Horace’s ideal symposium: a contextualized look at Odes 4.11

Kristen Ehrhardt (University of Wisconsin, Madison)

On the relatively rare occasion that a scholar pays attention to Horace’s Ode, 4.11, it is usually analyzed as a standard genethliacon to Maecenas or a love poem to Phyllis. The poem’s setting, an idealized symposium, may bear a comment or two, but is seldom fodder for nuanced analysis itself. In his book devoted to analysis of the sympotic settings of Odes 4, T. S. Johnson devotes a majority of his attention to, first, the Phyllis and later, the Maecenas aspects of the poem. (Johnson, 2004) Even here, the sympotic setting seems to have been glossed over. While there is nothing wrong intrinsically with the prior analyses, it seems better to approach the poem holistically, examining not only its named addressees but also its setting.

In an attempt to read 4.11 as a whole, I will look at the sympotic setting of the poem and beyond. Certainly, a sympotic theme runs through many of Horace’s Odes, but the symposium described in 4.11 differs from the others. The drinking party Horace depicts here has a striking resemblance to the earlier idealized symposium described in Xenophanes 1. Finally, I will argue that this resemblance is not coincidental. Horace refracts Xenophanes, using similar imagery to frame his birthday poem to Maecenas. This is not simply the case of a rewritten Greek poem by a Roman author, however; rather, Horace manipulates the form and content of his predecessor to suit his own poetic purposes, highlight his skill, and give Maecenas a very clever birthday present.