UNDER CONSTRUCTION
In the years following Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, internecine strife continued unabatted, and there was much coming and going of emissaries and messengers among the figures of the 2nd Triumvirate, Anthony and Octavian in particular who, though rivals, had a common interest in ridding themselves of Sextus Pompeius. The latter was ambitious, controlled the grain shipments to Rome and was not to be eliminated until 36 BC, and then in battle by the same Agrippa who savaged the fleet of Cleopatra a few years later.
This was the Golden Age of Latin verse, a period of highly refined culture somehow maintained in the face of social dislocation and outright civil war. Horace and the slightly younger Vergil were at the peak of their powers and frequented a wide circle of poets less known to us, the Gallus whom Vergil praises in his Eclogues, and the Varius who joined Vergil and Horace on the diplomatic junket which is the topic of Horace’s satire Iter Brundisium, usually known as “Journey to Brindisi.”1
For junket it apparently was, though we are not sure on which of the many trips the skilled mediator Maecenus made down the Appian Way to Brindisi at the heel of the Italian boot Horace and his companions came along on. We do have, however, a fairly clear notion of the season from several allusions scattered throughout the text, instances of logging*, the required reference to time and place which is one of the conventions of travel writing. It was, for example, chilly enough for Horace to have worn a nightshirt (85), evidence for an autumn trip perhaps, except that naturalists agree that the chorus of frogs on the Pomptine Marshes which, along with cursèd mosquitos and drunken fellow travelers, kept Horace awake on his second night out from Magna Roma are more appropriate to early spring (14); and the thrush roasted in l. 72 is “emaciated,” as it would be after a lean winter, not an lush summer. Of importance are not the specifics, but that logging of season, however indirectly, is a prime figure of travel writing.
Not that the Journey is “pure” travel writing– as if such a creature could exist. Travel is like war, a chameleon whose rational aspects are rapidly transformed by instinct and accident. On the open road the best-laid logistics easily go awry, and as for the literary forms into which travel is cast, they too have no rigid substance of their own, apart from the diary or log, notes and fragments which correspond to the stages of a trip, the cycle of arduous march and deserved repose, a rhythm which is preserved in most travelogue, even in as mannered a one as Horace’s journey.
The afffinity between this Journey and the Iter Siculum by Lucilius (of which we have only suggestive fragments) is well acknowledged, though there is no final word as to whether the literary model composed eighty years prior or Horace’s actual experience among Maecenus’s camp-followers should be credited as prime mover of this particular poem. But is not the desire to do so a case of the chicken and the egg, of what Franekel suggests is a unconscious modern fallacy, the “insistence on a sole primary source of inspiration”? The point is well-taken, not just for this finely-honed piece, but for travel writing as a whole. The raw experiences of travel, even within one’s own safe little sphere– the boundaries of which in the modern as in the ancient world sometimes turn out more tenuous than we think– are so variegated, amorphous and dépaysant that unless some customary frame of reference can be found utter chaos alone may result, a serial itemization of random incident of no interest to the reader or even the writer himself.
Yet despite his above-mentioned preference for ambiguity, Fraenkel sees Horace’s response to Lucilius primarily as an act of polishing and up-dating, a relatively successful endeavor to pare away the indiscretion and vulgarity of the earlier poet, and, as such, more derived from the literary code of the time than from Horace’s own brute experience, which would in any case have been transmuted by the poet, which must have underlain not only Lucilius’ Iter Siculum (whatever its flaws in either Horace’s or Fraenkel’s eyes), but also Caesar’s journey to Spain as recorded in Suetonius (Jul. 56), the travel memories in Catullus Phaselus, and passages subsequent to Horace’s Journey like Ovid’s Tristia I. 10, or the introduction to Ausonius’s
Mosella. That these topoi of travelogue antedate Lucilius or even Greek culture is obvious from our preceeding study of the Journey of Wen-Amon from Egypt to Phoenecia in the 11th century BC. That they transcend the confines of “Western” culture is shown by the fact that they occur in the works of the 6th c. Chinese pilgrim Hiuan Tsang, the 10th c. Persian poet Naser-e Khosraw, the 14th c. Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta, the anonymous Aztec legends of the journey and return of Quetzacoatl, and in Bernal Diaz’ account of Cortes’ invasion of the Aztecs.
