WEEKEND COLUMNISTS One of my most heartening recent experiences was tuning in to a series of late-night radio essays about the Roman poet Horace. I particularly liked the contribution from Martha Kearney, one of Britain’s most experienced news journalists, who also turned out to be a one-time classicist who imbibed her Horace from a chain-smoking, inspirational Oxonian dragon she called Miss Hubbard (this was Margaret Hubbard, co-author of one of the greatest classical commentaries of the 20th century).
Kearney is about my age; like me, at school and at university she fell for the furious, bawdy and brilliant passion of Catullus and was generally either bored or mystified by the apparently staider, more cautious, less self-revealing and apparently power-serving Horace. But now that she has reached a stable and contented middle age, she has come to appreciate Horace’s more temperate approach to love and life; in particular the deep delight he found in his modest country retreat near Tibur (“far from the din and stench and wealth of Rome”) with its herb-filled hillsides.
Kearney’s mature perspective makes an interesting contrast with that of a younger woman journalist who has recently published her thoughts on Roman poetry: Charlotte Higgins has written a bright and breezy primer called Latin Love Lessons, arguing that there is nothing much in the realms of chick-lit and self-help that wasn’t anticipated by Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, Horace and (Higgins’s favourite) Ovid.
I am extremely sympathetic with Higgins’s overall thesis that we would all do far better to spend more time with Roman poetry and less with popular psychology; indeed the recent renaissance of Latin as an exciting – not dry and dusty – language to learn, exemplified by the runaway success of Harry Mount’s amusing Amo, Amas, Amat, is one of the most encouraging cultural trends to emerge for ages. I also like many of Higgins’ commentaries on individual poems: her comparison of Propertius’s obsessive circling round the experience of being in love with Proust is spot-on. She loves Catullus also; not just the most famous poems about his obsessive love for Lesbia but the long, densely mythological tale of Peleus and Thetis.
But with one comment the admirable Higgins stopped me in my tracks and made me ponder whether it was quite so easy to assimilate the Roman poets to the world of Bridget Jones. This was a cheery injunction to her readers to indulge in safe sex at all times. What, I suddenly wondered, would the Roman poets make of the idea of “safe sex”?
Here I came back to Horace and the beautiful poem singled out by Martha Kearney that begins his last book of odes. It is addressed to Venus, the goddess of love: the 50-year-old poet implores the goddess to spare him a return of the love “wars” he thought he had put behind him. He begs her to go instead to the houses of amorous young men who, when they achieve their heart’s desire, will set up statues and institute festivals in her honour. He is past it; past the stage of “women or boys, of hopes of the mutual happiness of love, of drinking bouts and garlands of fresh flowers”.
Of course, that is all a front. He is caught once more: weeping unaccountably by day, while at night he dreams of running after the swift Ligurinus over the tender grass of the Field of Mars.
So how does all that fit with safe sex? To take the second part of the phrase first, the biological term “sex” is completely alien to the Roman love poets. They may have fornicated with enthusiasm but they also thought of love as a god or goddess. In an earlier ode, I xix, Horace speaks of Venus “falling” on him “with all her might”, like a natural disaster, a flood or earthquake, altering the course of his life and poetry. He can no longer write about the Scythians and Parthians: he burns with love and lust for the white-skinned Glycera.
The divinity of love made it far from safe. Time and again Horace calls Venus “saeva” (the origin of our word savage): this is not the sweet and virginal being Botticelli painted rising from the waves but a wild power of nature, fierce and cruel as a tigress. The only solution is to try to placate her with an altar and a blood sacrifice. I may be wrong, but I cannot imagine Bridget Jones going out to slit the throat of a goat to help solve an intractable romance.
Horace himself, assimilated to the world of the English country gentleman, praised for his moderation and his espousal of the golden mean, is not altogether a cosy and comfortable writer. His achievement in, as he put it, “adapting Greek song to Italian verse”, is a technical feat unparalleled in the annals of poetry. And he knew it, as he boasted in the same ode: “I have completed a monument more lasting than bronze and loftier than the royal pile of the Pyramids.” Can you imagine a poet saying that today?
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