Futile Horn

05.17.2003 - 6:00 am (hey carmina)

I didn't get enough sleep last night, and when I woke up this morning I read some Lucretius. I was angry. Lucretius makes me angry. There is a tradition that Lucretius was a raving lunatic -- beyond the fact that he wrote a six book poem on Epicurean philosophy in epic meter. He says, "It is pleasant when the winds rages against waters upon the great sea to look upon the great toil of another from the land -- not because it is a sweet pleasure that someone is in peril, but because it is pleasant to see those hardships you yourself are free from" (Luc., De Rerum Natura II.1-4). While this is possibly true, you are a bit of a spore to say it out loud, a heathen to write a poem about it, and a total miscreant to use epic meter to do it in.

I have discovered if I lie on my back and hold my breath, the beating of my heart pushes tiny puffs of air out of my lungs. I am hoping this is just a fun oddity and not a symptom of something life threatening.

I also read Horace's Ode 1.3 which through me for a few loops. First of all there were a few bits of Latin I wanted to check against other translations, but the only one I could find I needed the Latin to make sense of the English. And the notes told me very little wanted to know. Of the first person who committed a boat to the sea, he seems to say "For him oak and triple bronze were around his chest." My guess is that it somehow means "he had balls of solid rock," but if you are writing a commentary, you really should have something to say about that.

The poem is addressed to the boat carrying Vergil to Greece (which is itself kinda strange), and then Horace preaches about the folly of sailing and how it is against divine will. Of course, the Romans are traditionally "wary" of the sea (if not necessarily historically), and lyric poetry has a habit of warning against exceeding mortal bounds (Pindar especially), but neither fact justifies this tirade. And what does it have to do with Vergil?

I looked but I couldn't find too much on the internet, but I found a gay/lesbian/bisexual site on Horace (yeah), and while I was disappointed about how little of the article had to do with ass-pirating, it did give me the idea that the lambaste against the sea might not of had so much to do with hubris as the fact that if people weren't sailing, Vergil would still be around. He calls the poet "animae dimidium meae," the words "my soul" physically split by the word "half". Latin audiences are sensitive to and appreciate of this kind of play, so it would express both the dearness of his friend and the loss cause by their parting. So he's being childish in a high class charming sort of way.

Twice mentioned is the march of death (both mors and letum), which is interesting because Vergil will die following a trip to Greece a few years after Horace's poems are published. In the first Ode, Horace talks about being a vates: poet, but also soothsayer. How Twilight Zone.

Where is the Aeneid in all this? with its conspicuous amount of sailing? Is Horace somehow ignorant of the project at this point, or does he have something to say about undertaking the writing of an Augustan epic?

I suspect one is meant to pick up a play between Iapyx, the wind that carries Vergil to Greece and the son of Iapetus (Prometheus) who steals fire for men but thereby brings new miseries upon them (there's only about one other word in Latin that begins with "Iap"). Horace says may "all the winds be bound, except Iapyx", and Prometheus of course was bound to the rock at the edge of the world for stealing fire. "Sigh, Vergil, I know you have to go, but..."

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn