In 1752, the German poet Christoph Martin Wieland wrote Anti-Ovid, or the Art of Loving. In this response to Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, Wieland attempted to show that true love, by contrast with lust, always includes virtue.Footnote 1 The prefaces of later editions express Wieland’s dissatisfaction with his juvenilia and note the extensive changes made later.Footnote 2 Indeed, in the preface of his collected works, Wieland says that the Anti-Ovid became a frock whose original colour is not discernible anymore, because it only consists of patches.Footnote 3 One passage or patch that Wieland included in all editions shows the Greek lyric poet Anacreon appearing in the first canto and singing a carpe diem song: ‘Genießt und liebt, weil euch die Jugend winkt, | Sie wird verblühn, genießt und liebt, und trinkt’ (‘Enjoy yourselves and love because you are young and youth will wither; enjoy yourselves and love and drink’). The insertion of an Anacreontic song within an anti-Ovidian poem is interesting. To be sure, the hedonistic attitude of the two ancient poets can easily be linked (‘verführerische Sittenlehre’; ‘seductive teachings’), and Ovid himself recommends reading Anacreon at Ars Amatoria 3.30. But on a formal level it is striking to see a piece of lyric appearing inside a work of didactic poetry.Footnote 4 Is it the case that Wieland, the great expert in ancient literature, knew that such inserted lyric excerpts of carpe diem are also a notable feature of ancient texts – the more so as he published a translation of Horace’s Sermones which includes a similar excerpt?Footnote 5 This and other excerpts of carpe diem will be the topic of this chapter.
The previous chapters of this book have all dealt with short texts on the carpe diem theme. All of these, whether they are epigrams or lyric poems, can justly be called ‘carpe diem poems’. The topic of this chapter is longer texts which are not primarily about carpe diem, but which contain shorter sections dedicated to this motif. These ‘sections’ are characterised by three traits (though not all traits necessarily apply to every passage): they are clearly demarcated units within a longer surrounding text, they are self-contained, and they constitute (apparent) quotations or will in turn be quoted. Thus, in Wieland’s Anti-Ovid the carpe diem section is demarcated through a different diction, and a separate speaker. As a poem on its own, it is clearly self-contained, and it at least pretends to be a work of Anacreon, not Wieland. Such demarcated and self-contained passages can also be found in ancient literature. Indeed, Horace’s Ars Poetica provides us with a neat image for such passages. For not just Wieland refers to texts as patches – Horace criticises poets who make use of ‘purple patches’ (purpureus pannus; Ars 14–23), rhetorical set pieces that stick out as alien elements.Footnote 6 Though their material is precious, they are all too well known and do not fit into the surrounding text. In looking at such ‘purple patches’ of carpe diem, I am interested in these seemingly conflicting dynamics: the natural splendour of the material (purple) and its reduction to a small piece in poor surroundings (patch). What is particularly notable is how the natural splendour of the purple material of carpe diem passages keeps attracting readers, so that the same patches are repeatedly removed and continuously sewn onto new clothes in anthologies, florilegia, and commonplace-books. The purple patch then becomes an independent textual object, completely removed from its original context, a cliché or a pure excerpt.
The term ‘excerpts’ perhaps requires some explanation. This is the word I will use to refer to sections of carpe diem in this chapter, a term with several interpretative benefits. In my use of the term, I note its primary meaning from the Latin verb excerpere, ‘to pick out’ or ‘select’. Seneca, for example, uses excerpta to refer to literary extracts (Sen. Epist. 33.3).Footnote 7 While I will consider some excerpts in Seneca and Athenaeus according to the ancient meaning of the term, I ultimately wish to add a broader meaning. Let us again consider the Wieland passage. The carpe diem song is presented as an excerpt from Anacreon, but this is, of course, a pastiche by Wieland himself, who is evidently inspired by the Anacreontea, which are in turn themselves pastiches of Anacreon’s poetry. A further source for Wieland is a carpe diem ode of Horace (C. 1.4.16–20), which provides him with an ending for his poem, and the name Phyllis in Wieland’s poem also appears in several Augustan poets. Additionally, Wieland here parodies the fashion of Anacreontic poetry, which was in full bloom in Germany when he published the Anti-Ovid.Footnote 8 Thus, the distinctions between real quotations and pseudo-quotations are hopelessly blurred. It, therefore, seems much more fruitful to broaden the meaning of the term ‘excerpt’, in order to analyse the specific intertextual dynamics that combine quoting, abridging, and imitating.Footnote 9 Referring to this intertextual overlap as ‘excerpt’, I wish to explore the rhetorical scope of purple passages of carpe diem, which – whether actual quotations or pastiches – draw on the auctoritas of a purple model. This broader view on ‘excerpts’ relates to work on textual dynamics beyond Classics. Thus, the slavist Gary Saul Morson wrote a book on quotations, in which he analysed among other things something he called ‘quotationality’: ‘Sometimes we do not cite specific words but rather conjure the aura of a quotation’ (original emphasis).Footnote 10 There exists one more reason why ‘excerpt’ is an appropriate term for the phenomenon discussed here. The semantics of the word excerptum already point to how the concept of carpe diem is treated in longer texts; bits of poems or patches are cut out and ‘flowery purple passages’ (flosculi; see Sen. Epist. 33.1, 33.7) are plucked out.Footnote 11 Indeed, when one author encourages ‘plucking sweet things’ (carpamus dulcia; Pers. 5.151), we cannot tell whether this is just an exhortation to enjoyment, or a metaliterary comment on plucking sweet poetry. My interpretation of excerpts develops some thoughts on allusions as physical, pluckable textual objects, put forward by Philip Hardie, and engages with Gian Biagio Conte’s thoughts on the rhetorical scope of intertextuality.Footnote 12 In short, I am arguing that it is no coincidence that the motif of carpe diem is particularly prone to being excerpted.Footnote 13
Naturally, not every excerpt of carpe diem can be discussed in this chapter. Rather, mirroring my material, I will gather some of the choicest examples. The selection here focusses in particular on textual developments towards and during the Roman Empire, and pays close attention to their later reception in quotations, florilegia, and anthologies. While two texts that are discussed here, Vergil’s Georgics and Horace’s Sermones 2, still look towards the Empire, other texts are firmly placed within this period. By focusing on the Empire, I am, however, not claiming that such excerpting is a purely late phenomenon. Indeed, one of the earliest carpe diem poems we possess, Mimnermus, fr. 2, can fruitfully be linked to excerpting, as Mimnermus excerpts and decontextualises material from a Homeric purple passage on leaves (Il. 6.146–9).Footnote 14 The Theognidean corpus, featuring many short ‘snippets’ on carpe diem, may also invite this concept. And perhaps one of the best-known and most elaborate carpe diem set-texts is the speech of drunken Heracles in Euripides’ Alcestis (780–802), a text that would in turn become much excerpted.Footnote 15 Nonetheless, the focus on the Roman Empire is not arbitrarily chosen. For, as David Konstan says in relation to excerpts in Stobaeus, while excerpts have always been a part of Greco-Roman literature, they become increasingly important in the Empire.Footnote 16 This period, and in particular its anthologies and satires, which are stuffed full with other genres, seem the richest meadows for gathering my flowers.
The chapter falls into four different parts, each one dedicated to a case study of excerpting. In the first part, I will look at Vergil’s Georgics 3 and discuss how purple passages from archaic poetry are used to convey an independent voice of wisdom. The other focus of this section is how the natural splendour of a purple passage leads to later excerption. The topic of my second section is the tale of the town and the country mouse in Horace, Sermones 2.6. Here, I am concerned with how a section on carpe diem can appear as an intrusive voice of high-style poetry in the pedestrian context of the Sermones. The third section deals with Trimalchio’s poems in Petronius’ Satyrica. I will analyse these excerpts as a product of rhetorical education which treats literature as a series of patterns. The other theme I am interested in here is how Trimalchio’s recitation of poetic scraps demonstrates an especially ‘sympotic’ preference for extracting lyric (as in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae). Finally, in the last part of this chapter, I will look at Juvenal, Satires 9. I will show how excerpting and re-excerpting has created a cliché that can be inserted just about anywhere, so that the musings of a Roman male prostitute ended up in a letter to Charles IV, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and self-proclaimed descendant of saints.
