What! are you a little touched with the sublime lash?” someone asks in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, scenting an affair of the heart. No footnote was needed pointing the reader to sublimi flagello in Horace, Odes III.26, for these Horatian tags were part of the small coin of educated conversation. An unworthy purpose for a great poet to serve, one might think, but one that Horace would probably not have taken amiss. A double-dyed ironist, he smilingly collaborates with his own under-reading, and one can imagine him saying, “If you want to respond to my verses at this level, feel free to do so.” In a poem addressed to a distinguished Roman soldier, he protests his inability to strike the required heroic note:
It falls to me to make up easygoing
Songs about such battlefields as parties,
Epic encounters between young men and
women.
Sometimes I write them because I’ve fallen
in love.
Sometimes I write them just for the fun of it.
And yet this poet who makes such modest claims for himself can on occasion come out with the highest claims. “But if you say I am truly among the poets,” he tells his great patron Maecenas in the first poem of his book, “Then my exalted head will knock against the stars,” “Sublimi feriam sidera vertice.” These four proud words herald the work that was to
