics, and society. Poverty is not trivial (9); neither is sharing one's wife with another man (75–83), nor (possibly) bumping off someone's son (49). Moral terms recur (5, 20f., 33, 102). The mock high seriousness of 2.5 is another point of connection with the Works and Days—and indeed specific parallels are striking. Both poems discuss the lawcourts; in both the courts are broached in verse twenty-seven. And the advice corresponds, albeit in reverse: if Hesiod advises steering clear of the courts as they eat up money and time (WD 27–46), Tiresias recommends the opposite: think of the lawcourts as the place to strike it rich (2.5.27–44). If Hesiod is angry at his brother for getting caught up with the ‘grandees’ (βασιλεῖς) around the courts (WD 37–42), Tiresias advocates pursuing them: Odysseus must attach to himself rich old men. If Hesiod thinks this fast lifestyle unsustainable—ὤρη γάρ τ᾽ ὀλίγη πέλεται νεικέων τ᾽ ἀγορέων τε (‘short is the season of cases and courts’, WD 30)—there is no time limit placed on Odysseus; legacy-hunting is a lifelong business and he will haunt the courts in search of victims throughout his career (2.5.24–6, 106–9).Footnote 33 In addition to legal justice, the satire also shares with Hesiod an interest in moral behavior: Hesiod is concerned with being just (esp. WD 174–292), Tiresias with how to lie, manipulate, control. Both poems discuss economics, that is, how to increase your livelihood.Footnote 34 The poems pursue serious subjects and do so in comparable ways.
Recognizing that Satires 2.5 is a parody of Hesiodic hypothêkai offers a new entrée into what the poem is about. It was not a casual thing to do in 30 BC, adopting a Hesiodic model, when Vergil's own Hesiodic poem, the Georgics, was on the immediate horizon (probably published in 29 BC).Footnote 35 And the satire indeed looks forward even as it looks back. Formally it anticipates Vergil's use of hypothêkai. Though the Georgics is not stylistically uniform, hypothêkai dominate the first panel of instructions (1.43–117) after its proemium, a clear initial acknowledgment of Hesiod. Horace's satire also anticipates the Georgics’ assumption of direct authority. Not holding back like Catius in Satires 2.4, Vergil often appeals to his own experience to justify his instructionsFootnote 36 and has no hesitation in speaking to Octavian: the Georgics is the first piece of Latin poetry to address Octavian directly (1.24–42).Footnote 37 The situations overlap too: if Satires 2.5 presents Tiresias, a uates, speaking to a king and general, Odysseus, Vergil in the Georgics addresses a king and general, Octavian. Thematically, the Georgics displays a major interest in justice—not only like Hesiod but also like Horace.Footnote 38 One of the more famous episodes of the Georgics, the epyllion of Orpheus and Eurydice (4.453–527), is set in the Homeric Underworld, as is this satire. It seems that Satires 2.5 is looking forward, through parody, to Vergil's essay in Hesiodic didactic.
A forward-looking orientation would help to explain the copious anachronisms. Though Satires 2.5 is set in the Homeric world, it makes no bones about mentioning fishponds (44), legal wills (48–55, 66–9), the Lares (14), the forum (27), the Roman names Quintus and Publius (32), an oracle about a contemporary legal squabble (55–69)—for Horace, these are the sounds of modern Rome.Footnote 39 Yet the anachronisms coexist with continual reminders of Hesiod and Homer.
The anachronism here is the Dauus comicus, the slave of Roman Comedy: Roman Comedy did not exist in Homeric times. Yet the modern element is offset by a strong pastiche of Hesiod. At the end of the Works and Days, the commands come fast and furious (695–821); so here, towards the end of 2.5, we find an increasing tempo and pile-up of commands—grassare, mone, extrahe, substringe, all in three lines. The advice to wear a hat comes from Hesiod (WD 545f.). Odysseus’ aggressive shoulders (oppositis umeris) are worthy of a Homeric hero.Footnote 40 With no embarrassment, Horace sets the Roman elements next to the Hesiodic-Homeric, as if hypothêkai poetry belonged in his contemporary world.
A final indication that the satire may be pointing ahead is its position in the book. There are eight poems in Satires 2. That means that 2.5 introduces the second half and takes the proemio nel mezzo position—it looks forward, while 2.4, the conclusion of the first half, looks back. It is piquant that the Hesiodic, that is archaizing poem would look forward structurally, while the modernist, Aratean poem looks back; as the Augustans will prove, what is new is old; what is old is new.Footnote 41 The joke may go further. As Emily Gowers suggests, the first-time reader of Satires 2 expects ten poems, on the model of Satires 1 and the Eclogues; it is a surprise when the book stops at eight.Footnote 42 In this light, the fifth poem becomes, on a first reading, the valediction of the first half, and only on the second reading the introduction to the second half. This poem that looks old may really be the presage of something new.
