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Horace’s hymn to Bacchus (Odes 2.19): politics and poetics

Stephen Harrison

Bacchum in remotis carmina rupibus

uidi docentem, credite posteri,

Nymphasque discentis et auris

capripedum Satyrorum acutas.

euhoe, recenti mens trepidat metu 5

plenoque Bacchi pectore turbidum

laetatur. euhoe, parce Liber,

parce, graui metuende thyrso.

fas peruicacis est mihi Thyiadas

uinique fontem lactis et uberes 10

cantare riuos atque truncis

lapsa cauis iterare mella;

fas et beatae coniugis additum

stellis honorem tectaque Penthei

disiecta non leni ruina, 15

Thracis et exitium Lycurgi.

tu flectis amnes, tu mare barbarum,

tu separatis uuidus in iugis

nodo coerces uiperino

Bistonidum sine fraude crinis. 20

tu, cum parentis regna per arduum

cohors Gigantum scanderet inpia,

Rhoetum retorsisti leonis

unguibus horribilisque mala,

quamquam choreis aptior et iocis 25

ludoque dictus non sat idoneus

pugnae ferebaris; sed idem

pacis eras mediusque belli.

te uidit insons Cerberus aureo

cornu decorum leniter atterens 30

cauda et recedentis trilingui

ore pedes tetigitque crura.

I have seen Bacchus teaching his songs

Amid distant rocks – believe me, you who come after –

With the Nymphs as his pupils and the sharp ears

Of the goat-footed satyrs.

Euhoe! My mind trembles with fresh fear

And rejoices confusedly with a heart full of Bacchus:

Euhoe! Spare me, Liber, spare me

You who are to be feared for your deadly thyrsus.

It is right for me to sing of the tireless Maenads,

The fountain of wine and rich streams of milk,

And tell again of the honey flowing

From hollow tree trunks:

Right too to sing of the ornament of your blest consort

Added to the constellations, and the house of Pentheus

Scattered in no gentle collapse,

And the end of Thracian Lycurgus.

You turn the course of rivers and the foreign sea,

You, wet with wine, in isolated hills

Bind harmlessly with a band of snakes

The hair of the women of Thrace.

You, when the impious squad of Giants climbed

Your father’s realm through the heights,

Thrust back Rhoetus, terrible to behold

For your lion’s claws and jaws,

Though, said to be apter for dances, games

And sport, you were rumoured to be

Not fit enough for fighting: but you were the same

Central figure in both peace and war.

Cerberus saw you without trying to harm you,

Beautiful with your golden horn, gently rubbing you

With his tail, and as you departed he touched your feet

And calves with his three-tongued mouth.

Introduction

This much-studied poem¹ takes the form of a hymn to Bacchus, though its opening vision-scenario is unusual for a hymnic poem.² In my view, its opening epiphany does not report a personal religious experience of Horace the historical individual;³ there is no reason to believe that this particular statement by the poet/narrator (or any other) necessarily represents an actual event.⁴ Hymns to Bacchus/ Dionysus go back to those transmitted amongst the Homeric Hymns (the fragmentary 1, the 59-line 7 and very brief 26), though Odes 2.19 interestingly avoids the main topics of those two poems (the god’s escape from Tyrrhenian pirates and his early life in Nysa). There are clear links with established religious language: Albert Henrichs has shown that this ode presents a number of formal elements also found in Dionysiac aretalogies.⁵ Though I acknowledge these cultic connections, I analyse this poem as an example of the literary presentation of a divine encounter, parallel to that of Hesiod with the Muses on Helicon at the beginning of the Theogony, or that of Callimachus with Apollo at the beginning of the Aetia; in both those scenes programmatic statements are famously made about poetry, and I will suggest that Odes 2.19 too has important messages about Horatian poetics. I will also argue that the figure of Bacchus has considerable political significance for the poem’s original readers in the context of the 20s BC.

