CHAPTER THREE
Helen
In the previous chapters we surveyed notions of the temporal and the spatial as well as of utterance and its inhibition as means to adjudicate the interaction between Catullus and Horace. We now turn from abstract to concrete, as in separate chapters we watch two figures who help focus our attention on a series of interconnected poems by each writer. The first is Helen of Troy.
Three adjacent odes in the first book of Carmina, 15–17, however diverse their subject matter in appearance, have important elements in common.1 The clearest unifying factor is their distinctive associations with Helen. The first of the trio is essentially a narrative poem:
Pastor cum traheret per freta navibus
Idaeis Helenen perfidus hospitam,
ingrato celeris obruit otio
ventos ut caneret fera
Nereus fata: “mala ducis avi domum5
quam multo repetet Graecia milite
coniurata tuas rumpere nuptias
et regnum Priami vetus.
heu heu, quantus equis, quantus adest viris
sudor, quanta moves funera Dardanae10
genti. iam galeam Pallas et aegida
currusque et rabiem parat.
nequiquam Veneris praesidio ferox
pectes caesariem grataque feminis
inbelli cithara carmina divides,15
nequiquam thalamo gravis
hastas et calami spicula Cnosii
vitabis strepitumque et celerem sequi
Aiacem: tamen heu serus adulteros
crines pulvere collines.20
non Laertiaden, exitium tuae
genti, non Pylium Nestora respicis?
urgent inpavidi te Salaminius
Teucer, te Sthenelus sciens
pugnae, sive opus est imperitare equis,25
non auriga piger. Merionen quoque
nosces. ecce furit te reperire atrox
Tydides melior patre:
quem tu, cervus uti vallis in altera
visum parte lupum graminis inmemor,30
sublimi fugies mollis anhelitu,
non hoc pollicitus tuae.
iracunda diem proferet Ilio
matronisque Phrygum classis Achillei:
post certas hiemes uret Achaicus 35
ignis Iliacas domos.”
When the treacherous shepherd was carrying his hostess Helen through the waters on his Trojan ships, Nereus stilled the swift winds with unwelcome calm that he might prophesy harsh fate: “With an evil omen you are carrying home (5) her whom Greece will seek back with many a soldier, joined by oath to break your marriage and the ancient kingdom of Priam. Alas, alas, how much sweat for horses, how much for men is at hand, how many deaths you are posing for the Dardan race. (10) Already Pallas is readying her helmet and aegis, her chariot and her rage. Fierce because of Venus’s protection, you will comb your hair in vain and strum on the unwarlike lyre songs pleasing to women, (15) in vain in your marriage chamber will you avoid the weighty spears and the darts of Cretan reed, the roar of battle, and Ajax quick to pursue. Though late, yet sometime, alas, you will smear your adulterous locks with dust. (20) Don’t you notice Laertes’s son, the ruin of your race, not Pylian Nestor? Fearlessly Teucer of Salamis presses after you, after you Sthenelus who knows about combat, or if there is need to guide his horses, (25) no sluggard of a charioteer. You will also recognize Meriones. See, dread Tydides, braver than his father, rages to discover you. Feebly you will flee him with panting breath, like a deer forgetful of its pasture (30) when it has seen a wolf in another part of the valley—what you didn’t promise to your beloved. The anger of Achilles’s fleet will postpone the day for Troy and the Trojan mothers. Nevertheless, after the allotted winters, Greek fire (35) will engulf the homes of Ilium.”
The ode’s initial stanza places us in the midst of the sea journey from Greece to Troy on which Paris abducts Helen, wife of his host Menelaus. Nereus causes the winds to cease so that, for the remainder of the poem, the god could harangue the “treacherous shepherd” about the consequences of his perfidy to himself and to his homeland. Foreground movement comes to a halt for the narrator to offer one long apostrophe—the word “you” appears as pronoun or within verbal forms in every stanza except the last—that in effect does not so much summarize heroic deeds at Troy as catalogue the gods and heroes, from Athena to Achilles, who will soon focus their menace on Paris. The poem essentially stands as a lyric documentation of the first of a continuum of actions leading inevitably to the burning of Troy, to which the final quatrain is dedicated. 2
Though nominally a narrative of events to come, Nereus’s speech carefully balances future with present. The repetition of words like quantus, together with the uninterrupted focus on the second person, steadies us to face the immediacy of events. Moreover, the personal involvement of Nereus in the story that he tells, as he both chastises and commiserates with his hapless listener (the iterations of heu at lines 9 and 19 are especially moving), underscores the subjective intensity here of Horace’s lyric art, even when dealing with an event shrouded in myth.
The second poem in the trio, 1.16, brings in Helen vicariously. The ode is on the surface an act of repentance by the speaker for the writing of some iambic poetry (criminosis iambis, 2–3; celeres iambos, 24) directed against his girl. Its core is a consideration of the destructive power of anger (irae, 9 and 17), while the conclusion is a prayer that she restore herself to him if he continues to make the requisite change from harsh to mild, which is to say from the writing of iambic poetry to that of lyric.
The poem was recognized in antiquity as a
in imitation of what were apparently two recantations on the part of the sixth-century poet Stesichorus. According to a tradition
famously initiated by Plato,3 Stesichorus was blinded for having calumniated Helen, by accusing her of going to Troy “on the well-benched ships” and therefore
of both causing and sharing in the war subsequent to her abduction by Paris. The poet’s sight only returned when he retracted
his supposed vituperation. 4
The third ode in the sequence, C. 1.17, finds us in the Sabine hills with the speaker offering an invitation to Tyndaris, which is to say Helen, daughter of Tyndareus, now in the guise of a lyre-playing guest-friend, or even potential lover, of the speaker. She is to join him in his retreat, rich in the glories of the countryside, and share the world of his musa by singing of Penelope and Circe (we are now in the context of the Odyssey) in the manner of Anacreon. Once within the speaker’s sanctuary, she will escape the threat of Cyrus’s violent hands and become as lacking in fear (nec metus, 24) as the animals who share in this magic landscape (nec metuunt, 8).