The paradigmatic quality of the Journey to Brindisi is not so much a function of its position within classical Western literature, all things considered a minor one, as of its concentration of the topoi of travel literature, which is perhaps why Horace chose the most heterogenous form available to him, the satire. Now satura to the Romans meant something altogether different from what “satire” means to us, although by the time of Lucilius it had evolved from its primary literary sense of a melange of various meters to that of a unified poem critical of human foible and vice. Indeed, the ancient Romans used satura primarily as a culinary term to refer to a kind of macédoine, a stew, hash, potpourri, or perhaps even a smorgabord, the point being the motley nature of the concoction. Later the word came to designate a law composed of several different laws, what we would call riders. Even stripped of the critical apparatus which accompanies most editions of it, the Journey does at first read like a series of, if not footnotes, tangential remarks or appended riders, then at least clusters of miscellaneous perceptions. The satire form of which Horace had availed himself was open to virtually any kind of experience he might have encountered on the road to Brindisi, except that by its very nature a mixed genre of this sort excludes the heroic temper. Heroism, gravity and especially godliness cannot survive the clash of tone and propriety which satire entails. Though always gently, Horace calls even his own dignity and good taste into question, as well as that of his companion poets, scholars and diplomats, showing himself the hapless victim of Montezuma’s revenge* at Forum Appi, on another occasion perhaps hung-over. Equally if not more important, I think, is the set of commonplaces and conventions about travel
modern reader familiar with Spanish cruda would read crÊdus, indigestion), and still later sullying his
nightclothes during a wet dream after an aborted tryst. Rudd remarks that the poem is less a private reverie
than the homologue of a slide show among friends who have taken part in the antics on the screen and whose
mirth is a matter of intimacy rather than mockery (60). As such it represents a sub-genre of the travelogue and
an ineluctable vice of travelers which has made Kodak a fortune, but bored innumerable captive audiences,
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Gibbon among them.
One need not be an insider to appreciate this succinct little composition of six hundred words, but it helps to read it on its own terms, first as a aimiable satire intended for a group of connoisseurs in which the poet could demonstrate his immaculate sense of irony, and only thereafter as the repertoire of travel topoi which it is– which does not prevent the latter from emerging in the first lines.
Egressum magna me accepit Aricia Roma Hospitio modico: rhetor comes Heliodorus, Graecorum longe doctissimus;
Mighty Rome behind me, Aricia received me in a modest inn: my companion, the rhetorician Heliodorus, by far the most learned of the Greeks.
Departure… arrival: the same motif, in fact, which encompasses the larger poem and places it firmly within the context of travel writing, for its last line with a deft zeumga links both poem and journey:
Brundisium longae finis chartaeque viaequest.
Brindisi is the term of this long text and trip.
In all of travel literature there is perhaps no more concise expression of the congruence of text, literally a
papyrus or parchment which reaches its end, and itinerary covered. In this case the linearity of both are adumbrated in the opening line with its apparently simple description of the first leg in a sequence to come, the travelers finding housing as humble as the modest poem in which their entire journey is lodged.
Travel companion is the closest English will come to comes*, a role filled by Heliodorus alone in these first stages of the Journey. NÀÎer-e Khosraw will speak as fondly of his companion a millenium later as he crosses Arabia Deserta. In a sense, though, reference to and praise for Heliodorus is just an early statement of intense friendship for the comites who are soon to join up. Horace is justly noted for singing the virtues of friendship, and the Journey to Brindisi provides him the occasion to work out a variant on this theme, the particularly
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intense bonds which grow between those who share the hardships of travel. This includes, in a somewhat formal way, the official sponsors of the expedition, Maecenas foremost, Cocceius Nerva, and Fonteius Capito, especially the later
ad unguem factus homo, Antoni non ut magis alter amicus.
