Addressees in Horace’s Odes: the example of Plancus, Odes 1.7

Daniel T. Barber (University of Virginia)

The first word of Horace’s Odes is “Maecenas”, the addressee of the first poem; the second to last word of Book 3 (Odes 3.30.16) is “Melpomene”, the addressee of the final ode. Within the frame of these two points, Horace gives us 88 poems, of which only seven do not have a named addressee, and only three (1.15. 1.34, and 2.15) do not seem to have any addressee at all.

These rude statistics confirm a principle, well-known even to the scholiasts: that a Horatian ode is directed at someone (Keller [1879] 33; Heinze [1923]). The speaker of an ode does not explicitly address his thoughts to himself or to the reader, but rather to a third party. Recent work on the structures of lyric poetry (Culler [1981] 135-54 and Waters [2003]) has shifted the emphasis from the “I” of a poem to the “you” of its addressee. For Horace, this shift raises a pressing question: what is the function of the addressee in Horace’s Odes? (Cf. Lowrie [1995] 20-26 and Barchiesi [2007])

On the most basic level, Horatian usage is, as might be expected, complex. Addressees vary widely in type – politicians and friends but also slaves, prostitutes, gods, ships, jars, and even trees – as well as in number and position in the poem. But in five of the first nine poems, the so-called “Parade Odes”, the addressee is a politically prominent Roman: Maecenas in 1.1, Octavian in 1.2, Sestius in 1.4, Agrippa in 1.6 and Plancus in 1.7. These historical addressees would seem to be a natural starting point for such an investigation, since we do not have to ask whether they are products of the author’s imagination. Yet even here giving a full account of the addressee’s poetic function is difficult, and nowhere more so than in Odes 1.7, addressed to Plancus.

In this paper, I will argue that historical addressees have a double effect on the reader; they allow the speaker to set himself within a concrete internal scene and to create a “poetic event” that the reader experiences, but also, as historical figures, their names link that event to the external world. That is, the interaction of speaker and addressee within the poem moves us to inquire after Horace the poet and L. Munatius Plancus the consul and censor, a question that threatens to expose the essential fiction of the scene in its historical and social context, for we may doubt that Horace could have spoken to Plancus in such a way. (Cf. Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) 93) The manner in which the scene of Odes 1.7 is depicted reveals a similar paradox; the priamel of lines 1-11 focuses attention on the beauty of Tibur, yet after the famously abrupt transition at line 15 to the central advice of the poem, it appears that Plancus is not in Tibur but abroad, or perhaps that the speaker’s advice would hold regardless of where the addressee is. (Nisbet and Hubbard [1970] 94, Davis [1991] 199, Lowrie [1997] 109) Thus, even as the dramatic setting of the poem is established, doubt arises as to that setting. Horace’s strategy here is in keeping with his tendency throughout the Odes to avoid making the scene explicit by abstaining from, on the one hand, deictic markers such as “this” or “that” (Barchiesi [2007] 156), but using in almost every poem the weaker deictic “you”, which hints at presence and the outlines of a scene but leaves the precise contours of that scene unclear. The reader is thus poised between the apparent immediacy of the “poetic event” and the question of that event’s place in its historical context, between the internal world of the poem and external world of events. These competing principles, as often in Horace, are held in careful balance, yet another indication of the mean the poet keeps between engagement with the world at large and literary seclusion.