5.1 Plucking Grass: Cows, Flocks, Vergil, Georgics 3, and Seneca
A passage that was considered a purple passage in antiquity and adapted by numerous authors is Hesiod’s description of a summer day in the Works and Days, where the poet advises his addressee to enjoy the season by sitting in the shade and having a good meal with wine (Op. 582–96):Footnote 17
When the golden thistle blooms and the chirping cicada sits in a tree and ceaselessly pours out its shrill song from under its wings in the season of toilsome summer, then the goats are fattest and wine is best, the women most lustful and the men at their weakest, because Sirius burns their heads and knees, and the skin is dry from the heat. But then make sure that there’s some shade from a rock and Bibline wine, a milk cake, the milk of goats which are drying up, the meat of a forest-grazing cow that has not yet given birth, and the meat of newly born kids. Also, drink gleaming wine, while you are sitting in the shade, when you’ve fulfilled your desire for food, with your face turned towards the fresh west wind. Pour in three measures of water from a spring that’s ever-flowing, running and unmuddied, and put in a fourth measure of wine.
These lines are repeatedly quoted when authors wish to speak in Hesiod’s authoritative voice, and already in archaic lyric Alcaeus used this voice in an exhortation to heavy drinking, as Richard Hunter has shown (fr. 347):Footnote 18
Drench your lungs in wine, because the star is revolving and the season is harsh; everything is thirsty under the heat, and the cicada sings sweetly from the leaves … the golden thistle blooms; now women are at their most repulsive and men are feeble, because Sirius burns their heads and knees
We do not know the context of Alcaeus’ fragment, but a carpe diem context may be at least suspected. Not only would this be in line with other poems of Alcaeus (see frr. 38, 335, 346), but it would also fit the reception of this fragment: Horace adapts the idea of drinking in a warm season in Odes 3.29.18–20 as well as in 4.12, where the carpe diem motif is strongly present in each case,Footnote 19 and the same can be said about the pseudo-Vergilian Copa (in particular lines 25–38).Footnote 20 Moreover, when Athenaeus quotes part of this fragment, he does so within a sequence of drinking exhortations of Alcaeus of which some have a definite carpe diem context and others have a possible one.Footnote 21 Though this cumulative evidence makes a carpe diem context in Alcaeus not unlikely, it is more fruitful to look at Alcaeus’ poem through the lens of its reception: we can see that the passage came to be treated as a model for ‘carpe diem in summer’. This is something not yet present in Hesiod, but linked to the reception of Alcaeus’ poem, which became an oft-quoted excerpt in its own right.Footnote 22 Indeed, whether this is an instance of misquotation or of reperformance, Alcaeus fr. 352 shows close verbal resemblance to fr. 347 and is a case in point for its status as a purple passage.Footnote 23
In Vergil’s Georgics, both Hesiod and Alcaeus are used as models for a description of summer heat. The one gives the passage didactic authority; the other adds a sense of humour and sympotic dimension to carpe diem, as Vergil explains how one should take care of flocks in the summer (Verg. G. 3.323–38):
But when the Zephyrs are calling and joyous summer sends the flocks of sheep and goats to the woodland pastures and the meadows, then let us take to the cool fields at the rise of the morning star, while the morning is young, while hoar frost whitens the grass, and the dew in the tender grass is most welcome to cattle. Then, when the fourth celestial hour has brought thirst and the song of shrill cicadas bursts through the thickets, I will ask the flocks to drink the water that runs through wooden channels at the side of wells or deep pools. But in the midday sun look for a shaded valley where the great oak of Jupiter with its old trunk stretches out its huge branches or where a grove, dark with many holms, lies with hallowed shade. Then, give them again trickling water and feed them again until sunset, when the cool evening star chills the air and the moon refreshes the woodland pastures by dropping dew now, and the shores resound with the song of the halcyon and the thickets echo the song of the finch.
Hesiod and Alcaeus have lent purple splendour to a topic that does perhaps not possess it by nature: the feeding and drinking schedule of flocks. The structure of the summer day in these lines and the prescriptions are taken from an agricultural treatise: Richard Thomas has shown in detail how Vergil here adopts a section of Varro’s Res rustica.Footnote 24 Vergil changes, however, the tone of ‘some of the most functional and mundane prose of ancient literature’,Footnote 25 as Thomas points out. I argue that Vergil achieves that as he combines Varro’s text with other models: dry technical instructions on farming are turned into a Hesiodic purple passage and are made to echo the sound of Alcaeus’ lyric. Thus, some features of the passage, such as the zephyr winds and the chirping cicada, are clear references to Hesiod.Footnote 26 Shade and drinking can also be found in Hesiod’s description of the summer day, though they do appear in Varro as well. A reference to Hesiod naturally befits Vergil’s Ascraeum carmen (Verg. G. 2.176), but there might be more in play here. As Richard Hunter has shown, the rich history of allusions to this specific passage from Hesiod makes it a typical Hesiodic ‘excerpt’, exactly the type of passage an author cites whenever he wishes to speak with Hesiodic authority.Footnote 27
By nodding to both Hesiod and Alcaeus, Vergil shows some awareness of the quotation history of the text. Alcaeus’ influence on the passage seems not to have been noted so far. Two lines of the passage strongly recall the lyric poet (327–8): inde ubi quarta sitim caeli collegerit hora | et cantu querulae rumpent arbusta cicadae (‘then when the fourth celestial hour has brought thirst and the song of shrill cicadas bursts through the thickets’). These lines evoke ἀ δ’ ὤρα χαλέπα, πάντα δὲ δίψαισ’ ὐπὰ καύματος, | ἄχει δ ἐκ πετάλων ἄδεα τέττιξ (‘the season is harsh; everything is thirsty under the heat, and the cicada sings sweetly from the leaves’). The train of thought that moves from thirst in one line to a singing cicada in the next one is the same in both poets, whereas Hesiod first mentions the cicada and burning heat later. While this could still be explained as a coincidence, another feature within these lines is crucial: the motif of thirst. This is not mentioned by Hesiod, whereas Alcaeus makes thirst the theme of his poem (at least from how the fragmentary state of the poem allows us to judge). Picking up the thirst motif, Vergil makes hora the agent of thirst, which may be an interlingual pun on Alcaeus’ ὤρα.Footnote 28 We are hearing Alcaeus’ lyric voice, a sound effect that transcends meaning. In a way, Vergil speaks of even heavier drinking than Alcaeus. Whereas Alcaeus speaks of ‘drenching the lungs’, in Vergil the drinking vessels are massive troughs.Footnote 29 The difference is, of course, that Vergil does not speak of wine for men but of water for flocks. The evocation of Alcaeus creates a drinking-party for flocks: whereas in Hesiod and Alcaeus humans are asked to enjoy the season, in Vergil’s world of humanised animals the flocks do that and even beat Alcaeus at drinking. The combined reference to more than one model is characteristic of Vergil’s ‘art of reference’,Footnote 30 and it is almost certain in the present case when we know that ancient commentators were already well aware of the Alcaean reference to Hesiod.Footnote 31 Vergil, here, continues dynamics of excerpting that are already present in archaic literature: Hesiod creates a self-contained purple passage, Alcaeus excerpts it, and Vergil’s version points to this textual history.
Vergil’s flocks enjoy the summer day with ample drink and shade. Yet, there is some haste implied and the danger that enjoyment does not last forever (324–5): frigida rura | carpamus, dum mane nouum, dum gramina canent (‘let us take to the cool fields, while the morning is young, while hoar frost whitens the grass’). This is a difficult sentence, as the meaning of carpo is not clear. To appropriate the meaning of the sentence, we can adduce a comparable passage from Tibullus (2.5.56): carpite nunc, tauri, de septem montibus herbas, | dum licet: hic magnae iam locus urbis erit (‘now, bulls, graze on the grass of the seven hills while you may; soon here will be the site of a great city’). Tibullus exhorts steers to graze (carpite) on the future site of Rome, while they still can (dum licet). The enjoyable time for steers will pass and the tag dum licet strongly points to carpe diem.Footnote 32 In Vergil, the limiting factor introduced by an anaphora of dum is the freshness of the meadow in the morning, which will not last. Ironically, here whiteness marks a time of enjoyment, whereas in the context of carpe diem it usually signifies oppressive old age.Footnote 33 But what to make of carpamus? The dum clause about the appeal of morning fields to flocks points to the meaning ‘grazing’ for carpamus. Yet, the first-person plural is somewhat surprising and suggests that, unlike in Tibullus, this does not describe flocks ‘grazing’ the fields, but humans ‘taking to’ the fields. Perhaps in a book that uses carpo in both these meanings, we should exclude neither option.Footnote 34 The first-person plural then expresses exuberance and shows humans taking part in the enjoyment of animals.Footnote 35 Carpere with a sense of enjoyment includes, once more, references to ‘plucking’ the products of the seasons (here: dewy grass), as I have discussed in Chapter 3. Horace would, of course, apply a much bolder object to carpere in the Odes by joining it with dies.