I The choice of deity

There are several significant motivations for the choice of Bacchus as inspiring deity in this poem, rather than the Apollo of Callimachus, or the Muses of Hesiod. First, Bacchus is a god widely associated with different types of lyric poetry related to dancing (dithyramb and hyporchema), and thus suits the lyric genre of the Odes. The desire to echo the atmosphere of the dithyrambs of Greek lyric poetry may possibly be a feature here: these were originally exuberant choral poems in praise of Dionysus (cf. Archilochus fr. 120 W.), though the extant works and fragments with this title show a rather broader range of topics.⁶ A wider currency for the theme of Dionysiac inspiration in Greek lyric is suggested by a fragment of a hyporchema by Pratinas (c. 500 BC) describing ecstatic dancing while possessed by the god (fr. 1 PMG) and by the extensive strophic paean to Dionysus composed by Philodamus in the fourth century BC (Collectanea Alexandrina pp. 165–71). Second, another factor influencing Bacchus’ presence in the Odes is his role as the god of wine, highly relevant to a lyric collection which often treats the symposium and the consumption of wine as a theme and setting for poems. Both these elements are also to be found in the other lyric hymn to Bacchus in the Odes, 3.25, where the possessed poet invokes Bacchus and his vinous inspiration in the cause of praising the future god Augustus. Third, the poet is also surely conscious of appropriating for his lyric a god who also had a strong generic association with Greek tragedy, and this link with a different and notionally ‘higher’ literary genre perhaps reflects the poet’s ambition as the collection of Odes 1–3 approaches Book 3 and the elevated Roman Odes.⁷ This rich literary history of Bacchus in Greek tragedy also makes a him a channel for a key technique of the Odes in appropriating material strongly associated with other literary kinds, ‘generic enrichment’ (see section III below).

This chapter also argues that the selection of Bacchus in 2.19 is political as well as poetical, and that the poem makes a clear connection between this god and Augustus. Since the battle of Actium and the subsequent foundation of the temple of Palatine Apollo at Rome as a celebration of its victory, Apollo had been perceived as the god with closest connections to Augustus, even to the extent that rumours circulated that Apollo was Augustus’ father (Suet. Div. Aug. 92);⁸ but in Odes 2.19, as in Odes 1.2, where at the poem’s climax he suggests a link between the young Caesar and Mercury,⁹ Horace seems to add a further deity to be identified with Augustus. The two poems seem to present an encomiastic common strategy, to create a link between the young Caesar and a wider range of gods; this is paralleled in the dedication of Virgil’s Georgics, published probably in 29 BC, a few years before the Odes, which lists twelve traditional gods of agriculture and then turns to the young Caesar, seen as a potential new god who could oversee earth, sea or heaven (1.24–35). In all cases the divine links of the leader are emphasised and extended. As we will see, the choice of Bacchus is not only an extension of divine links for the young Caesar; it is also an appropriation for Caesarian purposes of a god previously closely linked with the young Caesar’s most dangerous rival and enemy, Marcus Antonius (Antony).¹⁰

II Bacchus and politics

(a) Identifying with Bacchus – Antony and afterwards

In the late 40s and 30s BC, Antony chose on a number of prominent occasions to identify himself with the god Bacchus/Dionysus, for example on his entrance into Ephesus in 41 and during his stay in Athens in the winter of 38,¹¹ as well as in Egypt; there Dionysus was traditionally identified with the god Osiris, the brother and husband of Isis (cf. Herodotus 2.42) and Cleopatra was keen to present herself as Isis.¹² In all this Antony was following a tradition of Hellenistic kings identifying themselves with Dionysus which went back to Alexander.¹³ In poetry written after the battle of Actium, Antony’s link with Dionysus, like his link with Hercules, seems to be transferred to the young Caesar, the future Augustus, and I would like to argue that this is a possible way of reading Odes 2.19; as we shall see, multiple links can be established between the young god Dionysus and the young Caesar.

One text written a few years before Horace’s ode, and to which it seems to allude, is Tibullus 1.7 (27/26 BC).¹⁴ This is addressed to Messalla, ally of young Caesar at Actium and Antony’s replacement as consul for 31, and its main section praises the qualities of the Egyptian god Osiris, clearly identified with Bacchus as often (1.7.33–48):

Hic docuit teneram palis adiungere uitem,

Hic uiridem dura caedere falce comam;

Illi iucundos primum matura sapores

Expressa incultis uua dedit pedibus.

Ille liquor docuit uoces inflectere cantu,

Mouit et ad certos nescia membra modos,

Bacchus et agricolae magno confecta labore

Pectora tristitiae dissoluenda dedit.

Bacchus et adflictis requiem mortalibus adfert,

Crura licet dura conpede pulsa sonent.

