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Iambic Metapoetics in Horace, Epodes 8 and 12

Erika Zimmerman Damer
University of Richmond, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation
Damer, Erika Zimmermann. "Iambic Metapoetics in Horace, Epodes 8 and 12." Helios 43, no. 1 (2016): 55-85.

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 Iambic Metapoetics in Horace, Epodes 8 and 12

Er i ka Z i mme rma nn Da m er

When in Book 1 of his Epistles Horace reflects back upon the beginning
of his career in lyric poetry, he celebrates his adaptation of Archilochean
iambos to the Latin language. He further states that while he followed the
meter and spirit of Archilochus, his own iambi did not follow the matter
and attacking words that drove the daughters of Lycambes to commit
suicide (Epist. 1.19.23–5, 31).1 The paired erotic invectives, Epodes 8 and
12, however, thematize the poet’s sexual impotence and his disgust dur-
ing encounters with a repulsive sexual partner. The tone of these Epodes
is unmistakably that of harsh invective, and the virulent targeting of the
mulieres’ revolting bodies is precisely in line with an Archilochean poetics
that uses sexually-explicit, graphic obscenities as well as animal compari-
sons for the sake of a poetic attack. Epodes 8 and 12 may, in fact, offer
Roman culture’s most overtly misogynistic tone.2
In spite of the vehemence in the speaker’s verbal assaults, he is react-
ing to his own perceived sexual weakness. In fact, Horatian iambic con-
tinually notes the unmartial status and weakness of the speaker’s body.
He is programmatically imbellis ac firmus parum (Epod. 1.16) and his final
appearance is that of an enervated old man: he is jaundiced, breath-
less, feverish, and aged on account of Canidia’s powers (Epod. 17.21–6,
31–4).3 Accordingly, I posit here that bodily invective in Epodes 8 and 12
functions metapoetically. I call attention to the repetition of stylistic
terms—mollitia, inertia, and rabies—within Epodes 8 and 12, and show
how these two poems can be seen as part of Horace’s ongoing project to
distinguish his own emerging iambic project from the incipient genre of
Roman love elegy.4 To these two elegiac terms, mollitia and inertia, the
Horatian iambic speaker adds the quintessentially iambic rabies, a term
that the poet Horace himself will later call the emotion that first gener-
ated iambic poetry.
My reading thus suggests that Horace was well aware not only of the
tropes and topoi of Roman love elegy,5 but also of its vocabulary of style
that routinely associates the human bodies of its characters with the
central stylistic qualities of the poetic genre. While critics have disputed
the chronology,6 most agree that Horace’s Epodes were published soon

HELIOS, vol. 43 no. 1, 2016 © Texas Tech University Press 55

56 He lios

after Actium, in approximately 31/30 BCE, and were followed by the

publication of Propertius’s Monobiblos and Tibullus’s Book 1 in 28 and
27 BCE, respectively.7 We thus have evidence in the intergeneric dia-
logue that I draw out of Epodes 8 and 12 for the existence of two-way
influence between the poets of Roman iambic and elegiac erotic poetry,
what Peter Heslin (2011, 60) has aptly called “an extended process in
which each poet defined himself against the other[s].” Furthermore,
Horace’s poems articulate an iambic refusal to valorize these terms that
generally characterized effeminacy or other failings of normative Roman
masculinity in broader Roman discourses of gender and sexuality. Iambos,
despite its transgressively obscene content, thus serves to uphold and
reinforce the status quo in a period where elite Roman masculinity was
challenged through social forces, upset by the political instability of the
Triumviral period, and was witness to the emergence of alternative mas-
culinities in the sartorial self-expression of Roman elites like Caesar and
Maecenas and in the poetic aesthetics of Roman love elegy.8
For many decades, Epodes 8 and 12 were considered so obscene that
they were censored from publication and ignored by critics of Horatian
iambic.9 By the late 1980s, however, these Epodes began to be re-evaluated
as an integral part of Horace’s first lyric collection.10 William Fitzgerald’s
groundbreaking study (1988) argued for the interrelation between the
political, invective, and erotic poems of the Epodes, and has laid the foun-
dation for much later criticism focused on the sociopolitical context of
the Epodes’ production and on Roman sexuality.11 The Epodes demon-
strate a disconnection between the Archilochean iambic pose of “mas-
culinity and sexual potency adapted by the persona” and the persistent
concern with impotence and helplessness visible in the poems (1988,
186). While Epode 8 reveals a discomfort about the masculinity displayed
in “iambic vis,” Epode 12 makes the persona’s sexual inadequacy a meta-
phor for the inadequacy the poet feels in his political context (1988,
185–91).
Ellen Oliensis (1991, 1998) unifies Fitzgerald’s emphases upon the
political and the social when she argues that impotentia, both political
and sexual, is a pervasive theme in the Epodes. For Oliensis, the sexual
impotentia of the erotic poems is a twin to the impotentia the poet-speaker
displays to Maecenas in the political Epodes about civil war; overall, the
Epodes demonstrate that the “same virile goods are at stake in games of
social and sexual intercourse” (1998, 77) and that Horace continually
fails to measure up against Canidia, Maecenas, and the women of Epodes
8 and 12 (1998, 71–90).
Da m e r —Iambic Metapoetics in Horace, Epodes 8 and 12 57

Tim Johnson’s important work (2012), the first full-length mono-

graph on the Epodes to appear in English since 1969, has returned to the
central question of iambic strength and weakness in these Epodes and
offers a new perspective on the sociopolitical impact Horatian iambic
poetry may have had. Though Epodes 8 and 12 show the dangerous
potential of unchecked Archilochean rage, Johnson argues that the Hora-
tian iambic speaker demonstrates his strength, not his weakness, in these
poems, by “putting doubts about his iambic power into the mouths of
others and defends himself by placing the charges that he is weak within
the context of his most potent attacks” (2012, 41).12 Thus the destruc-
tive iambic rage on display in Epodes 8 and 12 yields elsewhere to a new
Horatian practice of polyphonic modality, in which competing voices
come together in a new Horatian iambic practice that may help recon-
struct, rather than divide, Roman society after the civil wars.13
John Henderson’s readings (1999, 2009) refocus the discussion on
the embodied invective within these poems. Where Fitzgerald’s reading
ignored too much of the corporeal and misogynistic texture of Epodes 8
and 12, Henderson’s reading exposes Epode 8 as a transgressive text, a
“performative act of victimization” that makes all its readers behave as
victimizer and victim of verbal, sexual, and textual abuse (1999, 96).
The woman’s body and its textual representation threaten to overwhelm
the structures (be they literary, those of Roman culture, or the textual
boundary between reader and character) which uphold the separation of
identities. The woman’s textual/sexual body confirms for the reader the
exclusion of the female upon which masculine identity is based, and the
poem attempts to create a community of masculinity based on that fun-
damental exclusion. Yet the female sexualized body and the virulent rep-
resentation of the lower bodily stratum, the Latin pus atque venenum, are
much more potent than the enfeebled masculinity of the epodic Horace,
Flaccus, who strives through iambic invective to conquer it (Henderson
1999, 101–7). Epode 12, in turn, with its dialogue between sexual part-
ners, further implicates us, as readers, in the performative erotic act of
insult (Henderson 2009). The iambic poet thus engages us in verbal
staining and staining-reading of the characters’ act of “mutual sexual
response” or an erotic exchange about “talk rough-and-dirty” (2009,
416–7).14
Against the backdrop of these sociopolitical interpretations, a more
purely metapoetic approach has emerged that places the Epodes within
their contemporary literary context. Stephen Harrison’s continuing atten-
tion to generic interactions (2007, 2013) highlights the ways Roman
58 He lios

poets thematize generic issues in their texts and how these generic inter-
faces themselves become the subject of poetic discourse (2013, 10; cf.
Cairns 1972, 158–76). Harrison offers a metapoetic reading of the sec-
ond half of the Epodes keen to the tension between iambic vigor and soft
erotic elegy. His analysis can at least partially explain the appeal of the
unorthodox soft elegiac poet-speaker as a model for masculinity in
the Epodes by pointing to the shifts in the sociocultural framework of the
Horatian poetic speaker, where the Archilochean equality of a circle of
aristocratic friends is “replaced by the more uneven relationships of
patronage and subordination [in Roman society]” (Harrison 2007, 114).
Although metapoetic work on the Epodes has not focused upon the erotic
invective Epodes, the important insights of Georg Luck, Alessandro Bar-
chiesi, Harrison, and Heslin demonstrate interactions between early
Propertian elegy and Horatian iambic, and point to Horace’s pervasive
use of tropes and topoi found in Roman love elegy which I will extend
here.15 My own work extends these insights about generic interaction
into our readings of Epodes 8 and 12 to articulate more clearly how Hor-
ace engages with Roman love elegy as a rejected model for masculinity.16
Where elegy reclaims and valorizes terms such as mollitia and inertia as
positive aesthetic and political choices, iambic upholds the Roman status
quo by rejecting such qualities when applied to the human body as mark-
ers of effeminacy.
Prior critics of the erotic Epodes engaged the themes of corporeality
and impotentia to produce significant political, social, and metapoetic
interpretations, and to reinstate these Epodes within Horace’s broader
iambic project. With the exception of Henderson’s interpretations, how-
ever, they have emphasized the social and political consequences of
Epodes 8 and 12 over a close reading of their obscenity. Yet just such a
close reading demonstrates how Horatian sexual invective participates in
Roman discourses of sexuality and of contemporary literary style and
poetics. In the following discussions of the individual poems, I first
expose how bodily invective mocks the women he rejects, as well as the
speaker; I then turn to the metapoetic qualities of the poems. My inter-
pretations strive to bridge the sociopolitical and metapoetic critical
strands. A close reading of the obscenity of Epodes 8 and 12 will demon-
strate that the very terms that describe the speaker’s and the women’s
sexual failures are open to a metapoetic reading as instances of “generic
interaction” with Roman love elegy and Horatian iambic criticism. The
human bodies in these sexually obscene poems have profound literary
valence that Horace uses to negotiate the difference of his erotic poetry
Da m e r —Iambic Metapoetics in Horace, Epodes 8 and 12 59