We have seen how a purple passage from Hesiod and in turn one of Alcaeus become excerpted and re-excerpted, while in their new contexts they still always point back to the archaic originals and their advice. In the discussion of the next passage, the sense of detachment of the statement will become clearer. Here, Vergil exhorts the farmer to haste when it comes to cattle-breeding. As Vergil humanises his animals once more, he says that cattle only enjoy a fleeting time of happy youth, before old age and death overcome them (Verg. G. 3.63–71):
In the meantime, while the cattle have joyful youth in abundance, let loose the males; be first to send the cattle to Venus, and by breeding supply generation upon generation. All life’s best days flee first for unhappy mortals; diseases come about and gloomy old age and suffering, and the harshness of stern death snatches them away. Always there will be cattle whose shape you want to change. Yes, always renew them; stay ahead so that you don’t regret your losses afterwards, and every year choose new stock for the herd.
As in the previous section, Vergil creates a carpe diem for animals. At first sight the placement of such a carpe diem section in Georgics 3 may seem natural enough; the urgent tone that the farmers had better make good use of their cattle’s short period of fertility is solid animal husbandry (modern farming manuals also stress that a key factor for cattle breeding is the critical time of the cows’ oestrus). Formally, the motif of carpe diem also seems to work well within a didactic poem. After all, the motif of carpe diem is naturally instructive: it supposedly expresses advice, imperatives are prominent, an authoritative speaker is required, and so is an addressee who will profit from the advice.Footnote 36 Thus, we have seen in the previous section how Vergil successfully blends Hesiodic wisdom with Alcaean largesse in creating a heavy drink. Yet, when Vergil applies the motif to cattle-breeding he takes the instructive nature of carpe diem to its limits and possibly beyond. The traditional lyric advice on the human condition constitutes a contrast to the technicalities of cattle-breeding. Vergil’s style in these lines is a far cry from the precision and technicality usual in treatments of cattle-breeding.Footnote 37
The misplacement of this purple patch in the Georgics is reflected in its reception. Lines 66 to 68, in particular, have proved popular with posterity: Seneca discussed them at length at Epistulae 108.24–9 and De breuitate uitae 9.2, and Samuel Johnson is said to have recited the passage ‘with great pathos’.Footnote 38 For Seneca, Johnson, and many besides them, these lines encapsulate the human condition. And yet the lines appear in a section on cattle-breeding, a context that is widely ignored.Footnote 39 This detachment of the passage from its context of cattle is suggestive. In other words, I do not so much wish to emphasise the fault of Seneca and others who ignore the context of the passage as I wish to show how their reception makes us see more clearly that the passage is already detached in the Georgics. Even there the passage feels separated from the rest of the text, as it does not quite fit into the context of cattle-breeding. Indeed, Samuel Johnson may have a point that the carpe diem sentiments are more naturally at home at the dinner table than in discussions about mating cows and bulls.
It is arguably one expression in particular that seems an ill match for cattle and invited readers from Seneca onwards to see in these lines a statement on the human condition, namely miseris mortalibus (‘unhappy mortals’, Verg. G. 3.66). This expression is naturally evocative of human affairs, not cattle. Servius may have felt the mismatch, as he insisted that we should not limit the passage to cattle, but understand it as referring to everything: ista sententia non solum ad animalia pertinent, sed generaliter ad omnia.Footnote 40 When Vergil applies the term miseris mortalibus to cattle, the expression seems to resist this application. The expression miseris mortalibus is taken from Lucretius 5.944. Monica Gale has shown that the anthropomorphic features of Vergil’s animals in Georgics 3 owe much to Lucretius, who already blurred the lines between humans and beasts.Footnote 41 Indeed, when Lucretius uses the term miseris mortalibus, he does so in a description of prehistoric humans who behave much like beasts.Footnote 42 The Lucretian model might have suggested itself for Vergil’s humanised animals. Elsewhere, Vergil also applies the term mortalis to animals; before Mezentius meets Aeneas in battle, he speaks to his horse Rhaebus and includes it along with humans among the mortales, in a passage in a similar tone to the one in the Georgics (Verg. A. 10.861–2):Footnote 43 Rhaebe, diu, res si qua diu mortalibus ulla est, | uiximus (‘Rhaebus, we have lived for a long time, if anything lasts long for mortals’).
Vergil uses the word mortalis for animals but, when he does so, he is aware that this is a term which carpe diem poems use to describe the human condition.Footnote 44 This is what Heracles does in Euripides’ Alcestis when he mentions ‘all mortals’ in the context of carpe diem (βροτοῖς ἅπασι, line 782), and a character from a lost play directs his carpe diem advice to ‘all mortals’ (πᾶσιν δὲ θνητοῖς, TrGF Adespota 95.1 apud Ath. 8.336b–c).Footnote 45 As Vergil turns this description of the human condition into a description of cows and uses almost entirely human terms, the passage becomes detached from the surrounding text, a detachment that can be felt in its reception. Conte described this effect of allusion in his Rhetoric of Imitation thus: ‘the foreign body remains distinct from, and hostile to, the coherent design of the whole work within which it “refuses” to be integrated’.Footnote 46 This refusal to be integrated characterises the excerpts of carpe diem in this chapter. Thus, the passage in the Georgics has the appearance of a lyric purple patch stitched onto the fabric of the Georgics; whether we think of Horace, Odes 2.14.1–4 here, which Richard Thomas speculates may have been influenced by Vergil, or about Mimnermus, fr. 1, we are reminded of lyric poetry, which bears little relation to cattle-breeding.
When Seneca takes the passage out of context and quotes it misleadingly, he gets away with it, because the passage is already detached from the rest of the text in the Georgics.Footnote 47 Seneca introduces the passage in De breuitate uitae, as if Vergil, half-lyric sage, half-prophet, were standing in front of him performing a song (9.2): clamat ecce maximus uates et uelut diuino ore instinctus salutare carmen canit (‘look, the greatest poet shouts out and as if inspired with divine utterance he sings a saving song’). This is hardly a good characterisation of Vergil’s voice, talking of cattle-breeding in the Georgics, but we will see throughout this chapter the prevalent association of the carpe diem motif with song and lyric: Seneca quotes a passage of text, but for him the passage is evocative of song and performance. Seneca invites us then to see Vergil as if he were present in front of us (ecce). And, perhaps appropriately, Seneca virtually lets us see Vergil’s words presently performed on the stage when he uses the Vergilian expression optimos uitae dies (‘life’s best days’) in a carpe diem section of one of his plays (Phaed. 450). His introduction of Vergil’s line in De breuitate uitae also shows us how excerpts of carpe diem were commonly received: we will encounter throughout this chapter readers who admire the carpe diem motif as if it were the purest form of poetry and wisdom, even if it reappears in as base a context as cattle-breeding. This reception is part of the culture of excerpting; enduring admiration for the motif leads to further excerpting and so a cliché is created. Vergil’s exhortation for constant renewal proves as true for poetic excerpts as it does for cows: semper enim refice (‘yes, always renew them’).Footnote 48
5.2 Plucking the Road, or Of Mice and Muses: Horace, Sermones 2.6
In Horace’s Sermones 2.6, the carpe diem motif is again applied to animals, in this case mice. The rustic Cervius tells a fable of a town and a country mouse. Though the country mouse does his utmost to offer a good dinner to the town mouse during his visit, the latter is displeased with the rustic meal and uses the idea of carpe diem as an argument for preferring the luxurious life in the city to impoverished simplicity in the countryside (Hor. S. 2.6.90–7):
Finally, the town mouse said to him [i.e., the country mouse]: ‘How can it please you, my friend, to endure a life on the ridge of a rugged forest? Why don’t you prefer people and the town to the savage forests? Trust me, my friend, seize the way, since terrestrial beings live with mortal souls as their lot, and neither the great nor the small can escape death; therefore, my good fellow, while you may, live a happy life among pleasures; live and keep in mind how short-lived you are.’