Though the figure of Helen is the surest connecting link between this extraordinary trio of odes, much else besides serves to unify the group. There is copious lexical overlap among all three poems as well as a careful chain of verbal interconnections. Let me offer a few examples. The ruin that Odysseus plans for Paris’s Trojan race (Laertiaden exitium tuae / genti, C. 1.15.21–22) anticipates the disaster, which we hear about in the next poem, that wrath brings upon Thyestes (Thyesten exitio gravi, C. 1.16.17); and the description of Diomedes as melior patre (C. 1.15.28), better than his father Tydeus, looks ahead to the subsequent poem’s opening address—o matre pulcra filia pulcrior (“O daughter, fairer than your mother fair”). In this respect, the first word of the final stanza of 1.15, iracunda, has special force. The fleet of Achilles is angry because its leader is angry. This serves as a reminder of the first word of the Iliad, and therefore of the epic as a whole, but also as a foretaste of the poem to come, with its emphasis on the destructiveness of irae.5
If anger connects poems 15 and 16, the idea of change links 16 and 17. The speaker of 16 will forego fury for friendship at the end of that poem (mutare, 26). At the start of C. 1.17, Faunus will exchange Arcadia for the poet’s Sabine setting (mutat, 2), and will serve thereby as a model for the transition that the speaker trusts Tyndaris will make. Helen once journeyed with Paris from Sparta to Troy, with dire consequences. Horace’s Tyndaris, by contrast, will abandon the incipient violence of a world elsewhere for the poet’s arcadia of calm and song.6
All three poems can likewise be viewed as exemplifying a figurative aspect of change, replacement, and alteration based on genre. Horace’s commentator Porphyrio tells us, without offering specific evidence, that in C. 1.15 Horace is imitating an ode of Bacchylides in which Cassandra predicted the advent of the Trojan War. Stesichorus, whose “serious Muses” (graves Camenae) Horace mentions at C. 4.9.8, would also be a likely candidate as an important influence on Horace here. This is a feasible suggestion, first, for the combination of epic themes in lyric verse that typifies his work, and second, because it anticipates his overriding presence in the subsequent ode.7 Certainly the poem itself serves not only as an example of the lyricizing of epic themes, but also of the tension, in the future life of Paris, between the two genres.
At C. 1.6.10 Horace speaks of his allegiance to the “Muse who has power over the unwarlike lyre” (inbellis . . . lyrae Musa potens), a loyalty that will not allow him to sing in epic the praises of Caesar and Agrippa. Paris, strumming “songs on an unwarlike lyre” (inbelli cithara carmina, C. 1.15.15), is in a parallel position, with the difference that he is supposedly a warrior, not a poet-singer. For Paris in his context, under the patronage of Venus, to chant songs pleasing to women is in fact to feminize himself and to leave the deeds worthy of epic to the men who will soon prove to be his, and Troy’s, undoing. Horace encloses epic within his own lyricizing, but in the same process tells a tale where amatory passion, and its imaginative outlet in lyric song, is incompatible with what, at least here, are the destructive energies that a Homer documents.
If we turn to C. 1.16, we find that the generic mutation around which this poem is built lies in the tension between iambic and lyric poetry, which is to say in this instance between invective poetry steeped in anger and poetry of affection and affiliation. Horace’s juxtaposition of these two odes, however, may be meant to bring with it a touch of humor, especially coming after Nereus’s relentlessly negative catalogue of Paris’s enemies in the preceding poem:
O matre pulcra filia pulcrior,
quem criminosis cumque voles modum
pones iambis, sive flamma
sive mari libet Hadriano.
non Dindymene, non adytis quatit5
mentem sacerdotum incola Pythius,
non Liber aeque, non acuta
sic geminant Corybantes aera,
tristes ut irae, quas neque Noricus
deterret ensis nec mare naufragum10
nec saevos ignis nec tremendo
Iuppiter ipse ruens tumultu.
fertur Prometheus addere principi
limo coactus particulam undique
desectam et insani leonis15
vim stomacho adposuisse nostro.
irae Thyesten exitio gravi
stravere et altis urbibus ultimae
stetere causae, cur perirent
funditus inprimeretque muris20
hostile aratrum exercitus insolens.
conpesce mentem: me quoque pectoris
temptavit in dulci iuventa
fervor et in celeres iambos
misit furentem: nunc ego mitibus25
mutare quaero tristia, dum mihi
fias recantatis amica
opprobriis animumque reddas.
O daughter fairer than your fair mother, bring about whatever demise you choose for my slanderous iambs, whether it be by means of flame or through the Adriatic Sea. Neither Dindymene, nor the dweller in Delphi’s shrine equally sets trembling the mind of his priests, (5) nor Bacchus, nor do Corybantes so clash their cymbals, as bitter anger, which neither the Noric sword daunts nor the ship-breaking sea (10) nor fierce fire, nor Jupiter himself, descending in fearful uproar.