from his contemporary Roman erotic poets. This metapoetic concern

with iambic obscenity, traced in the bodies of the characters targeted,
links early Horatian lyric to his later lyrics on aging women lovers (e.g.
Carm. 1.25, 3.15, 4.13), and shows an early glimpse of Horace’s later
concern with generic origins in Epistles 1.19 and the Ars poetica.

Epode 8: Ironic Attraction, Iambic Disgust, and Impotentia

Epode 8 provokes because its virulent invective and coarse vocabulary
contrast with its profound literary polish. On first reading, this poem’s
invective places it squarely in the Archilochean tradition of sexual invec-
tive targeting a rejected woman. I open this poem up to a second meta-
poetic reading, however, one that recognizes the irony in the speaker’s
claim to have an illiterate phallus (illiterati nervi, 17–8; Adams 1982, 38).
Throughout this poem, bodily invective sits alongside diminutives, neol-
ogism, a virtuoso display of words for the male member, and a conspicu-
ous display of material wealth and social status. The particular vocabulary
of this bodily invective, which marks the mulier’s belly as soft (mollis
venter) and displays the softness of the speaker’s sexual impotence, further-
more, has a metapoetic significance that shows the interaction between
Roman love elegy and Horace’s Roman iambics, an influence that will
become more apparent in Epode 12.17
Epode 8 reports the speaker’s rejection of an old woman who has failed
to arouse him, and explains the speaker’s initial impotence (viris quid
enervet meas, 2)18 as caused by his full-blown disgust at the woman’s aged
body.19 As seen in Epode 12 as well, this poem plays on typical stereotypes
of old women in Greek and Roman literature. She is sexually aggressive,
and the physical details of her exaggerated old age and decrepitude are
catalogued.20 Through its extensive use of agricultural and animal meta-
phors in lines 4–9 (exarare, bovis, equina ubera), this poem introduces the
theme of bestial comparison that will characterize Horatian invective
against old women as he modifies the archaic Greek tradition.21 As Victor
Grassmann (1966, 88–9) notes, the diction here combines high poetic
expressions with unpoetic vocabulary, incorporating language from the
street and the barnyard.
The poem concentrates on a piece-by-piece graphic physical descrip-
tion and describes the speaker’s paradoxical attraction to the disgusting
body of the old woman. Henderson’s probing examinations and provoca-
tive translations (1999, 2009) and the recent comprehensive close read-
ing of Christoph Schubert (2012, 37–43) allow me to be brief. The view
60 He lios

moves from head to ankles, and is perhaps best understood as a parody

of love poetry’s typical descriptions of the beloved’s beauty (Watson
2003, 292). It is here that the connection to Roman erotic elegy begins
to emerge.22 The Vetula has a single blackened tooth and a deeply wrin-
kled face (3–4),23 her breasts sag, her stomach is squishy, she has skinny
thighs on swollen calves (7–10), and even her shriveled buttocks are
lambasted (5–6). These features are all signs of age, but more signifi-
cantly, physical traits like these are to be avoided by the later elegiac
puella (Propertius 2.15.21–2, 3.25.12; Ovid, Am. 1.5.17–8, 21, 22;
2.14.7), where wrinkles on the face, stretch marks on a belly, or the sag-
ging breasts of a mother are singled out as ones that the elegiac lover
claims turn him off (James 2003, 173–5). As the elegiac lovers’ disgust
suggests he should do, the Horatian speaker rejects this woman, despite
her wealth, style, family, and education (11–20), because of her age and
ugliness.
The language of this rejection (sed incitat me, 7), however, suggests at
the same time an ironic attraction of the revolted speaker to the woman
whose bedchamber he shares.24 The speaker describes her naked body
harshly as he looks on it, but how did someone so disgusted with the
Vetula end up in her bed in the first place? Her body, described with
“stomach-churning but intimate familiarity” in Lindsay Watson’s apt
description, arouses both disgust and attraction to the unattractive
object.25 Horace’s iambic poetics so hyperbolically describe the woman
as to call into question the boundaries separating the beautiful from the
disgusting, since descriptions of both types of object captivate and trans-
fix an audience. As the poem concludes, the speaker does not leave in
disgust—as this description suggests should happen—but rather con-
cedes to a sexual encounter with the woman despite his repulsion. It
is worth noting here that the adjective describing her stomach, mollis,
becomes a programmatically attractive quality of elegiac women in Pro­
pertius and later in Ovid’s Amores. In Horace’s iambic parody of such
descriptions of a beloved’s beauty, however, this soft belly, mollis venter
(8.9), is an object of disgust and becomes a mark of erotic iambic’s dis-
tance from other contemporary Roman poetry.
The Vetula’s conspicuous consumption of wealth in the second half of
the poem could prove attractive, but does not. Amidst the speaker’s ran-
cor are material and literary markers of the Vetula’s elite status, and Hor-
ace’s deployment of diminutives and neologism gives the passage a
Neoteric refinement at odds with the iambic invective of the poem’s first
half (11–20):
Da m e r —Iambic Metapoetics in Horace, Epodes 8 and 12 61

esto beata, funus atque imagines

  ducant triumphales tuum
nec sit marita quae rotundioribus
  onusta bacis ambulet.
quid? quod libelli Stoici inter Sericos   15
  iacere pulvillos amant,
inlitterati num minus nervi rigent26
  minusve languet fascinum?
quod ut superbo provoces ab inguine,
  ore adlaborandum est tibi.27     20

Granted that you are rich, and that imagines of triumphant generals
lead your funeral procession, and there is no other wife who strolls
burdened with rounder pearls. So what? Just because your little Stoic
books delight to lie amongst silken pillows, do uneducated sinews
stiffen less or does my member droop any less? In order for you to call
it up from my haughty groin you need to work hard with your mouth.28

The speaker chastises the Vetula for publicly parading her triumphales
imagines in her funeral (11), as Watson (2003, 302–3) wryly suggests,
hinting that she is already dead. Yet this attention to her imagines and her
large pearls (rotundiores bacae, 13–4) distinguishes her own and her fami-
ly’s high status and wealth. The woman’s luxury goods, such as pearls,
along with imported silks and even Greek philosophical texts (libelli Sto-
ici, 15), are products of the Roman Empire’s expansion into the Greek
East which are specifically associated with sexual promiscuity in contem-
porary Roman love poetry (cf. Propertius 1.2.1–4; Tibullus 2.3.51–8)
and elsewhere in Roman moralizing discourses.29 Horace’s language bor-
rows from the highly polished Neoteric style of Catullus and his coterie
through his use of the diminutive ending (libelli, 15; pulvillos, 16) to char-
acterize the elite objects in her bedroom. 30 Horace is also innovative in
his Latin here: this passage marks the importation of the adjective sericus
into Latin (Watson 2003, 305), an adjective of which the Greek cognate,
shrikov~, is first attested in Greek of the Augustan Age (Peripl. M. Rubr.
49; in plural, Nearch. apud Strabo 15.1.20).31 This poem also mixes con-
spicuously literary style alongside low words that do not occur elsewhere
in poetic usage; this particular admixture of luxuria and poetic refinement
with the speaker’s disgust is used again to characterize the Horatian
speaker’s and the mulier’s iambics in Epode 12.32
The concluding lines of Epode 8 offer a remarkably dense collection of
62 He lios