There is something enticing about the presence of a passage on carpe diem already in the Sermones, before Horace made this one of the most important themes of his poetry in the Odes.Footnote 49 Indeed, carpe uiam in the passage from the Sermones already seems to look forward to the daring lyric expression carpe diem of Odes 1.11. Andrea Cucchiarelli speculates that this ode had already been written and published separately, but as there is no evidence for this it seems more likely that in this case the humorous usage of an expression precedes the serious one.Footnote 50 Wieland might have recognised the connection, as he included in his translation of the passage from the satire the phrase ‘so sei du weise’ (‘be wise’), which has no direct equivalent in the Latin of Sermones 2.6, but is an excerpt from the carpe diem ode, 1.11, where Horace writes sapias (‘be wise’).Footnote 51 The similarity between the speech of the urbanus mus and Odes 1.11 is arguably not accidental. Indeed, I will argue that the section in Sermones 2.6 is poignantly different from its surroundings and sticks out as an excerpt of lyric poetry within the humble mouse tale. Horace’s foray into lyric poetry risks crossing the generic boundaries of satire.Footnote 52 On the following pages, I will analyse how the purple patch (cf. Ars 14–23) stands out among the surrounding clothes, or how the lyric carpe diem excerpt intrudes on the satirical fable of mice.Footnote 53
Numerous features of the town mouse’s speech display a much loftier style than befits Horace’s pedestrian muse, and show the mouse’s aspiration to being urbanus in every sense.Footnote 54 Thus, commentators have long noted the rare tmesis of quocirca in line 95, the mannered uiuunt sortita instead of sortiti sunt in uita, and the elevated register of letum, which Horace elsewhere only uses in the Odes, as well as the high register of aeuum.Footnote 55 The last one is part of the expression sis aeui breuis, which deserves closer attention. Kießling and Heinze, here, see a translation of the Greek βραχύβιος, while the Homeric ὠκύμορος is also used in the context of carpe diem at AP 11.23 (= Antipater of Thessalonica 38 GP) and the epitaph SGO 05/01/62.4 (= GV 1364.4); but, arguably, Paul Lejay, who thinks of ὀλιγοχρόνιος, hits the mark.Footnote 56 Though Adam Gitner does not discuss this expression in his dissertation on Grecisms in Horace, his analysis of a different expression seems valuable for the present passage. Gitner says of Horace’s periphrastic expression seri studiorum (‘late learners’) at Sermones 1.10.21, translating Greek ὀψιμαθεῖς, that ‘it serves to draw attention to the translation as a translation, so that one feels the Greek moving beneath it’.Footnote 57 In Sermones 2.6, the urbanus mus, who misses a certain je ne sais quoi at the rustic dinner, is eager to show off his cosmopolitism and urbanitas. His Grecism draws attention to this passage as a set piece of Greek-style lyric poetry. In this genre ὀλιγοχρόνιος indeed appears in a carpe diem poem (Mimn. fr. 5.5 apud Stob. 4.50.69 = Thgn. 1020).Footnote 58 Further, a Hellenistic carpe diem epigram ascribed to Plato ends on a very similar note to the little speech of Horace’s mouse: σκέψαι τὴν ὥρην ὡς ὀλιγοχρόνιος (‘consider how short-lived youth is’, AP 5.79 = [Plato] 4 FGE). The town mouse seems to ask the country mouse to remember (97: memor) poetry of this kind as well as to remember the sentiment.Footnote 59 Indeed, Persius would in turn answer Horace’s call and remember the passage: at Satire 5.153, he uses the Horatian expression uiue memor leti in a carpe diem context.Footnote 60
Moreover, Horace himself uses a comparable expression in one of his carpe diem poems. For in Odes 2.14, the Postumus ode, Horace describes Postumus as a ‘shortlived master’, breuis dominus (C. 2.14.24).Footnote 61 When Kießling and Heinze say about this expression ‘noch kühner gesagt’ (‘an even bolder expression’), their note almost sounds like a German translation of Quintilian’s characterisation of Horace (uerbis felicissime audax; ‘fortuitously bold with his words’, Inst. 10.96).Footnote 62 Indeed, such a callida iunctura formed ex Graeco fonte is characteristic of Horace’s project of writing Greek lyric in Latin (see Hor. Ars 45–71, discussed in Chapter 3.1 and 3.2). It is thus rather apt that Brink discerns a ‘sudden lyric touch’, when Horace uses the expression aeui breuis again in the Epistles in the context of carpe diem (Epist. 2.1.144).Footnote 63 In Sermones 2.6, however, the marked translation and the high register show that the town mouse’s speech is inserted here from a different language, a different genre, and a different dinner. Indeed, when a mouse uses the expression aeui breuis, one cannot but think of the mouse’s ‘short’ stature.Footnote 64 So much for the purple patch, but what about the surrounding clothing, the story of the mice?
While few conversation topics are more sympotic than carpe diem, fables on mice are the opposite of elegant dinner conversation.Footnote 65 Indeed, mice have certain characteristics that link them with small-scale writing such as fables and satire.Footnote 66 Thus, in the Ars Poetica, Horace criticises writers of epic, who promise too much and come up with too little, by referring to a Greek proverb that involves a mouse (Hor. Ars 139): parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus (‘mountains are in labour and give birth to – a ridiculous mouse’).Footnote 67 This poetic embarrassment, the tiny single-syllabic mus ending the hexameter, is contrasted with Homer, who gets epic right, perhaps by adding just one letter to mus: dic mihi, Musa, uirum (‘tell me, Muse, of the man’; Hor. Ars 141). Rather than in epic, mice find their appropriate generic place in Cervius’s fabella in Sermones 2.6, where the diminutive makes the fable look almost as small as its subject matter. The fable arises as a cognate of Horace’s Sermones at the countryside dinner (2.6.71): sermo oritur (‘a chat begins’).Footnote 68 There is one other thing that links mice and satire. Horace describes the style of his satires in Sermones 2.6 with the oxymoron Musa pedestris (2.6.17; cf. Hor. Ars 95 sermone pedestri). And what could be better suited to a ‘muse that goes on a foot’ or is even ‘crawling on the ground’ (sermones […] repentes per humum, Epist. 2.1.250–1) than mice, who are ‘terrestrial beings’ (terrestria, 2.6.93) and ‘crawl’ over the ground (urbis auentes | moenia nocturni subrepere; ‘eager to creep under the walls of the town at night’, 2.6.99–100)?Footnote 69 Indeed, ancient etymologies link mus with humus, the natural territory for Horace’s satires, as he claims in the Epistles.Footnote 70 Yet Horace’s pedestrian m(o)use most risks leaving the humble path when the talk turns to carpe diem.Footnote 71 It does not come that far, though: the mice are soon to find out that they are too ‘terrestrial’ and that the danger of death can materialise for the ‘small’ much faster than for the ‘great’. The excerpt is parodic and cannot be simply cut out and pasted in the Odes.
Few poets who appeal to the carpe diem motif really think that there is a genuine chance that actually ‘tomorrow we die’. For the two mice, however, this does almost materialise, when they can scarcely escape the Molossian dogs that break into their luxurious city dinner (2.6.110–15):
The country mouse was reclining and enjoyed his changed lot and played the guest delighting in all the good things, when suddenly loud dashing of the doors made them both tumble from their couches. Panicked, they ran through the whole room and they were even more terrified – more dead than alive – when the lofty house rang with the barking of Molossian dogs.
This scene quickly finds the mice’s lofty ambitions cut short and sees them close to the ground, running on their feet again (currere).Footnote 72 The scene also literalises the pretensions of the earlier lyric excerpt; there, the urbanus asserted that there is no ‘flight from death’ (leti fuga) but, once a danger of death materialises, he quickly forgets his sentiment and flees. Finally, the scene also lets us hear the last, barking sound of this satire (before the closing words of the country mouse): the Molossian dogs are exclusively perceived as a barking sound. Certainly, this is sufficient to restrain the ambitions of the country mouse, who looks for simple fare again instead of lavish symposia. But maybe the barking is a call to order in more than one sense. The barking dogs are probably an invention of Horace, which is neither present in Aesop’s, nor Babrius’, nor Phaedrus’ version of the fable (Aesop 314 Hausrath and Hunger, Babrius 108, Phaedrus fabulae nouae 9 Postgate).Footnote 73 Moreover, the sound of barking dogs has been associated with the sharp sound of satire since Lucilius, who repeatedly portrays himself as a barking dog.Footnote 74 So possibly in Sermones 2.6, which is ranging between low and high style and is in acute danger of leaning towards the latter – maybe here Lucilius’ barking sound of satire calls not just the mice to order but also Horace the satirist. As it is not the time yet to turn to lyric, the chaotic canine cacophony offers an appropriately satirical ending, reminiscent of the similar scene that ended Sermones 1.2.Footnote 75 The country mouse happily lay on ‘purple coverlets’ (purpurea ueste, 2.6.106) at the town dinner until the barking frightened him. Yet, if anyone should know the danger of an unfitting purple patch it is, of course, Horace, and the Molossian guard dogs of genre make sure that he does not forget it.