Prometheus, when forced to add a segment culled from anywhere and everywhere to our primal mud, is said also to have attached the violence of the mad lion to our disposition. (15) Anger laid Thyestes low in grievous ruin and has remained the primary reason why lofty cities have utterly perished and a haughty foe has stationed a hostile plough on their walls. (20) Restrain your spirit: in the sweetness of youth, passion of heart afflicted me also and drove me, raging, toward swift iambs. Now I seek to exchange harsh for mild, (25) provided, seeing that I have recanted my insults, you become my friend and return me your mind.
We start off with an enormous compliment from the speaker to his Helen—O matre pulcra filia pulcrior—one that Ovid caps in Heroides 16. Paris is writing to Helen, but the words are Venus’s (85–86):
“nos dabimus, quod ames, et pulchrae filia Ledae
ibit in amplexus pulchrior illa tuos.”
“We will bestow on you something that you can love, and the daughter of beautiful Leda, herself more beautiful, will come to your embrace.”8
Nevertheless, by adopting the stance of Stesichorus, Horace’s speaker ironizes Helen’s part in the Trojan War out of existence. He thus not only does away with the Homeric tradition of Helen at Troy but also gives the lie to the subject matter of the preceding poem. The martiality of C. 1.15 is replaced in C. 1.16 by the catalogue of horrors that irae can bring into being. But just as the ghost of Stesichorus brooding over the poem makes Helen and war discordant entities, so the change from iambic to lyric verse mollifies the pernicious aspects of anger that had previously ruled the speaker’s mind.
C. 1.17 also exhibits many characteristics in common with the preceding poems:
Velox amoenum saepe Lucretilem
mutat Lycaeo Faunus et igneam
defendit aestatem capellis
usque meis pluviosque ventos.
inpune tutum per nemus arbutus 5
quaerunt latentis et thyma deviae
olentis uxores mariti
nec viridis metuunt colubras.
nec Martialis haediliae lupos,
utcumque dulci, Tyndari, fistula 10
valles et Usticae cubantis
levia personuere saxa.
di me tuentur, dis pietas mea
et musa cordi est. hic tibi copia
manabit ad plenum benigno 15
ruris honorum opulenta cornu.
hic in reducta valle caniculae
vitabis aestus et fide Teia
dices laborantis in uno
Penelopen vitreamque Circen. 20
hic innocentis pocula Lesbii
duces sub umbra, nec Semeleius
cum Marte confundet Thyoneus
proelia, nec metues protervum
suspecta Cyrum, ne male dispari 25
incontinentis iniciat manus
et scindat haerentem coronam
crinibus inmeritamque vestem.
Swift Faunus often exchanges Lycaeus for lovely Lucretilis and ever wards off fiery heat and rainy winds from my goats. Harmlessly through the safe wood the wandering wives of the smelly husband search for lurking arbutus (5) and clumps of thyme, nor do the female kids fear green vipers or the wolves of Mars whenever, Tyndaris, (10) the valleys and the smooth rocks of reclining Ustica have resounded with the sweet pipe.
The gods protect me, my piety and inspiration are dear to the gods. Here for you from kindly horn Abundance, rich in the glories of the countryside, will pour forth to the full. (15)
Here in a withdrawn valley you will avoid the swelterings of the Dog-star and you will tell on Tean lyre of Penelope and deceitful Circe, in turmoil over one man. (20) Here in the shade you will quaff goblets of harmless wine from Lesbos, nor will Semeleian Thyoneus embroil battles with Mars, nor, as object of jealousy, will you fear that forward Cyrus lay unrestrained hands on one scarcely his equal, (25) and tear the garland that clings to your hair and your undeserving garment.
Homer is again part of the speaker’s world, this time, as we saw, in the form of the Odyssey rather than the Iliad. And, even though the subject matter is erotic—the mutual love of Penelope and Circe for Odysseus—nevertheless Tyndaris/Helen is to sing of it on a Tean lyre, namely in the manner of Anacreon. Once more, different genres are juxtaposed. In particular, once again epic is, as it were, domesticated to lyric, and once again any threatening elements, here in the person of Cyrus and his propensity for physicality, are absent. Helen and her lyric song are safe in Horace’s sequestered vale and an enhancement of it.
There may be a touch of humor here, too, as complement to the lightening of genre. Though at Epi. 1.16.10 Horace mentions a flock (pecus) in connection with his Sabine farm, the first three stanzas of C. 1.17 offer the only detailed mention of what we might call animal husbandry in Horace’s poetry. We move from she-goats (capellis, 3), those “wives of a smelly spouse” (olentis uxores mariti, 9), to female kids (haediliae, 9). All are protected in this magic environment from any danger, be it from the elements, such as heat or rainy winds, or from inimical fauna such as snakes and wolves. But goatherds are implicitly present as well, because the rocks reverberate with the sound of the “sweet pipe” (dulci fistula, 10). In fact, we find ourselves, suitably enough in a poem much concerned with poetry, introduced into the domain of pastoral song, a domain that would have been familiar to all of Horace’s readers from the Eclogues of Virgil and of which he offers an incisive vignette at C. 4.12.9–12, a poem dedicated to his fellow poet and one with which we will later be concerned. If we were to choose an appropriate symbol for pastoral poetry, it would be the reed pipe.
