and indexes. We are also grateful to our editors at Wiley for their patience and assistance in bringing this book into print.
We dedicate this book to: (Barbara Gold): my husband, Carl Rubino, who could not understand how on earth anyone could write a book about Horace for people who do not know Latin, and to my granddaughter, Annabel Calvo Gold, a very smart young lady who is destined for big things; and (Genevieve Liveley) to my husband, Richard Huxtable, for his persistence in mischievously mispronouncing “elegiac”.
Introduction: How to Read and Teach a Latin Elegiac or Lyric Poem
Part I: How to Read a Latin Elegiac or Lyric Poem
Translating the original Latin of a lyric or elegiac poem into English is only part of what it means to read and enjoy this kind of poetry. Lyric and elegiac poetry is particularly rich in the use of poetic devices and literary effects, so understanding how these literary features operate is important if we want to fully understand and appreciate the poems in these genres. William Fitzgerald’s 2013 book, How to Read a Latin Poem: If You Can’t Read Latin Yet (a book which is also extremely useful if you can read Latin), describes poetry as a “heightened form of speech” precisely because it uses these features. He points out that poetry “is memorable, powerful, and sensitive to complex nuances of feeling and meaning. It may signal its heightened nature by using metre and rhyme …, but most of us can tell that we are reading poetry simply by the way language is used” (Fitzgerald 2013: 2). As this description suggests, lyric and elegiac poetry uses language carefully. It arranges its words according to the pattern of a particular rhythm or meter, and it plays around with word order. It sometimes uses unusual or special vocabulary, and it often employs figurative language such as metaphor, symbolism, and simile.
If we think of Latin lyric and elegy as a “heightened form of speech,” some important characteristics of these genres come more clearly into view. First, this kind of poetry typically has a speaker and an addressee: if we are to fully understand a poem’s meaning we must try to identify who is speaking to whom (look out for someone’s name appearing in the first few lines – often in the vocative case). Second, this kind of poetry is written to be read aloud, and the way that it sounds makes an important contribution to its overall emotional affect and meaning. You should always try to read a Latin poem out loud (even if you aren’t quite sure what the Latin means). When you do, you’ll notice clever sound effects at work, among them features such as: alliteration, the repetition of initial consonant sounds; assonance, the repetition of vowel sounds; anaphora: the repetition of a word or phrase; apostrophe, directly addressing someone (possibly even the poet himself – Catullus particularly likes to do this); and onomatopoeia, words that sound like their meaning (the hissing sound produced by lots of Ss, or the murmuring sound produced by lots of Ms, for example).
When you read a poem aloud, you will also begin to notice that this “heightened form of speech” has a certain rhythm or meter. English meter is largely determined by the “stresses” that we naturally place on certain syllables when we speak – an effect that is sometimes enhanced by the use of words which rhyme. Latin meter is very different. It alternates between “heavy” syllables that take a relatively long time to pronounce (generally speaking those which contain long vowels and those which end in a bunch of consonants) and “light” syllables that take a comparatively short time to speak (try saying aloud the words “heavy” and “long” and compare the sound with the words “light” and “short” to get a feel for this in English). In Latin lyric and elegy, the particular meter used by the poet describes the careful arrangement of these “heavy” and “light” syllables into certain patterns. Fitzgerald uses the opening lines of one of Horace’s most famous lyric stanzas (or verses) – Horace Odes 1.5.1-2 – to illustrate how this pattern works sonically and metrically in the case of a particular lyric form known as the “Third Asclepiad.” He represents a “heavy” and “long” syllable with a “dum” sound and the traditional symbol “–” and represents the “light” and “short” syllables with a “da” sound and the traditional symbol “
Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa
dum dum / dum da da dum / dum da da / dum da dum
– – / –
perfusus liquidis urget odoribus
dum dum / dum da da dum / dum da da / dum da dum
– – / –
The basic scheme of the elegiac meter follows a similar pattern of “heavy/long” and “light/short” syllables but is recognized by its use of elegiac couplets – two paired lines of poetry with a carefully regulated rhythm of those syllables into units known as “dactyls” and “spondees.” The first line of each couplet is a line of “dactylic hexameter,” the meter used in epic poetry, i.e. six dactyls (– ) or spondees (– –); the second is a shorter line of dactylic pentameter (i.e. five dactyls or spondees). One of the nice things about the elegiac meter is that each metrical couplet tends to be “closed” – that is, the sentence typically ends at the end of a line. The typical meter of an elegiac couplet, such as the opening lines of Ovid’s Amores (1.1.1-2) where the poet talks about the elegiac meter as rising and falling (1.1.3-4), can therefore be represented as:
arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam
–
dum da da / dum da da / dum da da / dum da da / dum da da / dum da
edere, materia conveniente modis.
–
dum da da / dum da da /dum / dum da da / dum da da / dum
In Latin, individual words can be arranged in almost any order in the lines of a poem, which enables Latin lyric and elegiac poets to be especially creative in adapting their choice of words to different
