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Drunk on Latin Verse

A caution against juxtaposing your life with that of a famous classical writer
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I’ve always believed in the principle that literature, broadly construed, is only as good as the readers who read it. For example, Sir Ernest Barker’s commentaries on Aristotle and Plato are insightful and engaging precisely because Sir Barker’s personal biography was complex and engaging. The principle is even more relevant when a writer examines himself through his reading of a great poet from the past.

In Horace and Me, Harry Eyres—a leisure columnist for the Financial Times and former wine columnist for The Spectator and poetry editor of the Daily Express—juxtaposes his own formative experiences with the life, legacy, and verse of the Roman poet Horace (65-8 BC). Among other minor topics, Eyres discusses Horace in relation to wine, Eton College, and the change he underwent in his literary approach to classical texts while attending Cambridge. Haphazardly going from each topic to the next, the assumption behind the author’s examination is that his varied experiences help him better interpret Horace’s odes—and that he is worthy of Horace’s guidance. On both counts, Eyres is not very convincing.

Eyres is the product of the prestigious Farleigh House Preparatory School as well as Eton College and Cambridge University. He acquired a cold, old-school type of classical education that consisted of learning Greek and Latin and to compose verse in Latin hexameters and elegiac couplets and Greek iambics. Eyres was not always a fan of Horace, the “classic of classics,” beloved by Petrarch and Voltaire, Pope and Johnson, Goethe and Nietzsche. Early on Eyres was an admirer of the Roman poet Catullus. The young classicist had not yet discovered the non-official Horace. The Horace he was introduced to represented Augustus’s cruel imperialism, the Pax Romana. But he soon discovered that the establishment Horace was a falsification. The real one was complex, sensitive and wrote lyric poetry that, if read carefully, resonates with modern sensibilities. marapr-issuethumb

Horace’s poetic musings on the power of wine resonated with Eyres. It was this that gave Eyres “the key to the connection between his time and our time and me.” Eyres was the son of an independent wine merchant, and his teenage years were spent winetasting throughout Europe with his father, the result of which was the development of a snobbish, academic attitude toward the fermented grape. Horace’s poetry provided the corrective to that attitude and brought a change to Eyres’s perspective on life. Now wine for Eyres represents both the alcoholic beverage and life’s meaningful experiences. He observes that the function of wine in Horace’s odes is elemental. It is linked to the cycles of birth and death, friendship, intimacy, inspiration, vulnerability, and catharsis.

Unfortunately, despite Eyres’ appreciation of wine beyond its snob appeal, he fails to communicate how precisely Horace’s poetry has changed him. His naysaying about the effects of technology on the modern production of wine and the many references to vinum he highlights in Horace’s corpus or in classical artwork he describes on location in Greece and Rome seem frenetic and beside the point. Eyres’s account of his introduction to the field of classics and Horace at Eton College during the 1970s is interesting, given the cultural conditions of the 1960s. He was a bit of a rebel for being drawn to a subject viewed as “moldy, dusty, dry.” The attraction of the dead languages was the sheer vibrancy of Latin words and the lucidity and grace of Attic Greek—sentiments shared by most admirers of classical culture. Like Horace and his harsh teacher Orbilius—also known as “the flogger”—Eyres’s schoolmasters were crusty and exacting. They adhered to the old way of teaching classics, parsing words, scanning meter, and construing syntax. Unlike classicists today who take every opportunity to add irrelevant postmodern commentary to the interpretation of literary masterpieces, Eton’s old schoolmasters hardly went beyond the grammatical to reflect on the philosophical or historical significance of a text. The old schoolmasters either refused or were incapable of doing so.

Eyres relates a story that captures the lack of historical interest among the old-style Etonian teacher. It was one of the lowlights of studying Livy’s history of the Carthaginian wars with the headmaster:

At no point, as far as I can remember, did he step back to give us some idea of what Livy’s history might really have been about, about who Livy himself was, who the Romans were, who the Carthaginians were: about what for Livy, writing two hundred years later, was the purpose of writing this immense history. It was a missed opportunity, for Livy was telling the story of Hannibal’s attack on Rome across the Alps, one of the most daring military adventures ever undertaken.

Yet shortly after his disappointing experience with Livy, during his sixth form Eyres was introduced to book 1 of Horace’s Odes. The “Soracte Ode,” in particular, charmed him:

Do you see the depth of snowfall
On Soracte standing bright? This frost
Has stopped the rivers in their tracks;
The trees are bowed with their white, heavy pall.

In here we’re warm. Keep piling logs, Hugh,
On the blazing fire—and let’s uncork
A mellow four-year-old riserva,
Just the Sabine vino, not a fancy cru.

Give up trying to control the weather; some god
Will calm the raging storm at sea.
The tall flame-cypresses and the ancient ash
Won’t always shake and bend and madly nod

His initial encounter with Horace’s “Soracte Ode” was not exactly transformative; the teacher was too practical to communicate the ode’s expressive power and the pervasive influence Horace had on poets, philosophers, and free thinkers throughout Western civilization. But it was enough for the young Eyres to glimpse Horace’s literary personality and style, which promised many insights into the good life.

At Cambridge University Eyres began reading the lyric poets who influenced Horace and started refining his approach to poetry. Instead of continuing the gentleman’s version of literary criticism of his past, Eyres decided that his way with classical texts would be more emotionally engaging—more in the tradition of Petrarch, Leopardi, and Nietzsche. The shortcoming of Eyres’s brief discussion of the change in his literary approach is that he does not explain the effect it had on his reading of Horace or any classical work. It would have been helpful for the reader to see him illustrate the methodological differences between the old-style Etonian interpretation and his new emotionally engaged way by interpreting one of Horace’s odes.

Horace and Me tells more than it shows. The many experiences that make up the author’s life lack unity. The life and poetry of Horace is supposed to provide the unity, but the poet often ends up as a prop in Eyres’s peripatetic life. No unique perspective or argument is on display in the book that is convincing enough to motivate intelligent readers to invest time in getting to know the great classical poet. Instead Eyres’s book makes a convincing case that it might not be a good idea to examine one’s life through a classical writer from the past unless one’s life is worthy of the comparison.  

Andre Archie, professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University, is author of the forthcoming Politics in Socrates’ Alcibiades.

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