vocabulary for male genitals and sexual actions, and thus evoke the
hyperphallic language of Greek iambic poetry in a vivid description of
the poet speaker’s genitals and sex acts.33 Nervus (17) and fascinum (18)
are both terms for the membrum virile (Adams 1990, 38, 63–4), while
rigere and its antithesis languere (17–8) describe its activity and inactivity
(Adams 1990, 46). This sexually euphemistic language characterizes the
speaker as soft and impotent, and looks to the representation of the
speaker’s body throughout the Epodes. Horace turns sharp-edged wit
against the speaker in the last lines: in order to give the speaker sexual
satisfaction, the Vetula must fellate him (19–20), debasing both herself,
by assuming an active sexual role, and the speaker, who is further
unmanned by becoming the passive partner in a sexual activity (Hender-
son 1999, 105–6; Parker 1997, 49–59). The poem thus ends in self-
irony, and bodily invective turns against the speaker when he admits that
the hyperphallic language of Archilochean invective, as mapped onto his
own enervated member, needs help to reach its climax. This concluding
insult against the male speaker of Epode 8 forecasts the upper hand that
the mulier of Epode 12 will hold over the speaker in a second episode of
sexual embarrassment. In each poem, bodily invective attacks both the
speaker and his target.
In the Epodes, the persona is not the masterful lyric bard of the Odes,
but Horace’s impotent iambic alter-ego. Critics have read this impotentia
very broadly to refer to Horatian weakness in the changing political
landscape of the Triumviral period, when the later success of Octavian
was still in dispute, as well as more narrowly to characterize sexual impo-
tence and bodily weakness. 34 This impotentia has physical symptoms
expressed in the speaker’s body throughout the Epodes, but it can also be
linked to a contemporary literary-critical vocabulary of softness and lan-
guor, mollitia and inertia, which Horace borrows from emergent Roman
love elegy and transforms from its metaphorical usage there describing
elegiac style into pejorative terms characterizing the speaker’s sexual fail-
ures and his broader failures of masculinity, and as denunciations of the
flesh of his repulsive sexual partner in these erotic invective poems.35
In many of the Epodes, as in Epode 8, Horace uses the language of mol-
litia to distinguish his poetics and his iambic poetic ego from the Archi-
lochean model.36 As in its broader usage in Roman gendered invective,
mollis becomes a term of unmanning and frequently a sexualized insult
within the Epodes, directed against the speaker, the mulier of Epode 8, and
against Roman men in general.37 Mollis first appears in Epode 1, when the
speaker fears that he cannot manage to support Maecenas as strong men
Da m e r —Iambic Metapoetics in Horace, Epodes 8 and 12 63

(non mollis viros) should, because of his characteristic weakness: both he

and his Epodes will be unwarlike and too soft, imbellis et firmus parum
(Epod. 1.10, 1.16). In the erotic invectives, mollis describes the unattract-
ive, soft flesh of the woman’s stomach (venter mollis, 8.9), and the speak-
er’s sexual impotence (mihi semper ad unum / mollis opus, 12.15–6). In its
final appearance, the adjective describes the worst part of the Roman
citizenry who will not abandon Rome in Epode 16: mollis et exspes / inomi-
nata perpremat cubilia (Let the effeminate and defeatist [part] press their
accursed beds, 37–8).
In Epodes 11 and 14, the adjective mollis appears as a metageneric
marker showing the influence of Roman love elegy on Horace’s iambics.
Horace’s engagement with Roman love elegy is most clearly seen in Epode
11, where the vocabulary and situations find ample parallels in early
Propertian and Tibullan elegy, and in Vergil’s incorporation of Gallan
elegy into Eclogue 10.38 This poem, first termed by Friedrich Leo as plane
elegia in iambis concepta,39 uses mollis and mollities in two lines marked with
erotic elegiac resonances. First, the poet-speaker burns for soft boys and
girls (mollibus in pueris aut in puellis urere, 4), a turn of phrase echoed in
Ovid’s programmatic Amores 1.1 when the amator names the proper sub-
ject matter for Roman love elegy: nec mihi materia est numeris levioribus apta
/ aut puer aut longas compta puella comas (Am. 1.1.19–20). Second, at the
end of Epode 11, the speaker reveals that now the love of Lyciscus holds
him, a boy who rivals any woman in softness (gloriantis quamlibet muliercu-
lam / vincere mollitie, 23–4). As Epode 14 begins, Horace justifies why he
has not completed his book of iambi despite Maecenas’s frequent
requests: soft languishing (mollis inertia, 1) has overwhelmed his senses.
Critics have noted that Epode 14 reflects Horace opening his Roman
iambi out into the influence of Catullus and anticipates his own later
lyric topics, but I would add that the coincidence of elegiac vocabulary
here at its outset40 is also an appropriate choice for a poem devoted to
the erotic feelings of the Horatian speaker and Maecenas.
In the emerging Roman love elegy of Propertius and Tibullus, how-
ever, the adjectives mollis and iners, and the nouns inertia and mollitia,
appear frequently both as characteristics of poetic aesthetic principles
and as qualities of the bodies of the speakers or love objects. This ten-
dency towards metapoetic self-expression is particularly pronounced in
programmatic poems, but scholars have thoroughly traced this slippage
between the human bodies figured within the genre and the terms of its
stylistic aesthetics throughout Propertian, Tibullan, and later Ovidian
elegiac poetry.41 In Maria Wyke’s (2002, 204–5) influential formulation,
64 He lios

these stylistic qualities become the very ‘grammar’ that composes the
bodies of elegiac women. Propertian and Ovidian elegy pervasively con-
flate the personal style and shape of the human body with elegiac prin-
ciples of literary style. Softness, or mollitia, is one of these central defining
characteristics. The elegiac puella walks softly and has a delicate art (mol-
liter incedit. . . . ​mollior esse viro: Ovid, Am. 2.4.23–4; soleant molliter ire
pedes, Propertius 2.12.24; molli ab arte: Ovid, Am. 2.4.30 [Keith 1994,
33–5]). Yet this language of softness also describes Propertius’s own
compositions: he composes soft verse and a soft book (mollem componere
versum, 1.7.19; mollis liber, 2.1.2), and it is a frequent descriptor of Pro­
pertius’s elegiac style in the Callimachean programmatic suite of 3.1–3.3
where the poet’s garlands, the shade of Mount Helicon, and the meta-
phorical poetic meadows are all soft (mollia serta poetae, 3.1.19; molli Heli-
conis in umbra, 3.3.1; mollia prata terenda, 3.3.18). Throughout these
citations, mollis and mollitia become revalued as prized characteristics of
soft poetry and the soft, elegant, and refined bodies that inhabit the Cal-
limachean genre.
Outside of elegy, however, mollitia is a quality scorned in men (Wil-
liams 1999, 125–32). In discussions of Roman masculinity, it is routinely
translated as “effeminacy.”42 As the elder Seneca’s rather extreme con-
demnation of young men’s style at Controv. 1.praef. 8–9 shows, mollitia
marks a failure of masculinity and is one of the many features that char-
acterized an effeminate Roman male:

torpent ecce ingenia desidiosae iuventutis nec in unius honestae rei

labore vigilatur; somnus languorque ac somno et languore turpior
malarum rerum industria invasit animos: cantandi saltandique obscena
studia effeminatos tenent, [et] capillum frangere et ad muliebres blan-
ditias extenuare vocem, mollitia corporis certare cum feminis et inmundis-
simis se excolere munditiis nostrorum adulescentium specimen est.
quis aequalium vestrorum quid dicam satis ingeniosus, satis studiosus,
immo quis satis vir est? emolliti enervesque quod nati sunt in vita manent,
expugnatores alienae pudicitiae, neglegentes suae.

Behold the brains of our indolent youth are inactive nor does even
one of them stay awake in the work of a single worthwhile effort; sleep
and languor and zeal of bad acts more degrading than sleep and lan-
guor invades their spirits; the obscene pursuits of singing and danc-
ing hold those effeminates, and to break the hair and to weaken the
voice to womanish flatteries, to rival women in the softness of their bodies,
Da m e r —Iambic Metapoetics in Horace, Epodes 8 and 12 65

and to cultivate themselves with the foulest adornments, these are

the ideals of our youths. Who of your age mates is there who I could
say is sufficiently intellectual, sufficiently studious, who truly is man
enough? As effeminate and nerveless as they are born they remain through-
out their lives, assaulting the chastity of others, while heedless of
their own.

As Catherine Edwards (1993) has shown, mollitia appears in invective

contexts like Seneca’s to police failures of normative Roman masculinity.
Used as an invective term, mollitia speaks to a broader breakdown of
socially constructed manhood often manifested in sartorial and gestural
manners. The man who is mollis wears soft, expensive clothing, perfumes,
and cosmetics, and is timid, lazy, self-indulgent, and luxurious. Mollitia
can carry a sexual significance as well, where it describes men who are
said to take the passive role in sexual activities as well as men who are
sexually promiscuous or possess excessive libido.43 This pejorative range
of meanings better matches Horace’s usage in the Epodes, where mollitia
is further used to describe the speaker’s sexual failures and his soft, pro-
miscuous proclivity to partner with women he finds so disgusting. Hor-
ace, I argue, deploys a sense of softness as a narrowly embodied insult of
sexual impotence and as a quality of undesirable female flesh in Epodes 8
and 12 to challenge the pervasive revaluation of mollis in Roman love
elegy, a genre that helped shape the polymetric second half of Horace’s
iambi (Harrison 2007, 125–35; Johnson 2012, 138–44).
The language of mollitia is first used in embodied erotic invective in
Epode 8 and it will recur in its twin, Epode 12, yet it appears throughout
the Epodes as a description for men. An adjective describing delightful
and seductive female flesh in Propertian elegy becomes here a disgusted
vituperation of a woman too eager to play the active sexual role. This
term has literal, social, and literary significance, as will become even
more clear when it describes the speaker’s sexual failure in Epode 12, a
poem that links Horace’s iambic poetics more overtly to the terms of
literary style mollitia, inertia, and rabies.