Non tibi sunt tristes curae nec luctus, Osiri,

Sed chorus et cantus et leuis aptus amor,

Sed uarii flores et frons redimita corymbis,

Fusa sed ad teneros lutea palla pedes

Et Tyriae uestes et dulcis tibia cantu

Et leuis occultis conscia cista sacris.

He it was who taught how to join the soft vine to stakes,

He how to cut its green hair with the cruel pruning hook:

For him the ripe grape first produced its delicious flavours,

Pressed by the feet of the uncultivated.

That drink taught voices to modulate in singing,

And moved limbs that knew not how to fixed measures.

Bacchus too granted that the heart of the farmer, worn out

By great labour, should be freed from sorrow.

Bacchus too brings relief to afflicted mortals,

Though his legs clank with the sound of the cruel fetter.

Grim cares or grief do not befit you, Osiris,

But rather dancing and singing and the lightness of love,

But rather colourful flowers and a brow bound with ivy berries

But a yellow dress spreading down to your soft feet,

And Tyrian purple clothes and the pipe sweet in song,

And the light box aware of its secret rites.

The hymnic repetition of pronouns found in the two poems is common enough, but what makes it likely that Horace alludes to Tibullus is the couplet on Bacchus’/Osiris’ penchant for love and the dance: 2.19. 25–6 quamquam choreis aptior et iocis | ludoque dictus appears to pick up 1.7.43–4 Non tibi sunt tristes curae nec luctus, Osiri, | Sed chorus et cantus et leuis aptus amor. This echo is of interest for the political aspect of Bacchus which I have suggested for Odes 2.19. Given that Messalla had recently been a close lieutenant of the young Caesar in his post-Actium Eastern campaigns,¹⁵ Tibullus’ elegy, like Horace’s ode, can be seen as an appropriation of Antony’s previous identification with Bacchus for the now triumphant Caesarian side. Just as Tibullus suggests a clear encomiastic parallel between his addressee Messalla, bringer of peace and civilisation through his military achievements and their peaceful celebrations, and the god Osiris/ Bacchus, bringer of peace and celebration through wine,¹⁶ so Horace suggests a similar symbolic parallel between the young Caesar and Bacchus in Odes 2.19: both the young Caesar and the young Caesar’s lieutenant can be identified with the god previously prominently appropriated by the now departed Antony. Thus the capacity to identify oneself with a particular deity becomes part of the spoils of military success in the war of Actium and its Eastern aftermath.

After Antony’s defeat, identification with Hercules seems to undergo much the same trajectory in becoming the property of his conqueror. Antony had encouraged identification of himself with the great hero and famously claimed descent from him through a fictional son Anton (Plutarch Antony 4.1–3, 60.3),¹⁷ but after Actium we find the same identification taken over for the young Caesar/Augustus: the Odes themselves represent Augustus as parallel to the great Hercules in his return from the West after campaigning in Spain in 24 BC (Odes 3.14.1 Herculis ritu), and Hercules is one of the parallels for the crucial encomiastic idea of Augustus’ future divinity in Odes 3.3 (see the next section). Very similar ideas are found in Virgil’s Aeneid, where Augustus is explicitly compared to Hercules as a world traveller to the benefit of mankind (Aeneid 6.801–2, immediately preceding Bacchus at 803–4), and where in Aeneid 8 something of a trinitarian relationship develops between Aeneas, Hercules and Augustus as divine saviour figures.¹⁸

(b) Bacchus as warrior, conqueror and liberator

One aspect of Bacchus mentioned prominently by Horace in Odes 2.19 points in particular to the contemporary political context of Augustus’ civil war victory. This is the role of Bacchus/Dionysus in the Gigantomachy, the traditional war of the gods and giants, in which he was a prominent combatant, alluded to at 2.19.21–4 and much depicted in ancient art.¹⁹ In other Augustan poetry the battle of Actium could be treated as a version of the Gigantomachy in which the young Caesar plays the role of the victorious Jupiter and his enemies Antony and Cleopatra become the defeated giants; this symbolism has been persuasively detected as underlying one of Horace’s Roman odes (3.4.37–80)²⁰ as well as the description of the battle of Actium on the Shield of Aeneas at Aeneid 8.671–713.²¹ This implied equivalence between Bacchus and Augustus is also found outside Gigantomachic allusion. At Odes 3.3.9–16, in another of the Roman odes, we find Augustus compared to Pollux, Hercules, Bacchus and Quirinus as an example of virtus:

hac arte Pollux et uagus Hercules

enisus arcis attigit igneas,

quos inter Augustus recumbens

purpureo bibet ore nectar,

hac te merentem, Bacche pater, tuae

uexere tigres indocili iugum

collo trahentes, hac Quirinus

Martis equis Acheronta fugit …

It was through this quality that Pollux and wandering Hercules

Strove and touched the fiery heights:

