BMCRn't you glad you're not Stuart?

My all-time favorite BMCR contributor, Steven J. Willett, has a new review of Stuart Lyons's Horace's Odes and the Mystery of Do-Re-Mi.

He touches on some of my favorite topics:

1) The fallacy of biographical reading.

The Roman Odes have long been a quarry from which critics try to extract hard traces of sincerity or insincerity, as if these were binary opposites, but the job of a court-poet is to reflect court agendas and not his own private opinions. ... Sincerity is a poetic illusion created by the poet's verbal and structural dexterity. We have no instrument to probe behind the illusion to mental states, even in the case of modern poets where we possess letters and contemporary documents.

2) The performance of Latin verse.

Whatever Horace's own theatrical performance might have involved, there is nothing to suggest his contemporary readers sang such complex, intricate, allusive, ambiguous and rhetorically informed odes. The only way to comprehend their riches is by reading. Lyons shows himself far too confident in drawing "inescapable" conclusions from literary conventions that lack the slightest external corroboration.

3) Versification.

[Lyons's] decision to use traditional English versification has dressed Horace in such traditional garb that he vanishes into the mob of pallid imitations that stretch back to the sixteenth century. No matter how hard Lyons tries to make the odes sing, they sound like Thomas Gray on a bad day when he had nothing better to do than write his "Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat."

Ouch.

HESPEROS: Studies in Ancient Greek Poetry Presented to M. L. West on his Seventieth Birthday

The cleverly-titled Hesperos, a Festschrift for M.L. West (get it?), has just been reviewed in the BMCR and has opened a hole in my library that I hadn't noticed. As the reviewer notes in his curt close, "The price of the book is hideous." It's listed at $199, a small sum for Croesus, but Amazon has knocked off 32% for the moderately wealthy among us.

I'm most intrigued by Kenneth Dover's contribution, a 'lyric Encomium' that

sets itself the familiar task of encoding the honorand's achievement in a few well-chosen phrases. In West's case, this would be hard enough to do in English, but Dover pulls it off in clever and elegant Greek. His epode praises West's pioneering efforts to make students of Greek poetry more aware of its interactions with Near Eastern culture.

So without further ado:

ΕΣΠΕΡΩΙ
ΣΟΦΙΑΙ

μελετᾶν ἄνδρ' ἔμπειρον ἀκριβέων      (στρ.)
ἔδοξε βουλᾷ συνετῶν ἐπαινέσαι
ἀφνειόν τ' οὐ κατὰ δαμόταν θέμεν,
ἄξιον ὄντα χρέος πράσσειν μέγ' ὀφειλόμενον·
τοσαῦτα κείνου μεμαθήκαμεν ἄμμες.      (5)

γενεὰς τὰς καθ' Ἡσίοδον θεῶν      (ἀντ.)
σαφανίσας κ' Ἀρχίλοχον καὶ Θεόγνιδας,
τέτραπται πρὸς Διόνυσον ἠδ' Ἄρη
ἁρμονίας τε λυρᾶν καὶ τέθμα Τερψιχόρας
ὥστ' ἐξικέσθαι σοφίας ἐπ' ἄωτον.      (10)

τολμᾷ δ' ὑπερβαίνειν ὅρους ἐθνέων παλαιῶν·      (ἐπ.)
ἀλλ' οὐ γὰρ ἑλλανίδα μῆτιν ἐλέγξας
ἀπώσατ', ἰχνεύει δ' ἰδέας ἀοιδᾶν
φαίνων ἄρα μοῦνον ἐὸν Μοισᾶν γένος.
     K.J.D

I should point out the synizesis in Θεόγνιδας at the end of line 7.