5.3 Butchering Poetry: Trimalchio, Petronius’ Satyrica, and Athenaeus
In the person of Trimalchio in Petronius’ Satyrica we find another would-be-urbanus, who attempts to stage recitals of literary and not-so-literary works, which are supposed to show his sophistication.Footnote 76 In the following section, I will look at Trimalchio’s epigrams on carpe diem and analyse how their aesthetics are shaped by cutting and fragmentation. As Trimalchio’s poems can be compared to carefully (or perhaps not-so-carefully) cut-up portions of food, we can witness a debased version of the quotation culture of Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae. But the comparison of texts with delicate bits of food links Trimalchio’s epigrams not only with Athenaeus’ fragmented quotations but also with over-seasoned rhetorical sententiae, such as the schools of rhetoric teach. An exploration of this rhetorical scope of Trimalchio’s epigrams is the other focus of this section.
Towards the beginning of the meal, Trimalchio decides to serve some Opimian wine which he alleges is 100 years old. The combined sight of the wine and a skeleton puppet makes Trimalchio think of human transience, a topic that occupies him throughout the dinner, and he expresses his thoughts in a carpe diem poem (Petron. 34.10):Footnote 77
‘Poor us! The life of human creatures amounts to nothing! We’ll all end up like this, after Orcus has carried us off. So, let’s live it up while we may.’
The 100-year-old wine raises the expectation of a poem that emulates and surpasses Horace, who frequently links his carpe diem poems with vintage wines – though none as old as Trimalchio’s (see Chapter 2). Yet, where Horace masters most difficult Greek metres, Trimalchio falls short of elegiacs. For the metrical form of his poem is unusual: although there are parallels for a sequence of hexameters followed by a pentameter in inscriptions, it is surprising when encountered in a book.Footnote 78 The unusual metrical form makes the poem seem compressed; but, even though one pentameter line seems to be missing, there are enough carpe diem expressions for four lines crammed into three lines. The word homuncio, for example, bears some resemblance to homullus, which Lucretius uses in a similar context at De rerum natura 3.914;Footnote 79 uiuere with the pregnant sense of ‘enjoying life’ is used in this context by Catullus and Horace, among others, and so is dum licet.Footnote 80 Trimalchio crams all these well-known expressions into three lines. The result is a poem that seems almost cut and pasted. Gregson Davis says that ‘it is this bare skeleton [sc. of the Horatian carpe diem ode] that Petronius, a demonstrably percipient reader of Horace, parodies’.Footnote 81 Indeed, I described above how Horace, Odes 1.11 already seems to play with its form, as the exhortation to ‘cut back long-term hopes’ (spatio breui | spem longam reseces) is voiced in a poem that, extraordinarily in the Odes, is wider than it is long and thus seems itself pruned or cut back (see pages 131–5 in Chapter 3). Trimalchio’s epigram goes further still; it has the appearance of a lyric excerpt, something cut out and cut back from familiar motifs, a pseudo-quotation that attempts to evoke a lyric atmosphere, albeit with one missing line.Footnote 82 A comparable case is perhaps Simonides’ carpe diem poem that adapts Homer’s image of the generations of leaves (frr. 19 + 20; also see pages 113–16 and 128–30 in Chapter 3); in Stobaeus, Simonides’ elegy begins with a pentameter, so that a preceding hexameter seems to have been cut out (Stob. 4.34.28). Otherwise, the poem seemed complete, until papyrus evidence revealed that Stobaeus had additionally omitted a central section and the ending in order to create a condensed carpe diem poem (P.Oxy. 3965 fr. 26).Footnote 83 This condensed poem fits well into the section title of Stobaeus, περὶ τοῦ βίου ὅτι βραχύς (‘On the brevity of life’). Trimalchio’s three lines are no less condensed, but the difference is that Stobaeus’ (or his intermediary’s) surgical knife fooled us for centuries: it created a neat little poem, and without the papyrus evidence no one would have ever suspected that a central section is missing. Trimalchio’s butchering is rather different from Stobaeus’ surgical approach, and his poem has never found much favour. The method, however, is the same – both readers prune poetry in order to create a highly condensed carpe diem piece.
Trimalchio, of course, would protest against my characterisation of his mediocre cutting skills. For if anyone truly cares about the art of cutting it is Trimalchio. At his dinner, it is not only in the realms of poetry that cutting is treated as an art and poems become ex-cerpts (carpere), but cutting meat is also a form of art for Trimalchio. Thus, at one point a slave dressed as the Homeric hero Ajax attacks a boiled calf as if he is mad, cuts it, and presents the pieces to the guests (Petron. 59). This spectacle of cutting is closely connected with Trimalchio butchering Homer. For Trimalchio introduces this Ajax while he summarises Homer’s Iliad and creates arguably the worst epitome of this epic: Agamemnon kidnaps Helen, who is the sister of Diomedes and Ganymedes and so on and so forth. Cutting meat and poetry are strongly entwined; the literary digest and the digestible are connected. Elsewhere, cutting up food is a spectacle not unlike gladiatorial games (Petron. 36.6):Footnote 84 ‘Carpe’ [sc. Trimalchio] inquit. processit statim scissor et ad symphoniam gesticulatus ita lacerauit obsonium, ut putares essedarium hydraule cantante pugnare (‘“Cut”, said Trimalchio. Immediately the meat-cutter came forth and cut the dish, moving in rhythm to the music; you would have thought that a gladiator in a chariot was fighting to the sound of the water organ’). Trimalchio highlights the importance of cutting with an exhortation that puns on the name of the carver (Carpus) and the exhortation to cut (carpe!) (Petron. 36.7): ‘Carpe, Carpe’. Even before the narrator learns the meaning of the pun, he suspects that here again Trimalchio aspires to urbanitas (Petron. 36.7): ego suspicatus ad aliquam urbanitatem totiens iteratam uocem pertinere (‘I suspected that the frequent repetition of the word aimed at some sort of urbane witticism’).
Poems and meat-cutting alike rely on staged repetitions, but a gag that depends on the repetition of one word becomes stale when the whole gag is repeated all over again and old dinner guests know it all too well (Petron. 36.8). I can only tentatively suggest that the parallels between the meat-cutting incident and Trimalchio’s poems may go further still. Though Horace’s expression ‘carpe diem’ might not have had quite the proverbial meaning in Petronius’ time that it would later acquire in English, Ovid, as well as Petronius’ probable contemporary Persius, used carpere in a carpe diem context (Ov. Ars 3.79; Pers. 5.151). Furthermore, this chapter has shown two instances in Vergil and Horace where carpo already expresses urgency and enjoyment in exhortations of carpe diem, before the Odes were written. Thus, it is possible that in a dinner that relies as heavily on the idea of carpe diem as Trimalchio’s, the repeated Carpe, Carpe! also points to the idea of enjoyment. At any rate, Trimalchio’s dinner indulges in excerpts: both poems and meat are more or less artfully cut up and the excerpt becomes a spectacle. Trimalchio’s poems were in turn also excerpted and collected in the Florilegium Gallicum.Footnote 85 There, his little carpe diem poem received the moralising heading Quod uiuendum sit bene dum licet (‘Why we must live it up while we may’). No doubt, Trimalchio would have been pleased. Once more a purple passage seems to call for its future excerption.
Aesthetics of excerpting, of ‘sampling’ older culture, may also help to explain what is going on with the peculiar wine Trimalchio serves. Its label praises it as 100-year-old Opimian (Falernum Opimianum annorum centum; Petron. 34.6) and it inspires Trimalchio to his thoughts on carpe diem. In an ingenious article, Barry Baldwin suggested that Trimalchio’s faux pas in this scene consists of serving a wine so old that it was only used as a bitter by his time.Footnote 86 Thus, Pliny tells us that by his time Opimian was reduced to a thick liquid, with which younger wines were spiced (Nat. 14.55). When Trimalchio serves this wine at his dinner and responds to it with his carpe diem poetry, he seems to act in the tradition of Horace (see Chapter 2), but the samples of the past he serves, whether wine or poetry, are too condensed and leave a stale taste in his guests’ mouths.Footnote 87
Literature as over-spiced dish, pastiche of repeated and all-too-well-known motifs – this is something that is not only an important theme of Trimalchio’s poems but also of the Satyrica as a whole and Neronian literature in general.Footnote 88 At some point, Petronius even alludes to Horace’s purple patch (Petron. 118.5).Footnote 89 In the opening of the novel as it has been handed down, Encolpius blames the schools of rhetoric for this type of literature (Petron. 1–5). Gian Biagio Conte in The Hidden Author says of this section: ‘In Petronius’ eyes the great myths of literature have become simply patterns, forms of expression, collections of memorable gestures.’Footnote 90 This rhetorical approach to literature also characterises Trimalchio’s poems, which treat carpe diem as such a pattern.Footnote 91 It is thus not surprising that ‘Encolpius’ image of clichéd sententiae as “honey-balls of phrases, every word and act sprinkled with poppy-seed and sesame” (1.15) gets served up by […] Trimalchio’Footnote 92 (31.10). Trimalchio’s poems are all about loci communes and rhetorical imitation.
