ODES OF HORACE,
A Student's Edition of the Odes of Horace, Z III. By C. R. Garnsey. (Swan Sonnensehein and Co. 6s. net.)—Mr. Garnsey reads the three books of the Odes here discussed under the con- trolling influence of a very strange idea. The three are, he thinks, intimately connected; a common purpose runs through all, and this purpose is the revelation of the wickedness of a certain Lucius Varro Murena. This Murena was a soldier of some dis- tinction, who was accused in B.C. 22 of conspiring against the life of Augustus, and was executed. Terentia, wife of Maecenas, was his sister, and the fall of Maecenas from power was doubtless con- nected with the incident. The theory which Mr. Garnsey wishes us to accept is that in B.C. 19 Horace published a book consisting of eighty-eight poems, in all of which he attacks the life and character of this man, executed, it will be remembered, three years before. One of the poems is addressed to him directly. It looks like a piece of friendly advice, and has always been understood as cautioning a man to whom he wished well against rash enterprises. It seems impossible that it could have been written after the man's death,—"rectius vices," it begins. He is referred to as having been liberally treated by his brother Proculeius (II. 2), and he is mentioned in the account of a banquet (III. 19). Here, accord- ing to the common interpretation, Horace "chaffs" a learned friend who was so much taken up with his books that he had not given the details of time and place in his invitation, and then describes the feast itself. The toastmaster was to give "The New Moon," "Midnight," and "Morena the Augur." All this seems plain enough, but Mr. Garnsey reads into it the strangest meanings. Bat we must pass on to a characteristic specimen of his inter- pretation in the well-known "Ne sit amines+ tibi amor pudori " (II. 4). Hero Horace tells his friend not to be ashamed of loving a slave-girl (ancilla). Great heroes had done the same ; very likely his Phyllis was nobly, even royally, born; one so faithful and so unselfish could be nothing else. "Don't be jealous, if I praise her beauty: remember I am a man of forty." All this seems simple enough ; but our interpreter introduces amazing complications. Phyllis is really Julia, the daughter of Augustus, whom the ambitious Murena had thought of marrying. Xanthiaa is of course Marone ; he is called Xanthias, "bright, blooming," because he was dark and deformed, exactly on the same principle on which in the Banquet-ode he is called Tolephus "shining afar," and said to be "fair with abundant locks " (spissa nitidum coma) because be was "a bald, elderly, deformed person." As for the
"forty years "—the poet was forty-six in B.C. 19—it is "a round number accommodating itself to the metre." We gather that Mr. Garnsey is a follower of Dr. Verrall and Signor Ferrero. We wonder what they think of their disciple.
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