Epode 12: Metaliterary Language and the Rejection of Sexual

Mollitia, Inertia, and Rabies
Epodes 8 and 12 have often been taken as a pair for good reason, as
they create similar narrative situations.44 Epode 12, I argue, is also open
to a metapoetic reading, with its density of references to Hellenistic and
66 He lios

Neoteric literature and to the literary stylistic terminology of mollitia,

inertia, and rabies, words that can characterize both sexualized, gendered
bodies and poetic genres. Thus, Epode 12 mingles literal sexual obscenity
with literary polish. Through his own virulent invective against the sexu-
alized body in Epodes 8 and 12, Horace participates in the style of iambos
most associated with the archaic exemplars Archilochus, Hipponax, and
Semonides.45 Horace’s Roman iambos, however, transforms the genre
through the richly literary resonance of the speaker’s and the mulier’s
voices with contemporary Roman poetics. This poem, then, I would
argue, continues to broaden the scope of what Horatian iambic is.
While earlier critics have noted the influence of Roman erotic elegiac
tropes and topoi in Horace’s final polymetric Epodes (11–17), I maintain
that Horace’s Epode 12 incorporates the literary stylistic terms of molli-
tia and inertia from Roman love elegy into a profoundly iambic poem
redolent of archaic Greek iambos. This incorporation characterizes the
poet-speaker as effeminate—too soft and lazy to make a capable sexual
partner—but not as a speaker lacking in vituperative iambic power.
While the mulier’s invective characterizes the poet-speaker in the lan-
guage of Roman love elegy, the terms here have not undergone the recla-
mation they will later in Tibullus and Propertius. Thus, the iambic poet
pillories the stance of the elegiac poet-speaker by placing his iambic
speaker in a situation that parodies the power structures of Roman love
elegy, where a puella holds power over the enslaved speaker.46 Horace’s
rebarbative iambics serve to right Roman love elegy’s apparently topsy-
turvy power structures by reasserting the normative meanings of mollitia
and inertia as failures of masculinity. The mulier, on the other hand, is
characterized by her too iambic body because she possesses an excess of
the quintessential, genre-defining rabies. Horace’s iambic speaker is chas-
tened for his effeminacy and indolence, and elegy’s superficially inverted
vision of a world where women hold mastery is rejected.
I begin, again, with a close reading of the poem’s obscenities before
turning to a metapoetic reading. Epode 12 makes thorough use of bestial
comparisons and animal imagery; this imagery characterizes both speak-
ers of the poem, and the final lines insert a surprising gender reversal
accomplished through this animal imagery. The poem falls into three
sections: the speaker’s rejection of the woman (1–6), the description of
the woman’s body in bed (7–12), and the woman’s speech complain-
ing of his impotence (13–26). First, the speaker rejects a further sexual
relationship because of her overly strong smell and her animalistic
lust (1–12):
Da m e r —Iambic Metapoetics in Horace, Epodes 8 and 12 67

quid tibi vis, mulier nigris dignissima barris?

  munera quid mihi quidve tabellas
mittis nec firmo iuveni neque naris obesae?
  namque sagacius unus odoror,
polypus an gravis hirsutis cubet hircus in alis     5
  quam canis acer ubi lateat sus.
qui sudor vietis et quam malus undique membris
  crescit odor, cum pene soluto
indomitam properat rabiem sedare, neque illi
 iam manet umida creta colorque         10
stercore fucatus crocodili, iamque subando
  tenta cubilia tectaque rumpit.

What’s up with you, woman most fit for black elephants? Why do you
send gifts and love letters to me, an unfirm young man and with a nose
not undiscerning? For I above all others sniff out more keenly than a
swift dog where the pig hides, whether a foul-smelling polyp beds in
your nose or a billy-goat beds in your shaggy armpits. What a sweat and
what a bad smell rises all over her wrinkled limbs, when she hastens to
calm her unconquerable frenzy with my slack penis, nor does her damp
chalk remain or her blush dyed with crocodile dung and now she is
breaking the bed stretched tight and the canopy with her rutting.

The poem opens with beast-analogy when the woman’s body is envi-
sioned through a series of animal comparisons.47 She is more suited to
black elephants (1),48 her armpits reek like a musky billy-goat (5),49 she
is like the pig hunted by the speaker’s hunting dog (6), and her blush is
made of foul-smelling crocodile dung (11). Her sexual passion, like her
appearance, is also animalistic. Rabies is more commonly used as a term
for animal rather than human passion in Lucretius, Vergil, and Proper-
tius (Lucretius 5.1065, of a hound; Vergil, G. 3.266 and 3.496, of a dog;
Propertius 3.16.17, of a dog). Horace, furthermore, implicitly compares
the woman’s sexual exertions with porcine behavior through his intro-
duction of the term subare used for human behavior.50
Animal comparisons also describe the speaker, and link the imagery
of Epode 12 to other iambic and lyric moments in the Horatian corpus.
The speaker’s sense of smell uses the technical vocabulary for a hunting
dog’s scenting power (sagax, odoror; Watson 2003, 396). Here the pro-
grammatic iambic imagery of the poet as dog (Epod. 6.1–6) enters the
bedroom when the speaker is compared to the keen-nosed hunting dog
68 He lios

capable of sniffing out its prey.51 The close connection between animal
imagery and sexual passion recurs in the woman’s speech as she turns
the speaker’s iambic rhetoric against him. While she wanted a worthy
bed-partner, she ends up with a taurus iners (17), a near oxymoron
because of the bull’s association with the sexual drive (Mankin 1995,
211).52 The poem concludes with a sexual role-reversal expressed through
an animal simile. Throughout the poem, the woman has been the sexual
aggressor, yet the speaker had also been characterized as an aggressive
hunting dog. Now, in her concluding lines, the woman compares herself
to wolves and lions, and the speaker becomes a trembling lamb or deer
(ut pavet acris / agna lupos capreaeque leones, 25–6). Her language character-
izes the speaker as passive prey in the erotic hunt, reversing the gender
roles typical for this metaphor, and finds a close comparison in Horace’s
own poetic persona in Odes 1.23.9–10, where Horace exploits animal
comparisons to characterize Chloe’s coming ripeness in similar language
(atqui non ego te, tigris ut aspera / Gaetulusve leo, frangere persequor).53
Woman is the sexual aggressor, as in Epode 8. Here, however, the
woman is given the chance to speak her proposition to the speaker, in
which she attacks his sexual prowess as well as his masculinity. She
deflates the priapic masculinity of the Horatian iambist by her accusa-
tions of mollitia (softness) and inertia (torpor), words burdened with both
literal and literary significance in Roman culture. On the literal level,
these words describe the iambic speaker’s sexual impotence. Read on a
metaliterary level, however, these words link this most sexually obscene
of the Epodes to Horace’s enrichment of Archilochean iambus by his
deployment of the tropes and lexicon of contemporary Roman erotic
elegy and its Alexandrian and Neoteric heritage (13–26):54

vel mea cum saevis agitat fastidia verbis:

  ‘Inachia langues minus ac me;
Inachiam ter nocte potes, mihi semper ad unum   15
  mollis opus. pereat male, quae te
Lesbia quaerenti taurum monstravit inertem.
  cum mihi Cous adesset Amyntas,
cuius in indomito constantior inguine nervus
 quam nova collibus arbor inhaeret.          20
muricibus Tyriis iteratae vellera lanae
  cui properabantur? tibi nempe,
ne foret aequalis inter conviva, magis quem
  diligeret mulier sua quam te.
Da m e r —Iambic Metapoetics in Horace, Epodes 8 and 12 69

o ego non felix, quam tu fugis, ut pavet acris      25

  agna lupos capreaeque leones!’

Or when she vexes my disgust with savage words: “You are less limp
with Inachia than with me; you can do it three times a night with
Inachia, with me you are always soft at one go. To hell with Lesbia,
who, when I sought a bull, pointed out sluggish you instead. Even
though Coan Amyntas was available for me, whose sinews stand more
firm in his inconquerable groin than a young tree clings to the hillside.
For whom were the fleeces of wool twice-dyed in Tyrian purples hast-
ily fashioned? For you of course, lest there be a guest among your
peers, whose woman loved him more than yours loves you. Oh I am
unlucky, since you flee, like a lamb fears fierce wolves and the roe deer
fears lions!”