Augustus, reclining with them,

Will drink nectar with crimson mouth;

It was through this quality, Father Bacchus,

That your tigers bore you, fully meriting,

Drawing the yoke with untamed neck, through this quality

That Quirinus fled Acheron on the horses of Mars …

Here again we find the warrior Bacchus with tigers drawing his chariot in triumph after his supposed conquest of India, a feat well known to poets of the Augustan period (cf. e.g. Virgil, Aeneid 6.801–5 and Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.21–2 as well as Odes 2.19); the Eastern victories of the god are clearly to be compared to the Eastern victories of the contemporary Roman leader, another way in which the battle of Actium and its following campaigns can be assimilated to the career of Bacchus. Moreover, the grouping here of Bacchus with Pollux, Hercules, Augustus and Quirinus points to another key element linking him with Augustus; all in Roman thought are mortals who achieve divinity through their personal achievements.²² This is precisely how the Augustan poets come to conceive the status of Augustus himself: the young Caesar is close to the gods, being divi filius, son of a god, as the adoptive son of Julius Caesar who becomes Divus Iulius in 42 BC, but he is not yet a god – that is a status he will achieve after death, after a life of service to mankind. This privileged status is crucial to Augustus’ image making after Actium.

The naming of Bacchus as Liber in Odes 2.19.7 perhaps points to another element of the identification of Augustus and Bacchus in the context of the battle of Actium which is especially important in propaganda terms. T. P. Wiseman has suggested that in Roman culture Bacchus as Liber had long been associated with libertas, ‘freedom’, and the overthrow of tyrants,²³ and Bacchus’ name of Liber is specifically played on in the famous sympotic opening of Horace Odes 1.37, the poet’s celebration of the victory of Actium (1.37.1–2):²⁴

Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero

pulsanda tellus,

Now we must drink, now pound the ground

with the foot of freedom.

The ‘foot of freedom’ specifically identifies Antony and Cleopatra as tyrannical, kingly figures threatening Rome, who have now been deservedly defeated by the young Caesar. The parallel figures to Antony and Cleopatra in Odes 2.19 are the tyrants Pentheus and Lycurgus, who both wrongly resisted the power of the god. The story of the Theban Pentheus, gruesomely torn apart by his own mother who is under the influence of Bacchus as a Bacchant, is famously told in Euripides’ tragedy Bacchae, which is clearly referred to here (see further III below), while the story of Thracian Lycurgus, like Pentheus a monarch who refused to recognise the god’s identity and was driven to death via madness, was narrated in the Lycurgus tetralogy of Aeschylus and the lost Lycurgus of the early Roman tragedian Naevius.²⁵ The story of Pentheus at least can be seen as an analogy for civil war, given that, as for the (ex-)brothers-in-law Augustus and Antony, internecine strife takes place within the family (Pentheus is the god’s first cousin). The figure of Liber in Odes 2.19 can be seen as a clear parallel to Augustus, who uses violence to establish proper order in the world and to defeat and destroy tyrannical figures who represent disorder and lack of respect for the divine character of their opponent.

The element of destructive power inherent in the mythological profile of Bacchus, explicitly invoked in Horace’s poem, might point to reflections on the Augustus/Bacchus analogy which seem to go beyond mere propagandistic encomium. The idea that Bacchus was rumoured not to be capable of military exploits (2.19.26–7 non sat idoneus | pugnae ferebaris) could suggest to some the young Caesar’s capacity to be ill during crucial battles and to leave the main fighting to others (to Antony at Philippi: Suetonius, Augustus 13.1), and to his usual mode of campaigning through legates rather than personal command (Suetonius Augustus 20). But here ferebaris (like dictus in 26) seems crucial: Bacchus’ reputation of non-military character is spectacularly belied by his distinguished deeds in the Gigantomachy, matching Augustus’ presence and decisive personal command at the key battle of Actium (Suetonius, Augustus 17; Plutarch, Antony 65–6). On the other hand, the stress in 2.19 on Bacchus’ capacity to unleash tremendous destructive power might point to the new reality of monarchy at Rome: for better or worse, the salvation of the state now depends on a single individual in whose hands all authority and official title to violence lies, whether an Augustus or a less predictable successor.