(32-33)
a man of perfection hewn, a better friend of Antony’s there is none.
The poet gives these bigwigs their due: Maecenus is optimus; Fonteius is a gentleman jusqu’au bout des ongles (though the Latin term refers to the sculptor’s habit of running his finger over a finished marble to seek imperfections), the kind of friend to have. Horace is gracious enough, moreover, to L. Varro Murena who though absent7 lent them rooms in his villa in Formies (a topos we would call the borrowed apartment), and to Capitonus, who provided board. But such display of good manners and of respect for the prestigious and powerful is not the heart of the matter. It is rather to the arrival of Plotius, Varius and Vergil, who join up at Sinuessa on the coast about a hundred miles south of Rome, that his exuberant description of good times is due:
O qui conplexus et gaudia quanta fuerunt! Nil ego contulerim iucundo sanus amico.
(43-44)
O what a commotion! What a time we had! As long as I stay sane I shall prefer friendship to any other charms.
When like minds meet on the road* there is not always such frolic and horseplay, but, as we find in the travels of Hiuan Tsang, Ibn BatÊta, Matteo Ricci and BashÈ, the recognition of and celebration with a compatriot or friend is a regular feature of travelogue.
But we are leaping ahead of ourselves. Forum Appi, where Horace first suffers from diarrhea, was a full forty- three miles from the Forum and embarkation point for the barge route on to Terracinus, and a crowded port*
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teeming with sailors, hucksters and perfidious innkeepers*.
the journey in a day, but there was no need for a forced march, and in any event on account of the “bad water” of the marshes Horace’s stomach was glurgling and he had to forego the pleasures of the table. While waiting none too patiently for his companions to finish diner, the poet savors the sunset, “night preparing to spread shadows across the earth and constellations across the sky” (10), a rare passage portraying nature, but one of
Those who “held their tunics high” could make
5 which the potential grandeur is sapped by the satirical juxtaposition of the poet’s embarrassing infirmity, on
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Fraenkel to task for his assertion that this marks the first time “in European poetry” that a landscape was so
the one hand, and on the other the clammer of boatmen and slaves which rises up on the quais.
Rudd takes
10 the distant vision of Anxur,
suggestively sketched.
(Did Fraenkel have some non-European precedent in mind?) With the exception of
inpositum saxis late candentibus Anxur (26) Anxur, set upon rocks which glisten from afar
Horace is in fact quite sparing of nature description. Fraenkel’s assertion does prove a point, however, the impression of a place does not depend upon a photographic likeness or realistic portrait. Horace says not a word about the actual vista of the marshes (apart from the damned bugs and frogs), but the reader’s sense of place is nontheless poignant. Even when one is on the road and even in travelogue, with its conscientious logging of time and place, place is a figment of allusion and imagination. There is no better evidence of the intense inner life travel brings on than the habit most travelers make of carrying along reading matter* to wile
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away long hours of delay and forced lay-overs.
It is of such a delay that Horace complains first in l. 13: “a whole hour goes by collecting fares and hitching up the mules” for the overnight barge ride; and then again, a few lines on, after the bargeman and a passenger, soused in rotgut, warble on about their absent lovers, the bargeman ties up and passes out. But it is the middle of the night and there is no reading to be done, only tossing and turning, the discomfort of travel arising from petty irritations, croaking frogs, mosquitos, and drunks.
It is because Horace has so carefully logged the season that the hour of arrival can be known. The travelers do
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not make landfall until after 9 AM, the quarta hora (23) falling between 9 and 10 AM in the spring,
they do finally disembark three miles short of Terracinus, they wash up at a fountain dedicated to Feronia, an ancient Etruscan divinity associated with Juno. Her fountain is hardly a full-blown shrine*, in fact the apostrophe to Feronia is tinged with irony, the down-to-earth business of washing away the grime of travel taking precedence over whatever religious residue inhered in the site.
