In his set of lyrics, partially in the style of the Greek poet Archilochus and partly along the playful amatory lines of his Neoteric predecessors, Horace introduced certain Greek meters into Latin. His metrical variety and ingenuity is obvious from the first poem in Book 1 of the Odes. The first four poems all have different metrical patterns. Horace, in fact, was so proud of his originality that he used nine different patterns in 1.1-9 and then added a tenth in 1.11. The opening poem of the three books of Odes, 1.1 and the closing poem 3.30 are the only examples of the particular Asclepiadean pattern employed. These poems offer us significant insights into the way the poet wants us to regard him. He demonstrates his ethical integrity, free of the corrupting materialism of the times: he shrewdly avoids the moral dangers of the city of Rome, leading a modest life of contentment and poetic creativity in the Sabine countryside. . Horace takes apart the elegiac situation of paired love and the elegiac monologue of the ardent lover and exposes it to his own and our ironic observation. Thus, he composes love poems that add a third person to the pair of would-be lovers and inject a note of practical realism.

Horace’s first Ode functions as an introduction to the entire collection, and its emphasis falls on the role of the lyric poet in ancient society and Horace’s self-consciousness as such a poet. He adopts a rhetorical form familiar to Greek poets and orators anc to their Roman admirers: we call it today a ''priamel.'' It lists a number of choice goals or occupations that three or more groups prefer, in order to lead up to the particular choice that the speaker wants to stess. Does Odes 1.1 have a logical and arstistic unity? Particularly troublesome is Horace's description of himself as already in the grove of the Muses before his request to Maecenas for inclusion amongst the great lyric poets. For as Horace almost certainly wrote 1.1 after most of the other odes included in Books I-3, in effect composing an epilogue rather than an initial statement, so the critic reads the first ode not as an introduction, but as a statement about the other poems and the poet himself. However, we should note that recipient is not only Maecenas but also the general listener. The listener becomes the defender of Horace's poetry by the very act of reading. Instead of Horace taking pleasure in the reflected glory of Maecenas, the man descended from Etruscan kings, it is the reader who becomes the source of glory for the obscurely-born Horace. In the priamel of Odes 1.1, it is clear that the poet as master of words sets the values of his community. Although all may find pleasure in what they do, value is not assigned by the tokens of Olympic victory nor by the exchange of patronage between the political leader and the crowd (3-8). Poetic evaluation resides in the poet's description of these pursuits. In recognition Of their achievements, the token of the palm carries these men off to the gods. Yet the palm is seen as a conventionally set object. So too the politician does not control, but is the object of the fleeting attentions of the Roman populace. The wealthy man is not reliant on public recognition, but rejoices in making his own whatever comes his way. He sets a personal valuation on his goods. The man is virtually burying (condidit) his wealth and, by hiding it, takes away its circulation and meaning.

While, the farmer doggedly clings to early Roman values and refuses Greek gifts, the merchant rejects the Roman values of otium, oppidum and rus for the Greek waters of the sea of Icarus. By geographical selectivity, Horace has given the impression of not ' only portraying the social roles of great and small, but even showing them throughout the Roman world. We have passed around the Mediterranean, to Greece (pulverem Olympicum: 'Olympic dust'), Rome (turba Quiritium: 'the crowd of citizens'), Africa (Libycis...areis: 'Libyan threshing-floors'), Asia Minor (Attalicis condicionibus: 'the terms of an Attalus'), Cyprus (Cypria trabe: 'Cyprian ship') and the Greek seas (Myrtoum. . .mare; lcariis fluctibus: 'Myrtoan sea' ; 'lcarian waves'). Although the mention of otium (16) provides a bridge to the next figure, the poem also seems to restart halfway through, since est qui (19: 'there is one') corresponds to the introductory sunt quos (3: 'there are those'). The three lives that follow can be characterized as extra-social; that is, they are marked off from the earlier types by their position outside the normal structure of society. The man at the stream enjoys his otium alone by a gently murmuring spring of sacred water (ad aquae lene caput sacrae, 22), while others enjoy the blare of clarion and trumpet (lituo tubae/permixtus sonitus, 24), delighting in hated war (bella...matribus detestata, 24-5). The hunter's joy comes from the yelps of his young hounds chasing a doe or the destructive crash of a boar breaking his fine-woven nets (teretes...plagas, 28). Since he ignores the attractions of his comely wife, he is appropriately cold-shouldered by Jove (sub love frigido, 25). Horace sets a value more important to the lyric poet - the man has mistakenly left unattended his tenera coniunx ('tender wife'). Horace appears to define his own role against these lives, both social and extra-social. Composing poetry is glorious in itself. The poet's description of himself and the man at the spring are very close. The momentary joys at the spring are impermanent. The desire for reputation remains, but Horace cannot pronounce on its complete accomplishment. That is in the hands of the reader who will judge after this poem ends and after reading the poetry that follows. The list has been functioning synecdochally: each portrait seems to be part of a picture of mankind's desires, with each being erased and replaced by other exemplars. Yet this last item, the poet in the grove of Muses, cannot be totally independent from the rest of mankind. We should consider treating the lives as metonymical, rather than read each item as synecdoche. That is, the list does not express a whole, but instead emphasizes the congruence of each item. The congruent feature in this list is the element of excess in the desires which is indicated throughout the descriptions. Horace too longs for glory, the peace of his Sabine farm, or the pleasure of otium by a cool stream. The priamel is not merely illustrative of mankind (synecdoche) but, while aiming at a definition of the poet, links him with the other lives (metonomy). Thee exaggeration in the final Iine of short-statured Horace butting the stars with his head keeps the poem from becoming too self-important. Horace displays how Horace the poet Writes, in an attempt to define Horace the author. The poet's place outside the world is a fancy which cannot be maintained. Instead of being separate, Horace the poet is but another type with similar aspirations to those of the others.

Odes 1.5 seeming simplicity is the achievement of the highest art and refined meditation. The close physical propinquity and the verb urget suggest that foreplay of a heavy kind is in progress. Theboy is rather ''skinny and girlish'' and has '' thoroughly drenched himself in perfumes.'' This was, in the traditional Roman view, an unmanly habit. There is a certain effeminacy about Pyrrha's puer and Pyrrha is a cradle-snatcher. It is right to consider to whom and in what way the grotto is gratum. It conveys the notion that it is ''habitually welcome to her'' or ''her frequent resort for sexual enjoyment. Why does so careful a poetas as Horace stress the color of Pyrrha”s hair? It follows that Horace's emphasis on the flavus color of Pyrrha's hair would lead to a presumption on the part of his readers that it is dyed hair- and that she is no better than she should be, lax in morals or pretending to be younger than she is (more probably the latter in view of her penchant for gracilis pueri). It is worth adding that it was from the time of Pyrrha, wife of Deucalion, that moral corruption was conventionally held to have spread throughout mankind. Her namesake proves it. Pyrrha has dressed her hair not ad ostentationem but ad lasciviam, as suggested by the verb urgere. This comprises a comment on the deceptiveness of love and on the wisdom of renouncing it. 1. Like a woman, the sea is mutable and untrustworthy. Pyrrha is his sea, on which he has rashly set sail. It is, however, important to recognise how closely <mutatam> fidem and mutatos deos are related, for they form a single idea, almost a hendiadys. The sentence may be expanded as ''how often he will bewail the fact that she has transferred her allegiance and the gods from himself to another.'' To transfer one's fides was in Roman eyes a serious matter, for the gods presided over fides and it had a cardinal importance in the moral order. To play fast and loose with fides is to play fast and loose with the gods that are its guardians. What the puer will lament is the transference of an allegiance that he believed to have a divine sanction sacrilegiously away from himself; Pyrrha is foresworn and he will feel that the gods too, the guarantors of her oaths, have abandoned him along with her. It is not so much a belief that the gods have turned against him as that they have forsaken him altogether. Pyrrha, it seems, carries her own gods around with her. ' Admiration has been expressed for the skill with which Horace has deployed his adjectives in lines 6-12, with their various balances and antitheses. The descriptive words applied to the puer (insolens, credulus, nescius) all relate to his naivete and inexperience; those found in the comparison of Pyrrha to the sea stress her cruelty, darkness, and deceit (aspera, nigris, fallacis). In between them, in the two relative clauses, we find presented the false picture of Pyrrha, which the boy - while in the grotto or perhaps until her fides is transferred elsewhere - forms of her (aurea, vacuum, amabilem). Three words pertain to each category, for there may be said to be three characters in this part of the ode: the boy, the reaI Pyrrha, and the imaginary Pyrrha. The adjectives applied, metaphorically, to the real Pyrrha overwhelm and cancel both those applied to the boy and those that serve to mark out his naive vision of her: deceit in place of ignorance and credulity, harshness instead of availability and affection, blackness instead of gold. But there is more: whereas the boy and his imagined Pyrrha remain as human beings, with adjectives applied to them befitting their humanity, the real Pyrrha is presented only in terms of the violent, uncontrolled, and uncontrollable elements- it is they that sweep away and obliterate the human figures, one of which is indeed only the product of the other's fantasy. The boy who now glories in his (supposed) conquest will later have to learn that he is quite unversed in the ways of women. This idea is clearly brought out in lines 9-11. These provide, as it were, a glimpse into the boy's thoughts while in the grotto, when he foolishly sees a Pyrrha who is aurea and always vacua, amabilis. The boy is naive, but Pyrrha is not; he responds to her in a simple and trusting manner - his ''golden, willing and gorgeous girl'' - without foreseeing at that point her tempestuous, destructive nature. That the puer is only one among many on whom Pyrrha has preyed and will prey again is confirmed by the brief exclamatory interjection that follows: ''miseri, quibus intemptata nites'' (12-13). Miser is a quasi-technical word far those suffering through love. Gold was normally tried by fire in antiquity and this is entirely suitable to the context in view of the frequent comparison made in love-poetry between ignis and amor. All those who ''assay’' Pyrrha in the fire of love find her base metal, despite the superficial sheen that captivates them. Me in line 13 is in emphatic contrast to miseri in 12. It is sometimes

rashly treated as if it referred to Horace himself; in fact it serves as a cover for a definable category of men: former lovers of Pyrrha.

On either side of the main verb indicat two noun-adjective word-pairs are poised and at the same time interlocked, so that the entire sentence itself becomes a symmetricaIly balanced votive tablet. The traditional image of ''woman as sea'' is suddenly given an almost mischievous specificity; because lovers are sailors only within poetry, so the votive tablet, commemorates the renunciation of love symbolised bv the uvida vestimenta, is itself a part of the ode, is inscribed within it. The ode begins and ends with enclosed spaces.

In I.9, varying an opening scene in the Greek poet Alcaeus, Horace starts with an impressive picture of Mt. Soracte (visible from the highest hills of Rome) in the freezing temperatures of winter. It is a realistic but imaginary scene: Romans did not have picture windows through which they could enjoy outdoor scenery, for all Roman houses looked inward. Amid the difficulties of our lives, we all have some possibility of affecting circumstances and our happiness. We have to concentrate on our immediate present. There is a contrast in stanzas 3 and 4, between storms which image anxiety and the dismissal of anxiety for the delights of youth. We see a variety of amatory details, which represent the available enjoyments of the ''now'' that is urged on Thaliarchus and us by repeated nunc in 18 and 21. The seasons and the weather are beyond human control. Some greater power whether it be the gods or the rhythm of nature, will see to it that winter does not last for ever. We should therefore ignore the snow and make things as comfortable as possible within. A similar rhythm governs our national and personal affairs. Dangers pass, troubles recede. Meanwhile we should turn away from all that is grim and depressing, and think only of those things which make the moment happy. For today is a gift which Fortune will not offer again. So it turns out that

Carm. I, 9 has four main pairs of antitheses: winter/ spring, age/ youth, storm/ calm, anxiety/ cheerfulness.