In his Rhetoric of Imitation, Conte distinguishes between two different types of allusion, both linked to rhetorical devices: ‘integrative allusions’, which can be compared to metaphors and harmonise the voices of two poets, and ‘reflective allusions’, which can be compared to similes and contrast the voices of two poets.Footnote 93 Earlier in this chapter, I showed how Vergil’s carpe diem for cows in Georgics 3 is an example of a reflective allusion: the allusion to lyric poetry is not integrated in its present context of cattle-breeding and feels detached. Through the analysis of Trimalchio’s poetry, this assessment of excerpts can be further modified. The lyric scraps that are inserted in the texts of this chapter feel detached, are treated as quotations, but are often not specific allusions to a single source. Thus, they do not fit easily into the categories that Gian Biagio Conte and Richard Thomas introduce in their studies of ancient allusion.Footnote 94 As the excerpts of carpe diem evoke purple passages of a whole genre of poetry and can be adduced in various contexts, I propose to compare them to yet another rhetorical figure: the exemplum. Like exempla, Trimalchio’s carpe diem excerpts are recasts of old models, rooted in rhetoric and attempting to convey the paradigms and auctoritas of old wisdom, when occasions such as the serving of old wine require a literary response.
The epigram of Trimalchio that has concerned us so far is not the only one that seems incomplete and patched together. When an acrobat falls down during his performance and injures Trimalchio slightly, he marks this event with another epigram (Petron. 55.3):
‘What you don’t expect hits you from the other side, … and above us Fortune controls our affairs. So bring us Falernian wine, slave.’
The lines do not scan. Though this can be solved with Heinsius’ ubique | nostra filling the gap at lines 1–2, emendation is probably unnecessary, and in this one point my text differs from Müller’s Teubner edition. As Aldo Setaioli discussed in detail, the failing arguably derives from the improvised nature of the poem: Trimalchio could not know that the acrobat falls, so that he has to improvise his composition and fails.Footnote 95 Inspired by the sudden fall of the acrobat, the poem presents quite literally oc-cas-ional poetry, and the falling artist already foreshadows Trimalchio’s failing artistry.Footnote 96 But besides its obvious failure and its improvised nature, these verses again point to the status of Trimalchio’s poetry as excerpts that are cut up and pieced together. The one line Trimalchio gets right is quare da nobis uina Falerna, puer (‘so bring us Falernian wine, slave’). It is telling that this line does not have a direct relation to the occasion, but was probably a line Trimalchio always had in store, so that he could add it to various poems. This is supported by the fact that Trimalchio uses variations of this command in prose at Petronius 34.7, quare tangomenas faciamus, and Petronius 73.6, itaque tangomenas faciamus (‘so let’s do some deep drinking’). Such a command is, of course, extremely common in sympotic poetry.Footnote 97
Trimalchio is not the only symposiast who chops up lyric. The effect of reading Trimalchio’s parodic lyric scraps is similar to that of reading the fragments of early Greek lyric on the carpe diem theme. The similarity may not be accidental. Of course, I am not suggesting that authors such as Petronius only knew fragments of early Greek poetry. Nor am I implying that the quality of all these poems is similar. Rather, I am saying that early Greek poetry came to be treated as prime material for excerpts, which could be quoted at fitting occasions. This is, for example, what happens in Athenaeus. In similar fashion to Trimalchio, the Deipnosophist Ulpian also exhorts a slave to bring more drinks and he does so with a literary excerpt, though here one from Middle Comedy rather than lyric (Ath. 10.426b quoting Xenarchus Twins fr. 3.1): πίμπλα σὺ μὲν ἐμοί, σοὶ δ᾿ ἐγὼ δώσω πιεῖν (‘fill my cup and I’ll return the favour’). Perhaps this literary allusiveness even in the most pedestrian conversation is something Trimalchio also aspires to with the riddling phrase quare tangomenas faciamus (‘so let’s do some deep drinking’), which may or may not be an allusion to Alcaeus. In Athenaeus, the Deipnosophists heap up literary excerpts, which, as Christian Jacob has analysed, are as carefully prepared as the food at the dinner: food and texts alike are artfully cut up and rearranged into delicate little portions.Footnote 98 When we read early Greek lyric, we often read it as fragments through Athenaeus’ perspective. This sympotic filter is similar to the filter of Trimalchio, as fragmentary texts interact with sympotic activity. At one point, for example, the Deipnosophist Democritus first drinks and then quotes a long list of texts that show how Alcaeus is drinking in every season (ταῦτ᾿ εἰπὼν ὁ Δημόκριτος καὶ πιὼν ἔφη; ‘Democritus finished his point, drank and said’, 10.429f). This list also includes Alcaeus fr. 335 at Athenaeus 10.430c:
We must not surrender our hearts to misfortunes for we won’t achieve anything if we are troubled, Bycchis. The best medicine is to get wine and get drunk.
As it is handed down, the text quickly proceeds from the condition of misery in human life to the exhortation to drink, just as Trimalchio’s epigrams do. Again, this is not to say that Alcaeus and Trimalchio are two poets of comparable quality. Rather, it shows how the imperial symposium acts as the filter through which we look at carpe diem poems as excerpts, whether they are Alcaeus’ or Trimalchio’s. The phenotype of the poetry at the two very different symposia is comparable, as they result from cutting lyric up to smallest excerpts that resemble little delicacies. Readers have quite literally shaped the texts they received; we look at the carpe diem motif of early Greek lyric, filtered through Athenaeus, as a sequence of similar gnomic expressions, which can be cut up and heaped up in a similar way to Trimalchio’s epigrams (see Ath. 8.335d–336f, 10.430a–d). The fragmentation of carpe diem, the thematic arrangement of these fragments, and their treatment as rhetorical patterns create excerpted objects, which are commonly known and can be inserted just about anywhere. In the next section, I will turn to an excerpt that appears in most unusual surroundings.
5.4 Plucking Flowers: Naevolus in Juvenal 9
Once more, Juvenal pumps up the volume.Footnote 99 Already in Satire 1, he professes that he has received a glut of rhetorical education and has exempla and purple passages at his fingertips (Juv. 1.7–14).Footnote 100 It is thus hardly surprising that in Juvenal, too, we can identify a rhetorical re-patching of a lyric purple passage. In his ninth satire, Naevolus, a bisexual male prostitute, struggles with his impotence, his profession, and his poverty (all problems that are somewhat intertwined). After some lengthy complaints from Naevolus, his interlocutor advises him to live a good life (Juv. 9.118–23):
119 post 118 ponunt PA, post 123 Φ, om. Vat. Ottob. 2885, Vat. Pal. 1700, del. Pithoeus122–3 del. Pinzger
You must live a proper live for many reasons [for that reason so you can ignore the tongue of your slave] but chiefly because of this, namely that you may ignore the tongues of your slaves. For the tongue is the worst part of a bad slave. [Still worse off is the man who will not be free from those he keeps up with his bread and money.]
The gist of the narrator’s advice is the recommendation of a proper lifestyle, uiuendum recte (119). As has regularly been noted, the advice seems to come straight from Horace, who used this expression a number of times.Footnote 101 Naevolus, however, finds that the Horatian commonplace is too trite to offer useful advice,Footnote 102 and he does not understand how it can help him, when his time of youth is quickly passing by (Juv. 9.124–9):Footnote 103
126–7 uelox … breuissima del. Ruperti
‘You’ve just given me some good advice, but it’s a bit trite. Can you tell me what to do now after my time has been wasted and my hopes deceived? The fleeting flower, you know, the shortest portion of our brief and miserable life, hurries to run its course; while we are drinking, while we are asking for garlands, perfumes, and girls, old age stealthily creeps up.