The presence of such music and music-making would be apropos for C. 1.17 alone were it not for two further details. By bringing Helen into his world, the speaker becomes implicitly a figure for Paris, poet-seducer of a lyre-playing Helen, drawn into a setting compatible with both. But Horace would also have us remember the striking way that he introduces Paris to us in C. 1.15, with its first word, pastor.9 It was as tender of herds on Mt. Ida that the Trojan youth was asked to make his famous judgment between Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite when, by opting for the goddess of love, he gained Helen as prize. The latter-day Sabine herder, Horace, guarding “my goats” (capellis meis) and associating himself with the sound of the reed pipe, will indeed, we trust, lure his own Helen into his version of pastoral, which in turn will harmonize with her own talent. But there will now be no Trojan War as a result. Just as the speaker in the preceding poem renounces iambic invective for love-lyric, so here Homer’s grandeur is tamed to the lyre’s gentleness. Whatever violence Tyndaris might have experienced in another sphere is banished from the poet’s precinct of pastoral and lyric melody.
As we have noted elsewhere, it is a working principle with the lyric poetry of Horace that when the poets of archaic Greece are mentioned, either explicitly or by implication, through allusion or from comments in the scholiastic tradition, then the work of Catullus will also often be part of the intellectual background. In this case, where we have Homer, Stesi-chorus, Anacreon, and Bacchylides as potential influences, we would also expect to find Horace’s great Republican forbear present. Let us turn first to C. 1.16, where the immediate impact of Catullus is most strongly felt. Then we will look at the adjacent odes.
When Horace himself thinks of the iambic tradition, it is to Archilochus that his mind turns,10 and his proud boast, in connection with his accomplishment in the Epodes, is that (Epi. 1.19.23–25)
. . . Parios ego primus iambos
ostendi Latio, numeros animosque secutus
Archilochi, non res et agentia verba Lycamben.
I was the first to show to Latium the iambs of Paros [birthplace of Archilochus], following the rhythms and the spirit of Archilochus, but not the matter and the language hounding Lycambes.11
When Porphyrio, in his comment on C. 1.16.22–24, thinks of the use of iambic poetry ad maledicendum, for abuse or slander, it is to Catullus that he turns for an example of invective writing. He cites a poem, knowledge of which comes only from his mention (fr. 3 Mynors): At non effugies meos iambos (“But you will not escape from my iambs”). He could presumably have turned to poems still extant in the Catullan corpus, such as 40, whose opening lines suggest the hostile force of the poet’s iambi:
Quaenam te mala mens, miselle Ravide,
agit praecipitem in meos iambos?
What unfortunate turn of mind, poor little Ravidus, drives you headlong against my iambs?
Or we have 54.6–7, where the ire of the addressee, in all probability Julius Caesar, will be aroused against Catullus’s iambs, innocent because veracious:
irascere iterum meis iambis
inmerentibus, unice imperator.
You will be angry again at my undeserving iambi, one-of-a-kind sovereign.
But there are two poems in the Catullan corpus that have direct bearing on C. 1.16, both of which in different ways are concerned with iambic verse.
The first is poem 36, a witty address to the annales Volusi, the epic chronicle of a certain Volusius, the sheets of whose poetry will replace Catullus’s own in fulfilling a vow of the poet’s girl (3–8):
nam sanctae Veneri Cupidinique
vovit, si sibi restitutus essem
desissemque truces vibrare iambos,
electissima pessimi poetae
scripta tardipedi deo daturam
infelicibus ustulanda lignis.
For she vowed to holy Venus and to Cupid that, if I were restored to her and ceased to brandish fierce iambs, (5) she would offer the choicest writings of the worst of poets to the limping-footed god to be roasted on unlucky logs.
The poem continues with a fulsome, mock-hymnic apostrophe to Venus to approve the vow, and concludes with a final invitation to Volusius’s disreputable trash to round matters off and “make your way into the fire” (venite in ignem, 18).12
Both Catullus 36 and C. 1.16 revolve around the notion of a poet having to make amends for producing iambs insulting to his girl, both by ceasing to write such invective and by disposing of the offending verse. The act of annihilation on the part of the girl, upon which Catullus expands, Horace leaves simply by reference to alternative methods of burning by fire or drowning in water (3–4):
. . . sive flamma
sive mari libet Hadriano.
In Catullus we have fire mentioned twice, in the form, first, of Vulcan’s ill-starred timber on which to burn the criminally guilty verse, then of the final flames. There is no mention of water, but Horace’s mari Hadriano as the place, or means, of putting an end to the dread verse may have been inspired by Catullus’s mention of Durrachium, the “inn of the Adriatic” (Hadriae tabernam, 15), among the extensive list of places where Venus finds suitable habitation.
At this point Horace leaves his offending iambi behind for the poem’s central subject, the injurious evils of irae. Only when he abandons abstract for concrete and returns again, at the ode’s finale, to the iambs themselves do we find a further aspect of commonality between the two poems. The abandonment of iambi, fierce for Catullus, criminal and swift for Horace, is the precondition for the pairs of lovers to become reconciled to each other. In the case of Catullus, it is the restoration of himself to his puella that is in question (restitutus essem, 4). He has been so chagrined by her behavior that he has abandoned her, leaving as their only point of contact the iambic weapons that are his source of menace. For Horace, his iambs, and the youthful fervor that engendered them, are what has driven his girl away. He asks that she “return her spirit” (animum . . . reddas, 28). This is the same verb that, at line 16 of his poem, Catullus had used for the proper “discharge” of his vow to the goddess of love and her child (redditum . . . votum). He returns to his girl, and the vow is appropriately “returned” to Venus.