Winter/ Spring - Storm Calm - Anxiety Cheerfulness - Age Youth.

1) Winter (age, anxiety).

2) Winter, cheerfulness (youth).

3) Storm, calm (anxietg, cheerfulness)

4) Anxiety, cheerfulness, youth

5) Age, anxiety, youth, cheerfulness (winter, spring).

6) Youth, cheerfulness (spring) .

The whole winter landscape - mountain, trees and rivers - was to be seen by the eye of the imagination. The snow was there all right, but was not visible from where Horace was writing or from where the party was supposed to be.

In I.9, the first of many Alcaic odes of the collection, Horace boldly starts off from a poem of Alcaeus in the same meter, on the same topic, pointedly adapting its literally wintry scene to his more obviously symbolic description. From there, he further adapts the injunctions of the 6th century Greek to the contemporary scene in Rome and to his young friend Thaliarchus, but always employing the energy of the Alcaic stanza in the service of energetic life-affirming recommendations, as Alcaeus tended to do.

In I.11, the speaker is arguing for himself as the prominent placing of mihi in line 1 implies, and for the sexual relationship which he plots to enjoy from Leuconoe. The speaker betrays his selfish motives. If Leuconoe can only use the clear mind that her name suggests, she will resist this argument and definitely avoid the wine which is preliminary to the speaker's goal.

The addressees of the four carpe diem poems are also significantly different. The first three CD poems of Book I all have in common a speaker who offers disinterested advice: he stands to gain nothing. In 1.11, on the other hand, the speaker is a very interested party in the outcome of his injunctions, for the call to enjoy the moment involves him as much as the addressee. His involvement in the situation qualifies his CD recommendations. The pronouns mihi and tibi stress the mutual involvement of the speaker and addressee as no other poem of this type has so far done. Leuconoe is not merely foolishly inquiring into her own future, but into a future that links her with the speaker. When, then, the speaker urges her to d forget the question of their future relationship, the advice may be more self-serving than genuinely helpful to Leuconoe. This speaker betrays himself and his rhetoric with dum loquimur. It seems plain that he has come restless with mere talk: he wants the amatory action toward which his speech has been working.

The speaker of I.11 plunges directly into his advice. The initial pronoun tu and the perfect subjunctive with ne warn us that he is more insistently concerned with his addressee and this advice than are the earlier speakers. The ''adviser's'' urgency involves a large element of self-interest, and he puts himself first in this line and indeed in the entire argument. He does not like Leuconoe to inquire what end or result the gods have assigned for each of them. Why not? Is it because she is really in love with him and wasting time and immediate pleasure, which he can count on anyway? I doubt it. Rather, he is dealing with a reluctant woman, a ''coy mistress,'' who distrusts him and the amatory pleasure he insistently advocates. But a practical woman does need some assurances that she has a reasonable chance of a durable mutual relationship: it is not to her interests, at least in the days of Horace to seize the moment carelessly. There are consequences that cannot be ignored, as every instance of sexual intercourse in New Comedy demonstrates. The ''long hope'' disparaged in line 7 may indeed be foolish when it amounts to hope for along life, as the phrase seems to imply in I.4.15. But here Leuconoe has little interest in long life, only in a long friendship with this speaker; and that is something that she can try to plan. . And we should hardly fault her for rejecting this specious rhetoric. The speaker has no very convivial goal; he rather works from the tried and true macho philosophy of: ''Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.'' And his libido says: now! But what advantage is there for Leuconoe in yielding to his amatory line? What does the ''love'' never promised, of this speaker offer to her now? Why not trust in the future, which, if it does not bring her much, may at least offer her another man who will prove more reliable? (Change postero of 7 to altero.) The special quality of 1.11, I think, arises from the interested way with which the friend of Leuconoe perfunctorily exploits the serious rhetoric of CD that in the earlier poems has been developed elaborately, seriously, and convincingly by a disinterested and honorable speaker. Thereby, he transforms the wise advice into a plausible but dishonest line serving his goal of seduction. This is one of the special appeals of Horace's Odes: the versatility of the speaker’s voice. The different levels of interest in the ever-moralizing words of the poems give us new pleasure and a new awareness of their wisdom in the proper context. It seems that the Horatian lover, speaking in the first person, particularly represents the interested and flawed use of moral advice.

I.13 - As in I.11, he reveals the interests of the speaker not only in calling attention at length to his jealousy but also in those seemingly calmer words of the last two stanzas. Horace generally looks on the elegists' idealization of a total, life-long union with the disenchanted eye of a wryly sceptical and somewhat cautious observer. The ending is not so serious as it might at first seem. Its very solemnity in fact, may prove to be the key to a highly refined and subtle irony. Horace has created an extreme polarity between the beginning and ending of the poem. How does Horace get from the emotion of the first three stanzas to the sententious objectivity of the last? The juxtaposition of his rival's with his lady's name in line 1, the alliteration of c- at the beginning of the three main rhythmic cola in lines 1 and 2 (cum, cervicem, cerea), the repetition Telephi . . .Telephi at the end of these same two lines, reinforcing the rhythmic and assonantal repetition within line 2 (cervicem roseam, / /cerea Telephi), the list of physical symptoms, the quarrel and the mark of the lover's bite in lines 9-12 all prove a strong and deliberate foil to the peace of the stable union depicted in the last four lines.

The second section of the poem, lines 15-16, is transitional. The poet moves to the language of persuasion. The syntax also changes from the first person to the second. Moving away from himself, the poet shifts his mood to greater calm and greater objectivity. He reasons and argues rather than shouts and gesticulates. He continues and strengthens the atmosphere of removal and emotional control. The last section (17-20) seems to be at first the natural consequence of this. The speaker has regained his poise and self-command. The last four lines completely abandon the first and second-person verbs of lines 1-16 for the impersonality of third- person gnomic generalization. They have a dramatic function and contain a trace of subtle humor. Horace is desiderating an ideal which may in fact be quite remote from his own capacities or his own present condition What is more important, he uses the gnome about calm and tranquil union to support his own attempt to outmaneuver his rival. This ostensibly disinterested advice to Lydia may thus reflect ironically on the still unassuaged passions of the lover who has spoken the preceding sixteen lines. The physical beauty of Telephus, so strongly emphasized in the opening lines, intimates that Horace has very good reason to fear his rival. Outclassed (one presumes) in physique, he resorts to mind. The unobtrusive phrase in 13, non, si me satis audias, is the clearest indication of the speaker's purposes. He is trying to win by persuasion a contest which he must lose on the grounds of immediate physical appeal. The disproportion between the vivid description of passion in 1-12 and the calm of 17-20, however, does more than just create a black and white contrast between Horace and Telephus, the gnomic wisdom of maturer years and the impulses of youth. The last four lines also form an implicit criticism not only of Telephus, but also of the speaker himself. It is part of the dramatic situation and the irony that the speaker is supposed to be unaware of this criticism although it is apparent to the observing audience. He has not in fact attained the calm or the disinterested concern of which he would convince Lydia (and perhaps himself). He is still very much involved in the passions of rivalry which he had so vividly described in lines 1-12. Horace's emotions in the first twelve lines are not merely jealousy, but also envy. He envies Telephus his beauty (2-4) and his total abandon to and enjoyment of the tumultuous vicissitudes of love (10-12). Even as he praises the calm union which remains until ''the last day'' Horace, as elsewhere, is not entirely convinced that the calm of age is superior to the heat of passion. Up to line 13, in fact, Horace is remarkably inattentive to Lydia. Instead he dwells lovingly on his own passions (3-9) and on Telephus' beauty and ardor (1-3, 9-12). The penultimate stanza (13-16) reveals the irony inherent in the whole situation. The criterion of ''eternity” (non...speres perpetuum) undercuts the position not of Telephus, but of Horace himself. If Lydia does indeed ''listen sufficiently'' to Horace's advice, she should be as suspicious of him as of Telephus. Yet it would be false to the delicacy of Horace's art and Horace's sensibility to deny all seriousness to the final stanza. But this seriousness is of a special kind. Horace is one of the few poets who can combine tenderness with a light touch of irony and leave the reader suspended. The last line of the poem juxtaposes death and love: amor and suprema. . .die and the contrast between youth and age, passion and tranquillity, Telephus and Horace.

At times that wisdom cannot quite compensate for youthfu1 vitality. Probably Horace intended the poem's close to leave us in uncertainty. He refuses, as he does so frequently, to allow us the satisfaction of restricting him to a single attitude. “It is a difficult poem to pin down, and that is part of its charm, as of the best of Horace... ''

I. 22 – The situation chosen by Horace is analogous to others where, because he describes himself as a poet, he experiences a charmed existence. If the speaker symbolizes the poet, and Lalage suggests the attractions of love poetry, then the wolf is associated by Greeks and Romans with anger, biting, sudden attack, and then with the iambic verse that featured personal attack. The poem is an antithesis between literary genres. To begin with, the Greek name ''lalage,'' is onomatopoeic - ''to prattle.'' In the case of the integer vitae, it is precisely as a love-poet in the Lesbian tradition that the speaker is mysteriously rescued from death. The wolf's appearance (and disappearance) is contemporaneous with an ongoing lyric performance (a carmen in progress). The definition of the integer as a noncombatant helps to characterize the developing ethos of the speaker as one who is faithful to erotic lyric. The wolf-portent is not merely abnormal but extra-natural. It precludes any ordinary species of wolf from the poetic agenda. There exists a well-documented tradition that associates the aggressive nature of the wolf with the truculence of both the iambographer and his opponent. Horace who professed quite openly his qualified debt to the iambic poetry of Archilochus and composed his own iambi (as he labelled his Epodes) before graduating to the radically disparate genre of carmina, was by no means unaware of the conventional link between the mask of the lupus and iambos. In view of the traditional connections between '' wolfish'' aggression and iambic personae (both assailant and victim) - connections that, as we have seen, Horace blatantly exploits in his own youthful imitations of Archilochus and Hipponax - it is conceivable that the fugitive lupus of the integer vitae is a kind of literary ''ghost from the past,'' a trope for the sort of defamatory poetry that the lyric speaker is now claiming to have transcended. The opening declaration of the integer to the effect that he has no need for martial implements in his projected journeys may be a token of his renunciation of a militant iambic posture: To disavow the need for weapons is to signal their inappropriateness. The lyric decorum will take the place of belligerent utterance. In regard to wolves as exemplars of the martial spirit, it is pertinent to recall that the metaphorical association goes back to the Homeric poems. The economy of the integer vitae appears even more rigorous when we examine the dominant mythological affiliations of the two geographical regions mentioned in 13-16: Daunias (Apulia) and Iubae tellus (Numidia). The first refers to the poet's familiar native haunts, the second, with equal banality, to a territory traditionally fertile in wild animals. The lands of the mythical Daunus and the historical Juba are predominantly marked in local legends by the presence of wolfish personalities associated with warlike kingdoms. Since Jubae tellus is mentioned in the Ode in connection with lions rather than wolves, the lions are strictly complementary to ''wolves'' in their contribution to the literary subtext. Anger is endemic to the genre of iambos. Horace's ''recantation'' unequivocally associates the renounced genre of iambi with a reckless youthful phase of poetic endeavor. The “armed,'' martial iambist, whether lupine or leonine in his bestial persona, disappears before the image of the peace-loving melic poet who is forthright in singing the praises of his beloved.

