The Poetics of Lyde's Bacchic Hairstyle in Horace's Odes 2.11

This article examines the figure of Lyde in Horace's Odes 2.11. She is one of the less-studied courtesans often found in Horatian sympotic and erotic poems. In the last thirty years, scholarship has emphasised how Horace's own male gaze and desire shape these female figures and turn them into objects of his own poetic agency. As such, they can be considered on par with Horace's poetic materia. In this article, I argue that the variant readings of the last stanza of Odes 2.11 add to Horace's characterisation of Lyde as geographically, poetically, and aesthetically elusive. I suggest, in light of this elusiveness, that Lyde can be interpreted as participating in Horace's "Bacchic Poetics," something which complicates her gendered interpretation as "fetishized" object for Horace and his implied Roman male audience. Lyde's elusiveness and inaccessibility, while being triggers for male desire, are also features that draw her close to a Bacchant and, at the same time, to Horace's own characterisation as a Bacchant in Odes 3.25. In this way, Lyde can be seen to embody the complex Bacchic tensions that, in Horace's poetry, liberate poetic energy: Horace represents Lyde as bacchic and thus ambivalent, both an object and an agent of his poetry.