II. Restoration and Metapoetics
Restoration was in the air in 30 BC. Language of return and renewal was common in the Triumviral and Augustan periods—peace was back, orderly government back.Footnote 43 The Laudatio Turiae speaks of the ‘republic restored’ (res[titut]a re publica, 2.25);Footnote 44 Velleius Paterculus later describes the Augustan settlement with multiple terms of restoration (reuocata, restituta, redactum, 2.89.3f.).Footnote 45 As early as the Eclogues, Vergil speaks of the ‘return of justice’ (redit et Virgo) and the ‘return of the golden age’ (redeunt Saturnia regna, 4.6); in the Georgics he again evokes ‘justice returned’ (redditaque Eurydice, 4.486).Footnote 46 In later work, Horace picks up on both tropes, speaking of the ‘return’ (redire) of the virtues and of the golden age.Footnote 47 In the Aeneid we often hear of Troy being born again.Footnote 48 Even if the Romans do not say so explicitly, one aspect of the broader movement to restore was literary restoration. In the 20s BC Horace and Vergil revived models of verse partially discarded by their Alexandrian predecessors, with Vergil attempting a large-scale heroic epic, a brave thing to do after Callimachus, and both authors returning to relatively direct political engagement in their art.Footnote 49
Doing its part in this program, Satires 2.5 enacts the restoration of Hesiodic hypothêkai in conscious contrast to Alexandrian didactic.Footnote 50 As it does so, the satire reinforces the theme of restoration through a repertory of metapoetic terms.Footnote 51 In the opening nine lines, a concatenation of potentially metapoetic words suggests a correlation between legacy-hunting and literary restoration. Just as Odysseus ‘restores’ (reparare, 2) his wealth through legacy-hunting, so Vergil and Horace restore the languishing state of poetry.Footnote 52
Tir. iamne doloso
Od. o nulli quicquam mentite, uides ut
Odysseus asks the prophet for advice on ‘restoring his lost wealth’, amissas reparare…res; after years of ravaging by Penelope's suitors his net worth could use a boost. Wealth may not be the only sort of restoration in play, however. The term res can also mean poetic topics; this was the meaning in Satires 2.4, the most recent occurrence of the term: res tenuis, tenui sermone peractas (‘delicate matter, conveyed in delicate words’, 9).Footnote 53 And the literary meaning is likely to be active here too. For this is a metaliterary context, Satires 2.5 being a fan-fiction addition to the Homeric text, a belated insertion into the Underworld scene of Odyssey 11 (90–151). The opening phrase, hoc quoque, Tiresia (‘this too, Tiresias’), acknowledges as much. It is no innocent conversation the satire reports, but a self-conscious continuation of Homer.
Besides, the word res is hardly alone. ‘Tell me’, says Odysseus, ‘how I can restore my lost res, by what artes and modi’ (1–3). Taken together the three terms are suggestive. artes may also refer to technical expertise like rhetoric; Horace himself will write the Ars poetica.Footnote 54 modi is a common term in Horace for poetic meter.Footnote 55 And res are topics. The polyvalence of the terms raises the possibility that Odysseus’ quest to restore his wealth (res) may be read as a project of poetic restoration as well: ‘tell me how to restore lost subjects (res) to verse, by what techniques (artes) and meters (modi)’—in other words, how to do exactly what Satires 2.5 is doing, with its return to Hesiod's moralizing, ‘serious’ didactic.
Then there are the economic terms. Greeks and Romans made fairly wide use of economic metaphors for rhetoric, and the quoted passage contains money words that could also be literary. When Odysseus complains of being nudus and inops—uides ut | nudus inopsque domum redeam (‘you see | how bare and poor I'm coming home’, 5f.)—the terms have a foot in both material and rhetorical domains. Cicero uses inops to describe oratory that lacks fullness and adornment; the term has both Stoic and Atticist connotations.Footnote 56 nudus too is rhetorical, as in Cicero's famous description of Caesar's style as like a nude statue.Footnote 57 In later work Horace complains of uersus inopes rerum (‘verses impoverished of matter’, Ars P. 322). Next, Odysseus reiterates his poverty by complaining that neque illic | aut apotheca procis intacta est aut pecus (‘not storeroom there nor flock the suitors leave untouched’, 6f.). What kind of storeroom is this? apotheca is not itself a critical term, but its synonyms are: thesaurus for the place (primarily)Footnote 58 and copia for the contents.Footnote 59 And the term intactus is often used by Latin poets wanting to make a claim of originality: elsewhere Horace speaks of Graecis intacti carminis (‘a song untouched by the Greeks’, Serm. 1.10.66), and Vergil calls his poetic subjects saltus…intactos (‘untouched groves’, G. 3.40f.).Footnote 60 The depletion of the storeroom, its ransacking by the suitors, may suggest poetic depletion.Footnote 61 Finally, Odysseus turns to loaded terms when he complains: et genus et uirtus, nisi cum re, uilior alga est (‘birth and strength, where there's no wealth, are not worth seaweed’, 8). It is not a lack of genus that haunts him, a word that means both family and genre: Cicero speaks of dicendi genus, orationis genus, genus scriptionis, genus litterarum, and just plain genus.Footnote 62 Nor is Odysseus bothered by a lack of uirtus, be that military prowess or poetic quality.Footnote 63 What haunts him in Satires 2.5 is the lack of res—something to write about. In a passage keyed in to the literary, Odysseus implies that generic and technical mastery will get him only so far when he has nothing worth saying.