Ode 1.23 - In this elegantly composed ode, Horace writes three stanzas, each one a complete sentence. Ostensibly appealing with calm good humor to the reason of Chloe and reassuing her absolutely of his dispassionate good will, he in fact refuses ''to specify precisely what his desires are,'’ but conveys them by the language of denial in the third stanza. He does want to ''break'' her (10). In showing the way this man masks his desires and works through ''emotional suggestiveness.'’ More than a quarter of the odes involve erotic themes and another quarter or so contain additional uses of erotic f

language, that is, language associated with love, sexuality, or desire. In turning our attention to how assumptions about desire have shaped 1.23, which serves as a microcosm of more general problems in Horatian criticism and the specific nature of desire in the poem. The poem is a version of male desire that expresses itself in a language whose rational argumentation is completely undercut by its emotional or affective power. The language of the poem expresses a tension between reason and emotion in the poet/lover which forms the basis for the poem's expression of male desire. To begin with, the word order of the poem's first line mirrors the conflicting interests of the poet/lover and Chloe, the addressee. While the rational meaning of the simile in the poem's first line, ''You are avoiding me like a fawn, Chloe,'' is reflected in the separation of verb (vitas), direct object (me), and vocative (Chloe), it is undercut by word order as well, for the poet surrounds himself (me) with ''Chloe words'' (inuleo. . .similis). Furthermore, the apparently rational characterization of Chloe's fears as empty or groundless (vano) in the fawn simile is undermined by the emotionally disconcerting tone produced by the presence of the fawn's tearful mother (pavidam. . .matrem) and the pathless mountains (montibus aviis) through which the fawn flees. Then, in the guise of expanding upon the fawn's empty fears (note the explanatory nam), the poet/ lover begins to image both arousal in Chloe and the fulfillment of his own desire. Chloe's name (Greek for ''green bud'' or ''shoot''), introduced earlier in the poem, has prepared the reader to associate Chloe with spring, which, as Commager argues, functions as the controlling metaphor of the poem. Thus, we associate the poet's description of the bristling forth of foliage at spring's arrival (mobilibus veris inhorruit / adventus foliis) with Chloe. And through the words mobilis (''pliant,'' ''flexible'') and inhorreo (''shudder'' or ''become erect'') the poet images symptoms of (Chloe's) physical arousal. Still further, the erotic potential awakened in this description of spring is realized in the vivid picture of sexual intercourse imaged by the lizards parting the brambles (virides rubum / dimovere lacertae). The description, following directly, of the fawn's or Chloe's trembling knees and pounding heart is equally evocative of both fear and desire, thus mingling symptoms that describe the effect the poet / lover presumably desires (namely, Chloe's desire) with the effect he describes himself as having on Chloe (namely, fear). As we can see then, the rational argument that Chloe is avoiding him because of unnecessary fears is undermined radically through word order and suggestive sexual imagery. The figurative power of the language evokes designs the poet has on Chloe which do not surface in his rational argumentation. What follows in the poem on the rational level (expressed once again through simile) is the poet/lover's attempt to reassure Chloe that he has no plans to attack her: atqui non ego te tigris at aspera/Gaetulusve leo frangere persequor; yet through word order that embodies pursuit (non ego te), and similes of predatory animals, each made more empathetic with a modifier (tigris...aspera and Gaetulus leo), the poet/lover undercuts his reassurances. Frangere, finally, demolishes the poet/ lover's seeming reassurances. The choice of frangere to embody this climax is particularly effective because of the word's range of meanings, which extends from the rational to the emotional spheres. The word encapsulates the poet/lover's multiple goals of influencing Chloe through rational argumentation, taming her the way one tames an animal, and breaking down her resistance. Indeed, frangere (which can be used of breaking down doors or barriers)'' may even hint at the breaking of the hymen, which would make real, and more specific to Chloe's youthful state, the sexual intercourse imaged earlier by the lizards parting the brambles. Perhaps now we can understand frangere as a powerfully evocative expression of the destructive component of a desire that requires a subordination of the other. To be sure, the poet backs off a bit from the explosiveness of the word frangere in the poem's final lines. Yet here, too, the seemingly objective language of tandem and tempestiva is undercut by the realization that Chloe's ''readiness for a man'' has been defined all along solely in relation to the interests of her would-be lover. In the guise of a rational polemic on the necessity for Chloe to adapt to the ''natural order of things'' the poet/lover conceals his own impatience and desire. It is a paradoxical desire for both control of the other and recognition by her. ''Reason'' allows the poet/lover the appearance of speaking from a dispassionate and uninvolved position, while it, in fact, functions as a kind of erotic subterfuge that masks an overpowering desire in the cloak of objectivity. In the Chloe ode the ultimate futility of the poet/lover's strategy is evidenced by the fact that what is absent from the poem is any clear sense of Chloe's will or of Chloe as the subject or agent of desire. We are left with only the surface of Chloe, with a Chloe whose trembling reaction to the poet/ lover suggests both her fear and (to the poet/lover) her potential for erotic response. As a consequence, the lines between seduction, domination, and invasion begin to blur.

Odes I.24 - it devotes precisely half its lines (1-10) to Vergil's feelings of loss for the dead man. Then, it turns to the second part of the form in 11-20, namely, to the need of the living to return to reality and put an end to their sorrow. The tradition which regards this ode as chiefly an effort by Horace to mourn the passing of a mutual friend of his and Virgil's, generally agreed to be Quintilius Varus, and to enshrine his memory for posterity. Critics have thought that if the first stanza were excised, we would have a more forceful and satisfying beginning. Was Horace's primary intention, judging from the treatment of the theme to write an elegy whose sole purpose was to praise Quintilius? Was it sympathy with Vergil, quite simply, and a desire to console him, that prompted him to include the remarks addressed to the epic poet ? The formal elements are beyond dispute. There is, however, an unmistakable tone of irony aimed at the emotional1y unrestrained Virgil, and the form in which this dose of gentle reproach is administered is an example- the ode itself- of how a balanced threnody ought to be composed. We have here a lesson to Vergil in the composition of an elegy. The poem is therefore in emphasis at least equally apportioned between Quintilius and Vergil - if indeed it is not Vergil whom we should put in the foreground as the person responsible for the composition of the poem in this form. The admonitory stain is not merely stuff thrown in to prevent Horace from becoming too involved in his own grief at Quintilius' death. It is an important and integral part of the poem. The lesson given to Vergil lies in the controlled manner in which Horace can mourn the death of a person whom he would have considered no less dear to himself than he was to Vergil. That Quintilius was the mutual friend of both Horace and Vergil places in a position of even greater prominence the difference in their attitude to his death. The poem begins with what seems to be a rhetorical question, the idea being that there can be no sense of proportion, no limits to be set when one is mourning such a heavy loss as the passing of Quintilius. The construction seems to be a rhetorical question with the implications mentioned above, if we understand sit as a potential subjunctive, and we translate ''What...can there be?'' But there is nothing, from a grammatical point of view, to prevent us from understanding sit as a subjunctive used in an indirect question since some such word as rogas is understood, and surprise may be registered by B that A has in fact thought the question worthy of being asked. Horace was surprised that Vergil would ask the question would gain prominence over the other notion- that there could be no limits to the grief for Quintilius. It could well be that in an elegy written for Quintilius, Vergil had showed no restraint whatever, and had asked the question ''what moderation or end can there be to mourning such a dear friend as Quintiiius?''7 The beginning of Horace's ode takes this question as its cue, and says ''Do you actually ask?'' Then Horace goes on to write the elegy with the restraint he thinks should be employed. The edge is taken away from the admonition by Horace's appeal to the Muse. It is she who teaches the way to compose elegies, rather than Horace himself. It emerges from the poem that Vergil in his asking the gods who have claimed Quintilius to return him, and in his 'outweeping' others to whom the death of Quintilius brought grief, transgressed the limits of pudor- that sense of restraint and of moderation which controls man's relations with his fellow men and with the gods. Horace might well be hinting that Vergil does not possess to a sufficient degree a quality so obvious in the man whose death he mourns! It is not that Horace is insensible to grief, rather he knows how to practice the rule ''Nothing too much.'' Horace can feel and yet suppress his feelings. Seneca writes ''It is stupid self-indulgence to be afflicted with limitless grief when you have lost one of your dearest friends, but it is inhuman hardness to have no feeling. The best thing is a compromise between deep feeling and rationality: both to feel longing and to control it.'' Good men wept for Quiutilius, but Vergil wept more bitterly than they all. Vergil must have been trying to show that his loyally to Quintilius outstripped that of all the others, since it was he who could weep the most copiously. Some take lines 11-12 to mean that Vergil entrusted Quintilius to the gods in prayer for safe keeping, taking non ita creditum to mean 'not on condition that the gods should claim him forever,' as they have done. Others think it was used to accentuate the transient nature of human life and our enjoyment of the goods of this world, which are but lent to us, to be claimed by the gods whensoever they see fit. Some critics consider that the subject of the action in creditum must be the gods, who have lent Quintilius to his friends on earth, and now Vergil claims him back non ita creditum -although the gods did not lend him on such terms. Grammatical necessity dictates that we should have as the subject of credere the same person who is the subject of poscis. It would be Vergil who is demanding from the gods his friend whom he entrusted to them for safe keeping. A common way of looking at the relationship between men and gods was in such terms that the gods loaned us our blessings which they were at liberty to withdraw whensoever they chose. It is the gods who are the creditors, mortals the debtors. It is the gods, then, who credunt, poscunt. It seems to me very likely that in Vergil's elegy for the lost Quintilius, he had sighed in passionate disillusiomnent at his own inability to rival the melodious strains of Orpheus, and now Horace picks up the reference and says, ''What if you did indeed prove a match for Orpheus? Do you think that by that sort of art you could revive the dead?'' Horace tries to draw the addressee away from the world of myth and fairy tale to the world of reality and hard fact. Orpheus could sway trees, whole trees; Vergil, by contrast, has no control even over a part of a tree - virga, that special switch, the rod of Mercury, the marshaller of souls. The fact that arboribus and virga are in the same stanza, and that Mercurius, the subject, is kept back until the end of the sentence helps to enhance the important role played by the symbols 'tree' and ‘switch.’ Trees listened to Orpheus, whereas Hades will not listen to the entreaties of Vergil. Nefas carries with it the notion of transgression of set limits. The saying of Vergil himself that there is no virtue that is more useful to a man than is the power of spiritual endurance, and there is no stroke of fortune so harsh that a stout-hearted man cannot overcome its effect if he has sense enough to bear up under the strain. One can pay an elegant tribute to a dead friend without flying in the face of Heaven. We have to take the ode as Horace gave it to us, not as we would prefer to have it. It is above all, an ode with a message to Vergil: that even in the case of an inestimable friend's death, pudor and modus are guiding principles of which a man should never lose sight.