(c) Full political allegorisation of Odes 2.19?

So far I have argued that the focus on Bacchus’ military career and his aspect as a mortal who achieves divinity in Odes 2.19 point to his identification with Augustus. Such symbolic allegorisation of the poem is not wholly new; it has been put forward by Koster (1994) and especially by Stevens (1999). Stevens argues not only that Bacchus’ role in the Gigantomachy points to the role of the young Caesar in re-establishing political order in the context of a monstrous threat at the battle of Actium, but also goes on to argue that just as Bacchus is defending his father Jupiter’s realm against the impious Giants, so Augustus should be seen as defending the former realm of his late father Julius Caesar against the threat of Antony and Cleopatra. Here I would be more cautious: though it is true that the young Caesar is proclaimed as the avenger of his dead father in Odes 1.2.44 Caesaris ultor, and in many ways Augustus was indeed Caesar’s monarchical successor, 1.2.44 is the only explicit mention of Caesar in the whole of the Odes. Although the legacy and name of Caesar was naturally vital for the future Augustus, Julius Caesar’s last years, where he was in effect an unconstitutional monarch who was assassinated by his own people and may have made himself into a god receiving cult at Rome, did not present a wholly desirable model for the young Caesar. As Peter White has argued, this explains why Julius Caesar is largely absent from Augustan poetry;²⁶ perhaps the oblique parentis regna at 2.19.21 reflects the dangers of too explicit a Caesar/Jupiter parallel.

Stevens also suggests that the scene in which Cerberus fawns on Dionysus is ‘a meeting of Octavian and a sexually submissive Egypt’ (292); this is not wholly unattractive, given that the normally fearsome but now fawning hound of the Underworld might reflect the defeated theriomorphic dog-god Anubis, presented elsewhere in Augustan poetry as one of the invidious bizarreries of the Egyptian culture of Cleopatra lined up against the Roman/Olympian gods at Actium (Virgil, Aeneid 8.698; Propertius 3.11.41). Stevens further argues that the nymphs and satyrs of the opening stanza are symbols of the ‘licentiousness’ (286) of the followers of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium; as he argues it, Horace’s poem stages the contest between the young Caesar and Antony for the right to identify with Bacchus. I would see Bacchus from the start as a positive figure, and his audience as reflecting one view of the audience of the Odes; as we will see below, the listening nymphs and satyrs form part of the imagined landscape of the lyric poet, and have a more persuasive match in the boys and girls presented as Horace’s audience in Odes 3.1.

III Bacchus and poetics

Having discussed the issue of politics in Odes 2.19, I now want in my final section to turn to the issue of poetics and argue that in this poem the figure of Bacchus represents not only Augustus as god and conqueror but also Horace himself as the powerful and controlling poet of a particular type of lyric in the Odes.

(a) Bacchus, poetic memory and generic enrichment

As already suggested, part of Horace’s account of Bacchus in this poem is plainly drawn from the Bacchae of Euripides (or just possibly a Roman version such as Pacuvius’ Pentheus or Accius’ Bacchae):²⁷ cf. 2.19.9–16:

fas peruicacis est mihi Thyiadas

uinique fontem lactis et uberes 10

cantare riuos atque truncis

lapsa cauis iterare mella;

fas et beatae coniugis additum

stellis honorem tectaque Penthei

disiecta non leni ruina, 15

Thracis et exitium Lycurgi.

It is right for me to sing of the tireless Maenads,

The fountain of wine and rich streams of milk,

And tell again of the honey flowing

From hollow tree-trunks:

Right too to sing of the ornament of your blest consort

Added to the constellations, and the house of Pentheus

Scattered in no gentle collapse,

And the end of Thracian Lycurgus.

The miracles of running milk, wine and honey look back famously to two scenes in Euripides’ play. The first is the song of the chorus of Bacchants early on in the play reporting their leader’s magical powers (Bacchae 142–3):

ῥεῖ δὲ γάλακτι πέδον,

ῥεῖ δ᾿ οἴνῳ, ῥεῖ δὲ μελισσᾶν νέκταρι.