This passage contains a textual problem in lines 126–127. The text seems to offer an odd mixture of metaphors, which involves the description of a flower as ‘running’. Various solutions have been proposed. Wakefield, for instance, places a comma before uelox flosculus, so that it stands in apposition to breuissima portio angustae miseraeque uitae.Footnote 104 Housman, too, puts uelox flosculus into apposition by placing it within commas, and Courtney recommends this in his commentary.Footnote 105 This solution disentangles the mixed metaphor and neatly makes portio uitae the subject of festinat, while the apposition uelox flosculus offers an image of comparison. But does this really solve all issues? Susanna Braund points out that uelox, the attribute of flosculus, signifies speed and thus goes rather well with the verb festinat decurrere. Moreover, she argues that portio uitae is no less bold a choice as the subject of a verb of running, so that we have to accept the metaphorical language anyway.Footnote 106 Subsequently, Braund opts for a different solution in her Loeb text and places a comma after flosculus, effectively putting angustae miseraeque breuissima uitae portio in apposition. She renders the sentence, then, thus: ‘The fleeting blossom, you know, the briefest part of our limited and unhappy life, is speeding to an end.’Footnote 107 This seems satisfactory (I have adopted Braund’s solution in my translation above). But a more radical solution has also been suggested: Ruperti argued for a deletion from uelox to breuissima, which Nisbet applauded and Willis printed.Footnote 108 Certainly this solves the problems with the odd word order and deletes one of the metaphors, so that the remaining one appears rather clear:Footnote 109 festinat enim decurrere uitae portio (‘a portion of our life hurries to run its course’). Essentially the problem comes down to the Gretchenfrage of Juvenalian textual criticism: how much is interpolated? Here is not the place to repeat the arguments of this hotly contested debate,Footnote 110 but rather I wish to show that in this passage the question of interpolation is closely linked to the poetics of carpe diem.
Naevolus’ first reaction to the interlocutor’s advice, according to which he should live a good life, is the complaint that this advice may be good but is too ‘general’ or ‘trite’ (commune; Juv. 9.124). Ironically, the generic carpe diem piece that follows is even more trite than anything the interlocutor had mentioned before. This is, of course, a technique Juvenal uses elsewhere in the satire, when Naevolus displays the same self-defeating rhetoric.Footnote 111 Naevolus thus already flags up the triteness of his statement beforehand, and the heaped-up images of carpe diem strengthen the appearance of these lines as an excerpt, the half-quotation of a half-educated gigolo.Footnote 112 Indeed, the beginning of the satire characterises Naevolus as a formerly ‘elegant dinner guest’ (conuiua facetus), whose witticisms full of urbanitas were ‘bred within the city limits’ (Juv. 9.9–11).Footnote 113 Naevolus’ little carpe diem piece would befit such conversation at a dinner, just as Horace’s mouse and Petronius’ Trimalchio attempted to show their urbanitas through the carpe diem motif at dinner. Thus, Braund points to Trimalchio’s speech in Petronius Satyrica 34.10 as a parallel for similar ‘pretentious and fatuous utterances’ on carpe diem.Footnote 114 Possibly even closer in genre is a passage from Persius (5.151–3).Footnote 115
Enjoy yourself, let’s seize our pleasures, just our life is ours; you’ll be dust and shades, a mere story. Live and keep in mind that you are mortal. The hour is fleeting – even the time that I’m speaking right now.
The rapid asyndetic style is similar to the passage in Juvenal, and when some commentators find fault with Horace for mixing upperworld and underworld concepts in saying at Odes 4.7.16 puluis et umbra sumus (‘we are dust and shades’), Persius here easily tops this with three metaphors, saying: cinis et manes et fabula fies (‘you’ll be dust and shades, a mere story’).Footnote 116 Naevolus’ mixture of metaphors tops this yet again. The dialogic nature of Persius’ fifth Satire may have further contributed to the attractiveness of this passage for the dialogic Satire 9, a form that is exceptional in Juvenal, but much less so in Persius.Footnote 117
In Naevolus’ speech, some ideas that may remind us in particular of Horace are crudely crammed together in a few lines voiced by a bisexual gigolo, who is complaining about the brief time of sexual potency before pale impotence approaches with aequo uel forsitan inaequo pede.Footnote 118 Yet, though we should understand Naevolus’ fleeting youth primarily as the fleeting youth of his membrum, this is not explicit in the text (just as in Vergil, Georgics 3.63–71, the carpe diem passage treats the fertility of cattle in rather oblique terms); the carpe diem passage is demarcated and self-contained and one could – if one so wished – take it out of context and quote it, in the spirit of Seneca and Johnson, with pathos at the dinner table.Footnote 119 In fact, it is not even necessary to imagine such fictional situations (non est cantandum, res uera agitur!), for Ausonius actually did this very thing and quoted Naevolus’ speech at Epigrams 14.1–3:Footnote 120
I used to tell you: ‘Galla, we are growing old. Time flies. Enjoy your youth. A chaste girl is an old woman.’ You turned me down. Old age has stealthily crept up.
The last words of line 3 adopt Naevolus’ obrepit non intellecta senectus (‘old age stealthily creeps up’), as Robert Colton has noted.Footnote 121 Yet, the setting in a poem of persuasion of love in the tradition of AP 5.21 (Rufinus) is much more respectable than Naevolus’ professional concerns about his waning sexual powers.Footnote 122 In a way, Ausonius pre-emptively responded to Gilbert Highet’s rather naïve wish that the ‘beautiful poetry of 9.126–9 is worthy of a better setting, and once more shows the peculiar character of Juvenal, who, like Swift, had a soft heart inside his armour of cynicism’.Footnote 123 Highet here fell for the purple splendour of one of Juvenal’s rhetorical set-pieces. This is a typical technique of Juvenal: pumping up the volume by throwing purple passages and excerpts into strange surroundings. This is also what he does, for example, in Satire 3, when he throws the description of a cave, a set-piece promised in Satire 1, into the gutter of Rome.Footnote 124 Such rhetorical set-pieces are isolated textual objects, purple patches, which can be cut. Philip Hardie has described how certain allusions to locks of hair become pluckable textual objects in their own right.Footnote 125 In Satire 9, flosculus, the Juvenalian term suspected of interpolation, is ironically also a ‘rhetorical ornament’ (= flosculus), plucked from lyric poetry, though it is not entirely certain who plucked it. What we do know is that this flower is plucked from Horace, and, quite appropriately for a short excerpt, it is made smaller through a diminutive: Odes 2.3.13–14, nimium breuis | flores amoenae […] rosae (‘the all too brief bloom of the lovely rose’).Footnote 126
As an excerpt, a lyric set-piece in elevated tone, these are not truly Naevolus’ words. This brings us back to the question that first concerned us in terms of textual criticism: who is talking? Is it Juvenal’s Naevolus overdoing it with his short lyric piece or an interpolator who recognised the carpe diem motif and added one more image of his own to the line? This question involves considering the role of interpolation in Latin poetry. Traditionally, textual critics would have described interpolators as dismissively as Robin Nisbet did in his notes on Juvenal: ‘one cannot assume that the interpolator, fool though he was, always wrote gibberish’.Footnote 127 Recently, however, Richard Tarrant offered some stimulating thoughts on interpolation that markedly differ from Nisbet’s portrayal of the interpolator as a μέγα νήπιος.Footnote 128 According to Tarrant, it might be fruitful to look at interpolations as creative work on the text. Tarrant proposes the term ‘collaboration’ for an ‘imaginative response to a text that enhances or amplifies it’.Footnote 129 Here, the interpolator is perhaps amplifying Juvenal’s already-pumped-up volume. He may be someone who is appreciating Juvenal’s poetry and is giving his best go at being Juvenal. Naturally, this explanation does not work for interpolations that are versified glosses, but is arguably fruitful for the present case. If we accept Ruperti’s assumption of an interpolation, an interpolator would have recognised the carpe diem motif and enriched it with the carpe diem buzzwords uelox, flosculus, angustus, breuis. We can then see an interpolator who is shaped by the education of his time, knows his Horace, and can insert flowers from Odes 2.3.Footnote 130 For the interpolator, the motif of carpe diem was then all too well-known (commune), and he could join Naevolus’ imitation game by adding further motifs and making the passage even more absurd than it was before. Of course, this is not a necessary conclusion, and I find it at least as likely that Juvenal wrote the lines as they have been handed down, and that he himself attributed the mix of metaphors and buzzwords to Naevolus. But the important point to note, I think, is that we cannot tell for certain whether Juvenal or an interpolator inserted this motif.Footnote 131 The poetic meadows were well explored and the schools had taught everyone how to pluck flowers there. When Mimnermus replanted Homer’s leaves, this was daring, and perhaps already a little less so when Simonides followed him. By the time Juvenal was writing, the simile of Homer’s leaves was a writing exercise at school.Footnote 132 Everyone plucked the flowers of carpe diem.