In her retort, the mulier overtly mocks the speaker’s sexual ability by
reversing his phallic braggadocio; though he is too soft with her for even
one effort (mihi semper ad unum / mollis opus, 15–6), he is more potent
with Inachia and can perform sexually three times in one night. Amores
3.7 offers a similar usage of the sexual endurance trope: while the Ovid-
ian speaker is hopelessly impotent now, he claims that with other part-
ners he could make love two, three, or even nine times in a single night
(3.7.23–6).55 She also employs subtler insults to his masculinity by
accusing him of enjoying rich foreign clothing dyed with Tyrian dye
(21–2). For a Roman man, to wear luxurious imported and dyed fabrics
marked him with softness or effeminacy (mollitia), and these sartorial
details accuse him of effeminacy as effectively as her charges of sexual
impotence have done (Olson 2014, 184–6, 190–3). Moreover, when the
speaker accepts the woman’s gift of clothing, he inverts the standard
direction of exchange between an autonomous Roman citizen male and
a Roman courtesan who accepts the gifts.56 Thus, the mulier returns
bodily invective with her own bodily invective and slanders the speaker’s
failed masculinity. At the same time, like the Horatian iambist in Epodes
8 and 12, her speech mingles highly literary language rich in metaliterary
references with coarse, euphemistic sexual metaphor.
The mulier’s speech evokes Catullus, Vergil’s Eclogues, and Theocritus,
as it reduces key words of Augustan poetic style to embodied sexual
meanings. Although the proper interpretation of Lesbia’s name in line 17
has been debated by the commentators,57 it is hard to resist a literary
reading that looks back to Catullus’s Lesbia,58 particularly when Lesbia
70 He lios

is herself followed by Coan Amyntas. The adjective “Coan” suggests the

birthplace of the Hellenistic poet Philitas, but it also looks directly to
Theocritus’s programmatic seventh Idyll, set on Cos, where Amyntas and
Eucritus accompany the first-person narrator on their walk to the har-
vest festival (7.1). Moreover, characters called Amyntas appear eleven
times in Vergil’s Eclogues, modeled on Theocritus’s Idylls.59 Thus, in the
mulier’s speech, explicit and euphemistic sexual language characteristic of
Greek and Roman iambos mingles with names rich with Alexandrian and
Neoteric literary resonances.
The mulier literalizes two key poetic style terms of Propertian and
Tibullan love elegy and transfers them to a narrowly embodied, sexual-
ized meaning. First, the iambic speaker was firm with Inachia, yet he is
soft (mollis) for this mulier (16). This pejorative embodied sexual sense of
the term, elsewhere valorized in Propertius and Ovid as characteristic of
elegiac style, is in keeping with Horatian metapoetics in Epode 8 and is
also consistent with Horace’s usage throughout the Epodes. Here the term
refers to his sexual impotence and points to his unmistakable mollitia.
Second, the mulier regrets that Lesbia has duped her with a flaccid bull,
a taurus iners.
As David Wray (2003, 224–6) has argued, iners and inertia become
programmatic Tibullan language for his poetic choice of the elegiac genre
in Tibullus 1.1, as well as for the poet-speaker’s chosen lifestyle of an
alternative Roman masculinity (vita iners, 5; tecum / dum modo sim, quaeso
segnis inersque vocer, 57–8). Like mollitia, the accusation of inertia similarly
unmans (Wray 2003, 224–6). For Wray, inertia opposes the ideal of vir-
tus, idealized Roman masculinity and manliness, but Tibullus reclaims
this pejorative term as a stylistic and human quality characteristic of the
non-normative elegiac lover. The woman of Epode 12, when she points
out the speaker as an impotent stud-bull, a taurus iners, makes no such
act of linguistic reclamation. Horace, in playing off this stylistic term
characteristic of Tibullus’s most programmatic opening poem, mocks the
elegiac attempt to valorize a new, potently oppositional form of man-
hood defined in the lifestyle of the elegiac lover, who rejects traditional
Roman social mores and norms of masculinity in favor of the soft and
lazy life of the erotic love affair.60
Outside of Tibullus’s first poem, Roman poetry typically features iners
as a term of abuse associated with sexual impotence or simply as a mark
of infertility.61 The term appears twice in Catullus, twice describes a
speaker’s impotent penis in Ovid Amores 3.7 and in the Appendix Vergili-
ana, and qualifies impotent and infertile animals in Columella’s De re
Da m e r —Iambic Metapoetics in Horace, Epodes 8 and 12 71

rustica. In Catullus, iners modifies the concubinus the groom will abandon
when he takes a bride who will produce offspring at 61.124; here a fertile
erotic relationship replaces a sterile one. The term recurs in 67.26, in a
passage with clear invective content, when it describes the father who
dishonored his own son’s partner, perhaps because he was born impotent
with sterile seed (seu quod iners sterili semine natus erat). In a priapic poem
found in the Appendix Vergiliana, the speaker’s aged and useless penis fails
to respond (nec viriliter / iners senile penis extulit caput, Carm. 4–5), and in
Columella’s De re rustica, the term describes an impotent stud horse
(6.27.10.1) and the infertile progeny of an aged mare (6.28.1.5).62 In
Amores 3.7, Ovid gives the adjective its most precise linkage to the impo-
tent penis anywhere in Roman poetics: truncus iners iacui, species et inutile
pondus (3.7.15).63 His usage, despite its appearance in canonical Roman
love elegy, follows the broader linguistic connotation of the term, rather
than the reclaimed sense of the term found in Tibullus 1.1, where it
refers to the modus vivendi of the poet-speaker and not to the languor of
his body.
The woman’s mockery of her lover’s failed virility thus vividly inten-
sifies the language of impotentia Horace turns against his own iambic
speaker throughout the Epodes. Her invective, moreover, through meta-
poetic language that narrowly literalizes mollitia and inertia as failures of
sexual virility, recasts some of the buzzwords of the emergent elegiac
style visible in Propertius’s Monobiblos and in Tibullus’s Book 1.
In light of the metaliterary reading of the mulier’s speech, it is possible
to see that when the speaker attacks the insatiable sexual desire of the
mulier, her indomita rabies (Epode 12.9), he himself also transfers rabies, a
stylistic term that Horace later states is characteristic of Archilochean
and iambic poetry (Ars P. 79–82), to an embodied sexual invective. In
Epode 12, the connotation and the semantic range of rabies are con-
strained to a sexual meaning. The Horatian speaker reduces iambos’s pro-
grammatic anger to an embodied sexual frenzy, comparable to the
behavior of animals, which the mulier cannot quench: cum pene soluto /
indomitam properat rabiem sedare (when she hastens to calm her uncon-
quered frenzy with my slack penis, 8–9). Lucretius employs this term to
refer to the maddened lust of the lover in his diatribe against love: inde
redit rabies eadem et furor ille revisit (4.1117; cf. 4.1083). Vergil uses rabies
to describe the effects of the plague on dogs: hinc canibus blandis rabies
venit, et quatit aegros (G. 3.496). Columella speaks of hippomanes in this
terminology as well: rara quidem sed et haec equarum nota rabies (6.35.1.1).
Horace, in his usage of rabies outside of Epode 12 (Carm. 1.3.14, 1.15.12,
72 He lios

3.24.26; Serm. 2.3.323; Epist. 1.10.16, 2.1.149), does not use this sexual-
ized connotation. While these broader usages foretell against a single
sexualized reading, in its context in Epode 12 the meaning of rabies must
be construed as sexual frenzy.64 Like the mollitia and inertia of Epode 12
and elsewhere, rabies can be read literally and literarily, and its sexualized
connotation reduces the stylistic characteristics of iambic poetry in Hor-
ace’s literary genealogies to an embodied invective.
When Horace turns to an explicit literary history of poetic genres in
the Ars poetica, rabies (anger or madness) becomes the emotion that drove
Archilochus to invent the iambic meter and offered the genesis of iambos
(79–82):

Archilochum proprio rabies armavit iambo;

hunc socci cepere pedem grandesque cothurni,   80
alternis aptum sermonibus et popularis
vincentem strepitus et natum rebus agendis.

Rage armed Archilochus with its own iamb; comic and great tragic
boots took up this foot fit for alternating speeches and for conquering
the din of the crowd and born for action.

Rabies armed Archilochus with a meter suitable for his content and dis-
tinguished it from other poetry of unequal verses such as querulous
elegia (Ars P. 75–7). In Horace’s explicit claims of the literary genealogy
of Archilochus’s iambic poetry, content gave rise to an appropriate
metrical form. When rabies encourages the free expression of iambic
poetry meant to shame and police the behavior of others back into
socially acceptable activities, it is the generic marker of the iambic
spirit. At Epistles 2.1, Horace again uses rabies to describe the potential
of verse (versibus alternis, 146) to change from a savage joke into open
rage that destroyed communities (donec iam saevus apertam / in rabiem
coepit verti iocus et per honestas / ire domos impune minax, 148–50).65 Thus, in
Horace’s later explicit literary-critical explorations of rabies in poetry,
Archilochus earns credit for iambos’s creation and the genre began as a
meter suited for anger (rabies, Ars P. 79), while Roman comic poetry has
always held the potential to become destructive rage (aperta rabies, Epist.
2.1.148–9).66
In Johnson’s recent (2012) reading, Horace’s iambic criticism contin-
ues from his early Epodes through the Ars poetica. Johnson cautions against
the old chestnut that the older Horace is a tempered version of his
Da m e r —Iambic Metapoetics in Horace, Epodes 8 and 12 73

