Horace, Epistles 1.2 and the Moral Utility of Poetry

Stephanie McCarter (University of Virginia)

Horace claims in Epist. 1.2.1-4 that Homer is a better moral teacher than the philosophers Chrysippus and Crantor, thus revealing, as commentators note, his allegiances in the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. This paper considers how the issue of poetic moral utility runs throughout the poem and how Horace challenges those philosophers, Philodemus especially, who remove poetic utility as a criterion of a good poem. First, I argue that in his description of Homer’s poetry, Horace responds to and challenges Philodemus’ views on the issue of poetic utility, especially as put forth in the On Poems and On the Good King According to Homer.  I then examine how his use of imagery in the second half of the poem anticipates the well-known statements in the Ars Poetica that the best poet is the one who both delights and instructs (334-38; 344-45).

D. Armstrong has recently demonstrated that Horace’s interpretation of Homer in Epist. 1.2.6-31 is strongly indebted to Philodemus’ On the Good King, the closest the philosopher comes to assigning moral benefit to a poet.  As E. Asmis has shown, however, this does not imply that Philodemus considered Homer morally useful as a poet; rather, it belongs to the philosopher to point out and elucidate morally beneficial aspects of Homer’s poetry; elsewhere he falls in line with traditional attacks against Homer’s piety. Horace’s evocation of On the Good King is most evident in his description of Nestor (11-12; cf. Good King col. 28.27-30). I would suggest, however, that Horace evokes Philodemus in order to counter the notion that Homer only acquires moral benefit when elucidated by the philosopher. His claim that Homer exhibits clarity (planius, 4) in teaching what is useful (utile, 3 and 18) recalls in particular Epicurus’ and Philodemus’ advocacy of prose as a vehicle for moral instruction because of its greater clarity vis-à-vis poetry. Horace thus broadens the range of poetic utility by reassigning to Homer the moral validity that philosophers, Epicureans especially, had denied to him.  Furthermore, he assesses Homer’s worth not on the basis of its beauty as poetry, but on its effectiveness in teaching moral truths. 

Horace continues to focus on the moral benefit of poetry in the epistle’s second half by employing the same imagery he will use in AP to advocate poetry that has an educational function. This runs counter to Philodemus’ On Poems, in which he argues against critics who assess a poem’s goodness on the basis of moral utility, and claims that if a poem benefits, it does not do so as a poem (col. 32.17-19). While Horace does not necessarily disagree with the latter statement, his famous claim in AP 344-45 (omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci, / lectorem delectando pariterque monendo) shows that he places value in a poem’s ability to instruct its listeners. As N. Rudd (1989, 232) has shown, Horace there figures poetry as a kind of liquid and alludes to the practice of mixing dry and sweet wine, i.e. the morally beneficial with the delightful. The liquid imagery of poetry in fact continues in AP 333-37, where he says that when a poet instructs, he should do so quickly, so that animi dociles may retain his precepts, and so that nothing superfluous may drip (manat) from the pectus of the listener. In Epist. 1.2 Horace tells Lollius to “drink in” (abbibe, 67) his words into his pectus and compares him to a docile horse (equum...docilem, 64), thus anticipating the language he will use to describe poetic moral instruction in AP. By so clearly looking ahead to the AP, which challenges the views put forth by Philodemus in the On Poems, Horace shows that such concerns are central to the earlier poem as well.  The evocation of Philodemus’ On the Good King in the epistle’s first half and the insistence that Homer clearly teaches what is useful strengthens this argument.

The concerns with poetic utility in Epist. 1.2 have implications for the collection as a whole. The figuring of poetry as wine is apparent in the programmatic opening of Epist. 1.1 (condo, compono, depromere, 12), and in Epist. 1.8 he asks the Musa to drip (instillare, 16) a healing praeceptum into the ears of Celsus. Thus the moral content of the book is not due to a heightened interest in philosophy per se, but to the larger idea that the poet ought to instruct. The poet may use philosophical precepts to bolster his instruction (cf. eg. AP 310-12), but it is the poet who most effectively distills and communicates these moral truths.