Here, too, interplay of genres is worth watching. Catullus uses an iambic meter, hendecasyllabics, for his poem as part of its humor because, although the relinquishment of invective is part of the poem’s plot, vituperation can still be the order of the day, since the poet’s addressee is the annales Volusi, not his girl, as is the case with Horace. Nevertheless, as poet seeks out other poetry to replace his electissima with someone else’s, it is to epic, or epic-like, verse, not to poetry akin to his own, that Catullus turns (at 95.7–8 the annales Volusi are compared to the Zmyrna of Cinna, to the former’s great disadvantage). Horace, because he is apostrophizing his girl, can only use the lyric of forgiveness as a gesture of change, when proposing the renunciation of iambic verse. Perhaps, too, this disavowal of past performance can be seen in Horace’s use of the meter of Alcaeus to demonstrate an aversion from Stesichorus and from the tristia for which he must make amends. In sum, Catullus can cleverly fulfill his mistress’s vow by substituting a bad poet’s bad epic for his calumniating iambs. Horace can complete his recantation by changing his tune, as it were, within his own putative poetic production, from iamb to lyric, from Stesichorean slander to Alcaic love-song.
The second Catullan poem that powerfully influenced Horace here is 42, one of his wittiest and most famous. It consists of an address to hen-decasyllables, in hendecasyllabic meter, asking them to take the initiative themselves to demand back their writing tablets, which a “base adulteress” (moecha turpis, 3) refuses to turn over to the speaker. What follows is a miniature drama in which the speaker takes the lead in putting the personified verses to work to regain their property,13 and in which we learn a great deal about the whore by indirection, as we did about the puella in poem 36, even though there the lackluster, overwritten verses of the annales Volusi are apostrophized. The hendecasyllables in 42 first must learn who the creature is (7–12):
. . . illa quam videtis,
turpe incedere, mimice ac moleste
ridentem catuli ore Gallicani. 10
circumsistite eam, et reflagitate
“moecha putida, redde codicillos,
redde, putida moecha, codicillos!”
She whom you see strutting repulsively along, grinning annoyingly the way a mime-actress would, with the muzzle of a Gallic whelp.Surround her and demand back from her: (10) “Stinking adulteress, give back our writing-tablets, give back, stinking adulteress, our writing-tablets.”
The first flagitatio, in which the speaker-poet and his creatures join in shouting their demands, has no positive result. So, in the hope of at least bringing a blush “from the iron face of the dog” (ferreo canis . . . ore, 17), they pursue the invective by repeating the same lines in a higher voice, as if iteration and increased volume will join with the words themselves magically to effect the desired end. When this effort, too, fails, the only recourse is a change of style, on which the poem ends (21–24):
sed nil proficimus, nihil movetur.
mutanda est ratio modusque nobis,
siquid proficere amplius potestis:
“pudica et proba, redde codicillos.”
But we’re making no headway. She isn’t moved at all. We must change our method and mode, if you can somehow gain a better issue:
“Chaste and upright, give back our writing-tablets.”
Alteration of tone, illustrated in the brilliant assonantal leap from putida to pudica, when the moecha now hears what the speaker imagines that she will like, even though his veracity is questionable, produces a laugh for the reader sharing in the entertainment. The outcome of the “plot” is never revealed.
In C. 1.16 Horace reveals his debt to this tour de force in ways both particular and general. The most specific reference occurs in the last three lines, which offer a canny commentary on the parallel three lines in Catullus (C. 1.16.25–28):
. . . nunc ego mitibus
mutare quaero tristia, dum mihi
fias recantatis amica
opprobriis animumque reddas.
A form of the verb muto initiates the antepenultimate line in each poem. In the final verses, Catullus’s proba is absorbed into, and suffers witty metamorphosis through, opprobriis, and the verb reddere, which appears six times in Catullus’s twenty-four lines, most pointedly as the poem’s next-to-last word, gains even more prominence in Horace for its final position.14
We will probably never know what influence the palinodes of Stesichorus exerted on Horace as he wrote (the one surviving fragment offers little help). But Catullus’s poem we have before us, and the weight the earlier poet carries is important to trace, if only to clarify the differences between the two. The assimilation of proba into opprobriis can serve as synecdoche for more general observations. Catullus’s adjective, though a clever way of telling the moecha what she is not, reverses the opprobria, the insults that he and his cohort of invective lines have hurled at her until this point in the poem. Whatever the diverse ways in which the listener within the poem and the reader outside may interpret the final line, it serves as a retraction of what has been said before. In other words, it is a form of palinode. The miracle of Catullus’s poem is that it is at once an invective poem and a recantation, however parodic. The change in the content and tone of the spoken addresses to the moecha serves to illustrate the typological distinctions. The mutation of one, over the course of the poem, anticipates the mutation of the other.
Horace also ends on a speculative note: Will the addressee give back her soul to the speaker any more than the adulteress will return the writing tablets? By turning to lyric as the vehicle for his poem, Horace makes a gesture that Catullus ignores. Whatever the intellectual tergiversations of 42, its sweep remains hendecasyllabic, which is to say that, whatever the apparent change of tone at the end, the framework of invective remains. By writing in lyric that specifically replaces an iambic past, Horace makes it clear in generic terms that his recantation takes palpable form in its means of expression. When Catullus uses modus at the end of his poem, he is attending to the manner in which he is performing, to the tone of his utterance. Horace, in line 2 of his ode, expands, varies, and enriches this same word in offering to his girl the opportunity to dispose of his negative iambs. For him, the modus spells the “finale” of an ill-conceived poetic adventure. But it also suggests that the end of one poetic mode is the beginning of another, one that may have a happier outcome.