younger self, and instead shows the continuity of Horace’s attacks against
aging women (Carm. 1.25, 3.15, 4.13) across Horatian iambic, lyric, and
epistolary poetry (2012, 231–3).67 These literary-critical images of poetic
rage in Horace’s Epistles, I argue, allow a metapoetic reading of the wom-
an’s sexual frenzy in Epode 12. In the phrase indomita rabies, Horace has
circumscribed the meaning of a literary critical term into an embodied
word that mocks the behavior of the woman just as she mocks the
speaker for his softness and torpor.
Epodes 8 and 12 in particular give circumscribed, narrowly embodied
meanings to terms used to characterize certain styles of poetry, such as
the rabies of iambos and the mollitia and inertia of Roman elegiac poetry.68
Horace’s practice in these poems has precedent, since Roman rhetori-
cians and poets made frequent analogies between the human body and
types of style.69 Horace himself frequently employed the human body as
a metaphor for style in the first book of his Sermones, published in 35
BCE (Freudenburg 2005, 11). The body of poetry and the body of the
poet who produce it are conflated at Sermones 1.4.56–62, where the
speaker imagines removing the meter and rearranging the words from
lines of Ennian epic or from Horatian or Lucilian satire.70 While Ennius’s
epic hexameters remain poetic, satire, when rearranged, yields only the
limbs of a torn-apart poet, disiecti membra poetae (1.4.62). In the same
poem, Lucilius’s muddy, too-long, too-quickly composed, and under-
edited style is imagined as a personality trait: ut magnum, versus dictabat
stans pede in uno / cum flueret lutulentus, erat quod tollere velles (1.4.10–1).71
In line with his own and broader Roman practice, Horace’s poetics map
literary styles onto the bodies of its iambic targets, both the speaker and
the mulier. The speaker exhibits mollitia and inertia, positive qualities of
elegiac poetic style that can also describe physical impotence within iam-
bic, and the women’s bodies and behaviors are also qualified by literary
style terms (mollis venter, 8.9; rabies indomita, 12.9). As in his first book of
Satires, the iambic Horace employs the sexual bodies of those he insults
as carriers of terms of literary style. The male and female bodies repre-
sented in these Epodes thus trace a metapoetic exploration of iambic
genre and its distance from the emergent Roman love elegy.
In my reading of rabies, mollitia, and inertia in Epodes 8 and especially
12, I have argued that Horace’s awareness of literary critical discourses
of style informs his representation of bodily invective. Barchiesi (2001,
144–6) has elaborated on the affiliation within Horace’s literary criti-
cism in the Ars poetica between iambic style and content (rabies) and the
metrical form of the iambic pes, coterminous with the human body part.
74 He lios

Horace, in the Ars poetica, surprisingly turns the metaphor around, so

that iambic style becomes the vehicle for the expression of the metrical
iamb. The iambic foot is anthropomorphized and displays the speed,
beat, and violence characteristic of iambic abusive style, before it is later
restrained and socialized (hunc socci cepere pedem gravesque cothurni, Ars P.
80; cf. 251–62). Thus, in Barchiesi’s reading, Horatian iambic is inher-
ently a poetic genre prone to collapsing poetic style and the shape and
qualities of the human body. Similarly, much elegiac scholarship has for-
mulated the idea that elegiac style is expressed in terms of bodily adjec-
tives and embodied characteristics, and that there is a strong analogue
between the bodies of its characters and the style of the genre. In his
later lyric work, Horace himself acknowledges the elegiac tendency to
analogize the human body to the elegiac style (Keith 1999). Expanding
upon these readings of Horatian literary criticism and Roman love elegy,
I propose that Horatian iambic style already in Epodes 8 and 12 collapses
rejected stylistic qualities of poetic genres into the bodies of the charac-
ters it produces.

Conclusions
In Epodes 8 and 12, Horace’s iambic speaker targets women through eye-
popping aischrologia intended to shame and wound and perhaps to raise a
shocked laugh as well, as Horace offers a virtuoso display of sexual invec-
tive coded in the language of the genre of iambos he renewed from its archaic
heritage. This sexual invective participates equally in the work of distin-
guishing Horace’s Epodes from other contemporary Roman erotic poets.
This metapoetic reading has thus far somewhat neglected the political
ramifications of Horace’s Epodes 8 and 12, arguably Roman culture’s most
overtly misogynistic poems. How then can we as critics remain mindful of
the work these poems do to create Roman ideologies of gender and sexu-
ality?72 As Schubert (2012, 37, 50), reminds us, echoing Henderson’s
readings (1999, 2009), in our desire as critics to historicize Horace’s Epo-
des in Greek and Roman aischrologia and in our search for iambic parallels,
do we excuse the vulgarity and pornographic character of these Epodes by
defending the higher artistic purpose of the whole endeavor?
By labeling the women of Epodes 8 and 12 revolting, the speaker col-
ludes with his audience to create a homosocial community based on the
exclusion of women who attempt to play an active role in a sexual rela-
tionship. The poet embraces and uses structural misogyny for poetic
effect, likening the flesh of his lovers to wild animals and to the dead. In
Da m e r —Iambic Metapoetics in Horace, Epodes 8 and 12 75

this reading, Horace’s iambic poetics, like slut-shaming and trolling com-
ments on the Internet, serve to re-inscribe the cultural norms of a priapic
Roman masculinity supported by the systematic domination of women,
foreigners, and slaves (Richlin 1992; Skinner 1997a, 1997b; Wray 2001,
115–43). Is this representation so intensely discomfiting and out of the
ordinary, like the black comedy of Ovid’s representations of female flesh
debased and dehumanized in the Metamorphoses, that it calls up a laugh?
Are these poems, in other words, parody? Parody can provide a safe out-
let for the expression of ethically dubious ideas, where the speaker can
use words that are unspeakable in daily life for the sake of encouraging a
laugh in her or his audience. Comparable to the ritually sanctioned use
of aischrologia, where communities of worshippers were allowed to trans-
gress the normal social order restricting the discussion of sexually explicit
matters to build community, Horace’s obscene representations of the
sexualized human body grant the poet an opportunity to transgress
momentarily the limits of typical poetic representation. Yet parody cuts
both ways, and can also serve merely to reinforce Roman gender struc-
tures that favor the masculine, the young, the sexually attractive, and the
decorous over the female, the old, and the gauche.
In these sexual invectives, Horace’s own iambic speaker is character-
ized as impotent. Do the character’s inertia and mollitia jeopardize Hor-
ace’s attempts at a Roman iambic genre because the speaker just does not
quite measure up? Does the speaker’s vituperative firepower turn against
these women because he represents both the newly disempowered status
of the Roman elite male unseated from his stable position by the decade
of civil war and the emerging autocracy of Augustus, and Horace’s own
anxieties that he cannot speak freely to Maecenas? My close reading of
sexual invective in Epodes 8 and 12 argues along metapoetic rather than
political lines that the speaker’s weakness is a feature of Horace’s rejec-
tion of the elegiac subject as a model. Under the biting iambic scrutiny of
Archilochean venom and rage, elegiac mollitia and inertia return to their
expected places in Roman discourses of sexuality and gender, and Hora-
tian iambos, despite its transgressive language of sexual obscenity, serves to
reinforce, rather than challenge, Roman ideologies of masculinity.73

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Notes
1  This is a notoriously vexing passage to construe, and critics have long commented
on the obscurity of the difference between following the spirit (animos Archilochi), and
not following the matter (res). Cf. Fraenkel 1957, 342–50; Mankin 1995, 7; Watson
2003, 5–8, 43–4; and Johnson’s extended discussion in 2012, 36–43.
2 As Richlin (1992, 109) and Henderson (1999, 94) note. Günther (2013, 199)
describes this tone most clearly: “Epode 8 reduces the obscenities of Archilochus’ figurative
80 He lios

