Going Soft on Canidia

Written during the early years of Augustus’s consoli-dation of power at Rome (the period sometimes, though misleadingly, called the beginning of the empire), many of Horace’s Epodes display an aggressive combi-nation of sexual, political, and social humor with connections reaching back to the archaic period of Greek poetry. Among the objects of invective in the collection is a certain Canidia, who is attacked in Epodes 3, 5, and 17 (she is attacked, also, in Satires 1.8, 2.1, and 2.8).1 In two other Epodes, 8 and 12, Horace writes about his own impotence, caused, he says, by the agency of an unnamed old woman (anus). I suggest that this anus can be associated with Canidia. If that’s true, the consequence is that Epodes 3, 5, 8, 12, and 17 make a single sequence in which attacks on the putative other are inseparable from confessions of impo-tence, both sexual and otherwise. Canidia, the ultimate target of Horace’s iambic venom,2 is not the symbol of his poetic power (as Lycambes is for Archilochus and Bupalus for Hipponax) so much as the ironic reflection of his powerlessness — symbol-ized, here, by his castration.3 The collection ends with Horace’s sudden surrender to the superior power of Canidia’s mala car-mina and her declaration that she will not refrain from tak-ing her vengeance lest all her power be held in vain (17.37–41, 74–81). This network of associations, in turn, extends beyond the series to the other poems in the collection, which are linked to it through a variety of textual and thematic echoes as well as through direct juxtaposition.