Horace himself, in epode 17, offers further commentary on the relationship of the two poems that furnishes as well a direct transition between them. We come in on the protagonist at the mercy of the witch Canidia. He prays that she stop torturing him, admits that he was wrong in questioning her power, and promises expiation. Her reply, which concludes the poem, offers him little hope, one reason perhaps being that sarcasm permeates his attempt to mollify her, an attempt that flaunts its own mendacity (Epodes 17.37–45):
effare: iussas cum fide poenas luam,
paratus expiare, seu poposceris
centum iuvencos, sive mendaci lyra 40
voles sonare: “tu pudica, tu proba
perambulabis astra sidus aureum.”
infamis Helenae Castor offensus vice
fraterque magni Castoris victi prece
adempta vati reddidere lumina:
et tu—potes nam—solve me dementia. 45
Speak out: ready to make expiation, I will faithfully pay the penalties you order, whether you will demand a hundred bullocks, or whether you will wish to resound on lying lyre: “You, chaste, you, upright, (40) will parade, as a golden constellation, among the stars.” Castor, angered by the circumstances of Helen’s defamation, and the brother of mighty Castor, won over by prayer, gave sight, which they had taken away, back to the bard. So do you—for the power is yours—release me from my madness. (45)
Another of Horace’s ancient commentators, Pseudo-Acro, in his comment on the opening line of C. 1.16, quotes lines 42–44 as offering explicit explanation of the parallel to Stesichorus that Horace leaves the reader to assume as intellectual background for his ode. But the direct notice of Catullus 42 in line 40 confirms not only that the epode looks backward to Catullus’s poem, but that C. 1.16 does so as well.15 Catullus seems as primary a touchstone on which Horace tests his ingenuity as Stesichorus.
The speaker’s consideration of the “lying lyre” (mendaci lyra) brings to the surface the prevarication at the end of 42 of Catullus’s persona, who flatters his subject into believing what he has led us to understand is an untruth. The lyre is mendacious on two counts. First, it utters lies. Second, it is false symbolically, giving vent to lyric statement—“You parade through the heavens as a golden constellation”—when in fact its utterance is in the iambic tradition.16 Yet the mention of lyra also duly serves as another means of transition between Catullus 42 and C. 1.16, because, in this tripartite progression, by the time that we reach the ode, we do in fact have a true lyric expression that puts behind it both Catullus’s invective and the epode’s less than candid pretense at lyric discourse within an iambic context.
The epode mediates between Catullus 42 and C. 1.16 in another way. There has been much debate about the root meaning of the name Canidia. Perhaps Horace had several etymologies in mind, all of which resonate in the poems where she is mentioned.17 But in the context of epode 17 and its Catullan heritage, none stands out more pointedly than a connection with canis (“dog”). Horace’s mining of 42.24 at Epodes 17.40 reminds us that the chief characteristic of the moecha, when confronted by the speaker and his powerful verse-allies, is her dog-like face. At line 9, we remember, she is “grinning with the muzzle of a Gallic whelp” (ridentem catuli ore Gallicani), and at 17, the hendecasyllables try to elicit a blush “from the iron face of the dog” (ferreo canis . . . ore)—in vain, of course, because she lacks both modesty and its close companion, shame.
But there is no figure in ancient literature with whom the attribute “dog-faced” is more strikingly associated than with Helen
of Troy, strikingly because such a characteristic is so at odds with her physical beauty. In all four Homeric appearances
of the analogy, Helen is speaking of herself. At Iliad 6.344 and 356 she describes herself to Hector as a dog 
and at both 3.180, as she talks with Priam, and Odyssey 4.145, with her husband Menelaus, she sees herself as “dog-eyed” 
which is to say as someone visibly lacking in shame.18
Implicitly, therefore, in epode 17, because of the speaker’s self-equation with Stesichorus at 42–44, Canidia serves as a figure for Helen, in however perverse a form. In particular, she is able to cure his “blindness” if he voices the correct apology. And the whole of C. 1.16, as we have seen, is on one level a further working out of the analogy between the speaker as Stesichorus and the addressee as Helen, more beautiful than her beautiful mother because, among other reasons, half divine. The invective tone of Catullus 42 and epode 17 is purged by the time that we reach C. 1.16, with its detached rumination on the negative capabilities of anger framed by the warmth of its request to the filia pulcrior. Nevertheless, Catullus 42 is on a par with epode 17 as a source for the later Horace’s inspiration, as dog-faced Helen suffers, in C. 1.16, a final, ameliorating transformation from moecha to amica, a transformation also reflected in the extraordinary poetry that documents this metamorphosis.
Helen as moecha also appears in another Catullan poem that has bearing on the first of the Horatian triad we have been examining. The only direct mention of Helen in the Catullan corpus occurs at 68.87–88, in connection with her rape and the ensuing conflict:
nam tum Helenae raptu primores Argivorum
coeperat ad sese Troia ciere viros.
For then, because of the rape of Helen, Troy had begun to summon to itself the chief men of the Greeks.
The particular context for warring is elaborated at 101–4:
ad quam tum properans fertur <lecta> undique pubes
Graeca penetralis deseruisse focos,
ne Paris abducta gavisus libera moecha
otia pacato degeret in thalamo.
At that time youth of Greece, [chosen] from everywhere about, is said to have hastened to [Troy], leaving behind their homes’ hearths, lest Paris, enjoying the adulteress he had abducted, pass unconstrained leisure in a wedding-chamber at peace.
One of the key words here for students of Catullus is otia, because the poet uses it so memorably in poem 51. There, as we have seen, it stands out for its appearance in triple anaphora in a concluding stanza that is unique with Catullus vis-à-vis his Greek original (13–16):
otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est:
otio exsultas nimiumque gestis:
otium et reges prius et beatas
perdidit urbes.
