Sins Against Love in Horace Odes 3.11

 

 

 

 

A new translation of Horace Odes 3.11:

 

 

 

O Mercury, from whom Amphion learned his skill

to build Thebes’ walls with stones by music moved,

from lyre of tortoise shell let songs sound forth

through strumming well-tuned strings.

 

Once silent and unwanted but now dear

to holy shrines and rich men’s groaning boards –

sing forth your song till Lyde’s stubborn ear

will turn this way and hear

 

who like a mare of three years old will play

and frisk on open plains and take no part

in mating, up to now she boldly thinks

herself too young for love.

 

You lead the tiger and the woods themselves.

swift rivers halt their flow for you,

Cerberus, monstrous Underworld guard,

will yield to your sweet song.

 

Tityos and Ixion brightened then.

The urns of the Danaean girls

stood dry, their watery load had had drained away,

their holders held by verse.

 

May Lyde contemplate the virgins’ crime,

their guilt there marked by all their urns,

whose water drained as fast as it went in.

This was their punishment

 

and thus the guilty after death still pay.

Those sinners (how could they have been more vile?)

who with sharp iron blades did take

the lives of their own mates.

 

Just one of many honored marriage vows,

proved false to her own father’s treachery

and won acclaim, a faithful bride renowned

for ages yet to come.

 

“Get up!” she told her youthful mate,

“Get up or else you’ll sleep a lengthy sleep

you don’t see coming.  Flee my sire

and sisters who mean ill,

 

and who like lions seizing calves – alas! –

one at a time while I, more mild in heart,

will neither wound you nor will I aim

to hold you in durance.

 

My father may confine me with cruel chains

for mercifully having spared my mate

or he may banish me and make my home

remote Numidia.

 

Run off as far as feet and winds can carry you

while night and Venus aid your flight.  Run off

while still you can and see my sorry fate’s

recorded on my tomb."

 

 

 

     Reading certain Horatian odes resembles contemplating a box by Joseph Cornell.  One sees in his Ode 3.11, for example, a meticulously constructed elegant little arrangement of objects or images attractive in itself but elusive in meaning with the context enhancing the connotative tendency of each element.  Part of what lends Horace’s references their rich suggestiveness is the fact that, apart from the mentions of Lyde, apparently a friend of the poet, the ode takes place entirely in the mythic realm.

    The poem is curiously doubled and self-reflexive.  The author seems to have intentionally introduced obscurities and contradictions.  To begin with, the poem has two themes, each accorded roughly equal space.  The first is self-reflective, the enchanting power of song, illustrated by Amphion’s music with which he razed the walls of Thebes, by the social prestige of poetry in religion and symposia, and by mythic references to the power of Orpheus’ playing to charm not only nature but even Cerberus and the sufferers in the underworld.  In a form of sympathetic magic, by claiming supernatural power for poetry the writer thereby predicts the success of this particular verse. 

     The claim of art’s persuasiveness provides a bridge to the second theme, the proper management of erotic energy.  The poet condemns mythic figures that offended against love –Ixion, and Tityos and, most prominently, the Danaean women who killed their spouses, all toward the end of convincing Lyde of the value of marriage and a conventional family life.  Horace provides a little horror show to reinforce poetry’s teaching by indicating the penalties for spurning the natural destiny of maturation in married love.  Stanza five, which would be a digitally animated sequence in a film, presents a luridly threatening Cerberus, a shocker itself, but also a reinforcement of the poet’s admonitions later.  The reader then is introduced to the theme of proper love relations with glimpses of the punishment in Hades of two others who had offended against marriage, Ixion by attempting adultery with the worst of all possible choices, the wife of the king of the gods, and Tityos for having attempted to rape Leto at the behest of that same goddess. 