By all evidence, Horace was not a hearty traveler, for at Terracinus he suffers a second affliction, ophthalmia or pink eye, and does not hesitate to tell us so in the same breath as the arrival of the mighty diplomats, once again mocking himself (30). Though not for the political reasons Gibbon has imagined, Horace here and several lines later deliberately contrasts the men of letters with the men of serious affair:
Lusum it Maecenas, dormitum ego Vergiliusque; namque pila lippis inimicum et ludere crudis. (48-49
and when
Maecenas went off to exercise, while Vergil and I took a nap. After all ballgames are bad for weary eyes and for indigestion.
Robust men of the world go off to play tennis, while wimpy poets take a rest. The going explanation for his eye ailment is the swamp gas through which the company passed; and at least one imaginative reader, apparently following Gibbon’s lead, has seen the sore eyes as indication of Horace’s personal scepticism about
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debauch– which hardly squares with the rather pompous image most scholars have stuck to Horace and indeed
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the forthcoming conference.
Lippus (“blear-eyed”) usually has the negative connotation of being due to
led one to vehemently deny such implications.
arrived when the pink eye is first mentioned. Over the first three days of the trip he would barely have had time or inclination to overindulge, so we should give him the benefit of the doubt as far as the eyes go. But that Vergil too has come to suffer indigestion since he joined the company is suggests that the gaudia in l. 43 may have involved some overindulgence. Whatever speculations we make on this score, the impression remains that even a relatively short voyage along the Appian Way in the company of the highest Roman dignitaries is not without discomfort and inconvenience.
The portrait drawn of the pretentious praefect of Fundos, is along the lines of what one expects from a “satire.” and should be read against the already enumerated virtues of the genuine articles, the imperial legates Maecenus, Cocceius and Fonteius. Aufidio Lusco is a former scribe and therefore lowly, especially in the eyes of poets who write for themselves (scribe is the same insult Sarmentus brandishes against Messius a few lines later). The ingratiating and obsequious manners of this pompous local official* as well as his ridiculous regalia, the brazier which he carries in case he must make an honorific sacrifice for the imperial messengers, spend the company on their way.
Almost a fifth of the text is made up of the argument between Sarmentus and Messius in the villa “high above the hotels of Caudium, a mock gladiatorial encounter which is an important satirical element of the poem, but perhaps of less interest to the typology of travel. These buffons do fit well into one category of travel literature, that of low-life*.
56-60
In any event, Horace’s (drinking) companions had not yet
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Very Llatin and endless, this business of the thorns. Farce. Satyr. Show-down. Cyclops. Pantomine. Prorsus iucunde cenam producimus illam. (70)
That is the kind of table-talk we put up with there.
In Beneventum another set piece: the fire an over-enthusiastic host sets to his kitchen while grilling the aforementioned emaciated thrush.
…ubi sedulus hospes paene macros arsit dum turdos versat in igni;
nam vaga per veterem dilapso flamma culinam volcano summum properabat lambere tectum. Convivas avidos cenam servosque timentis
tum rapere atque omnis restinguere velle videres.
As a scene in satire it is classic, the comic reference to the god Vulcan in a ridiculous setting, the pandemonium as kitchen slaves and guests rush about to save their dinners. To the traveler, moreover, a foreign kitchen is inevitably grim and insalubrious; Horace describes it as merely veterem, ancient, hinting as
he does at the prime travel figure foreign food*.
The second person…
(71-76)
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The mountains of Apulia occasion Horace’s use of the homecoming* topos.
Incipit ex illo montis Apulia notos Ostentare mihi, quos torret Atabulus
From there on Apulia beings to show the mountains so well known to, dried by the Scirroco.