Ode I.25 - The older commentaries on this poem tended to be embarrassed by its bad form in jeering at an old woman who is a failed prostitute. We have quite a number of Greco-Roman poems in which a man ridicules an older prostitute and exults in her misery. Nobody should deny the fact that Horace was steeped in the poetry of his predecessors. However, a long tradition has never kept a good poet from composing effective poetry and often it has in fact inspired him to significant modifications and adaptations of the conventions. How ingeniously Horace manipulates the dramatic situation he has chosen as his starting point. Lydia is not an old crone, in spite of the speaker's impatience with her: she is quite as attractive to lovers as she was in I.13 to Telephus, and Horace's speaker, in his jealousy and frustration, is resorting to another attempt at persuasion, which is likely to be as unavailing as the line was in I.13. He masks his desire behind his intemperate predictions of the future, but what he really wants is for her to open her door and welcome his erotic longings. If you were Lydia, how would you respond? Accepting the present state as factual and the predicted rnisery as likely, readers have tended to feel uncomfortable with this poem. According, then, to Nisbet and Hubbard, ''this ode is an elaboration of a traditional motif: the rejected lover tells his beloved that her beauty will fade, and then she will be sorry. It will soon be obvious that this ode does not expect us to identify sympathetically with the speaker, and it follows that his feelings indeed are not worth much. There is no question of the speaker's situation and motivations: the two couplets go from the lover's rejection directly to his warnings of Prodice's present aging and predictions of drastic decline. This speaker is rejected perhaps in the same way as Rufinus': by weeping vainly at Maria's closed door and reacting against her arrogance. Reaction to rejection varies in manner but has the same final goal: to force the girl to submit because of anxiety over the future (predicted or invoked). These and other epigrams exhibit the use of those conventions which Nisbet and Hubbard, following Pasquali, identify. Horace's poem begins with a speaker whose situation and motivation are not initially declared. He seems to be stating facts with his present indicative forms, but why he does so is not apparent. That the speaker reacts to rejection is assumed. But how these first two stanzas operate is never declared; they only deny that ''one is meant to suppose that Horace is lying at the door as he utters the poem.'' It seem as though they assign the conventional reaction to rejection to the vivid final three stanzas, where the predictions of old age are vigorously deployed. Why does Horace make this speaker start off with apparent objectivity about pebbles tossed against another's windows, using this comparative adverb parcius, instead of declaring openly and subjectively his personal situation and emotions? What he claims to be ''now'' is apart of his self-serving argument of persuasion: the comparatives are invalid; the real and true present is the cruel fact that Lydia has the power now to reject him, and that most definitely implies that she is entertaining someone else quite lovingly and profitably at the very moment this speaker so cleverly (but vainly) plays fast and loose with the actuality of what he asserts. . Where does this familiarityh with this house come from? “Are you sleeping while I, your devoted lover, am dying outside here in the cold and the damp – if we add rain to the scenario?” But this is a brilliant instance of the rhetorical device praeteritio. He is, I believe, reciting his own appeal and documenting his own rejection. That he complains of her sleeping just after claiming that she is getting more sleep than she wants; that he laments being shut outside the closed doors just after claiming that her door loves its lintel , shows up his inconsistency. The present indicatives speak slyly of a time that will no doubt be coming, using the presents to make it more threatening and useful to the speaker. He is excluded because Lydia has another lover in her bed at this very minute. She intends her door to be shut, ''loving'' its lintel as she loves her companion, her shutters remain ''joined'' as she and her lover are joined in passionate embrace; and the rivalry between the successful lover and this unsuccessful speaker provides solid evidence that this courtesan is doing quite well, thank you, with no gray hairs or wrinkles, not likely to be deterred by the self-interested spiel of the excluded speaker. She is definitely not the aged courtesan that commentators into the twentieth century have imagined. In short, she is essentially the same Lydia that Horace presented in I.13; and the speaker is in much the same disadvantage of a triangular

situation, trying to argue his way into an advantage that, as far as we in the audience can see, he is not likely to achieve. The humiliated position of the speaker as he is in the act of trying to persuade Lydia to relent and let him inside her house, will some day, he confidently asserts, become hers as punishment for her present arrogant cruelty. Although he is not so sure of himself to foresee that Lydia will come crawling to his home and he will reject her, he does imagine that she will vainly hang around alleys at night and solicit young men and be contemptuously spurned by them. Where did we last encounter a burning liver? Why, back in 1.13.4, when the unhappy speaker was describing his own symptoms of jealousy at Lydia’s preference for Telephus. So again in this stanza the detail is simply transferred, but angrily magnified, from the speaker’s experience of frustration. Again, then, the reference to the mare suggests the current status of the speaker as an over-excited stallion. He is wishing for Lydia the same suffering that he is now enduring. This contrast between youth and age is genderless and accordingly general enough to apply to the speaker as well as Lydia whom he addresses. It is as if he knows personally the humiliation of being rejected as too old and, in his prediction of her complaint, voices his own. The Horatian lover that we have met in I.5 and more recently I.13 regularly finds himself frustrated by the girl’s preference for a lover whom he labels as puer. Thus, in the final stanza, this speaker summarizes the plight of the aging lover with a poetic sympathy that both alludes to his own unhappiness and closes the poem with a poignant humanity. She did not grow old at all. The speaker has merely been reduced to a different series of ploys, equally unsuccessful, to gain her sympathetic attention. Though he admits none of her attractions, we can infer them from his desperation. The lies that men tell to win domination over females, when exposed in all their ugliness, as Horace (and later Ovid) tend to do, alienate.

By artful use of tenses, the speaker turns the conventional threat of old age for the woman into a confident prediction, in the vain hope that she will open her door to him now. Horace practiced the philosophy of Epicurus, who recognized as the primary goal of human beings pleasure and the need to educate the soul to a proper inclination for true pleasure and not simply for the unreliable goods of material affluence and political Power.

I.37 – Horace may have explored the world of propaganda. Few people were actually certain of how or why Cleopatra died. Horace may well not have known for sure. There were two prevailing strands of Octavian’s propaganda that were developed for Roman consumption. In the first, Cleo was a besotted barbarian enemy, a major threat to the survival of Rome. Then in defeat, the time of which the poet carefully foreshortens making his swift transition to the simile, he picks up that other strand, which developed after the mysterious circumstances of her death (murder? Forced suicide? Nobly chosen suicide?) and recites in all seriousness the incredible, unexplained conversion of the hated barbarian into virtually a heroic Roman matron who kills herself to preserve her integrity. That story served the purposes of the future Augustus more than it did the memory of Cleopatra. But it is the clash between those two public versions of Cleopatra that Horace emphasizes and the pernicious ways of propaganda in distorting the truth.

We can only account for the absence of the real Cleopatra from 1.37 either by supposing that Horace was the dupe of Augustus' propaganda or its willing or hesitant minister or by discovering even in this ode the ironic detachment and the profound striving for oxymoron which are of the essence for Horace's lyric genius.

Charges of habitual intoxication and unbridled lubricity are standard formulas for the ancient propagandist. Horace converts victor to hawk and victim to dove and hare. The similes function in three ways: they define Octavian's determination and Cleo’s cowardice, treachery and despair; they prepare for the transformation from wind sodden ogre to royal masochist by distracting us with emblems of pathos from the matter at hand; finally, by its fine velocity cheats even those of us who know better into thinking that Octavia chased Cleo straight from Actium to Alexandria, that nearly a year did not elapse between Actium and the asp. If however she acted as client-kings did in such circumstances...and put her crown in Octavian's hands, there was a chance that he might follow the Roman custom and give it to one of her sons. The hostile tradition, as far as we can tell, suppressed the tale of her real courage and ingenuity. Cleo’s only concerns in the last year of her life were to thwart Octavian as long as she possibly could and to secure

Egypt’s throne for her children, to assure that the house of Lagus should continue. Her finest hour came when all but the last of her cards were played, when she could only bluff, and so bluffed magnificently. She could not rule the world, but she was determined that her children should rule Egypt. Qctavian desperately needed money, and Cleopatra was prepared to purchase the crown of Egypt for her line with ''the last great accumulation of wealth in the ancient world.'' For his part Octavian was terrified that Cleopatra would remove the treasure of the Ptolemies beyond his grasp, and, when he had succeeded in destroying the fleet that was to have escaped with the treasure, he was unnerved to learn that she had gathered her wealth into the Mausoleum and purposed to bum it if and when he should take Alexandria. The year after Actium, then, shows deft games of cat-and-mouse and treasure-hunt, embassies to and fro, cryptic offers and cryptic counter-offers, Cleopatra's skilled but desperate bargaining and Octavian's familiar poker face. This part of the story ended only when Proculeius succeeded in taking possession of the Mausoleum, when Cleopatra attempted to stab herself (''nec expavit ensem'' -she did not pale at the thought of a dagger) : and when Octavian, the wealth of the Ptolemies intact, sighed with relief. He does not cut a particularly handsome figure, this victorious imperator dangling on the string of a clever, frightened woman: it is the stuff neither of high poetry nor official versions. Until the moment that Octavian had got control of Alexandria, the treasure and herself, her maneuvering, however nervous, however anxious, was supple, tough and inventive: sereno is hardly the word. Well, it was indeed a shrewd stratagem to focus on the manner of her death (rather than on the quality of her life), to fabricate and do homage to a splendid failure: such fabrication and such homage distract us from her real greatness, her real problems, and, of course, from the problems Octavian did not care to see clarified. Let us recall how she ''grasped and endured'' her fortune. In discussing the circumstances of her death, nobody knows what really happened. The notion that Octavian simply had Cleopatra murdered has been emphatically rejected, but it has at least the merit of drawing our attention to the dilemma that confronted Octavian when he finally had Cleopatra in his power. A live Cleopatra represented a very real and very hopeless problem for Octavian.

His problem was to induce her to kill herself in such a way that he could not be blamed. Or, more precisely, in such a way that he could not be blamed for having failed to provide his people with the sight they most wanted to see. Public opinion wanted Cleopatra in the triumph, convention and politics demanded that she be in the triumph,. But how to mollify and gratify a public opinion no less grieved? Take a desperate woman with her back to the wall, invent a melodramatic suicide for her, a bold lady, splendid even (or especially) in ruin, worthy to have marched, certainly, in the most magnificent of triumphal processions, whose vehement refusal to participate in that procession magnifies it, of course, as her presence in it (even if it were otherwise acceptable) probably would not. Publicize our own wonder at this incredibly great woman so as to magnify her response to our own greater incredible greatness. Need we believe, can we clearly know, that the ode is about what Horace felt about Actium and Cleopatra's death? Is it not also possible that the ode describes what Horace felt about other people' s feeling on these matters? Suppose both moods are not expressions of Horace's own moods but caricatures of moods he happens to distrust? This would not necessarily mean that he despised the moods and opinions of other people; it might mean that he had, as poets often have, an unusual insight into the velleities, inaccuracy and terrible power of human moods and human opinions . It seerns to me rather unlikely that poets whose minds and hearts were nourished in large measure on the greatness of Alexandria would easily have lent credence to the notion that Alexandria's queen was a barbarian, that a woman who had schemed so brilliantly was, or was nothing more than, a wine-swiller. Nor, however little they may have known of state secrets, however uncertain they may have been in the swirl of rumors after Actium, would these poets necessarily have been persuaded by the pious tableau which was staged to account both for Cleopatra's death and Octavian's complex but most honorable response to that death. . I suggest, then, this possibility: when Horace came to view the images of Cleopatra which had been designed to pass for the truth about her, he responded by writing an indictment of propaganda; he neither believed nor condoned nor constructed the lies he treated of; he ridiculed and dismissed them.