     This theme is supported as well by the story of the Danaïdes and of Hypermnestra’s saving her husband Lynceus.  There could scarcely be a less dutiful wife than one who murders her mate, and the reference seem overdone for the speaker’s message to the young Lyde.  The poem, though a sort of love advice, is more concerned with propriety than with eros, but even in this simple normative recommendation of marriage, it is hardly straightforward.  To begin with, the name of Lyde, the woman to whom the ode is addressed, has confused some readers.  The name is used for a ἑταίρα by several poets.  It is the name of Antimachos’ mistress and the title of his elegiac poem upon her death.  Athenaeus 13.597 mentions another courtesan of the same name and Horace himself mentions a ἑταίρα of the name in 2.11.  (Another reference in 1.23 is less certainly a courtesan, but there Lyde’s characterization in part resembles that in 3.11.)  Considering that the lesson the poet implores her to hear is to prepare for a respectable marriage and the role of a dutiful wife, this could hardly be a message for a courtesan.  The use of Hypermnestra as his exemplum is problematic in any event, though she was a spouse to Lynceus and with him founded the Danaid line that led to Perseus.  Having been coerced unwillingly  into marriage, she is inappropriate as a model bride, however loyal a wife she proved to be.    

     Horace’s Lyde is said to behave like a young filly playing in a field, active and healthy, while resisting the subjugation to a husband that would come with marriage.  This characterization makes inevitable the picture of her as a teen-aged girl, wholly inexperienced in love and dubious about relationships, perhaps the daughter of a friend.  She sounds very like Daphne in Ovid who (in Golding’s translation) hated “as a haynous crime the bonde of bridely bed,” but instead enjoyed sporting about the wild mountains: “unwedded Phebe doth she haunt and follow as hir guide,” but, of course, her lack of interest in men is there caused by Cupid’s intervention.  Daphne has been struck by his anaphrodisiac iron arrow, while Apollo’s desire has been enflamed by a golden one.

    For all the structural play, irony, and semantic disjunctions, the thematics of the ode persist.  Horace’s boasts about the power of poetry resemble the claims of poets from the revelations of shamans in archaic times to Wallace Stevens “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” but here they are hobbled as it were by the incongruities of the poetic argument.  Lyde is a misleading name and Hypermnestra an ill-fitting example of ideal marriage.  Such slippage renders the poet’s claims faintly ironic, while the hellish horrors seem exaggerated and out of place.  Naive and shy, Lyde is even less likely than the average wife to commit murder as the Danaïdes had done  

     Still at base the ode does represent a social consensus endorsing monogamous marriage as the fundamental building block of society.  Without such stabilizing institutions, violence and force would prevail, suggested by the multiple murders of Aegyptus’ sons  and the apparition of Cerberus.  Attitudes in support of marriage include the notions of respectability and propriety added to the age-old advice govern by an elder generation to the younger one just coming of age, “It is time to grow up now and act like an adult.”  The frightening pictures of the hellish dog and the torments of the condemned are nothing but the superego of a patriarchal system enforcing order through terror.

     These meanings are present in the ode, but they jostle one another uneasily.  Self-questioning, they feature cracks and flaws.  Yet the structure of the whole, the arrangement of symbolic objects from the world of myth, placed precisely to react against one another, is well-balanced so that all the elements of the problem of married love are included: not just the young woman’s reluctance to form a household, but also coercion from parents (Danaus and Aegyptus) and uncontrolled lust (in the figures of Ixion and Tityos).  The entire system of the universe, it is suggested, supports the marriage institution, assuring a sorry fate for those who defy their proper role and destiny.  Horace’s essentially poetic gifts are fully displayed as he renders what amounts to an admonition to behave in a dynamic field of competing demands of the ego: Amphion’s drive for power, Lyde’s desire to cling to childhood, the destructive lust of Ixion and Tityos, the coercive parental demands, the murderous potential of the reluctant wives, and the fidelity of Hypermnestra.  All these passions are on full display, while the reader hears nothing whatever of the joys of either nuptial or illicit love-making.  Who but Horace could build such a dynamic semantic field while simply recommending the most ordinary behavior?