The ground runs with milk, runs with wine,

runs with the nectar of bees.

The second is the marvelling speech of the messenger reporting the activities of the Bacchants to Pentheus, which confirms the truth of the earlier passage (Bacchae 707–11):

καὶ τῇδε κρήνην ἐξανῆκ᾿ οἴνου θεός·

ὅσαιςδὲ λευκοῦ πώματος πόθος παρῆν,

ἄκροισι δακτύλοισι διαμῶσαι χθόνα

γάλακτος ἑσμοὺς εἶχον, ἐκ δὲ κισσίνων θύρσων

γλυκεῖαι μέλιτος ἔσταζον ῥοαί.

And with this the god released a spring of wine:

And all those who had a desire for the white drink,

Clawing the ground with the tips of their fingers

Had swarms of milk: and from their thyrsi

Of ivy wood flowed sweet streams of honey.

These echoes would have been obvious to the more learned readers of Horace’s poem, for whom this ode repeats the material of a famous literary text in a genre other than that of lyric. This repetition and generic change seem to be marked explicitly in our text: at line 12 the verb iterare, ‘repeat’, points to the fact that Horace is telling the story of the Bacchae once more,²⁸ while the use of the verb cantare at line 11 perhaps suggests that material is being transferred to the ‘sung’ genre of lyric from another kind of poetry where at least the iambic parts are spoken rather than chanted.²⁹ This technique of drawing into lyric material which is clearly identifiable as belonging to another literary genre, and thus expanding the boundaries of lyric, which I have labelled ‘generic enrichment’, is one that is frequently used in the Odes.³⁰

Another possible element of generic enrichment in this poem is its evocation in its last three stanzas of lost epic poems about Bacchus, though it is difficult to be precise here, given the sparse nature of the evidence. The allusion to Bacchus’ role in the war of the Gigantomachy seems to look back to a specific Greek hexameter tradition, since the war between the Olympian gods and the Giants (and Bacchus’ role in it) was certainly a subject of early Greek epic,³¹ and is often represented as an epic topic in Augustan poetry.³² Bacchus’ descent to the Underworld may also have been part of a Greek epic narrative;³³ it is perhaps indicative that the element of katabasis in the close of Horace’s poem seems to owe something to Virgil’s recent hexameter evocation of the Underworld in the fourth book of the Georgics.³⁴ Such miniaturised versions of lengthier epic myths would be fully at home in the Odes.³⁵

(b) Bacchus and Horace: poetic teaching and flexibility³⁶

In the opening stanza of 2.19 we find Bacchus teaching his carmina to a set of younger subordinates of either sex (2.19.1–4):

Bacchum in remotis carmina rupibus

uidi docentem, credite posteri,

Nymphasque discentis et auris

capripedum Satyrorum acutas.

I have seen Bacchus teaching his songs

Amid distant rocks – believe me, you who come after –

With the Nymphs as his pupils and the sharp ears

Of the goat-footed satyrs.

In the very first of his Odes, Horace had claimed that Bacchus’ nymphs and satyrs were the natural inhabitants of his own space as lyric poet, a select poetic landscape contrasted with the vulgar normal world (1.1.29–32):

Me doctarum hederae praemia frontium

dis miscent superis, me gelidum nemus

Nympharumque leues cum Satyris chori

secernunt populo, …

Me the ivy leaves, the reward of poets’ foreheads

make to mingle with those above; the chill grove

and the light-footed bands of nymphs with satyrs

separate from the common people, …

Even more precisely parallel is another Horatian opening ode, that which begins the following book of Roman Odes, where the poet presents himself as singing his carmina to an audience of boys and girls (3.1.1–4):

Odi profanum uulgus et arceo:

fauete linguis: carmina non prius

audita Musarum sacerdos

uirginibus puerisque canto.

I detest the uninitiated throng and keep them back:

Give favourable silence with your tongues:

I, as priest of the Muses, sing songs

Unheard before to girls and boys.

As Michèle Lowrie has put it, ‘Was it the Roman Odes the poet witnessed Bacchus teaching?’.³⁷ In other words the reader of Odes 3.1 will look back to 2.19 (only two poems earlier in the sequence and collection of books 1–3) and see the parallel between Horace and Bacchus as lyric performers. Both Horace and Bacchus sing their songs to a young audience of mixed gender.