Leisure, Catullus, is troublesome to you. In your leisure you run riot and act uncontrollably. Before this, leisure has destroyed both kings and wealthy cities.
Catullus here posits a scenario, familiar in his poetry, where the detached, percipient speaker addresses a “Catullus” so deeply involved in a situation that he does not appreciate its hazards. In this case, it is his own adulterous relationship with Lesbia that poses a danger.19 The poem as a whole, appropriately a translation from Sappho, both deepens the threatening physicality of its Aeolic model and ends with a dynamic act of abstraction that has the effect of hammering home to the naïve addressee the peril that he is in. The speaker’s passionate dispassion should not only bring “Catullus” to his senses but also establish a similar distance for one presently “acting without restraint.”
The references to otium in the two Catullan poems serve as commentary on each other. As befits its powerful, essential act of generalization, poem 51 leaves in a deliberately vague plural who, or what, might be the “kings and wealthy cities,” destroyed for becoming engulfed in ominous circumstances akin to those with which the “Catullus” of poem 51 is involved. Poem 68 presents an obvious example. It is the moments of adulterous leisure shared by Paris and Helen—and otium and its adjective otiosus are elsewhere, as we have seen, associated by Catullus with erotic enterprise—that will cause the downfall of a specific king, Priam, and his particular city, Troy.20 This is the frightening inheritance of the protagonist of poem 51.
Beatas urbes may anticipate mention of altis urbibus in the subsequent poem (C. 1.16.18), just as the latter’s central notion, irae (C. 1.16.9 and 17), may hark back to otium as Horace’s abstraction of choice to exemplify a vice that can destroy cities (we remember that “the angry fleet of Achilles,” iracunda . . . classis Achillei, is the final instrument of Troy’s downfall in the preceding poem, C. 1.15.33–34). But it is primarily C. 1.15 that resonates with our Catullan poems. Take, for instance, Nereus’s opening words to the Trojan adventurer (C. 1.15.5–8):
. . . “mala ducis avi domum
quam multo repetet Graecia milite
coniurata tuas rumpere nuptias
et regnum Priami vetus.”
Lines 5–7 could serve as summary of the excerpts we quoted earlier from Catullus 68, and the final phrase replaces Catullus’s reges (51.15) while looking specifically to Troy’s aged ruler. Moreover, the subsequent description of Paris’s unmartial lyre-playing also glances back to Catullus (C. 1.15.14–18):
. . . “grataque feminis
inbelli cithara carmina divides 15
nequiquam thalamo gravis
hastas et calami spicula Cnosii vitabis.”
Horace divides, and varies, Catullus’s pacato thalamo (68.104), repeating the second word, which he uses here for the only time in his career, and replacing pacato with inbelli, the peaceful wedding chamber, soon to be disrupted by war, with the unwarlike, feminized Paris and his lyre, in a setting more suitable for masculine heroes and epic deeds.21
Finally, we have the link between Catullus’s four interacting uses of otium in poem 51 and the ingrato otio with which Nereus overwhelms the speedy winds in the opening stanza of C. 1.15, thus setting the narrative stage for his speech. The synchysis at 3–4—ingrato celeris . . . otio / ventos—suggests that winds and quiet are incompatible entities. Leisure is unpleasant to the winds because it is unwonted and goes against the grain of their nature. But, in the larger context of C. 1.15, and especially when examined against the Catullan background, the phrase ingrato otio looks also to Paris, Helen, and Troy. The otium of calm at sea is “unpleasant” to Paris because it postpones the otium of the future at Troy, the time of “songs pleasant for women,” of leisure for love without limit. But the reader is expected to remember Catullus’s libera otia and their potentially ruinous results, some of which Horace goes on to detail.
For Catullus, otium prepares the way for, or merges with, destructive sexuality. What begins as gratum may soon become its opposite. We think, for instance, of the ingrato amore, the thankless, unrequited, quasi-deadly love from which the speaker prays for relief at 76.6. Some of this same tone spills over into the opening of Horace’s ode. The otium of Paris and Helen will presumably become gratum when they reach Troy, but the time of bliss will be fleeting. The adulterous journey from Sparta, the mise en scène for Horace’s great ode, will elicit in response another journey from Greece to Troy, one this time bent on anger and revenge. If the ingrato otio of unexpected calm at sea leads to a time of (gratum) otium at Troy, this will in turn prove as destructive as it is short-lived, a still point that mimics the ill-boding lull from which C. 1.15 takes its start, with the sea god’s frenzied prophecy powerfully anticipating the fervid deeds of which it tells.
We have previously discussed the further meanings of otium for Catullus and Horace, especially in connection with the idea of poetic rivalry.22 Here I would like only to take note of the one moment where Horace is deliberately alluding directly to the end of Catullus 51, namely the opening stanzas of C. 2.16, mentioned earlier:
Otium divos rogat in patenti
prensus Aegaeo, simul atra nubes
condidit lunam neque certa fulgent
sidera nautis,
otium bello furiosa Thrace, 5
otium Medi pharetra decori,
Grosphe, non gemmis neque purpura ve-
nale nec auro.
Someone trapped in the open Aegean asks the gods for peace, as soon as a black cloud has buried the moon and the sure stars do not gleam for sailors, Thrace wild in war asks for peace, (5) the Parthians, handsome with their quiver, ask for peace, not to be bought, Grosphus, with gems or purple or gold.
