Lyric and tragedy in Horace Odes 2.1

Abstract

Horace Odes 2.1, addressed to the politician, historian and tragic poet C. Asinius Pollio, has in recent years been much analysed. Most often, critics have followed the steer of Nisbet and Hubbard’s commentary (1978) in looking for traces of Pollio’s lost Histories and of Pollio’s own historical role (e.g. Henderson, 1998; Woodman, 2012), and it is indeed clear that the poem contains a number of allusions to historiographical topics and stilemes and may relate to the lost proem of Pollio’s work. This paper looks in another direction, following the intuition of Nisbet and Hubbard that in this poem ‘Horace is suggesting an affinity between Pollio’s tragedies and his histories’ (1978: 9). It argues that Horace’s ode alludes more extensively than has been realised to established topics in tragedy, and thus to the other part of Pollio’s literary career which Horace here prominently mentions (2.1.9 severae Musa tragoediae) as being suspended for the writing of history. Given the loss of just about all pre-Augustan Roman tragedy, it argues from the texts of Greek tragedy, which Pollio must have imitated to some degree, that Horace’s poem is just as suffused with tragic topics as with historiographical material: similar references to blood, fire, gambling and dust can be found in tragic texts. It also suggests that the strong emphasis on sound and spectacle in the poem, usually thought to be part of a particularly vivid style of historical writing, can be related to the stage-productions of tragedies in Pollio’s own time, which we know to have been particularly lavish and grand.