This week Woody takes look at one of the better thoughts ever written into a poem.

Hello. It might have come up previously, but bears mentioning again. I am By Jove’s resident Classicist. This role consists of: 1) smiling politely and uncomprehendingly during the really in-depth dramatic theory; 2) muttering in a slightly superior tone when discussions of the aforementioned theory get too time-consuming and difficult something to the effect of “bloody thespians”; 3) apologising when the fruits of said discussions inevitably produces better results than just winging it; 4) providing socio-historic context context when we work on pieces based on Greek and Roman myth; 5) stealing biscuits. It is as a Classicist that I wish to address you today. So, put on your toga and grab some wine because we’re talking about Horace! Specifically, we’ll be looking at his Carmina (or Odes) Book One, Poem Eleven, known to the world as “Carpe Diem”.

In art one can divide things into two approaches. There’s doing it like Horace and there’s doing it like Ovid. If you want to do it like Horace you hide the effort that goes into the work, making things seem easy and casual. If you’re going for the Ovidian route then things have to be big, complex and clever. Other things being equal one isn’t better or easier than the other, it’s mostly a matter of how you want a thing to be received by your audience. Horace is a master in seeming laid-back and relaxed. He tells us he’s not really suited to writing on ‘Achilles’ grumbles’ (Odes I.6.6, my translation) and constructs his poems in lyric metres – which were seen by the Romans as a bit light and frothy. The Odes do for the most part take as their subject matters “inconsequential trifles”; there are ditties about drinking parties, little loves songs, and mocking of himself and of others in no small measure.

You’ll need a copy of the text if we’re going to look at things in any detail, so I’ve looked it up on thelatinlibrary.com and bashed out something suitably close to the Latin:

You oughtn’t seek, to know’s a sin, what end, to me to you

the gods might give, Leuconoë, and don’t try those Babylonian

horoscopes. How much better it is to endure what might come!

Whether Jupiter sends many more winters or this is the last

which now impairs the Tyrrhenian Sea,

have the sense to decant the wine and prune lengthy hope

to a shorter span. While we’re chatting hateful time will have passed.

Pluck the day, with scant trust in tomorrow.

(If you’d like a look at my efforts when I’m inspired by rather than studiously following the Latin you can do so here: http://bit.ly/LurgTX )

There is throughout large tracts of the Odes a strong flavour of the philosophies of Epicurus. This is the taste of drinkable but not expensive wine – the sort you might have open in the middle part of an evening after you’ve caught up with your friends and the conversation has become pleasantly aimless . In The Life of Horace, attributed to Suetonius, the poet is called ‘a pig from an Epicurean herd’. Carpe Diem is a wondrously elegant bit of advice on the Epicurean ideal of ataraxia – “tranquility” or “the untroubled mind”. The first thing to note about the poem is its brevity; it’s only eight lines long with 16 syllables to a line. it doesn’t need to be any longer because it’s a simple idea being conveyed, and in any case we’ve got some wine to be getting on with. It’s also really rather casual, using language more common in, say, Cicero’s personal letters than in poetry of any stripe. (Take this on trust. I do. Philology has been described to me as “the art of reading very slowly, and is best left to those of quiet, dutiful temperaments who can go about that sort of thing without succumbing to terminal tedium). The phraseology of the Latin is also very casual, at a quick glance it reads like prose; you can miss that all the line are sixteen syllables long and have in the middle a “dum-diddy-dum” rhythm (known as a choryamb, if you like jargon). This is the “doing it like Horace” mentioned above. If you’ve ever tried to make a thing sound natural and casual while conforming to a strict metre you’ll know it’s tricky than it might seem.

Horace is addressing a pseudonymous woman, as he also tends to do in his love poetry. Whether Leuconoë is real or not doesn’t matter; an addressee is a convention of the form and we can safely assume Horace is rather close to her. She is worried about the future generally, and with mentioning of the allocation of last winters about death in particular. You might think this is a perfectly reasonable concern. Not so, says Horace, it is ‘nefas’, a violation of divine law. Strictly speaking the Epicurean view was that any gods there may be are too blissfully contented to bother with the rest of us but Horace isn’t one to be caught up in the details. The most surefire way to muck up one’s happiness in this one life which Epicurus taught was all we had was to get worked up by things we can’t affect. We need to have the sense to see this and occupy our time between birth and death in a pleasant and laid-back manner.

Laid-back is the important bit. ‘Carpe diem’ means pluck the day, like with the string of a lyre or a grape from a vine. ‘Seize the day’ would be ‘rape diem’; it’s a decidely violent verb in Latin – it’s got a “burn down the walls and carry off all the gold and women” sort of vibe to it – and implies be tense and ready to spring into action. ‘Seize’ implies to me single-mindedly hunting for one specific thing (salary, swanky house, position of power) which if we could just get then all our problems would be solved. Far better to slow down and see what happens for a bit. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t put effort in – we’ve got to make arrangements to get the wine in for a start – but try not to get too worked up if things don’t go quite according to plan.

This is a very good tip and it’s quite a good trick to render it into eight lines of seemingly effortless verse, don’t you think? You don’t? Fair enough. I’ve got a drink and an interesting thing to watch, so I’m not going to let that bother me.

One hopes you’re well,

yrs,

ADWoodward