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RESEARCH on Shakespeare's choice of ‘Horatio’ as the name for Hamlet's fellow student and confidante has focused on two sources. In Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (mid-1580s), the character Horatio serves as the hero Hieronimo's faithful and trusted companion; J. Madison Davis and A. Daniel Frankforter suspect a more remote allusion to the Horatii, whose legendary story of Roman patriotism is told in Livy's Ab Urbe Condita.1 I propose another classical possibility: that Horatio, who tells Hamlet in the play's final scene that he is ‘more an antique Roman than a Dane’, is intended to recall the Roman poet Horace.2

Horatio appears for the first time in the play's opening scene, responding to the challenge of the sentinel Francisco (‘Stand! Who's there?’) by proclaiming that he and Marcellus are ‘friends to this ground’.3 When another sentinel, Barnardo, recognizes Horatio and addresses him by name, Horatio's second line in the play offers a curious reply:

Barnardo: Say—what, is Horatio there?

Horatio: A piece of him.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editors proposed various explanations for this rejoinder: that Horatio offers his hand to Barnardo, that he is making a metaphysical point about being present bodily but absent in mind, or that he is simply using a jocular catch phrase.4 The consensus view of recent annotated editions such as the Arden Shakespeare, the Oxford World's Classics Shakespeare, and the New Cambridge Shakespeare is that Horatio refers to the fact that he is shrinking away with cold, but it is not clear why Horatio chooses these particular words to make this point.5 No one has noted that ‘a piece of him’ is a direct quotation from one of Horace's most famous odes, III.30:

Exegi monumentum aere perennius

regalique situ pyramidum altius,

quod non imber edax non Aquilo impotens

possit diruere aut innumerabilis

annorum series et fuga temporum.

non omnis moriar, multaque pars mei

vitabit Libitinam

[I have finished a monument more lasting than bronze, more lofty than the regal structure of the pyramids, one which neither corroding rain nor the ungovernable North Wind can ever destroy, nor the countless series of years, nor the flight of time. I shall not wholly die, and a large part of me will elude the Goddess of Death.]6

Shakespeare imitates the opening lines of Horace's poem in the first quatrain of Sonnet 55:

Not marble nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme

But you shall shine more bright in these contents

Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.

Not only is Horatio's name is derived from Horace, but his first appearance on stage contains an otherwise difficult-to-explain line that turns out to be a quotation from a poem by Horace that Shakespeare knew intimately. Moreover, the logic of Horace's poem makes it fitting that ‘pars mei’ should reappear as ‘a piece of him’: Horace is saying that his body will die but his textual self, his literary works, will live on. If Horatio is quoting from Horace, preserving his text, then he perpetuates precisely the sort of literary immortality that Horace envisaged for himself (and that Shakespeare promises to the addressee of Sonnet 55). ‘A piece of him’ thus means not only ‘a piece of Horatio’ but ‘a piece of Horace’.

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