What follows is a poem not on the destructiveness of Catullan otium but on the abstraction as a necessary form of calm and quiet, defined here by Horace as lack of external ambition and as an unshaken sense of inner security in which the possessor lives a life-style that is “slender,” whether that be illustrated in the modesty of one’s exterior presentation—a gleaming saltcellar on a slender (tenui, 14) board—or of one’s interior simplicity and lack of elaboration, the slender (tenuem, 38) spirit of the Greek muse that the speaker-poet can claim as his own, the spiritual tranquility that lies at the core of Horace’s creativity.
By deliberately beginning where Catullus ends, by placing a triple anaphora at his poem’s start, Horace pointedly asks us to read the two poems as a sequence and therefore to watch the differences between himself and his predecessor. Catullus’s extraordinary gesture of originality in his concluding stanza, a final breaking from the Sapphic tradition, only adumbrated in the preceding segment of the poem, that serves to comment on it from the double vision of lover as poet and poet as lover, is picked up by Horace in an equally astonishing burst of originality. This novelty is highlighted by the challenge Horace offers Catullus in the words of a speaker who examines the meaning of otium from a series of new angles, foreign to the earlier poet’s ordinary usage.
Both poems are meditations on self-distance. Catullus pulls himself aloof in his final stanza to ponder the potential disaster facing the “Catullus” that he apostrophizes, imagined to be suffering from the same symptoms whose ruinous possibilities he has just clinically described, with the help of Sappho. Horace detaches himself from Catullus’s detachment, and holds up the poem not as an act of self-consciousness or of candid self-revelation, but as a mirror of Grosphus to Grosphus. An already self-aware speaker lectures Grosphus, the “javelin,” whose aims in life are questioned and revalued as the poem evolves from general to particular.23 For Catullus, otium activates a combination of eroticism and creativity whose intensity can readily turn deadly. For Horace, at least here, otium is the counterbalance to energy misused, the indwelling calm and self-mastery that serves as one defining characteristic of the Horatian muse.24
Taken together, the two poems form an extended chiasmus that pivots on the two sets of anaphora of the word otium, which at once converge and diverge. Catullus looks first at the details of physical symptoms, culminating in the terrifying, non-Sapphic phrase, “My eyes are covered by twin night” (gemina teguntur / lumina nocte). He then in his final, novel quatrain expands particular to universal, one person’s private emotional drama to history’s more general sweep, with the individual “Catullus” blending by synecdoche into the larger domain of kings and wealthy cities. With Horace we enter a world where blackness and fury, duly reminiscent of Catullus but now placed away from humankind in nature’s celestial doings, merely typify the threatened existence of the misguidedly ambitious for whom otium becomes a necessity when their lives are in peril. Though Grosphus is apostrophized in the second stanza, impersonal generality largely prevails through the course of the ode. It is only in the final stanzas that universal slides into particular, and the chiasmus is completed as Grosphus and the speaker take over and bring the poem to an end, Grosphus with his riches, his interlocutor with his slim muse and aloof stance.25
Let me in conclusion turn back to our Horatian trio to look at one last notice by Horace of Catullus, this time from C. 1.17 back to Catullus 35. The only occasions in each poet’s oeuvre where the phrase inicere manus occurs are at 35.9–10 and C. 1.17.26 respectively. The two appearances of this Roman technical sign for possession (“to lay hands on”) seem diverse. In the first situation, a girl is imagined throwing her hands around the neck of Caecilius to delay his setting out to visit the speaker, something the apostrophized papyrus is expected to command. In the second, Tyndaris is to be shielded, in the speaker’s sequestered environment, from Cyrus and the violent hands that he might otherwise lay on her. Each poem has a trio of protagonists. In Catullus, the narrator and his stand-in, the papyrus-poem, want Caecilius to come to them, though his girl holds him back. In Horace, the speaker invites Helen to join him in a setting that forbids Cyrus entry.
But one factor links these invitation poems gracefully together: both are concerned with poets and poetry. The first line of poem 35 represents Caecilius as poeta tener, a writer of love-poetry who is himself a lover, perhaps with implications of femininity. He is in the process of writing a Dindymi domina (14), or Magna Mater (18), which, though unfinished, has the goddess of love inspiring it, if we can judge from the adverb venuste (17). Catullus acknowledges both its quality and its erotic force by claiming for the girl, who has fallen in love with Caecilius because of the charm of his verse, an intelligence greater than Sappho’s muse (Sapphica puella / musa doctior, 16–17). But if the puella surpasses one of the masters of archaic Greek lyric, presumably we are meant to understand that “Catullus” outdoes both the girl and her Greek poetic touchstone in his understanding of, affection for, and parallelism with Caecilius. After all, his poem 63 offers bountiful evidence that the “mistress of Dindy-mum” also fascinated him as a topic,26 as did its central figure Attis, who is twice called tener, like the poet who writes about him.27 Both poetry and, presumably, sexuality render it appropriate that Caecilius make the journey to Catullus and thereby confirm their equivalence.
We may say much the same for Helen and “Horace.” She is invited as lover into the poet’s world because she is also to some degree an allegory for Greek poetry, singing Anacreon’s version of the Odyssey’s eroticism. She is taming epic to lyric, as Horace, in the tradition of Stesichorus and Bacchylides, does in C. 1.15. But she is also accomplishing her mission in a Latin setting. Her arrival in the Sabine hills hints at something of the lyric poet Horace’s accomplishment not only in these three splendid odes but in his total lyric corpus as well, as he leads “Aeolian song to Italian measures” (Aeolium carmen ad Italos / . . . modos, C. 3.30.13–14). This is exactly what the singer Helen will do, as she quaffs the harmless wine of Lesbos in the shadow of Lucretilis and Ustica, for she, after all, is Horace as well as his recreation.