Last, there is Tireisas. If Odysseus occupies the place of a struggling new poet—someone with talent but no subject, and with high ambitions to restore—where else to turn but to the great poet-prophet of antiquity? The interaction between the figures can be read as a gesture to poetic education. Odysseus consults the uates (6), a term that means both prophet and poet.Footnote 64 The language of his request is double-edged: Odysseus asks for praeter narrata petenti (‘more than what you have already told me’, 1). narrare implies a story; elsewhere Horace uses the term to describe epic or the plot of drama,Footnote 65 and the participle narrata would make a plausible calque on the Greek ἔπεα, narrative poems. As Odysseus consults the uates, he asks for new stories. Tiresias himself seems to acknowledge the figuration of these lines when he says: quando pauperiem missis ambagibus horres (‘since, not to beat about the bush, you are afraid of poverty’, 9). ambages means roundabout or periphrastic ways of speaking, and plausibly alludes to the figured language of these opening lines.Footnote 66 Tiresias’ concluding wink sets off the passage as distinctly metaliterary.
hoc quoque, praeter narrata, amissae res, artes, modi, uates, nudus, inops, apotheca, intactus, genus, uirtus, res again—the opening lines are filled with potentially literary terms. Though detailed allegory would be out of place, what matters is the tongue-in-cheek correlation between restoring wealth and restoring poetry. The correlation that these terms suggest is surely a comment on that moment of expectation that was 30 BC, when all was being restored, and Vergil and Horace were anticipating their most ambitious works. In fact, the phrase amissas reparare…res (2) has a further resonance linking it to the political situation. In the preceding decades, Cicero twice used the collocation res publica amissa (‘the Republic lost’, Att. 1.18.6, cf. QFr. 1.2.15) to refer to the political chaos of the time.Footnote 67 In combining res and amitto, the satire affiliates Odysseus’ project of legacy-hunting with the contemporary restoration of the Roman state.Footnote 68 Great things were in the offing in 30 BC; Horace must make fun of them; and the slimy ambitions of Odysseus are one way to speak about that moment of expectation.
III. Horace and the Ars amatoria
At least one figure in antiquity recognized the aesthetic dimension of Satires 2.5. A few years after Horace's death in 8 BC, Ovid produced the Ars amatoria (c. 2 BC–AD 2), his own work of mock didactic, followed shortly by a palinode, the Remedia amoris. These poems are aware of multiple didactic predecessors, from Hesiod to Lucretius to Vergil, but not least among the models is Horace Satires 2.5.Footnote 69 Both Horace and Ovid take as their subject the art of deceiving people into liking you, whether rich old men or lovers. It is true that the poems operate in a common tradition: there were Greek handbooks on how to attract people, and C.M.C. Green speculates that the handbooks were parodied in Greek.Footnote 70 (When Ovid talks about how crowded the road is, he may be gesturing to literary predecessors.Footnote 71) But Ovid's Ars is clearly conscious of a connection to Horace. Verbal and tropological parallels abound, and there is even a point at which Ovid seems to footnote his predecessor: in tabulas multis haec uia fecit iter (‘this method has, for many, led straight to testamentary bequests’, Ars am. 2.332). Hunting lovers is rather like hunting legacies.Footnote 72
Although connections have long been noticed between the poems, close readings are in short supply.Footnote 73 Here I want to examine a scene in the Ars that engages with Odysseus, and through him with Satires 2.5. It is a scene that responds above all to the satire's aesthetic or metapoetic dimension.Footnote 74
There are prima facie reasons to expect Horace in the background. Horace is the last important author to treat Odysseus at length (the Aeneid mentions Odysseus multiple times but without making him a prominent actor; Ovid engages with him in absentia in Heroides 1). And the character is reprised in a poem that already has generic connections to Satires 2.5 (mock didactic about manipulating people).