This parallel between Horace and Bacchus can be taken further if we consider the penultimate stanza of 2.19 (25–8):

quamquam choreis aptior et iocis 25

ludoque dictus non sat idoneus

pugnae ferebaris; sed idem

pacis eras mediusque belli.

Though, said to be apter for dances, games

And sport, you were rumoured to be

Not fit enough for fighting: but you were the same

Central figure in both peace and war.

Here we can see a clear parallel between the Bacchus of Odes 2.19 and Horace’s self-descriptions as a poet in other contexts. Bacchus here is concerned with ioci (25) and ludus (26), but also ready for participation in warfare. This is analogous to Horace, who in the very first poem of this same second book of Odes has defined himself as being principally a poet of ioci (2.1.37), and who in the first book of Epistles defines the Odes and the accompanying lifestyle as ludus and ludere (cf. Ep.1.14.36 nec lusisse pudet, sed non incidere ludum), but who like Bacchus is prepared to engage in the poetry of war when needed: we recall Odes 2.7 in this same book, where Horace looks back on his time as a soldier at Philippi, and the general broad range of the Odes, which deal with such a wide range of topics, from civil war and Actium to symposia and light love. The poet of the Odes, like the Bacchus of Odes 2.19, is a poetic figure who can cover both war and peace and who can stand at the centre of both as the controlling power.

IV Conclusion

In Odes 2.19, the figure of Bacchus, addressed in a conventional hymnic structure, performs a rich range of roles. The initial element of epiphany, relatively unusual in a hymnic context, creates links with the tradition of Hesiod and Callimachus, in which an encounter with a specific deity sets up a particular poetic programme. In the case of Odes 2.19, that programme is set out implicitly in the aretalogy of the god which takes up most of the poem (2.19.9–32): Bacchus’ wide-ranging actions and deeds can be seen to indicate the range of topics covered by the lyric poet Horace himself, including the self-conscious incorporation of material from another genre associated with this god – Attic tragedy. Bacchus can accordingly be seen as an inspiration for and symbol of Horatian lyric; but the god can also be viewed as a parallel in his conquest and divine nature for one of Horace’s key poetic subjects, Augustus. Thus the Horace/Bacchus parallel, that between matching poet and patron god of poetry, sits in interesting tension with the Bacchus/Augustus parallel, that between divine conqueror and the mortal victor and ruler who is ultimately destined for the status of a god.

It is a true pleasure to dedicate this (appropriately Bacchic) piece to the memory of David West, distinguished Horatian, whose considerable kindness to the author as a young scholar and years of friendship since are warmly remembered. I use my own text of the poem, published in Harrison (2017), where the choices of horribilisque (Bochart) over horribilique in 24 and cauda (Harrison) over caudam in 31 are justified in detail in the commentary (and will not be discussed here), and of other Latin poems cited; I also use my own translations throughout. The first princeps is called ‘the young Caesar’ when describing events before January 27 BC, ‘Augustus’ for dates thereafter. Versions of this paper have been given as talks at Tokyo Metropolitan University, UNICAMP (Brazil), Brown (as a Michael C. J. Putnam Lecture), Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Austin, Penn, Rethymnon, Bern, Rome (La Sapienza), Göttingen and Bochum, as well as at the West memorial event; my warm thanks to all hosts and audiences. A further version of this paper appears in the conference proceedings Martins (2017).

¹I pick out from the complete listing of studies in Holzberg (2007), also to be found conveniently online at http://www.niklasholzberg.com/Homepage/Bibliographien.html (accessed 2.05.2016), the following: Pöschl (1973); Henrichs (1978); Batinski (1991); Davis (1991) 107–11; Koster (1994); Krasser (1995) 108–11, 119–27, 138–41; Lowrie (1997) 205–10; Stevens (1999). David West’s own commentary is typically bracing and shrewd (West (1998) 137–42); other essential commentaries are Nisbet and Hubbard (1978) and Syndikus (2001).

²As noted by Syndikus (2001). We may compare perhaps the anticipated epiphany of Apollo at the start of Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo (cf. Krasser (1995) 111).

³Contra Fraenkel (1957) 200, over-biographical as often: ‘I think Horace means what he says. He did see Dionysus’.

⁴For the problems of the truth value of first-person statements in Horace see e.g. Horsfall (1998), Harrison (2007c).