I.38 - It has been conventional to see the ode, especially because of its terminal position in its book, as programmatic: emphasizing, as Horace does elsewhere, that he is a poet of simple pleasures. Horace does not want pleasure to be ''created'' for him by the labors of another, especially a slave. As son of an ex-slave, the poet had a definite sense of how the work d a slave could distort one's own achievement and one's pleasure in it. He will be responsible for his own pleasures, which will indeed be simple. And our last picture of him is of a man by himself, his slave dismissed or at least stilled, quietly drinking his wine in the shade of an arbor. Like most ancient poems, this one is addressed to someone - a slave. In the context of

this situation the utterance of the poem is strange, since the slave is given no order. Like the reader, the slave stands ready, waiting to hear what he should do if not what his master so compendiously dislikes, The fact that this final statement is cast in a double negative (neque...dedecet) contributes to the draining of authority from the voice of the master. In the context of the poem as address to a slave, we again find ourselves asking ''Is that al1?'' and the answer is '' I (rather than the master) have a right to pleasure.'' The poem seems to imply that pleasure is something simple that is there independently of the fuss and paraphernalia that simply has to be removed in order for it to be revealed. It has been pointed out that, in spite of this stance, the poem is a highly wrought artefact whose lingering over the things that are rejected suggests that it is at least half in love with them.

The poem's problematic of pleasure, simplicity and work in the context of the master-slave relationship - the poem stages the conflict between the idea of pleasure as a simple given that can be indicated by removing the luxuries that smother it, and as something that can only be claimed through a more complex operation in which the poem diverts, transforms and appropriates the work of the slave rather than simply ordering it away. The poem subverts its own claim that pleasure can be simply uncovered and revealed by a rejection of the superfluous; instead, it shows pleasure to be the result of operations performed on the unpleasure from which it must be claimed. In the final two lines of the first stanza, the master tells the slave not to go looking for the late rose, implying that for him true pleasure has nothing to do with the luxury of knowing that one's leisure has cost others a great deal of work.

In 2.3 Horace addresses another politician who made good in the wars up to Actium in 31 B.C., but has since then had no important role in the Augustan Era. Now that he has survived, though, with maybe twenty more years to live, can he make life worthwhile? Dellius stands for the many people of affluence who are regular topics of the Epicureans because they do not know how to live happily and wrongly assume that lavish expense on villas, trips, yachts, and parties will automatically bring them peace of mind. A quiet picnic in the country with a few friends can produce far more pleasure than another new villa on the seashore.

In his second book of Odes, Horace addresses some of the great men who survived the Civil Wars and settled down in various ways to the orderly rule of Augustus. Quintus Dellius, named in line 4, was a successful politician, a man of dubious morality who had survived by deserting one sinking cause after another until he finally made the decisive jump to Octavian before Actium and thus achieved survival and prosperity. Augustus had no important role for him to play, so he wrote his memoirs and had to content himself with his wealth. It might seem odd that Horace should write a poem for such an opportunist, odd, too, that he would encourage so strenuously a man of such affluence to practice Epicurean moderation with his vast estate and wealth. This is the target of Woodman’s trenchant essay: that Horace has let his cliches run away with him and fallen into patent illogicalitv in urging on Dellius the trite theme of carpe diem. According to Woodman, ''Horace has made it plain in lines 2-4 not that Dellius is having fits of depression, but that he in fact enjoys himself too much'' (p. 171). If, then, he is constantly living it up, it is entirely illogical for Horace to encourage him to seize the day and snatch its fleeting pleasures before his inevitable death, in a series of felicitous but fundamentally trite recommendations. I am not so sure that it is clear that Dellius over-enjoys himself, either in Horace's opening address or in actual history. It has never necessarily followed that, because one is rich and survives to retirement, one is guaranteed happiness. Many politicians and millionaire businessmen don't know how to use their wealth to enjoy life: that was the theme of Citizen Kane and of more than one novel. It then may be ironic that rich Dellius needs to be advised to take advantage of his wealth, but it need not be illogical. The commonplaces of carpe diem: are apt for rich as well as poor, old as well as young and potential lover.

The first part of the ode is remarkable for its slowness of progress. Horace continually repeats ideas or themes, and by means of such retrospection very little actual progress of thought is made in the first part of the ode. This is a quite common feature in the odes of Horace. In the second part of the poem (17-28), however, Horace repeats words and thus obtains an effect of speed or urgency. Dellius is in no way aequus, but the one thing he can be relied upon to do is to die; secondly, Dellius had become notorious during the Civil Wars for his extravagant attempts at saving his skin - and the one epithet which Horace in the whole ode addresses to him is moriture. It was one of the counsels of Epicurus that the wise man will love the country. Horace has made it plain in lines 2-4 not that Dellius' trouble is having fits of depression (in which case Horace's invitation would be most timely), but that he in fact enjoys himself too much. It is just possible that Horace is telling Dellius to keep equable in his insolens laetitia but that since he is to die (moriture), he must still enjoy life, though in moderation. Stop worrying about present difficulties, life is short, come and enjoy yourself in the carefree countryside. Dellius is so rich that he has no need to work or worry, no need to laborare. Indeed, he seems to be enjoying himself too much. But when he arrives in the supposedly trouble-free countryside, as Horace recommends, there he will find that even the stream laborat (11f.).The opening appears to be derived from a poem of Archijochus, a poet whom Horace in the Epodes was the first Roman to imitate. In writing his lyric poetry Horace was mainly concerned with following Alcaeus, Sappho, and Anacreon, but on a very few occasions he seems to imitate Archilochus. In line 10, where Horace with appropriate elisions is entwining branches implies the notion of love-making. The use of the words consociare amant is meant to give a hint that Horace seldom omits when his theme is the brevity of life, that love-making as well as drinking should not be neglected. The laboring steam, trembling along in its devious course, suggests the transience of all human effort. The double contrast between the slender poplar white in the wind and the gloom of the heavier pine is indicated, after Horace's manner, by one epithet with each of the pair of substantives. Similarly in the previous stanza Horace echoes remoto with interiore: both mean, in effect, ''the farthest away possible,'' but remoto indicates a place far into the open countryside, interiore the deepest and darkest recess of a wine-ce11ar.

Horace welcomes home in Ode 2.7 a friend, otherwise unknown, by the name of Pompeius. He organizes the seven Alcaic stanzas around favorite Alcaean themes: active war service and the pleasures of wine and companionship in the interludes of battle. The three first stanzas recapitulate shared experiences in the past, epitomized by mecum (1), cum quo (6), and tecum (9). Horace puts forward a perspective on the campaigns of Brutus and the Republicans that should help Pompeius abandon his bitter hostility to Octavian (Augustus). The terms in which Horace reviews the generalship - Brutus was incompetent; Oompeius and Horace suffered ominious defeat and had to flee or plead for their lives. Thus, the sooner Pompeius can celebrate the present and their reunion under optimistic conditions, the sooner he can fit into the new environment of the Augustan world. For Horace has asked a question at the start – who has restored Pompeius? - which gains its answer in the course of the poem. Augustus has brought the two old friends back together, genuinely achieving for them what the flawed leadership of Brutus failed to do.

We might also recall that deduco can mean '' lead astray'' metaphorically. In compounds the prefix de can function analogously to the Greek alpha-privative, implying reversal, negation, or defectiveness.

As a form of words, then, deducte... duce ''could'' mean ''misled under the leadership of Brutus.'' Is this appropriate to the context? Brutus was indeed an incompetent general and was widely so regarded by his contemporaries and later tradition. Modern scholars agree. The Republican decision to fight the first battle of Philippi was a bad strategic error, but it had been urged by Brutus (Plutarch, Brut. 39.8). Brutus was a very good man, Cassius a rather bad one; Cassius was a very good general, Brutus a rather bad one. Horace, a military tribune under Brutus, present at the debacle of Philippi, can not have been unaware of Brutus' shortcomings in battle. Brutus led his men down (deducte). The three external figures in the poem transport their charges in significantly different directions. Brutus was a Stoic, renowned for his virtus; it is a notorious Stoic paradox that virtue is immune to physical assault of all kinds. Thus Horace's wording gains additional point from being itself the paradoxical contradiction of a celebrated Stoic paradox, with direct allusion to Brutus' Stoic virtus. The point is that Brutus' virtus did not come up to expectations - was not in fact true virtus at all (true virtus cannot ''be broken''). Virtus, then, does not here refer to what was in fact virtus, but rather to what was claimed (as it turned out, wrongly) to be virtus. The word virtus thus does duty for both (1) military virtus and (2) the philosophical virtus of Brutus, conceived as a Stoic quality. And both, Horace implies, were defective. Fractus is a very common Latin term for ''unmanly.'' To Roman ears, therefore, fracta virtus would be a striking oxymoron: ''manliness was unmanned.'' ''Unmanning'' is also quite a common notion in political contexts,'' so that fracta virtus may also refer to the political ''emasculation'' of Republicanism at the decisive defeat at Philippi. Indeed, throughout the Odes, Horace himself shows Rome was now under the rule of one man. Biting the dust may refer to ''prostration before and worship'' of the victors by the vanquished. The fracti viri are like orientals, ''unmanned,'' who prostrate themselves before their master. Degrading social or political customs are often described in Latin in terms of ''unmanliness.'' He also sees a certain poetic justice in the fact that arrogant men sued for their lives in so degrading a manner. In the second stanza on the face of it, it simply recalls the drinking sessions Pompeius and Horace enjoyed together in their youth. But it seems to also suggests that Horace and Pompeius were ''soft,'' thus linking with the notion of ''unmanliness'' in v. 11. Horace is suggesting that he and Pompeius were only playing at being soldiers. They are passive participants in events which they cannot control. The friends thought that they were viri (active) but in fact their role was purely passive. Their only real activity was heavy drinking. In this ode Horace is drawing a generic contrast between the Stoic and Epicurean attitudes to political participation. The bogus virtus of the Republicans and the ''Stoic'' Brutus, the inadequacy of which was revealed at Philippi, involved participation in political and military life. Stoics characteristically advocated such participation. The second half of the poem urges Pompeius to forget his misguided past - his soldiering is over and he should instead celebrate with Horace, his friend. It is dulce to do so. Here surely we have a contrast between Stoic virtus and Epicurean pleasure, which necessarily involves disengagement from public life. In philosophical texts the contrast between Stoic ''virtue'' and Epicurean ''pleasure'' is commonplace. The second half of the poem also celebrates friendship for its own sake. No philosophical school attached a higher value to friendship than Epicureanism or interpreted the concept in a warmer way. The two friends are to drink in a garden. Horace is also deftly alluding to the Epicurean hortus which symbolizes retreat from the world of politics and war. Horace is concerned to give his friend some sound practical advice on the political attitude he should now take. Pompeius should not idealize the past. Power now resides with Octavian, the sole ruler to whom the Republican survivors prostrated themselves on the field of Philippi (a correct political analysis). Better to forget, and to find true repose in private life, in the company of an old friend, with whom he had shared both happiness and suffering long ago, and with whom he is now joyously reunited.

The occasion of 2.10 could have been a signal opportunity for political commentary. It addresses Licinius, who is almost surely the elected consul of 23 B.C. who entered a still-obscure plot against Augustus, was quickly executed, and replaced. Licinius had been adopted by a prominent man named Terentius Varro, whose daughter Terentia was the wife of Maecenas. Of all these complex relationships and the purposes and developments of the planned assassination of Augustus, Horace says nothing. But Horace didn't deal with burning political issues, anymore than Licinius listened to counsels of moderation. In refusing opportunities to exploit current events and in muting the warlike achievements of Octavian-Augustus and the importance of military exploits, Horace stands apart from the warm supporters of Augustus and the Augustan program of moral and political reform. He is too much of an Epicurean to want to participate in the toil and anxieties of political activity.

