| Happy Horace | Steven D.Smith, Summary of Dissertation |

Happy Horace 
by Barry Baldwin

Horatii curiosa felicitas, an "espressione giustamente famosa," remarks Paolo Soverini, "Teorie Retoriche e Poetiche di Petronio," ANRW II.32.3 (Berlin/New York 1985), 1749. Famous enough to earn a spot, albeit patchy, in the Oxford English Dictionary. But not in the indexes of Eduard Fraenkel's Horace (Oxford 1957). And Martin Smith's Petronian Bibliography 1945-1982 in the same ANRW volume (1624-1665) records but three articles on the matter (likewise Soverini, all in Italian), notably G.C. Giardina's Gordian Knot-cutting proposal (Museum Criticum 5-7, 1970-72, 5-7 & 178-80) that felicitas be changed to facilitas. The other two, by D. Gagliardi (1969) and P. Mantovanelli (1972) are inaccessible here, and to come fresh to the subject I have not looked further.

Giardina's re-writing can be discounted. No manuscript variants or previous editorial emendations are registered by Bücheler or Müller, unlike an earlier sentence (118.2) in the same passage where there is a division between ad portum feliciorem (printed by e.g., Bücheler/Heseltine/Warmington) and faciliorem - Müller, as usual, deleted himself out of trouble. In view of the unchallenged facilius in the very next clause, both adverse critical remarks, faciliorem is clearly preferable and facilitas would thus be an illogical compliment.

Whatever its precise nuance, the plaudit is genuine and generous, as evidenced by the full sentence: Homerus testis et lyrici Romanusque Vergilius et Horatii curiosa felicitas. No glowing epithets for the other literary giants; Horace is the big name on the marquee, in contrast with (say) Tacitus, Dial. 20.5, ex Horatii et Vergilii et Lucani sacrario. Persius (1.116), having no occasion to import the epic exemplars, dubs Horace vafer for his Satires. Quintilian (10.1.96) agreed with Petronius - Hands Up, those who would reverse this: Horatius verbis felicissime audax; cf. his quantum in nullo cognovi felicitas (10.1.119), along with similar praises (9.4.27 & 10.1.111) for the felicitous style of Cicero. The Elder Seneca (Controv. 3 pref. 8) granted the swan of Mantua his same due: Vergilium illa felicitas ingenii sui ... Ovid (Am. 2.17.27) and Martial (6.64.7 & 9.44.2) commended themselves for the same quality. This all militates against Giardina; so, too, may Petronius' eschewal elsewhere of facilitas, plus his curiosus pictor (29.4), which may evoke the remark attributed by Plutarch to Simonides: "Painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that talks."

With legitimate happiness, I here largely refrain from mounting that old war-horse: is Petronius' Civil War squib aimed at Lucan? Given the skepticism of Smith in his Cena edition (Appendix 1), following P.A. George (CQ 24, 1974, 119-133), and the descriptively misleading "ambivalent" applied to it by Kenneth Rose, The Date & Author of the Satyricon (Leiden 1971), 62 n6, it is worth reviving the opinions of W.E. Heitland in his 1887 Introduction to C.E. Haskins' edition of Lucan (xix & xxxvi): "It reads like a fair copy written to show Lucan how to do it ... The purpose is unmistakable: it is thrown off half in rivalry, half in imitation of Lucan, rather like our well-known 'Rejected Addresses' though less definitely intended for ridicule. It is smoother and perhaps more elegant than Lucan; but the importance attached to mere literary tricks and supernatural machinery is very remarkable, as Petronius' own words shew it to have been very conscious and deliberate" - Heitland subjoins his agreement with Teuffel that Lucan is not named and shamed because he was then living.

Without agreeing with all of this, I import it on the principle that editors of Lucan deserve equal time with editors of Petronius, adding a brisk triad of thoughts: Eumolpus' musings, literary and moral, are similar to earlier Petronian effusions put into the mouths of Agamemnon and Trimalchio; I remain attracted to the notion that Petronius may have ingratiatingly included mockery of Lucan to amuse Nero; as Rose (62) adroitly observes, the happy juxtaposition of Eumolpus' poetic manifesto with the Corax-Giton farting contest reminds us of the Suetonian anecdote in which Lucan exploited a fart in a public lavatory to deride Nero's thunderbolt half-line sub terris tonuisse putes. The OED notice of curiosa felicitas encompasses 5 entries: Chesterfield's Letters, 1752, a straight quotation of Petronius; Coleridge, 1817, applying the compliment to Wordsworth; F. Harrison, 1886, bestowing it upon Tennyson; L. Johnson, 1908, giving it to Yeats; R. Tuve, 1933, "generalising the curiosa felicitas which produces such handsome turns and expressions."

By no means the whole story. According to Stephen Gaselee, The Bibliography of Petronius (London 1910), 28, apart from the quotations in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), the earliest English translation of any part of the Satyricon occurs in Fanshawe's 1655 rendering of Camoens, his dedication to the Earl of Strafford being postluded by text and Englishing of chapter 118 under the rubric "Furor Petronianus, Petronius his Rapture," our expression coming out as "Horace, his curious foelicity."