⁵Henrichs (1978); see also Krasser (1995) 109–11.

⁶See Kowalzig and Wilson (2013).

⁷On this aspect of the last poems in Odes 2 see Harrison (2017), Introduction, section 3.

⁸On the links between Augustus and Apollo see especially Miller (2009) 15–53.

⁹It is worth noting (however) that Apollo appears first in the list of gods in that poem presented as potential saviours of Rome, followed by Venus, ancestress of the Iulii (1.2.25–36).

¹⁰On the political and cultural manipulation of the figure of Bacchus at Rome in this period see e.g. Batinski (1991), Schiesaro (2009), Feldherr (2010), Cucchiarelli (2011a) and (2011b), Fuhrer (2011), Mac Góráin (2012–13) and (2013).

¹¹See Plutarch Antony 24.4, 33.6, 60.3 with Pelling (1988) 179–80, 208–9 and 265, Velleius 2.82.4 with Woodman (1983) 213–15. For a summary narrative see Bruhl (1953) 127–32, and for recent studies see e.g. Śnieżewski (1998), Cucchiarelli (2011a).

¹²Cf. e.g. Brenk (1992).

¹³See e.g. Woodman (see note 11), Horsfall (2013) 548–9, Friesen (2015) 72–85.

¹⁴For the date see e.g. Maltby (2002) 40.

¹⁵Cf. Syme (1986) 108–10.

¹⁶Cf. e.g. Maltby (2002) 281.

¹⁷See Pelling (1988) 265 and Huttner (1995).

¹⁸See Galinsky (1972) 131–49 (reprinted in Harrison (1990) 277–94).

¹⁹Most famously on the Great Altar of Pergamum (cf. LIMC II s.v. Dionysos 76); see also Eur. Ion 216–18 (probably echoed at 2.19.25–6).

²⁰See Lowrie (1997) 238–42.

²¹See Hardie (1986) 97–109.

²²For Liber and Hercules in this role see Cicero, De Natura Deorum 2.62 (an idea presented by the Stoic spokesman Balbus), and for Hercules as parallel to Augustus in this respect see Galinsky (1972) 138–41.

²³Wiseman (2004) 64–70.

²⁴For the word play cf. e.g. Commager (1962) 91.

²⁵See M. L. West (1990) 26–50, Lattanzi (1994).

²⁶See White (1988).

²⁷Cf. e.g. Friesen (2015) 98, 107. For a parallel issue in Virgil’s Aeneid cf. Fernandelli (2002), who suggests that the Pentheus material in the famous simile at Aeneid 4.469–73 may draw on Roman tragedy as well as the Bacchae.

²⁸We may compare the famous (repeated!) use of iterum at Ovid, Fasti 3.371–2 to suggest that Ovid’s poem is re-running the plot of Catullus 64: see Conte (1986) 57–69, Hinds (1998) 3–4.

²⁹We may compare the similar cantamus at Odes 1.6.19, opposing Horatian lyric to Varius’ epic.

³⁰See Harrison (2007b) 168–206.

³¹It is interesting that the late-antique Greek epic Nonnus’ Dionysiaca presents a short episode in which Dionysus fights a solo battle with the Giants (48.1–89), no doubt dependent on earlier Greek sources. For the Gigantomachy in early Greek epic (often indistinguishable from the Titanomachy) see still Vian (1952) 184–222, especially 206–7 on Dionysus’ aggressive role and 221–2 for a reconstruction of the plot of the lost epic.

³²Cf. Propertius 2.1.19–20, 3.9.47–8, Ovid, Amores 2.1.11–16, Tristia 2.71–2.

³³For Bacchus’ katabasis (usually said to be undertaken to rescue his mother Semele) see Apollodorus 3.5.3, Diodorus Siculus 4.25.4, Pausanias 2.37.5, Iophon TrGF 22 F 3. It is famously parodied in Aristophanes’ Frogs, which might suggest an origin in earlier elevated literature, but it is not found in Nonnus’ late epic.

³⁴See e.g. Harrison (2013) 382–3.

³⁵See e.g. Harrison (2007b) 190–2, 184–8, 189–91.

³⁶Here I acknowledge some rich suggestions about the potential parallels between Bacchus and Horace in Krasser (1995) 92–149.

³⁷Lowrie (1997) 207.