great ability and energy of Professor Kelsey by electing him to succeed himself in its presidency. Professor Mitchell Carroll, who has served for three years as secretary of the Archaeological Institute, was re-elected with the title of General Secretary and with a salary which will allow him in the future to give his whole time to the work of the Institute. The Managing Committee of the School at Rome elected Professor Gordon J. Laing, of the University of Chicago, to be Professor of Latin in the School at Rome for the year 1911-12. The similar committee of the School at Athens elected Professor Charles Burton Gulick of Harvard for its school.

It will give pleasure to all western members of the Association and the Institute to learn the decision as to the next place of meeting; namely, that they will meet at St. Louis, if assurance of suitable rates can be secured from the railroads by April 1; that otherwise they will meet at Pittsburgh. The westerners will hope that the meeting can be held in St. Louis, and if it cannot, they will be glad that Pittsburgh is no farther east than it is. In either case, they will welcome the proof that their eastern colleagues recognize the national character of the societies. As the local and state classical associations find their bond of union and their common meeting-ground in the association of the Middle West and South, or of the Atlantic States, or of New England, so these three associations find their bond of union in the American Philological Association and the Archaeological Institute. It would be a serious misfortune to the solidarity of the classical interests of the country if these two national organizations, by meeting always in the East, should destroy the chance of a common meeting-place. It is with slightly mixed feelings that we record the fact that the decision for St. Louis was carried by eastern votes. There is on the one hand a feeling of regret that the West was so slightly represented that its vote was almost negligible; but the distance partially excuses the West and we shall hope that the easterners will set us a better example next year by the numbers in which they come to St. Louis. And on the other hand there is gratitude that the easterners, who had things as they liked, were generous enough to set the good of the whole above their personal convenience.

HORACE'S CLAIM TO BE THE FIRST LYRIC POET OF

ROME

BY H. V. CANTER
University of Illinois

Readers of Horace's lyrics seldom fail to remember the epilogue to Book III of the Odes, in which the poet declares with pride that by his verse he has won immortality—a fame already prophesied in the allegory of Ode 2. 16. Not less unfailingly associated with the poem under discussion are the words of vss. 13, 14:

princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos
deduxisse modos,

The first with poet fire

Aeolic song to modulate

To the Italian lyre.

Substantially the same statement is repeated by Horace (Epist. i. 19, 32) in

Hunc [sc. Alcaeum] ego, non alio dictum prius ore, Latinus | volgavi fidicen.

Horace's claim here to priority in having introduced Greek lyric measures into Latin poetry does not seem well founded to many who have once read Catullus. Others, having in mind Horace's large body of lyric verse, modeled chiefly after Alcaeus and Sappho, regard him as the pioneer in writing lyric poetry conforming to the best models of the Greeks. The reader who feels distrust in his own judgment is often unaided by the commentators. Some editors of Horace, as Wickham, Keller, Kiessling, and others, do not discuss the question at all. Others give comments which do not indicate a clear decision as to the soundness of Horace's claim, or the basis on which it must stand or fall. Moore says: "Horace ignores Catullus"; and in the introductory note to the ode: "He was the first Roman to write a large amount of lyric poetry." Shorey's comment, rightly interpreted, is favor

able to Horace: "He ignores the few experiments of Catullus” (italics mine). Bennett's note, with greater reservation toward Horace, may yet mean much the same: "Horace's statement is not strictly accurate. Catullus, some years before Horace, had introduced the sapphic and glyconic meters."

The issue between Horace and Catullus is an old one. It is unfortunate, however, that the relative merits of the two poets should so often be made the basis for its decision. And there can be little doubt that this fact has done much to prevent a careful and impartial consideration of Horace's claim. Few have tried to discover any important sense in which his words are true: whether he was not justified in regarding himself as the first melic poet of Rome, whether in fact there existed any recognizable school or department of lyric at Rome before Horace's day. Many have put aside Horace's claim by saying that his sneer at Catullus and his school (Sat. i. 10. 19) was prompted by jealousy, and that he accordingly neglected and rejected them; that Catullus' work shows a higher lyrical genius than that of Horace; that Horace is a skilful versifier, but lacking in the originality and spontaneity of the younger poet.