Not for the first time in PSN, I resuscitate the universally ignored remark in John Aubrey's Brief Lives, "Sir John Hoskyns enformes me that Sir Kenelme Digby (1603-1665) did translate Petronius Arbiter into English." No trace of this has ever been found, but habent sua fata libelli, e.g. Jean des Gouttes's 1536 translation of Lucian's De Mercede Conductis was lost until unearthed in a Versailles library over 200 years later, while Blaisot's 1559 Frenchification of the Greek satirist's Calumny is still missing. Petronius would have been congenial to the rackapelt Digby, and there is an Arbiterish flavour in these words from a (to us) unknown book of his cited by Samuel Johnson, Rambler 50 (1753): "Every man has a desire to appear superior to others, though it were only in having seen what they have not seen." John Dryden four times cites the tag, most notably in his Preface to Sylvae (1685): "There is a secret happiness attends his choice, which in Petronius is called curiosa felicitas, and which I suppose he had from the feliciter audere of Horace himself." Edward Young, On Lyric Poetry (1727) rhapsodises over "Horace's muse superadding a felicity of dress entirely her own." Alexander Pope mined it thrice: The Temple of Fame, vv221-2, "Here happy Horace tuned the Ausonian lyre/ To sweeter sounds;" Essay on Criticism, vv141-2, "Some beauties yet no precepts can declare,/ For there's a happiness as well as care;" Epistle to Mr. Jervas, vv67-8, "Led by some rule that guides but not constrains;/And finished more through happiness than pains." Samuel Johnson's applause (Life of Pope 343) of his Epistle of Eloise to Abelard is thus well-conceived: "Here is particularly observable the curiosa felicitas, a fruitful soil and careful cultivation."

Finally, Edward Gibbon, 'Critical Observations on the Sixth Book of the Aeneid' (1770), in (ed.) Patricia Craddock, The English Essays of Edward Gibbon (Oxford 1972), 156: "Those who are used to the laboured happiness of all Horace's expressions," with his accompanying note 7: "Curiosa Felicitas. The ingenious Dr. Wharton has a very strong dislike to this celebrated character of Horace. I suspect that I am in the wrong, since, in a point of criticism, I differ from Dr. Wharton. I cannot however forbear thinking, that the expression is itself what Petronius wished to describe: the happy union of such ease as seems the gift of fortune, with such justness as can only be the result of care and labour." Gibbon was retorting to Wharton's remark in his Essay on the Life and Writings of Pope that "Horatii curiosa felicitas is surely a very unclassical inversion, for he ought to have called it the happy carefulness of Horace, rather than his careful happiness." In "Petronius the Moralist" (TAPA 72, 1941, 176-194), Gilbert Highet developed what would become his much-quoted aphorism "It is possible that Petronius wrote the book to discourage Nero from becoming a beatnik" in Anatomy of Satire (Princeton 1962), 115. His Classical Tradition (New York 1957), 602 n1, contains the attractive suggestion of Petronian influence on Ronsard's "J'ay patronné mon oeuvre plustost sur la naive facilité d'Homère que sur la curieuse diligence de Virgile" (Preface to La Franciade) - Note that "facilité", Signor Giardina! Here also (684 n13) is Highet's example of "what Petronius would have called curiosa felicitas," namely this version of Juvenal 10.157-8 by José Maria de Heredia: Tous anxieux de voir surgir, au dos vermeil,/Des monts Sabins où luit l'oeil sanglant du soleil,/Le chef borgne monté sur l'eléphant Gétule. Highet embroiders this in his Juvenal the Satirist (Oxford 1954), 336-7 n22: "Heredia has magically made it sinister, by making the sun's single red eye glare over the elephant-backed hills like the eye of the Punic conqueror on his beast." Curiosa and curiosa, as Alice almost said.

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Steven D. Smith, Discourses of Identity and Freedom: Representations of Athens in Chariton. Dissertation, Boston University, 2004. [UMI #3101093.]
by Steven D. Smith

Readers of Chariton's novel Callirhoe encounter a curious dissonance between characters who despise Athens and a narrative voice that continually emulates classical Athenian authors. I focus on representations of Athens in the novel to investigate precisely this narrative dissonance. After considering the representations of Athens by Greek and Roman authors contemporary with Chariton, I look at the diverse representations of Athens in Chariton's text, analyzing the influence of classical Athenian literature on the novel's form and content. An interpretation of Chariton's Alcibiadean hero confirms my conclusion that Athens figures prominently within the novel's discourses of identity and freedom. Ultimately Chariton represents a world of negotiations with imperial power, relevant to Rome's hegemony in the East.

Athens is significant for the construction of national, civic, and individual identities. Characters from Syracuse to Persia talk about Athens as a means of defining their own identities in the socio-political world of the novel. Though characters attempt to diminish Athens' status, frequent references to Athens paradoxically reinforce its influence. Criticisms of Athens by Syracuse reflect Syracuse's own weaknesses, undermining the idealization of Syracuse within the narrative. On the individual level, Callirhoe defines herself in terms of her father's military victory over Athens, while Chaereas' ambivalent persona is suggested by numerous allusions to his Alcibiadean qualities. Fundamentally influenced by classical Athenian literature, in which notions of public and private are closely intermingled, Chariton's novel demonstrates how the heroes' private experiences take on political dimensions. Athens' participation in the identity politics of the novel affects the novel's thematic discourse on freedom and tyranny. Although Athens is despised as an imperialist threat, the narrative complicates a straightforward opposition between freedom and tyranny. Instead, allusions to the problematic relationship between Athenian democracy and tyranny at the end of the 5th century suggest the often subtle transition from one political extreme to the other. The interrelatedness of freedom and tyranny is further illustrated by the novel's bifurcated representations of Athens: while the characters attempt to escape Athenian hegemony, the narrator indulges in a sophisticated homage to the Athenian literary tradition, suggesting the inevitability of confronting the literary influence of Athens.

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