Lesbian Wisdom and Horace's Advisory Mode

William Tortorelli (Northwestern University)

Wilamowitz first noticed that Horatian odes with a theme of moral advising find parallels in the extant fragments of Alcaeus. This connection has become clearer with subsequent papyrus finds and it promises to elucidate a major principle in Horace's use and adaptation of his archaic Greek poetic models in the Odes. This paper explores the advisory mode in the lyrics of Alcaeus and identifies the Horace's adaptation of this mode as one major poetic project in the Odes.

The relationship between these two poets is of critical significance, as is clear even from the first poem of Book 1 of the Odes. Horace sets out his goal of being included among the canonical lyric poets, and he defines this inclusion through the action of the Muse Polyhymnia and her tuning of the Lesboum barbiton. The extent to which Horace envisions his lyric role as that of a “Roman Alcaeus” is fit soil for conjecture and debate, but it can at least be safely asserted that the poetry of Alcaeus was a potent thematic influence on Horace's lyric verse. The paraenetic/advisory themes in the Odes coincide strikingly with Horace's borrowing of surviving examples of gnomai from Alcaeus, particularly those involving wine, seasonal imagery, death, and the carpe diem theme. Horace's advisory posture follows Alcaeus' stylistic adaptation of the generic formulae of Hesiod and other early moral-didactic writers.

Hesiod provides the prototype for this genre of wisdom literature in Greece. In the Erga, Hesiod's narrator gives imperative injunctions to an addressee depicted as an inferior, peppers his didaxis with pithy gnomic material, and presents a proprietary claim to the status of sage in the poet's own name. This prototype may have influenced the later archaic poets, particularly Alcaeus, whose advisory mode comprises a set of the formulaic elements found in the Erga. This paper describes the specific discourse strategies developed in Alcaeus' poems and identifies Horace's use thereof. In this way, a model is constructed of a paraenetic poetic program in the Odes.