Ovid does not disappoint. Specific points of connection abound, and they tend to be aesthetic. First there is the didactic nature of both scenes. In Horace, Odysseus is the pupil; here he carries a ‘stick’, uirga, like a schoolmaster.Footnote 75 As he explains his Trojan War heroism to Calypso, he uses, as Jula Wildberger notes, a simplified, repetitive style, as if conscious of a didactic role.Footnote 76 Next, both episodes give us an Odysseus interested in poetry.Footnote 77 In Ovid, he is a storyteller (referre, ‘tell’, 2.128), his subject the Trojan War. The illustrations he draws in the sand are an opus (2.132), an important Ovidian term for poetry.Footnote 78 The combination of the visual and poetic in Ovid's storytelling may even gesture at Horace's motto, ut pictura poesis (‘a poem is like a picture’, Ars P. 361). If the Odysseus of Satires 2.5 wants to learn about poetry from Tiresias, in Ovid it seems he has succeeded—now he is a poet himself, and one who, like his teacher Tiresias, thrives on didacticism.
Yet even as Ovid takes over the notion of Odysseus the poet, he associates him with aesthetic principles that seem anti-Horatian by design. If there is one great characteristic of Horace's Odysseus, it is his resolve; if there is one great characteristic of Ovid's, it is his lack of serious purpose—and the difference is as much aesthetic as moral. Thus declares Odysseus in Satires 2.5: fortem hoc animum tolerare iubebo (‘I will bid my heart be strong, and endure this’, 20). Tiresias exhorts him: persta atque obdura: seu rubra Canicula findet | infantis statuas, seu…Furius hibernas cana niue conspuet Alpis (‘persist and endure, whether ruddy Canicula splits the gaping statues, or…Furius sprinkles the winter Alps with white snow’, 39–41); neu, si uafer unus et alter | insidiatorem praeroso fugerit hamo, | aut spem deponas aut artem inlusus omittas (‘if one or two clever fellows bite off the hook and escape the fisherman, do not lose hope, do not leave off your art because you've been deluded’, 24–6). Odysseus’ life as a legacy-hunter will be one of ‘long servitude and care’ (seruitio longo curaque, 99), continuing without end (106–9). This is an Odysseus of perversely high seriousness. So is the aesthetic he stands for. The Hesiodic tradition into which Satires 2.5 inserts itself is moral, political, ‘serious’. The Augustan aesthetic that the satire announces has similar aspirations. Indeed, the patient, laborious process of legacy-hunting resembles Horace's own view of poetry.Footnote 79 His Odysseus, whether legacy-hunter or poet, is dogged and ambitious.
Nothing could be further from Ovid's take on the hero. Gone is the high seriousness: Odysseus has become a sort of improvisation artist, telling his stories differently every time (Ars am. 2.128); drawing because he ‘happens’ (forte, 2.131) to be holding a stick, not from any set program; drawing on the shore, even though the waves will wash everything away (2.139f.). Whereas Horace's Odysseus has a single goal to which he devotes his life—to restore his property (or poetry)—Ovid's Odysseus is focused on the moment. When Calypso asks to hear about the ‘fall of Troy’ (Troiae casus, 2.127), Odysseus chooses the night raid from Iliad 10, an episode that famously does nothing to advance the plot.Footnote 80 He narrates an extra-teleological story, not really the fall of Troy. If the story suppresses Iliadic teleology, it also suppresses Odyssean: apparently forgetful of Penelope, Odysseus is showing off for Calypso. He chooses the night raid because it puts him in a good light; he reinforces his successful actions with the self-centered language of mea castra (‘my camp’, 2.134), sparsimus (‘we bespattered’, 2.136), and ego (emphatic ‘I’, 2.138). After all, as we know from the outset, Odysseus attracts people through his intellectual skills (2.107–22).Footnote 81 But why does Odysseus want to attract Calypso? His goal in the Ars (2.125f.), not to mention the Odyssey, is to get home to Ithaca.Footnote 82 Whereas Horace gives us a focused, committed Odysseus, an Odysseus with a life plan and the goal of restoring property (or poetry), Ovid gives us an Odysseus living for the moment, embracing the non-teleological aspects of life. If Satires 2.5 is a reflection on Augustan ambitions—a wry one, to be sure—Ovid's Odysseus seems to have no ambition other than attracting a very temporary partner.Footnote 83
These points of contact between Ovid's Odysseus and Horace's are specific enough to take seriously: both stories have a metapoetic dimension, they occur in generically similar works, and the two Odysseuses represent almost diametrically opposite approaches to life, and probably aesthetics. Ovid is often said to trade in a post-classical aesthetic, brilliant and facile, that differs from that of Vergil and Horace.Footnote 84 Certainly, Ovid is at one with Horace in his goofy take on Homeric mythology, in his parodic approach to didactic. But he carefully evacuates his Homeric episode of the ambition, the purpose, and the drive encoded in Horace's Odysseus. There is more to be said about these poems and their relationship, but it is enough for now that Ovid was a good reader of Horace Satires 2.5, and a further witness of its aesthetic interests.
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