Here, near home territory in the village of Trivicum he finds refuge in a rustic cottage which brings tears to his eyes– not because of nostalgia, but because of smoke emanating from the wet branches branches in the hearth. Here too he is stood up by a local girl after waiting up half the night and intentum veneri, stiff with love, falls asleep to a wet dream which stains his nightclothes. Again the author engages our sympathy with an open display of his own foible, and in doing so works a wry variation upon the erotic expectations* of the traveler. Since the company has crossed from the province of Latium and especially since the overnight in Cocceius’ splendid villa, the surroundings have gotten increasingly rustic, Horace increasingly caustic. In Ascoli (Asculum), whose name won’t fit into his Latin hexameter, finally allows that he is in a backwater*, where the
(77-78)
“commonest of things, water, must be sold,” but the bread, on the other hand, excellent. His advice to the traveler* is to stock up, for at Canusium thirty-five miles on, the bread is hard as rock, and water no easier for find.
More discomfort, the bad roads* at Rubos and at the fishing village of Barium.
Local yokels* at Egnatia who try to persuade the company that incense burns there on altars without flames, a incipient tourist trap*.
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………
TOPOI OF TRAVEL
logging*,
Montezuma’s revenge comes
like minds meet on the road crowded port
perfidious innkeepers reading matter
shrine
local officials
low-life
foreign food
homecoming
erotic expectations backwater
advice to the traveler
bad roads
local yokels
tourist trap
- 1 Satira, I, v.
- 2 Eduard Franekel, Horace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) 106.
- 3 Fraenkel 108. Rudd espouses the countervailing “unfashionable view” that Horace did not invent any episode in the
Journey “either to provide a literary allusion or to invite stylistic comparisons” (55).
4 The various Latin travel texts are assembled in L. Illuminati, La satura odeporica latina (Bibliotecha della “Rassegna”, 1938) and have been treated in a dissertation by H. Grupp, Studien zum antiken Reisegedicht (Tübingen, 1953).
5 No Greek prototype for the travel poem exists. Niall Rudd, The Satires of Horace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966) 281. Paul Lejay disputes the parallel with Theocritus’ Thalysics Idyllia, 7, which have more to do with Horace’s Odes and Epistles. Oeuvres d’Horace, Satires. Commentées et publiées par Paul Lejay. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1966. These discussions concern the Reisegedicht itself. The preceeding chapter will have shown, I trust, that Herodotus and those he drew upon are primary sources of travel convention.
6 Rudd mentions Gibbon’s lack of interest in the Journey and the latter’s certainty that the trivial nature of the episodes was an attempt on Horace’s part “to convince his enemies that his thoughts and occupations on the road were far from being of a serious or political nature” (282).
7 François Villeneuve, Horace, Satires. Texte établi et traduit par F. Villeneuve. (Paris: Société d’Edition “Les Belles Lettres”, 1980) 72.
8 The classic step-by-step itinerary is by H. Düntzer in Philologus LV (1896), but there are charts both in Lejay 146, and Satiren, Erklärt von Adolf Liessling, erneurt und besorgt von Richard Heinze (Dublin/Zürich: Weidmann, 1968) 90. One satirical touch implicit in knowledge of the terrain is that the journey which could be taken in nine day (Ovid, Pont., IV,
5, 7: luce minus decima dominam venietis in urbem,/ ut festinatum non faciatis iter “in fewer than ten days you shall arrive at the City of Light, although you shall not hurry”).
9 There is a similar effect in 51 ff. (the mock-heroic battle between Sarmentus and Messius, and in 74 (the chaos around the kitchen fire).
10 Rudd 60; Fraenkel 110.
11 If to read is to travel, as above, is not traveling, for the modern traveler, to read? Among the “few necessities” NÀÎer-e Khosraw packed were books. Matteo Ricci had ulterior motives for the tome he brought along, but he was a rapacious reader and we have no difficulty imagining him perusing a volumes in the middle of a spectacular and unknown landscape.
12 Lejay 151.
13 A. Noyes, Portrait of Horace. (London, 1947) 75.
14 Lejay 153.
15 Unerlying this topos is a realm of study: the food others eat and foreign food cookbooks.