But perhaps they are better, and not so much because they don't end up buzzing "Caesar, Caesar" as because of the Georgics' tonality of utter detachment. Perhaps it's those days of yore I spent roaming the mountains and deserts of Central Asia that make this tonality most appealing. Back then, I suppose, it was the impersonality of the landscape I'd find myself in that impressed itself on the cortex. Now, a lifetime later, I might blame this taste for monotony on the human vista. Underneath either one lies, of course, an inkling that detachment is the final product of many intense attachments. Or else the modern predilection for a neutral voice, so characteristic of didactic genres in your times. Or both, which is more likely still. And even if the Georgics' impersonal drone is nothing but a Lucretian pastiche—as I strongly suspect it is—it is still appealing. Because of its implicit objectivity and explicit similarity to the monotonous clamor of days and years; to the sound time makes as it passes. The very absence of story, the absence of characters in the Georgics echo, as it were, time's own perspective on any existential predicament. I even remember myself thinking back then that should time have a pen of its own and decide to compose a poem, its lines would include leaves, grass, earth, wind, sheep, horses, trees, cows, bees. But not us. Maximum, our souls.
So the standards are indeed his. And the epic, for all its splendors, as well as because of them, is a letdown as regards those standards. Plain and simple, he had a story to tell. And a story is bound to have us in it. Which is to say, those whom time dismisses. On top of that, the story wasn't his own. No, give me the Georgics any day. Or, should I say, any night, considering my present reading habits. Although I must confess that even in those days of yore, when the sperm count was much higher, hexameter would have left my dreams dry and uneventful. Logaoedics apparently are much more potent.
Two thousand years this, two thousand years that! Just imagine, Flaccus, if I'd had company last night. And imagine an—er—translation of this dream into reality. Well, half of humanity must be conceived that way, no? Wouldn't you be responsible, at least in part? Where would those two thousand years be; and wouldn't I have to call the offspring Horace? So, consider this letter a soiled sheet, if not your own by-blow.
And, by the same token, consider the part of the world I am writing to you from, the outskirts of the Pax Romana, ocean or no ocean, distance or no distance. We've got all sorts of flying contraptions here to handle that, not to mention a republic with the first among equals built in, to boot. And tetrameters, as I said, are still tetrameters. They alone can take care of any millennia, to say nothing of space or of the subconscious. I've been dwelling here for twenty-two years now, and I've noticed no difference. In all likelihood, here is where I'll die. So you can take my word for it: tetrameters are still tetrameters, and so are trimeters. And so forth.
It was a flying contraption, of course, that brought me here from Hyperborea twenty-two years ago, though I can as easily put down that flight to my rhymes and meters.
Except that the latter might add up to an even greater distance between me and the good old Hyperborea, as your dactylic Caspium does to the actual size of your Pax Romana. Contraptions—flying ones especially—only delay the inevitable: you gain time, but time can fool space only so far; in the end, space catches up. What are years, after all? What can they measure save the decay of one's epidermis, of one's wits? Yet the other day I was sitting in a cafe here with a fellow Hyperborean, and as we were chatting about our old town in the delta, it suddenly crossed my mind that should I, twenty-two years ago, have tossed a splinter of wood into that delta, it could, given the prevailing winds and currents, have crossed the ocean and reached by now the shores I am dwelling on, to witness my decay. That's how space catches up with time, my dear Flaccus; that's how one truly departs from H yperborea.
Or: how one expands Pax Romana. By dreams, if necessary. Which, come to think of it, are yet another—perhaps the last—form of life's regeneration, especially if you've got no company. Also, it doesn't lead up to Caesar, beating in this sense even the bees. Although, I repeat, it's no use talking to you like this, since your sentiments toward him were in no way different from Virgil's. Nor were your methods of conveying them. You, too, preach Augustus' glory over man's grief, saddling with this task not—to your considerable credit—idling souls but geography and mythology. Commendable as this is, it implies, I'm afraid, that Augustus either owns or is sponsored by both. Ah, Flaccus, you might just as well have used hexameter. Asclepiads are just too good for this stuff, too lyrical. Yes, you're right: nothing breeds snobbery better than tyranny.
Well, I suppose I am just allergic to this sort of thing. If I am not reproaching you more venomously, it is because
I am not your contemporary: I am not he, because I am almost you. I've written in your meters, and in this one particularly. That, as I've said, is what makes me appreciate "Caspium," "Niphaten," and "Gelonos" sitting there at the end of your lines, expanding the empire. And so do "Aqui- lonibus" and "Vespero," but upward. My subject matter, of course, was more humble; besides, I used rhyme. The only way to overlap with you completely would be by setting myself the task of repeating all your stanzaic patterns in this tongue or in my native Hyperborean. Or else by translating you into either. Come to think of it, such an exercise is plausible—far more so than redoing, say, Ovid's hexameters and elegiac couplets. After all, your Collected is not such a large book, and the Carmina itself is just ninety-five pieces of varying length. But I am afraid the dog's too old for new and old tricks alike; I should have thought of that earlier. We are destined to stay separated, to remain pen pals at best. Not for long, I'm afraid, but long enough, I hope, to get close to you now and then. Even if not close enough to make out your face. In other words, I am doomed to my dreams; but this doom is welcome.
Because the body in question is so rum. Its greatest charm, Flaccus, is the total lack of the egocentricity that so often plagues its successors, and I daresay the Greeks also. It seldom pushes the first person singular—though that's partly the grammar. In a language so highly inflected, it's hard to zero in on one's own plight. Although Catullus managed; that's why he is loved so universally. But among you four, even with Propertius, the most ardent of all of you, that was out. And certainly with your friend, treating as he did both man and nature sui generis. Most of all with Naso, which, given some of his subject matter, must be what turned the Romantics against him so sharply. Still, in my proprietary (after last night) capacity, this pleases me considerably. Come to think of it, the absence of egocentricity may be a body's best defense.