'Lycambae spretus infido gener | aut acer hostis Bupalo: Horace’s Epodes and the Greek Iambic Tradition'

This article re-examines the presentation and characterisation of Greek iambos and iambic poets in Horace’s Epodes (and his wider corpus) in order to get a deeper sense of Horace’s positioning of the Epodes within the tradition of iambic poetry. It argues that we cannot (of course) take Horace’s iambic literary history in the Epodes (see Epodes 6.11-14) or Epistles (see Epistles 1.19.23-5) at face-value because Horace carefully misrepresents the character of the poetry of Archilochus and Hipponax and effaces the importance to the Epodes of Callimachus’ Iambi, whose own misrepresentation of earlier Greek iambos Horace is adapting (see Watson 2003: 4-19). The presence of Greek iambos in the Epodes is not found only in explicit mentions of Greek iambic poets: the ways in which Horace’s iambic targets are utilised (and named or not named), the breadth of tone and range of types of poem in the collection are all important parts of the engagement with earlier iambic poetry. But a hitherto neglected aspect of the Horatian adaptation of Greek iambos is the role of the wider reception of Greek iambicists in the Classical and Hellenistic periods: we find the (distorted) presentation of iambic poets in a wide variety of texts including Pindar’s Pythian 2 (Archilochus fattening himself on words of hate, vv. 54-6) and Hellenistic epigram (where Hipponax, for example, is sometimes a more moralising poet than his fragments would lead us to believe). Such portrayals of Greek iambicists are important for Horace’s Epodes also, though Horace’s particular presentation of his iambic antecedents will be shown to be an iambic strategy which itself recalls in different ways the generic repositioning of earlier iambic poets. This paper argues in particular that we should the Horatian presentation and adaptation of Hipponax (the acer hostis Bupalo of Epode 6) as an iambic antecedent as more important than has sometimes been thought (Archilochus and Callimachus having tended to dominate discussion, e.g. in Barchiesi 2001).