One reader who was particularly aware of the semantics of plucking was the Renaissance poet Petrarch, who as a young man would look around the ‘meadows of poets’ (auctorum pratis) and excerpt or pluck the flowers of poetry (haec […] decerpsisti; ‘I plucked these’; also flosculos decerpere; ‘to pluck little flowers’, Epistolae Familiares (henceforth Fam.) 24.1).Footnote 133 Later, in the Canzoniere, too, Petrarch describes himself plucking rhymes and verses as well as herbs and flowers (thus effectively glossing flosculus): ‘or rime et versi, or colgo herbette et fiori’ (Canzoniere 114.6). Quite pointedly, Petrarch describes Horace in very much the same way: [sc. Horatium] carpentem riguo gramine flosculos (‘Horace was plucking little flowers on a well-watered meadow’, Fam. 24.10.118–25).Footnote 134 Here, Horace’s breuis flores rosae (‘all too brief bloom of the rose’) from Odes 2.3 becomes a small excerpt, a flosculus, which brings us back to Juvenal. For the passage from Juvenal 9.124–9 is itself also such a little flower plucked by Petrarch and noted in his reading. Petrarch would then quote the Juvenal passage in a letter to Emperor Charles IV (Fam. 23.2.13).Footnote 135 And one can only hope that Charles, who boasted two saints among his ancestors, was unaware of its original context. Petrarch quoted the same passage again in a letter to his patron Philippe de Cabassole, the Bishop of Cavaillon (Fam. 24.1.4). In both letters, the passage appears in a sequence of excerpts from Latin literature, all of which deal with transience. Thus, in the letter to Philippe, lines from the usual suspects, Horace’s carpe diem poems such as Odes 1.4, 1.11, 2.11, 2.14, are quoted. But here and in the letter to Charles IV, we also meet Vergil’s cows again. Evidently, Petrarch picked up the Vergilian quotation from Seneca, as he introduces it in almost the same way.Footnote 136 Vergil’s cows, Juvenal’s gigolo, and Horace’s Odes all make it into the same list of excerpts, as the passages have lost their context and are isolated objects, which can be collected and re-arranged as a collection of little flowers. Indeed, Petrarch notes in a letter how he eagerly marked passages dealing with the transience of human life in his editions and was genuinely moved (Fam. 24.1). This practice helped Petrarch to imitate a classical style and similar techniques were advanced in the Renaissance in the form of commonplace-books, which were collections of loci communes from classical literature. These collections, based on marginal notes, gave authors a toolbox of ancient models, of purple patches full of auctoritas.Footnote 137 But when we encounter a list of topoi based on Petrarch’s reading in one of his letters, it almost reads like an inanis strepitus uerborum, a sequence of marginal notes with no corresponding text; his list shows purple threads below the patches and turns the motif of carpe diem into a sequence of completely isolated excerpts (Fam. 24.1):
miserae scilicet uitae huius angustias, breuitatem, uelocitatem, festinationem, lapsum, cursum, uolatum, occultasque fallacias, tempus irreparabile, caducum et mutabilem uitae florem, rosei oris fluxum decus, irrediturae iuuentutis effraenam fugem, et tacitae obrepentis insidias senectutis, ad extremum rugas et morbos et tristitiam et laborem et indomitae mortis inclementiam implacabilemque duritiem.
The distress and brevity of this miserable life, its speed and haste, its tumbling course, flight, and hidden deceits, time’s irrevocability, the perishable and changing flower of life, the fugitive beauty of a rosy face, the frantic flight of unreturning youth, the traps of old age stealthily creeping up, and, finally, the wrinkles, diseases, gloominess, suffering, and the harshness of indomitable death and its stern implacability.Footnote 138
The possibility of an interpolator inserting an additional image to the carpe diem piece of an impotent gigolo, which in turn is inserted into a letter to the self-proclaimed descendant of saints, brings me to a natural close: Juvenal 9 shows the most extreme context for a carpe diem excerpt and after this it hardly seems possible to go further. Over the course of this chapter, we have witnessed the ongoing fascination with the carpe diem motif, as it was excerpted and re-excerpted. These dynamics of excerpting would continue, as generations of poets would pluck the flower of carpe diem. Plucking flowers thus became an important motif of French poetry in the sixteenth century, and perhaps the most Horatian iunctura in this time is offered by the Pléiade poet Ronsard, who speaks of gathering the youth (‘cueillez, cueillez votre jeunesse’; ‘pluck your youth, pluck it’). Yet, such later poems of Ronsard or also Herrick’s well-known Gather ye rosebuds are beyond the scope of this study.Footnote 139 Rather, I wish to stress that when Ronsard and others weave their garlands, they gather their flowers from the same meadows which have been explored by humanists and ancient writers. Indeed, other humanists who followed Petrarch’s lead used excerpts of Latin poetry in their compositions. Beside many other motifs, the expression carpe diem itself was also adopted; Angelo Poliziano wrote carpamus uolucrem diem (‘let’s pluck the winged day’) in a carpe diem poem, and probably just two years later Erasmus of Rotterdam finished his Elegia de mutabilitate temporum with the following couplet: utamur, ne frustra abeat torpentibus, aeuo | carpamus primos, dulcis amice, dies (‘let’s make use of our time (if we are idle, time’s lost); let’s pluck the days of our youth, my sweet friend’).Footnote 140 Yet, as Erasmus himself tells us, it lies in the nature of the commonplace imagery of carpe diem that it can also be employed for the opposite cause.Footnote 141 And thus, in a later poem Erasmus would attribute every possible carpe diem image and expression to an interlocutor whose hedonistic arguments he refutes in his reply – if time is short, we should dedicate our life to learning (Elegia in iuuenem luxuria defluentem atque mortis admonitio). Erasmus indeed also followed a similar strategy in his great collection of proverbs, the Adagia, successors of commonplace-books: when he explains a Horatian idiom on the shortness of time from a carpe diem poem, he says that we should dedicate our lives to study as time is short.Footnote 142 In the light of Erasmus’ interest in commonplaces, it is not surprising that his carpe diem poems read like a collection of pseudo-quotations from Horace and others woven into a new garland. Indeed, one of the images of his Elegia de mutabilitate temporum again evokes the language of Juvenal’s gigolo: sic, sic flos aeui, sic, dulcis amice, iuuentus | heu properante cadit irreparata pede (‘just so, sweet friend, the flowering bloom of our lifetime, our youth, hastens and dies, never to be recovered’). Here, too, we encounter the odd mixed metaphor of a surprisingly speedy flower. This, however, is just one of many images in a poem pieced together from ancient motifs and phrases, which Erasmus, as he said elsewhere, gathered (carpo) like a Matine bee in an image itself gathered from Horace (C. 4.2.27–32).Footnote 143
It is easy to smile about Gilbert Highet’s naïve wish to have Naevolus’ short poem excerpted, and we can see through Seneca’s manipulative quotation strategies. Yet, their treatment of the carpe diem theme points to something inherently fascinating about the motif. Jonathan Culler argues that one fundamental characteristic of lyric is something he calls after Baudelaire ‘lyric hyperbole’: in lyric, seemingly trivial observations are characterised as extremely significant, whether it is the fall of a leaf or the withering of a rose.Footnote 144 Such lyric images succeed in becoming commonplaces – or at least Baudelaire described these dynamics as a success in a passage adduced by Culler: ‘to create a cliché is genius. I must create a cliché.’Footnote 145 Carpe diem, then, is a quintessentially lyric motif, not despite but because it easily becomes a cliché: as phrases and images are repeated again and again, they paradoxically become solidified as gestures for a momentary now.Footnote 146 The passages of this chapter indulge in such lyric hyperboles and clichés, and believe in their splendour. Excerptors strive to catch the hyperbolic essence of lyric. Yet, once the passages are excerpted, we often see clearly the triviality of the hyperbolic statements. On the one hand, carpe diem continues to be treated as a lyric motif par excellence, displaying urbanitas. It is adduced in excerpts, which present the motif as some poetic or vatic wisdom, a wisdom that is properly expressed through lyric rather than philosophy. Whoever adduces this motif, even if he hardly manages to scramble two or three lines together, believes that he has reached the Parnassus and has become an Alcaeus or Horace, as he has said something quintessentially lyric. On the other hand, excerpting creates a cliché, a text removed from its proper context and occasion, textual objects that are compared to little flowers, dinner delicacies and purple patches. Indeed, the two contrasting sides of carpe diem can be understood through its status as a purple patch: the shine of its purple material keeps attracting people who remove the patch and stitch it on ever more clothes. As a patch or excerpt, the carpe diem motif is a textual object: small, cut up, removable, always displaying its noble material, even if it is just a scrap of this material on shabby clothes. The image of the purple patch and the rhetorical scope that is behind it offer further justification for treating the passages in these sections as ‘excerpts’, even when they are no direct quotation; for the purple material has to come from somewhere and always looks all-too-well-known, even if it is an imitation rather than a quotation. As textual objects, the excerpts of this chapter are removed from present occasion to the extent that the carpe diem motif is applied to cows, mice, and a gigolo. It is thus perhaps not altogether unfitting when, in our own day, we encounter another decontextualised excerpt, utterly removed from its original context: on a T-shirt that screams ‘Carpe that fucking diem!’Footnote 147
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