SINGING HORACE IN ANTIQUITY AND THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES

Abstract

Horace (65–8 BC), the great lyric poet of the Augustan Age in Rome, composed over a hundred Odes. Scholarly understanding of their early medieval reception has been hampered by the insistence of classical philologists that he was a purely literary poet. Ancient sources and Horace’s own writings demonstrate that he was a performing artist who sang to the accompaniment of his lyre. His use of Alcaic, Sapphic and Asclepiad metres has musical implications. In manuscripts from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, forty-eight passages from the Odes are accompanied by musical notation. The Montpellier codex has notation for the Ode to Phyllis (Odes 4.11) which relates to Guido d’Arezzo’s ‘ut-re-mi’ mnemonic. The St Petersburg codex has settings which suggest various uses, in the schoolroom, abbey entertainments and goliardic performance. The surviving manuscripts were widely spread across Europe and supported a monastic and secular tradition of Horatian song.