language to nuda verba and creates, in its compression of detail and devastating real-
ism, an image of aged flesh and repulsive sexuality that in its shocking violence and
realism is, to my knowledge, without peer in ancient literature and perhaps even sur-
passes the brutality of modern exposures of repulsive fleshliness.”
3  Despite the speaker’s enfeebled appearance, critics have read the speaker’s final
silence at the end of Epode 17 as an act of power against Canidia: see Oliensis 1998
and Barchiesi 2009.
4 Horace too had surely had the opportunity to read and respond to Cornelius
Gallus’s four books of the Amores, now almost entirely lost to us, save the important
Qasr Ibrîm papyrus fragment, first published in 1979 by Anderson et al. Ross’s impor-
tant study (1975) shows how influential Gallan elegy was on later Augustan poetry,
and more recently Cairns (2006) has explored his influence on Propertius’s Monobiblos
and Tibullus’s Book 1.
5  Critics have long recognized the appearance of elegy’s tropes and topoi, especially
in Epode 11. See Leo 1900, Luck 1976, Barchiesi 1994a, and Harrison 2001 and 2007.
6 Recently there have been a few challenges to the standard chronology: Heslin
(2010) dates Propertius’s publication of the Monobiblos in 33/32 BCE, while Knox
(2005) dates Tibullus 1 in the 30s, ahead of the publication of Propertius’s Book 1.
7 Lyne (1998, 519–23) offers a clear discussion of the standard chronology for the
publication of Propertius’s Book 1 and then Tibullus’s Book 1. Mankin (1995, 10–1),
Johnson (2012, 23), and J. N. Hawkins (2014, 63) date the Epodes to post-Actium,
likely in 31/30 BCE.
8 See Fitzgerald 1988 (below, note 11) on political instability and elite masculinity
in the Epodes, Miller 2004 on political instability and masculinity in elegy, Corbeill
1996 on humor and political invective about the self-presentation of Caesar and other
politicians, and Olson 2014 on dandies in Roman dress.
9  Fraenkel’s (1957, 58) evaluation is typical: “Epodes VIII and XII, with all their
polish, are repulsive.” Henderson (1999, 288 note 5) catalogues their omission from
editions, and their eventual recognition in the 1990s as part of the Horatian canon.
10  Craca (1989, 129–55) offers an important overview of criticism of these Epodes
prior to 1989. Comprehensive commentaries that printed and engaged all of the Epo-
des, without omitting Epodes 8 and 12, first emerged in the 1990s. Kiessling 1958 is an
early inclusion. Romano (1991) and Garrison (1991) print and comment on these
Epodes. Cavarzere (1992) shows that Horace’s Epodes draw heavily from Callimachus’s
Iamboi, while Mankin’s (1995) Cambridge commentary stresses the importance of
Archilochean models for Horace’s poetics and uses the tools of criticism applied to
archaic Archilochean iambos to interpret Horace’s own Epodi. Watson’s (2003) Oxford
commentary also stresses the continuity of the iambist’s characterization with Archi-
lochean and Hipponactean iambos and offers the most comprehensive readings and
bibliographies of the individual Epodes.
11  First published in 1988 and reprinted in Lowrie 2009. Fitzgerald’s discussion
has generated many positive and negative reactions, and his work helped cement read-
ings of sexual impotence as a metaphor for Horace’s iambic misgivings within the
context of the civil wars. See representative responses to his work in Oliensis 1991 and
1998, 73–7; Gowers 1993, 288; McMahon 1998, 31–2; and Harrison 2001 and 2007.
12  Johnson 2012, 122–33, 144–6.
13  Johnson 2012, 182–230.
Da m e r —Iambic Metapoetics in Horace, Epodes 8 and 12 81

14 A comparable approach to Catullus’s poetics of verbal abuse can be found in

Wray 2001, esp. 117–26.
15 Luck 1976, Barchiesi 1994a, Harrison 2007, and Heslin 2011.
16  Glinatsis (2013) argues that Epodes 8 and 12 are poetological. These poems are
actualized forms of the iambic code or theory inherited from Archilochus’s stinging
invective, which is described in Epode 6.
17 Dozier (2015, esp. 315–8) contextualizes Horatian mollitia in the Epodes as a
weakness comparable to the mollitia occasionally recommended by Quintilian in his
Institutio Oratoria, a softening of invective in the midst of political engagement with
men of authority.
18  Horace introduces the sexual usage of enervare into poetic Latin here. Lucretius
(4.1115) and Catullus (67.27) use nervus for membrum virile; see Watson 2003, 294.
19 Prior readings are found in Newman 1998, Henderson 1999, Johnson 2012,
and Schubert 2012.
20  Richlin 1984, 69.
21 Invective poetry in general frequently makes sexual insults through beast-anal-
ogy. Cf. Archilochus, Fr. 41W and Fr. 43 W; Semonides, Fr. 7 passim; Phrynichus Fr. 34
K.–A.; Catullus 25.1 and 97.7–8; Priapea 46; Martial 3.93, 9.27.2, 11.21.1, 11.21.10,
11.21.11. See extensive discussion of Tiervergleiche in Epodes 8 and 12 in Watson 2003,
298, 385–6 and Barabino 1993/1994, 15–29. Bonanno (1990, 88–9) looks to Epodes
8.4 to explain the agricultural metaphors in Archilochus’s First Cologne Epode.
22 It also follows the rules for an invective description of an oratorical target, fol-
lowing the traditional course from head-to-toe. See Craig 2004, 190–1 on conven-
tional loci of invective.
23  The black tooth of the old woman is a common feature of Vetula-Skoptik, and
traces back to Aristophanes’ old women: Plut. 1057–9, and Eccl. 996, 1030–6, 1101,
1111 (where the woman is portrayed as already dead). It appears in Roman Comedy:
Plautus, Mostell. 274–5 and Propertius 4.5.68 (Acanthis). Within Horace’s poetry, see
also Epod. 5.47 (Canidia), Epod. 6.15 (of the rival iambist), Sat. 1.8.48 (Canidia loses
her false teeth), and denied at Carm. 2.8 (of Barine’s physical perfection).
24  Incitat me pectus et mammae putres here must be “transparently” ironic (Garrison
1991, 183; see also Watson 2003, 288). Incitare can have sexual connotation, and
mean “to turn on” as it does at Catullus 16.9 (quod pruriat incitare), Juvenal 6.315
(lumbos incitat) and Appendix Vergiliana Priapeum 44 (= Priapea 83.44–5) (neque
incitare cesset, usque dum mihi / Venus iocosa molle ruperit latus). This latter poem, addressed
to the speaker’s own impotent penis, bears many narrative similarities to the erotic
situation of Epodes 8 and 12, and also features overlapping vocabulary, where mollis
(45), iners (5, 38), and incitare (44) are all directed at the male member.
25 Watson (2003, 288–9) highlights the paradox of this phrase. See Henderson
1999, 96–100 on the reader’s inability to look away from such a vivid description of
female embodied sexuality.
26 I have printed the problematic minus regent . . . ​minusve languet of the manuscript
tradition along with Kiessling 1958, 521; Romano 1991, 422; and Mankin 1995, 37.
Heinsius suggested magis for minus in line 17, and his emendation has been endorsed
by Watson 2003, 307 and Courtney 2013, 555. See further discussion at Schubert
2012, 42.
27 Latin texts are from Mankin 1995, unless otherwise noted.
82 He lios

28 All translations are my own.

29 See Keith 2008, 139–65 on the association between imports from the Greek
East and sexual promiscuity in Propertius. See also Bowditch 2006 and 2009 on impe-
rialism and Propertius, and Dench 1998, 121–46 on Roman moralizing discourses of
luxury and its association with sexual promiscuity.
30 See Knox 2013, 538 note 48 on Horace’s lexicon and the infrequency of dimin-
utives in the Epodes.
31 See TLG, s.v. shrikov~ for the first attestation. Like the novelty of the lexicon
used to describe her objects, Chinese silk pillows would have been a mark of extreme
luxury. Chinese silk, though well-known in Greece from the fifth century, was very rare
even in the first century CE in Rome (Watson 2003, 305).
32 See Craca 1987, 138–52 on Horace’s use of different linguistic registers in this
poem as a sign of Hellenistic poikilia. See too Schubert 2012, 37, 45.
33 Archilochean and Hipponactean archaic iambos both frequently feature hyper-
bolic descriptions of male sexual acts and male genitalia. Athenaeus (3.122b, 10.447b)
records a few examples from Archilochus; all the fragments are collected in Gerber
1999. These include: Archilochus, fr. 43; Scholia gr. ad Hom. Il. 9.7; P. Oxy 2312 fr.
14; Scholia ad Euripides, Med. 679; Hipponax in Et. Gen. lambda 156.
34  Fitzgerald (1988) and Oliensis (1991) above began the discussion of the theme
of impotentia in the Epodes, continued by Gowers (above, note 11), Watson (1995),
Henderson (1999), McMahon (1998, 31–4), Oliensis (1998, 73–7), and Barchiesi
(2001). Johnson (2012, 40–1) concentrates upon the iambist’s strength.
35  Dimundo (2002, 295–303) gives an overview of the extensive bibliography on
the relationship between Horace and Propertius.
36 On Horace’s softening of Roman iambos from Archilochus’s genre, see Harrison
2001, 168–72 and Hills 2005, 33–7. The Roman reading of Archilochus long associ-
ated him with virulent, aggressive invective, graphic descriptions of sex, and bitter,
stinging iambic poetry. See T. Hawkins 2014, 1–8. On Archilochus’s and iambos’s leg-
acy, Rotstein 2010 is critical reading.
37  Mollitia as an accusation of effeminacy turned against men appears throughout
Roman writings. As Edwards (1993, 63–97) makes clear in her seminal discussion,
mollitia carries a “much broader frame of reference than the specifically sexual” (68)
and was also associated with political, social, and moral weakness.
38 Later scholars have expanded upon Leo’s (1900, 9–17) argument, including
Barchiesi 1994a, who shows that the cross-genre borrowing goes both ways: Propertius
has recognized Horace’s usage of elegiac tropes and topoi and used iambic forms in his
1.4 addressed to the iambic poet Bassus (133–4). Heslin (2011, 55–60) supports Bar-
chiesi’s reading of Horatian elements in 1.4 and further suggests that Bassus is likely
a metapoetic pseudonym for Horace himself. Luck (1976, 123–6) offers a detailed list
of comparisons between Epode 11 and Vergil’s Gallus of Eclogue 10, along with exam-
ples from Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. On Epode 11, see Woodman 2015, 678, who
finds a stronger parallel to Catullus 50.4, scribens versiculos, than to elegy in Horace’s
scribere versiculos (Epod. 11.2).
39 Leo 1960, vol. 2, 146.
40  This epode not only uses mollis inertia in its opening line, but it also speaks to
Maecenas’s feelings as “burning” (urere), a term Karakasis (2013, 231–4) has called
chiefly elegiac in his discussion of Calpurnius Siculus’s generic interaction with love
Da m e r —Iambic Metapoetics in Horace, Epodes 8 and 12 83