For the question raised by this paper a discussion of the respective merits of Catullus and Horace is useless. Not only is it unnecessary to award poetic supremacy to one or the other, but it is practically impossible to do so on any such basis. There are, of course, certain criteria by which may be determined one's sense of excellence in poetry, and whether a poet's language and technique satisfy the conditions of high poetic art. But relative merit in its wider sense resolves itself, after all, into a matter of personal taste, an understanding and agreement of terms, and a recognition of the fact that each of the poets is as eminent in his own sphere as the other in his. Sympathy with the ideals of Catullus makes a large number of readers feel that nothing can surpass "Catulli incuriosa felicitas." A still larger class of readers, setting up a different standard of judgment, prefer "Horatii curiosa felicitas."

The purpose of this paper is to show that there exists no sufficient reason for making the works of Catullus and Horace a basis

for rivalry; that in fact they represent not identical, but companion forms of lyric, forms whose history reveals differences too fundamental to be ignored. This view finds support as well as clear-cut statement in the following words of Professor K. F. Smith in a recent review of Duff's Literary History of Rome (A.J.P., XXX, 225):

The value of studying the departmental in combination with the individual is visible in the recent criticism of nearly every Roman author who has been seriously investigated by competent scholars during the last few decades. A knowledge of departmental tradition, for example, proves that Catullus was not a lyric poet but an epigrammatist.

To maintain the position here taken it is necessary to look at the history of the lyric, which, as practically all other literary forms, came to the Romans as an inheritance from the Greeks. The body of poetry which passed in Greece from 650 to 450 B.C. under the name of lyric was enormous. In the judgment of Alexandrian critics nine poets deserved to be rated lyrists of the first rank. There is no uniform agreement as to the many subdivisions of the Greek lyric, the limits prescribed for each, and the strictness with which actual adherence was given to these limits. However, lyric is properly regarded as a generic term, including melic a term reserved by the Greeks for lyric proper-elegiac, iambic, and epigrammatic poetry. All of these, used in shorter personal forms and expressing individual emotions, developed in the period which succeeded the epic, thus giving to the individual a vehicle for the expression of whatever he felt on any subject, public or private. At the same time, each, during the best period, showed a harmony of subject and form satisfying the demands of artistic finish. The Greek innate sense of fitness established in these several branches of poetry peculiarities of diction and meter which rest on a fine appreciation of feeling and expression, form and content. The epigram, however, is in itself one of the most general of literary forms, lending itself to the expression of a wide range of thought and feeling. Thus, in content it may be an elegy or a bit of pastoral; a mild satire or a political lampoon; a miniature love poem or a treatment of a

mythological theme; an epitaph or votive inscription on subjects real or imaginary, or a sententious saying embodying the wisdom of ages. Sometimes it becomes a lyric in everything but metrical form, while again it is mere fact set off in verse. Its wide range is evident from the fact that only partial success has attended the many efforts that have been made to state its essential elements, and that failure has overtaken all attempts to devise a definition wide enough to include on the one hand and precise enough to exclude on the other. The truth is that the term epigram has changed its meaning from the time of Simonides of Ceos, the originator of the Greek epigram, to the present day, with a constant tendency to become more flexible. In the Alexandrian age it was carefully cultivated, largely because of the exhaustion of loftier forms of poetry, but also because of changed political conditions, which led those who would otherwise have been active in public affairs to follow literary pursuits. In this brilliant period the epigram type had such rapid and extensive growth that it comprehends practically every species of epigrammatic composition. Its tendency to absorb everything else is evident from the fact that all the Alexandrian poets wrote epigrams and some of them wrote nothing else.

Of the several branches of lyric poetry the first attempted by the Romans was the epigram. This enjoyed an uninterrupted existence at Rome from Ennius down to the latest times, adapting itself in its course to practically every use, from pure inscriptions to the most miscellaneous purposes. The tradition of the Roman epigram goes back not to Simonides, but to Alexandria, whose most notable addition to the delicacy and simplicity of the Simonidean type were the erotic and satiric elements and the painstaking effort to produce something striking and novel. It is true that the epitaphs of Naevius, Plautus, and Pacuvius (cf. Gellius i. 24), and the scanty remains of the epigrams of Ennius follow early Greek models. But the epigrams of such writers as Q. Catullus, Valerius Aedituus, and Porcius Licinus of the Gracchan period, and Laevius of a later date, show differences from the epigram of the earlier, or Ennian school, in source, in subject, and in technique, and clearly foreshadow Catullus and his co-workers. Now,