The poem presents two interconnected themes: the golden mean in behavior and the unavoidable but ephemeral nature of hardships through which only the virtuous man can pass safely and with equanimity. Hardship in life is man's testing ground; the tension within man, his dissatisfaction and his insatiable desire to achieve, are at once his claim to glory and potentially the means of his ruin. But it is more than this; in its fundamental metaphor, the voyage at sea in the ship of life, in its use of imagery and its structure, in its tone and texture, in its use of and play on words the ode is a comment on the cycle of life and death in which virtue plays an integral role and is the one insurance of reasonable happiness. Horace through the use of oxymoron, states these themes and ideas in a radical form first in the words 'celsae graviore,' (9), then in 'angustis animosus' (21). The diction of the first strophe, and indeed of the poem as a whole, is particularly striking and complex. The description of the stormy sea and the perils of the ship and its insolent and unwary navigator are vividly presented through the use of onomatopoeia. The alliterative effect of the 'p,' 't,' 'c,' 'v,' 'r,' 's,' 'm,' 'n,' and the assonant 'u' and 'a' found throughout the first three strophes suggest all the sound and fury of the marine and celestial turbulence, the wind, the thunder, the wave, the creaking and groaning of the hull and the mast, the tearing of the sails and later the crashing of tree and tower. The Sapphic strophe for this ode is appropriate to the moralizing tone and content of the poem. Structure is based on the idea of the harmonia discors. It will also show that through the use of the discordant figure oxymoron, Horace has succinctly enunciated the themes and ideas he has presented. Premendo, a confining action, connotes for Horace the act of dying. If premendo suggests death for Horace, then urgendo, clearly its opposlte, connotes expansiveness and life. The voyage at sea, the quest for the mean (virtue) is a life and death struggle, taking a man now nearer one extreme, now nearer the other, and it is expressed uniquely through kinesthetic imagery.

Iniquum focuses upon the hostile or unfriendly situation of the voyage itself. The statement of the first and major theme of the ode 'the golden mean’ is presented in the second strophe. The order of presentation is exactly the opposite of the exempla of the first strophe. Unlike the first strophe where we see the insolent and over-cautious mariners, we observe the extremes from the point of view of the man who is protected (tutus) by his virtue, in particular by his prudence (sobrius). Only Horace uses the term aureus in speaking of the mean. Tecti (7) obsoleti (6) brings out what Horace has in mind, namely that it is a home that is barely a roof to cover a man's head. Sordibus (7) means 'filth' but may also mean 'lowness or meanness of rank' and in its plural form may also mean 'mourning garments.' The suggestion of death has, therefore, been restated. The images are designed to show the punishment of nature itself for hybris. The emphatic position of the three key adjectives ingens (9), summos (11) at the end of their verses and celsae (10) before the caesura makes clear the intent of the strophe. All three words carry us back to the first stanza and the word altum (1); all suggest immoderation and pride. But the most important of all, the juxtaposition of celsae and graviore (10) sums up the theme of the first three strophes by means of the figure oxymoron on the connotative level, recalling all the extremes against which Horace warns. Celsae ' 'high' or 'haughty' and graviore ''heavy,' suggest the same imagery on the connotative level that urgendo (2) and premendo (3) do in the first strophe. Celsae implies the expansiveness of life; graviore the confining oppression of death. The fourth and fifth strophes should be taken together, for only at this point in the poem is there enjambment of strophes. Sperat (13), the initial word of the strophe, sets the keynote for this and the last three strophes. Metuit (13) does not suggest in this context the cowardly fear of the navigator in the first strophe, but a just and reasonable fear that begets temperance and prudence. Horace here warns against foolish overconfidence in favorable times and unreasonable despondency in the midst of misfortune. In this exemplum Jupiter, as Apollo in the next, is an ambivalent figure, for Horace suggests that he is the bringer of death as well as life. Angustis (21) in its context means, 'difficult' or 'adverse' but its literal meaning is 'narrow' or 'confined' and, as we have pointed out, this notion of confinement or restrictiveness connotes death for Horace. On the other hand, animosus (21), while it may in its context here mean 'spirited,' has a more fundamental meaning 'full of life.' Angustis and animosus form a tension with each other on the connotative level. Even in the midst of life we are never far from death.

Postumus of 2.14 is probably a fictional character with a name that Horace has usefully appropriated, to emphasize his theme of time.The question that he asks at the start, ''Who has given you back to Italy as a citizen?'' gets no open answer in the ode. Nevertheless, it is Augustus who, by his general amnesty, has made life in Rome a safe possibility again for Pompeius. Horace thus puts implicit stress on the positive results of the Augustan Peace, which provide the ideal conditions for true Epicurean pleasure, for the realization of carpe diem.

In this poem, Horace produces another memorable variation on his favorite theme of carpe diem. He concentrates almost exclusively on the inevitable death of his addressee, whose no doubt carefully chosen name, Postumus, helps to stress what comes ''next'' for him. The speaker is quite sober, because neither he nor Postumus is enjoying cups at a banquet, but rather focusing on the religious confidence that Postumus is voicing (or even acting out in a sacrifice) that his pietas somehow guarantees his future. We don't control our futures, only some part of the present. The ode, like many superior lyric poems including those of Horace himself, employs an imaginary situation and a speaker who need not be identified as Horace. Although pietas appears regularly in gloomy poems on the unavoidability of death, to emphasize the absolute inflexibility of the natural order, in this poem Horace stresses the point more than strictly necessary. And Postumus' personal situation, as the final two stanzas reveal, obligates him to live a little more reasonably, to concentrate less on pietas and more on the blessings which he already possesses. As part of their direct method, both 2.3 and 2.11 start concretely from the present situation. The speaker makes it clear that he contrasts the future with the present, the only temporal period which Dellius can in any positive way affect. In 2.11 the speaker fuses present and future in a different manner, still concentrating on the imperative of now. To keep Quintius attentive to the transitory aspect of even those advantages which he can be said to control. Thus, 2.11 works explicitly in the present, implicitly in terms of the future's threat. Not one future tense occurs. By contrast, 2.14 elaborates its themes almost exclusively in relation to the future. All this explicit emphasis on the future, a consistent aspect of the poem from first to last stanza, surely suggests less about the speaker than about Postumus. If he will open his eyes to a realistic picture of the future (in sharp contrast to his pious expectations), he may at least acquire an appreciation of the present and accept its implicit imperatives. By avoiding the present tense, though, by retraining from all imperatives, by sketching in the scene only through a seemingly incidental relative clause and a participial clause, the speaker keeps his advice indirect, and the poem becomes one of the most artful of these typically Horatian hortatory odes. The heir serves as a veiled threat in a specific sense: he reminds Postumus of all the wine which he is vainly leaving behind him untasted. The references to the Underworld are not crude; they have been selected carefully. For example, Geryon (8) was chosen probably because his name connotes great herds of cattle. Postumus, who seems to think that huge sacrifices of bulls might save him from death, can well take that gigantic owner of bulls and cows as a pattern. Tityos also was a giant, but his name, juxtaposed to tristi, suggests the pain of death, the perrnanent tristitia which Postumus will be unable to alter. The Danaides and Sisyphus (18-20) emphasize another crucial aspect about the Afterlife to which Postumus is destined: it consists of protracted toil (longi laboris 20). The allusions to Greek literature do not stand out in opposition to the rest of the poem. Thus, the supposed echo of Homer in 10, quicumque terrae munere viscimur, by its very Homeric associations would serve to validate the generalization

such numbers as trecenis 5 and centum 26, the exaggeration serves rhetorically to bring home the unwise, excessive commitments of Postumus. Banquets of pontifices do, however, represent what Postumus regards as important, for the lavish extravagance of such meals belongs to the same kind of superficial pietas as the munificent sacrifices referred to in the second stanza. The comparison, then, serves to remind us of the unwise scale of values cherished by Postumus, for that Caecuban wine, when properly enjoyed, symbolizes a way of life that is indeed better than formal paraphernalia of pietas like Postumus.’ The unwise Postumus as a man who puts all his confidence in formal religious pietas to guarantee his future, but completely fails to grasp the practical wisdom of his ultimate heir who will prefer the wine at hand to all that is symbolized by cenae pontificum, banquets of priests. Pietas, associated with vain sacrifices of bulls and lavish pon- tifical banquets, is heated as pathetically futile, not only to save Postumus from death, but also to gain him any happiness after death. Postumus, the speaker implies, has damned himself by the unwise way he has chosen to live on earth and so will be among the damned, utterly barred from the Elysian Fields and the toi1-relieving songs of an Alcaeus. But perhaps if he reverses his ways, begins to enjoy his immediate blessings, he may attenuate both the tristitia and laborem of this life and that which otherwise surely lies in store for him after death.

Roman Odes – III.1 - Horace begins Book 3 of his Odes with six successive poems in Alcaic stanzas, all serious and focused on Roman political themes; the poem is the collection of unpredictable images and contrasts that Horace composes. Although he seems to talk about a kind of impartial Fate (Necessitas 14) which disposes of high and low, rich and poor, his emphasis falls on the doom of high and rich. Death and fate strike all alike, but contented sleep is a precious gift to few. Our poet is both the priest of the Muses and the man who has achieved moral understanding and satisfaction in the retirement of the Sabine countryside.

