Genre, Intertextuality, and Odes 1.14

Joel Street

Theta Eta at DePauw University

Horace’s Odes 1.14 presents a problem of interpretation grounded in questions of intertextuality. The poem treats a commonplace familiar to the classical world: that of a ship caught in a storm. Because fragments by the Greek lyricists Alcaeus and Theognis present relatively unambiguous allegorical interpretations, Horace’s text has itself been traditionally regarded as allegorical. Thus, the diversity of interpretations of 1.14 has its basis in arguing for a relationship with a single precursor text to the exclusion of other texts. This diversity, however, suggests that 1.14 resists a decisive relationship to a single text. Instead, one should take a broader view of intertextuality, treating the poem as related not only to individual models, but also to the ship-in-a-storm commonplace and the genre of lyric poetry.

At this point, Alessandro Barchiesi’s concept of “folding” genre is helpful. In tracing the shift from oral lyric to written lyric, Barchiesi observes that formal features of the former become incorporated (or “folded”) into the content of the latter. Extending this model to the ship-in-a-storm commonplace, one may see 1.14 as incorporating features of its allegorical predecessors without being strictly allegorical. Rather than a riddle with a solution to be divined, one can regard the text as a hybrid or pastiche, and possibly a deliberate one. As a literary poet detached from the rhetorical necessities of oral poetry, Horace had the opportunity to model his poem after allegorical predecessors without demanding for it a fixed allegorical interpretation.