elegy in Ecl. 3. On Horace’s shift towards the lyric of his Odes in Epode 14, see Mankin
1995, 227; Watson 2003, 440; and Harrison 2007, 221.
41 See, e.g., Kennedy 1993, 31–3; Keith 1994 on women in the Amores; Keith
1999 on Tibullus in Horace’s Epist. 1.4 and Carm. 1.33; Wray 2003, Nikoloutsos
2011, 34 on Tibullan elegy; and Miller 2004, 137–43 and Greene 2005, 76 on Prop-
ertian and Ovidian elegy.
42 See Olson 2014, 184, 187–93 on mollitia as sartorially displayed.
43 See Edwards 1993, 63–97; Williams 1999, 125–32; and Skinner 2005, 212.
44  Epode 12, furthermore, expands many of Epode 8’s themes including matching
the speaker’s self-directed invective with the mulier’s iambic and embodied response.
Epode 12 greatly elaborates upon Epode 8’s bestial imagery for the female body, also
turns self-ironic humor against phallic language for the male body, and as in Epode 8,
the speaker becomes impotent in the face of this mistress.
45  Carrubba 1966, 1 and Kiessling 1958, 519. Watson (2003, 290) cautions that
extant Archaic iambos, however, does not supply parallels for “either the density, or
even the realism of sexual detail” of these Epodes. Cf. Barabino 1993/1994, 16. Glinat-
sis (2013, 165–6) reads the catalogues of body parts insulted as a “veritable style
exercise” (“une hypergénéricité”) which allows the iambic poetry to be at its most marked,
virulent, and misogynistic.
46 Feminist criticism of Roman love elegy has long demonstrated, however, that
the topsy-turvy inversions of Roman gendered power structures that the poetic Ego
claims for his elegiac world work only to his own advantage, and that despite the ele-
giac speaker’s claims to be a powerless slave of love (servus amoris), he continues nev-
ertheless to exert masculine hegemony over the puella by means of his persuasion and
through threats of violence. See Frederick 1997; Greene 1998; Wyke 2002, 155–88;
and James 2003, 184–210.
47 Barabino (1993/1994, 22–6) has demonstrated that many of these animals are
linked to hyperbolic sexuality and luxuria.
48 See Cavarzere 1992, 195 and Barabino 1993/1994, 22–4 on elephants in
Roman literature, and their link to insatiable libido.
49  To have a “goat in the armpit” was a common expression in Latin poetry for
strong body odor; cf. Catullus 69.5–8, 71 and Ovid, Ars am. 3.193. Goats are also
proverbially horny. See Kutzko 2008, 446 and Koenen 1977, 72 note 2 on Rufus in
Catullus 69 and 71. See Maleuvre 1995, 67–71 on the influence of Catullus on Epodes
8 and 12.
50 Adams 1982, 90–1.
51 See J. N. Hawkins 2014 on canina eloquentia in the Epodes as a voiceless, but
powerful and animalistic, response to the changing trauma of the political climate in
triumviral Rome.
52 See also Epod. 6.11–2 where Horace is again a bull. The mulier deflates the iam-
bist’s prior image of the threatening horns of a bull when she mocks the speaker.
53 Johnson (2012, 157–8) also connects the mulier’s language to the adynata of
lions and tigers mingling with their prey in Epod. 16.31–4.
54 On Horace and Neoteric context, see Romano 1991, 991 and Günther 2013,
177–8.
55 Catullus makes a similar boast in 32.7–8; Propertius boasts of his virility at
2.23.33; and the trope appears in Hellenistic epigram as well (Asclepiades, Anth. Pal.
84 He lios

5.181.11–2 and Philodemus, Anth. Pal. 11.30). On Ovid’s phallic bragging, Sharrock
1995 is crucial.
56 On clothing as a costly gift given by a lover to his mistress, see Plautus, Men.
130, Asin. 929, Truc. 53, 535–6; Lucretius 4.1130; Propertius 1.2.1–4, 2.1.5–6; Tibul-
lus 2.3.55–62; and James 2003, 84–98. When he sees Aeneas wearing Dido’s gifts,
including an expensive lion’s skin dyed with Tyrian murex, Mercury chastises Aeneas
as uxorius and forgetful of his own mission (Aen. 4.261–7).
57 Watson (2003, 410) feels that Lesbia is a procuress’s name, because Lesbian
women were known for their sexual talents. Mankin (1995, 211) thinks Lesbia is an
epithet for Inachia, who is skilled in “Lesbian acts,” i.e., fellatio.
58  Maleuvre 1995, 70.
59 See Ecl. 2.35, 39; 3.66, 74, 83; 5.8, 15, 18; 10.37, 38, 41.
60 On Horace’s relationship with Tibullus’s elegy, see Keith 1999. On the unorth-
odox masculinity of the elegiac speaker and his response to the temporal pressures of
the Augustan life-course, see most recently Gardner 2013, 85–112.
61 See also Barabino 1993/1994, 28 on the narrowly restricted sense of iners
within erotic language to mean sexually inert or impotent.
62 In Propertian elegy, the term does not carry the same sexual connotations when
it is used at 1.8a.10, 2.32.20, and 3.7.72.
63 That inertia is a sign of infertility may also look to a characteristically elegiac
wordplay. The Ovidian iners body evokes the idea of physical and poetic infertility, one
without ars. See Gardner 2013, 89 on Tibullus’s play with poetic artlessness.
64  J. N. Hawkins (2014) provides further context for Horace’s restricted sense of
rabies as animalistic in Epode 12. Her study of rabies in the Epodes connects Horatian
practice to a broader Greek and Roman iambic association with a dog’s rabid rage or
to a guard dog which helps friends and harms enemies. Rabies, in Hawkins’s reading,
is canine: a “barking cure” that is therapeutic against the trauma of the triumviral
period.
65  Johnson (2012, 60–1) has connected this passage on the need to restrict Fescin-
nine verse in the Roman world to Archilochus’s Roman reception as a poet of overly-
excessive invective.
66 In a similar discussion, Barchiesi (2009, 241–2) notes that iambic poetry
“lends itself to a metapoetic reading . . . ​The aggression of the iambic poets is tradi-
tionally explained in terms of rabies and cholos, melancholy and obsessive anger. To
become an iambic poet in antiquity meant to become a danger—to others and possibly
to oneself.”
67 Cf. Esler 1989 on Horace’s representation of aging women in the Epodes and
Odes.
68  My interpretation here supplements Clayman’s (1975, 55–60) earlier readings
of Horatian iambos, where she has argued that the bodies pilloried have been under-
stood as stand-ins for different stylistic traits rejected by Horace. Clayman’s reading of
these Epodes link Horatian practice to Callimachean iambic in that both use a “potent
combination of obscene insult and literary criticism” (1975, 55); see also Barchiesi
1994a. Oliensis (1998, 75) criticizes the limitations of what she terms allegorical read-
ings, remarking: “If Horace is criticizing not only sexual but also literary excesses, the
critique has not managed to stay above the mud of its metaphors.”
69 On Roman elegy and rhetorical theory, see Keith 1999, 41 note 4, who lists
Da m e r —Iambic Metapoetics in Horace, Epodes 8 and 12 85

some of the analogies between parts of the human body and parts of texts to be found
in Roman rhetorical texts, including corpus, membrum, caput, color, candor, figura, forma,
latus, lumen, manus, nervus, os (oris), os (ossis), pectus, pes, sanguis, vultus. Further discus-
sion of the metaphor is in Fantham 1972, 164–74. Clayman (1975, 55–60) points out
that the Vetula’s physique in Epode 8 is described in the language used elsewhere for
rough, Archaic verse, and for Stoic style (turpis, 8.8; crudus, 8.6; aridus, 8.5; and exilis,
8.10).
70 See Farrell 2007 and Freudenburg 1993, 148–51 for a discussion of the ancient
tendency to equate Horace’s own body with the poetics of his books. On the limita-
tions of using autobiographical elements to interpret the Satires, see the fundamental
treatments of Zetzel 1980 and Gowers 2003.
71 On Horace’s conflation in the Sermones of the poet and his poetry, see also Serm.
1.10.36–7 on turgidus Alpinus; and Serm. 2.5.34–41, a passage teasing the Neoteric
poet M. Furius Bibaculus. On these passages, see Gowers 2012, 323 and Freudenburg
1993, 103, 191.
72 See also Günther 2013, 151–4, 210.
73 I am grateful to Jim O’Hara, Sharon James, Hunter Gardner, and Anne Fel-
tovich for their generous and acute feedback throughout different stages of this proj-
ect, for the vital support of my writing group, and to the Faculty Research Council at
the University of Richmond for financial support. The editor and anonymous readers
of Helios have saved me from errors and omissions and have provided valuable guid-
ance and thoughtful comments to tighten the argument.