Horace's poems, which open up Latin lyric to the wealth of Greek meter and subject, were indeed lyrics but not designed for singing, rather they are lyrical by virtue of their meters, subjects and forms. The term lyric as modernly used is non-generic and descriptive, denoting poetry presenting the artist's image in relationship to himself, fusing concept and image in sound. For the Greeks as for the Romans, the lyric poet, in varying ways and with increasingly complex developments, spoke not only for and to himself, but for all who could hear him and heed him. There was a clear place for the lyricist in Greek literature; one need only think of the political statements of the Aeolian poets reflecting tension between the received oligarchic traditions and newer ideas. The Roman audience for Horace' s three books of Odes, published as a unit in 23 B.C., would have been prepared through awareness of Greek antecedents to understand that lyric poetry addressed to public concerns existed as a recognizable form. The attentive reader of the first two books of odes preceding Book III would have noticed recurring expressions of civic concern as early as the second poem of the first book. His relationship and attitudes in regard to Augustus, who figures so largely in the Roman Odes may be taken as indicative of his complex evolution of ideas about the new Roman state coming into being after a century of civil war. It seems clear that Horace gave Augustus his full support only for a relatively short time, and that the time of publication of Odes I-III, 23 B.C., marked a time when the tide of commitment began to ebb away. Horace's youthful feelings of social and political concern can be seen in his fighting in the army of Brutus and Cassius as a tribune: a commitment referred to with pride several times in his poetry and once in the Roman Odes themselves. Further, Horace's aristocratic rather than democratic bias appears often: e.g., Odes III.1.1 ff. alone show his distrust of the masses. After the wreck of his world at the end of the civil war, Horace buys the post of scriba quaestoris and works in Rome, meeting Octavian's minister of internal affairs, Maecenas, in the early 30's, when Octavian was struggling to end the Roman revolution and reestablish a structured society for Rome. From probably late 38 B.C. on, Horace had Maecenas' support and encouragement as well as a limited access to Octavian. As his success through the 30' s and early 20's grew and order was restored to the Roman state, Horace's gratitude and support for Octavian's program (the success of which resulted in Octavian taking in 27 B.C. the name Augustus) can be seen in the first three books of Odes, including specifically the Roman Odes. Later the ever-present shadows of doubt and pessimism grow deeper; Horace turns increasingly to philosophy, especially Stoicism, and enunciates, principa1ly in his Epistles, growing concern for the tone of contemporary society. The pessimism about the Roman order at the end of the Roman Odes, Ill.6.46-48, and the prominent attack on materialism there and the use of the term libero in III.5.22, show that Horace's aristocratic contact and biases, and his complicated character, increasingly content to assign to Augustus mere conventional flattery unlike his deep and authentic expressions of sincerity in Odes I-III, did not allow him to continue for long to present Augustus and the state's well-being as coterminous. The modern reader is handicapped, in respect to the ancient audience, by not being able to read many Greek lyrics and many works of Roman literature now lost that no doubt had a bearing on Horace's Roman Odes, and helped create a context for reading them. It is the young to whom the poet speaks, those capable of implementing the vision which he mediates. It is up to the audience to choose one of these two roles: to draw near in silence, or to withdraw in silence of another sort altogether. But it is the young, the pliable, those upon whom the performance of sacred text may make its deepest and longest-standing effect, that are addressed in the enclosure of the Roman Odes. The poems with themes previously enunciated and not precisely heeded are here renewed; the poet, charged with the divine, turns his message into art (musarum sacerdos) and selects a special addressee for his messages. The idea of the dependency of all upon God is usually presented from the perspective of the lower looking upward rather than the way Horace manages it here, from above, at a great distance (the after-effects of arceo) looking down on the great collectives of reges and their greges. The principle of undifferentiation may even extend to the mention of the Giants in line seven; for it is usually the Titans, not the Giants, who are named in connection with Jupiter's great power, and to confuse them with the Giants may signal blurring or lack of identification because of disinterest and hence distance, like that associated with odi and arceo, line one. If the reges have their greges, and Jupiter has both in sway, so too the individual has property, station, character, repute, and a following of clients, to greater or lesser degree in comparison with his fellows. As Jove rules rulers and peoples, so Necessitas, in that aspect of her akin to the Fortuna of I.35, and not as death, is in control of high and low alike. Jupiter has become Necessitas, and the divine figure, far from perceiving undifferentiated masses of people, now knows your name: cuncta the neater plural, of line eight becomes omne nomen in line sixteen. This degree of particular awareness on the part of Necessitas is ominous, and may bode ill. Differentiation in degree of status on earth is levelled by the aequa lex of collectivization; the personal individualities represented by est ut vir are flattened by the gnomic quality of the utterance about the equal law. Property, ancestry, character, repute, political following, all the factors by which we distinguish social roles and individuals, for Necessitas all are nomen. The impending terror of lines seventeen through twenty-four is terror of loss, of discovery: sleeplessness, worry, fears that dog the cervix impia do so not because of wealth only, but because they are tied to a particular station in life. In fact it is impossible, in the terms provided by the text, to assign the man who desires what is enough any specific role or station. Clearly Horace has shifted to the problem of attitude, away from the problem of social categories. One has to be aware of the hanging sword, or of the troubles it symbolizes, before being so worried as to be insomniac. It is the striving for elaboration (line nineteen, elaborabunt; cf. moliar, line forty-six), the crossing of natural barriers symbolized by building over and in water that is held up for question. It apparently occasions no surprise that a text prepared for so lavishly and sacrally as III.1 can be reduced to ''Live an unambitious life.'' Yet if one remains shackled to the literal, to the discursive, to the text isolated from its context of other poems in the cycle this is the kind of interpretation that must result. The poet is not engaged in differentiating two selves in the first and last strophes of this poem any more than he is distinguishing between kings that must be feared and despots sure to be envied: both are operations resulting from the perspective of the world from which the poet is seeking to free others, as he himself has been freed by the authenticating vision he proclaims. The aequa lex Necessitas brings all to one end; things can not help the human condition, be it desiderans or dolens; they are much the same, for even if one is desiderans quod satis est, the same awaits. God rules, kings reign, and man is either ill at ease or at home in the world; but the world's things, beyond mere subsistence, are useless in making a difference toman. Much depends on rulers and on heaven; but even with benevolent rule and good weather, the same end awaits. Far from issuing didactic calls to take attitudes or actions, the poet here advances brilliant pictures of the futility of personal drive, personal power, personal possessions. Both Roman examples (strophes 3 and 4 and 7ff) and non-Roman examples (strophes 2 and 5) show the universality of this poet's visionary scope. Next, one may observe how the text passes from vast concerns (eastern kings and their peoples) to the Roman merchant and farmer, thus preparing the way. The rule of Jupiter and the underlying control of Necessitas are transformed into a sword suspended over a neck, and the weather (about which indeed nothing can be done) becomes a local manifestation of Necessitas. The grand and universal continually shade into the particular and the everyday, but of course not presented in everyday language or tone. The personifications of 37ff. do much to elevate the tone.

Far from being a text enjoining contentment with one's lot and discouraging personal ambition, the first Roman Ode is a psychological model of a social state: God's control, capable of being articulated on a grand scale, shades off into the everyday where it is no longer perceived except in social terms: quod satis est, dominus terrae fastidiosus, etc. Yet the outriders of divine permeation of the world's fabric, Timor, Minae, Cura, objectify the interior state of the man who is dolens, in spite of his success, wealth and power, economic and hence social. Odes III.1 may urge young Romans to seek individual happiness, rather than to help build up the new Rome of Augustus. When all levels, social, economic and political, are illusions before the great power of God and the levelling law of Necessitas, one must realize the futility of aspirations that well up from individual or collective man.

Odes 3.9 - In his opening of negotations, he offers to toss Chloe out (19). In the following line, he makes a second suggestion, the sense of which depends on the syntax: is reiectae Lydiae dative or genitive? Many scholars opt for the dative; and so he proposes opening his door to Lydia. Another interpretation, assuming the genitive, would have her opening her door to him, which she shut after he had spurned her. Thus, the man would propose a response from her that would match his giving up Chloe and assure them both of being unattached for a while. It is quite attractive and suggestive of greater equality in the resumed love.

Analogy to regal stance also proves that power, whether active or passive, is much in his thoughts. He savors the exquisite beauty of her neck, yet candidae is the central feature of a chiastic deployment of words which catches this whiteness between bracchia and cervici, potior and iuvenis, even quisquam and dabat. His language displays the erotic force he holds in value. She by contrast lives more for surfaces. In exchanging his beatior for clarior, she chooses bright fame and public acknowledgement over inner riches and personal strength. She finds a likeness for herself not in some anonymous exotic king, devoted no doubt to a life of delicate abundance. Instead she opts for a more immediate Roman Ilia whom all would know. Titles fascinate her. Where we never learn his name, she narcissistically thrusts hers upon us twice, and in the very act calls attention to the nomen that results from her repute. The very sounds which run from alia to Lydia, Lydia, and Ilia feed on each other. Naturally she thinks first of her rival and sees their interconnection as one of rank in the eyes of their common lover. Naturally, too, she exploits arsisti, an image of glittering presence as well as sensuality to describe his emotion. In his reply, which initiates their differing views of the present, he seems not to have heard her. He announces, what we already knew, that Chloe is his new love. True to his fashion he chooses someone of non-Roman extraction, and sees their relationship in terms of power. She now rules him whereas in the earlier liaison there existed mutual interdependence: he was gratus to her and rex as well in his own thinking. More pointedly than before he prizes the life of the mind. Chloe's learning (twice noted) and the artistic form it takes appeal to him. His proclamation of a is couched in terms of not fearing an internal reaction- and, aptly enough, it is her anima his death would save. He values Chloe for her spiritual side, of itself but surely also for the inspiriting effect it exerts on his own mental impulses. Lydia's riposte holds true to form. She is direct where he was oblique. We learn not only her new lover's name but his father's and that of his natal town. Since Calais, apparently, means turquoise, the dazzling object again lures her eye. We are also ready for the double metaphor of burning and the protests of mutuality (no gradations here) with which she introduces her new amour. In capping non metuam with bis patiar she hyperbolically rejects fear imagined in favor of torture felt. And in replacing animae with puero she yet again chooses the physical over the metaphysical, immediate literal sexuality instead of some deeper more intellectual design.

This energetic world of going and coming, expelling and receiving, rejecting and accepting, separation and compulsion, is reflected in the careful, calculated pattern his thoughts receive. He still deals in positions of strength and, as in previous stanzas, wavers between active and passive. We have both a Venus who commands and a lover who opens the door. He is the controller and the controlled, the verbal leader who at times is also the emotional follower. She sees her present suitor as sidere pulchrior, a stable object of attention, physically attractive, tailored to her interests. For her former lover and present interlocutor, she finds two similes, dedicated appropriately to psychic, not physical characteristics: his fickleness (at least in her view) and his changeable temper. It offers animated proof of the infidelity we assume she now forgives.

Horace' s humorous self-distance grants that for each individual, including himself, there is always s a melior Venus, a more appropriate, kindred attachment which could replace one's present antonymy, but such perfection one is rarely allowed to choose, not to say maintain. His language is obsessional, as fits the subjective, solipsistic contemp1ative, hers compulsively directed to externals, reacting not proposing. Over and above them differentials the poet establishes his own principle of orderly disorder as comment on their union. I refer to the striking manner in which she chooses to parallel or fails to mimic his utterances. The first two stanzas, with the repetition of donec and vigui, the reverberation of eram in erat and the corresponding comparatives betrays a certain linguistic conformity, and hence erotic intimacy, which the two parties have disturbed but have not replaced. The third and fourth stanzas, however, are paradoxical. Close reiteration advises that his manner of expression is hers, that an expanding mode of familiarity has been achieved in a fabric of words that still conveys appropriate personality differentiations. To reproduce as closely as she does the architectonics of his stanzaic construction postulates a certain kindred imaginative ordering and spiritual interdependence. Her selfhood is defined most clearly as an expansion of his proclivities. Her attempt at greatest freedom is framed in terms that refer as much to him as to herself.

She voices the only two and seven word lines in the poem - its extremes of brevity and length - and iracundior is its longest word. His last stanza was noteworthy for its regularity. Each line is self-contained. Nowhere else in the poem are balanced meter and balanced sense so tightly merged. She, on the contrary, in the course of indulging in broken chiasmus, strange emphases, patterns worked and unworked at the end, presents one of the two stanzas in the poem with three lines that can not stand alone (her way, perhaps, of pointing up pulchrior and iracundior, the distinction between her two lovers, as well as of proving her excitability). Verbally, then, she manifests aspects of disorder that she finds patent in his character. Where we most expect congruence in language we find variance, just as in the previous pair of stanzas. Close imitation complements the proclamation of extreme erotic distinction. There are no verbal echoes at the moment when greatest intimacy should be espoused. There is most individuality at the instant where reinforced allegiance would be in order. Which is to say that in the complex amalgam of unity and differentiation by which he defines amatory coupling, Horace sees patterns of sexuality constantly challenged by patterns of language. The poem's dialectic is the actual working out of an oxymoron, proving how opposites attract - a favorite Horatian principle.

In the Acme and Septimius of Catullus' forty-fifth poem, love now sneezes endorsement on the right as he had previously demonstrated his approval on the left. Catullus twice confirms as much in his envoi to the two suitors. He begins 19-20 as if to suggest that this dedicated mutuality (which the asyndeton enhances) had not always been the case, that in fact once in the past they had set out with an inauspicious omen. Is this love only more auspicious by comparison to former times? To be more cynical, what if in reality we have seen lovers setting out more happily matched? . Horace devotes equal time to past, present and future, with no illusions about love's permanence. It is a verbal dance of love-making. Lydia equates love with existence, with living and dying together. Better a brazen yoke for the unmatched, Horace appears to say, than no partner at all.

III.13 - Surely the relation between the spring and poetry is more complex than he allows when he states: ''The waters of the spring do not create his poetry; rather his poetry gives new life to nature.'' The effect of this stanza, its pleasure, comes from the conflict between proud boast and humble listening, between speaking for the spring and letting it speak for itself. The final stanza of Horace's ode, then, is not just a claim that the power of his poetry can raise a humble spring to classic status; the spring is a source of inspiration to the poet, as the listening with which the poem ends indicates. Horace's claim is rather to the right to be inspired by nothing more, or less, than the prattling of this insignificant spring; that is the paradox that constitutes the claim to a poetry of pleasure. We should note, though that Horace also claims that the spring truly comes to be heard through his poetry: the enjambment between lines 13 and 14 creates an icon of the structure built out of blocks placed on top of each other, while that between lines 14 and 15 allows the falling of liquid to appear: the structure of the spring is homologous with that of the poetry. If the poem apostrophizes the spring, then the spring must become an object capable of response, the speaking of the poet and the prattling of the spring. By promising to sacrifice a kid, rather than the customary wine and flowers, the speaker unbalances the relation with the spring insofar as he is not content merely to reflect the worthiness of the spring as the spring had reflected his delight at its presence. This unbalancing paves the way for the statement in the final stanza that this ordinary spring (tu quoque, 13) will become one of the nobiles. The condition of its becoming a comforting and relieving other side to a burdened animate life is that it should become complicit in the sacrifice, which in this case means that there is a reciprocity between the spring's metaphorizing of the kid's dead, as a redistribution of liquid energy and the kid's narrativizing of the spring's liquidity. It is the sacrifice that draws the spring into the operation of pleasure, putting at stake the cruel irreversibility of death, smudging it in the pleasurable oscillation between narrative, with its irreversible sequence of discrete blocks, and the fluid energy of metaphor. But the spring, as the other necessary to the dialectic of pleasure, is always either too far or too close: too far inasmuch as the untouchable spring that provides cool to the wandering flock is the indifferent spring that is untouched by the kid's death,

III.30Distancing himself from the Augustan achievement, he will write poetry, not serve the Roman state. Horace claims his poetry as his eternal monument. Augustus had just completed his great funeral monument or mausoleum in the Campus Martius. But in 3.30 Horace ranks himself, like Augustus, princeps (13), a leader who first planted a Greek colony (deduxisse 14) of Greek meters on ltalian soil. As if to suggest by metaphor that he, as poet, is on a par with, or superior to, the ruler of Rome, his former enemy.

He has recounted his miraculous escapes from death threatened by the wolf of I.22 and from the enemy swords at Philippi in II.7; and he will have another escape to recount to us in SatireI.9. He escaped because he was a poet, and the gods wanted to preserve him to introduce poetry. He claims permanent escape from death with images and verbal constructs that are timeless and invulnerable. Horace evades the charge of pride by subtly bidding his Muse herself to take just pride in his work and to crown him with Apollo's laurel. He has ended in prayer.

It is the very last poem in the last book, an epilogue, occupying as important a position as the very first poem in Book I. Now a particularly favorite method of concluding a book of poetry in the ancient world was known as the 'seal' or sphragis (as it is technically called). This would be a number of lines, or perhaps a complete poem, added at the end of a book of poetry and including some personal details of the poet's life or background together with a mention of the poet's name. These same lines, however, have recently been subjected to a rather different interpretation. Epitaphs as found on tombstones conventionally mentioned the place of a person’s origin and details of his career, exactly as we see in lines 10-12; and it has been argued that this ode belongs to the category of epitaph poems, composed (as it were) for Horace's own grave. The two objects with which the monumentum is compared are both memorials to the dead: bronze plaques adorned the tombs of the dead in ltaly, while the pyramids are of course the tombs of the Egyptian kings. It is thus likely that the monumentum is itself a memorial to the dead, especially since we know that one of the commonest meanings of the word is 'tombstone.' By means of a strong and vivid metaphor Horace sees his lyric poetry as the tombstone which will cause him to be remembered by future generations. Moreover, the first two words of the poem, Exegi monumentum, are a striking resemblance to inscriptions commonly found on Roman tombstones, such as hoc monumentum feci or hoc monumentum apsolui. Horace's Odes are his tombstone, and this final ode, the epilogue, is the epitaph inscribed upon them. In visualizing his poetry as his monumentum and the present poem as its inscription he has invented not only a new image but a completely new context for his claim to immortality. Five glorious opening lines describing Horace' s pride in his monumentum, his metaphorical tombstone; this was the exact opposite of Epicurean doctrine, which held that the wise man will be indifferent to statues and will not concern himself with his tomb.

What does situ mean? The noun situs can mean either 'site' or ‘decay.' Here the word is usually taken to mean 'site.' The commentators admit that the usage is unusual, but the expression can be defended on two counts. There would be little point if Horace compared his monumentum to a decayed ruin, and besides he

may have wanted the unusual noun situs = 'site' to stick in our minds and evoke thoughts of the common sepulchral inscription hic situs est. Such a suggestion would be in hamlony with the epitaph form discussed above. Some critics, however, have maintained that situ means 'decay.' Horace would be using the word in a proleptic sense, 'higher than the pyramids which themselves must soon decay; and the adjective regali provides a pleasing oxymoron 'royal decay.' If 'decay' is the right meaning, Horace's lines gain added lustre

The word's meaning changes as our reading of the poem progresses. Now the wearing away of stone by water is an extremely common motif with a long heritage in classical literature, but as far as we can judge, no writer before Horace had used this particular image to illustrate mortality or immortality - water wearing away a stone memorial and 'rusting' a bronze memorial. The reason why Horace's monumentum will not be destroyed by the violence of the wind or the rusting of the rain is that the monumentum is only metaphorical: the monumentum is his poetry, which in literal terms can clearly neither rust nor be blown away. But we must remember that rust and the blowing wind have metaphorical applications too. Catullus and Ovid use the metaphor of 'rust' to describe something which has fallen into disuse, while Tacitus uses it to describe an obsolete style. Horace is perhaps indicating that his verses will never 'rust' in as much as they will be continually read and their style will appear forever fresh. We see this idea repeated later in the poem with the words usque ego postera / crescens laude recens (7-8), where the adverb usque (as some, but not all, of the commentators remark) qualifies recens as well as crescens). Similarly when Horace refers to the wind attempting to destroy the monumentum which is his poetry, he perhaps had in mind the motif of a person's words being scattered on the wind. The motif is extremely common in ancient literature to express the idea of 'speaking in vain' ; but this will not be the fate of Horace's poetry. A tombstone, however durable, carries only the name of its dedicatee. But in Horace's poetry it is the essence of the poet himself which lives on.

The king is called 'poor in water' because Apulia was famous for its poor water-supply: Horace calls the region siticulosa ('thirsty') at Epodes 3.16. But why does Horace stress the aridity of Apulia in this way when he has already pointed out that the territory is blessed by a river. Horace intends to emphasize the

river, to make it stand out: it is a force of nature to be compared with the forces of nature in line 3. There the gnawing water and violent wind were attemptive destroyers of his monumentum, whereas here the violent rush of water in the Aufidus symbolizes the locale where above all Horace and his poetry will be preserved. And we may also like to see in regnavit (12) an echo of regali (2): the lofty royal pyramids will eventually crumble, but Horace will live on. A place which has its own proud royal heritage, preserved in legend and in Horace's own poetry (my reputation will be to have introduced Greek poetry into Italy from my homeland Apulia). Why so much emphasis on the river? We must remember that in the ancient world water was frequently a symbol of literary inspiration: Horace appears to be saying that he took his inspiration from the river which ran through his native territory. King Daunus, despite the regions natural resources, was helpless (11-12): he could not utilize the river and himself remained pauper aquae (a metaphorical way of saying that he lacked poetical inspiration), while his people remained uncultured (agrestium). Horace, on the other hand, was able to draw inspiration from his local river. As a result he is now potens (12) - and here we may see another echo of impotens in line 3. In its immediate context the wind is 'violent' (like the wind in Pindar's ode and like the Aufidus itself); but now it comes to have its other meaning of 'impotent' (as in Odes 2.1.26). Horace has become potens, and the forces of nature are 'powerless' to resist him. What does deduxisse mean? Is it a metaphor from founding colonies, from a victorious general celebrating a triumph, or from the spinning of fine thread? In the last two lines of the poem Horace appears to see himself as a victorious general being crowned by the Muse. The technical term for taking to Rome for a triumph is deducere,

Callimachus had insisted that poetic style should be equivalent to the Latin ‘tenuis.' The style was achieved only through a continual process of perfecting and refinement, and a metaphor which came into fashion with Callimachus' Latin followers to describe this process is deducere = 'spin,' found in Virgil's Eclogues. We cannot exclude the notion of 'spinning' (that is, producing finely wrought work) from our minds. (to the ancients regular meter was an essential feature of poetic craftsmanship. The difficulty of adapting the heavier vocabulary of the Latin language to the lighter metres of Greek lyric poetry must have been a supreme test of sustained effort and poetic competence, and for this one achievement alone Horace could feel justifiably proud at the result. Commentators differ as to whose merita are being referred to, Horace' s or the Muse's, but the whole tone of the poem indicates that these are Horace's merita, nor must we forget that epitaphs commonly referred to the merita of the dead person. Since this poem is Horace's epitaph, there would seem to be no question that these are his merita. If, on this interpretation, we sense that Horace' s attitude is overbearing, he tempers it by offering his newly won pride to the Muse: sume superbiam. The verb contains the notions of 'putting on’ (a crown or cloak, for example) and 'taking for one's own.' The Muse must assume Horace's superbia and make it her own; in return, meanwhile, she must garland Horace's head with a Delphic laurel. The crowning of the poet's head with laurel recalls the procedure of Roman triumphs. He addresses the Muse as volens, a word which belongs to the respectful language of prayer-ritual.

Odes IV.7 - the Nymphs represent the element of nature, while the Graces represent the qualities and activities which bestow beauty and grace on the life of man. All verbs in the depiction of spring denote not a state or condition but movement and change. The cycle has opened and closed not with spring, the season of hope and of life, but with winter, the ''sad and death-portending season.'' The verbs denote persistent movement and change. At this critical juncture, in the very jaws of death, as it were, Horace voices his invitation to life. The fortune hunter (heredis, 19) was at this time becoming a notorious character in Roman society. Pretending to be your friend (amicus), he real1y hoped for your early demise, so that he could inherit your wealth and possessions and enjoy them himself. But you should be your own best friend (amicus), and to allow this to happen, if it could be avoided, would be foolish, even perverse. Indeed, we have only a brief time to heed the advice. With the next statement the poet returns to the theme of death, as if to punctuate the need immediately to act on the advice. Cum semel occideris (21).... When once we have died and Minos, the proverbial judge of the underworld, has passed his final splendida judgments brilliantly clear, in that it consigns us, without ambiguity or chance of appeal or reprieve, to everlasting death. We all should make the best use of our gifts and qualities while we can, for soon they will avail us nothing. The meter with its quickly moving dactyls in alternating lines of hexameters and half-pentameters gives a sense of the quick rhythm of nature, of life and death, and in this rhythm there is not much time for us. He exploits the psychological fact that what is valuable becomes more dear to us, more precious and important, if it becomes threatened and jeopardized. Horace's philosophical conception of friendship with oneself, amicus sibi, as a positive virtue: the notion occurs very seldom in Latin and Greek literature, and that Horace apparently derived it from Aristotle, who argued for it on philosophical grounds against Plato who condemned it