The Odes of Horace

Book IV

Fourth Asclepliad system 1. An earlier love of Horace, also referred to in Ode IV.13 and Epistles I.7 and 14. 2. Paullus Fabius Maximus, consul in 11 BCE, was a close friend of Augustus. 3. The Alban Lake and Lake Nemi, about twelve miles southeast of Rome. IV.1 Once more do you rouse wars long discontinued, Venus? Spare, spare me, I pray. I am not what I was when kindly Cínara1 held sway. Cruel mother of desires sweet, have done with bending one who, reaching fifty years, now is hardened to your soft commands; go o= to where youths’ coaxing prayers call you back. More seasonably you on wings of purple swans will pass with revels to the house of Paullus Maximus,2 if you intend to scorch a fitting heart. For he both wellborn and fair favored, eloquent for those accused and troubled, young man of a hundred skills, will bear your standards widely on campaign, and when he’s laughed victorious against a lavish rival’s presents, near the Alban lakes3 he’ll raise for you a marble statue under citron beams. There you’ll inhale abundant incense and will be delighted by the lyre BOOK IV 144 THE ODES OF HORACE 4. The Berecyntes were a Phrygian tribe, so the adjective is a poetic way of saying “Phrygian.” These flutes were originally associated with the goddess Cybele, who originated in Asia Minor. 5. The priests of Mars, the Salii, dressed in armor, and each carried a figure-eight shield called an ancile. Their name derived from their leaping ritual dance (from the verb salio, “to leap”). 6. The name means Ligurian, a member of a Celtic tribe in northern Italy—a slave or freedman’s name. 7. Campus Martius in Latin, the Tiber flood plain on the northwest side of Rome, which, during the republic, was used as an exercise ground, meeting area, and voting place but gradually was built up, especially during the empire. and the Berecýnthic flute4 in songs that also blend the shepherd’s pipe. There twice a day young men with tender maidens praising your divinity will shake the earth three times with bare feet flashing like the leaping Salii.5 A woman or a boy or hope of love that is returned is not my pleasure now nor drinking contests nor to bind my temples with fresh blooms. But why, ah Ligurínus,6 why do scattered tears slip down along my checks? Why in mid-sentence does my fertile tongue fall to unseemly speechlessness? In dreams at night I hold you now within my arms, now follow you fleet-footed through the grasses of the Field of Mars,7 through waters, moving on, hard lad. BOOK IV 145 Sapphic stanza 1. Jullus Antonius, son of Mark Antony, was author of a poem on the epic hero Diomedes. 2. The ingenious craftsman and inventor Daedalus, accompanied by his son Icarus, escaped imprisonment in Crete by creating wings fastened with wax, but when Icarus passed too near the sun, the wax binding his wings melted, and he fell to his death in a part of the Aegean which then came to be called the Sea of Icarus. 3. In this and the next three stanzas, Horace summarized the various types of poetry that brought fame to the great choral poet Pindar of Thebes (518–after 446 BCE): the metrically bold dithyrambs dedicated to Dionysus, paeans to Apollo and hymns celebrating other gods, victory songs for athletes successful in the great games of Greece (which alone have survived complete), and dirges for the dead. 4. The monster with the head of a lion, body of a goat, and tail of a snake was slain by Bellerophon riding the winged horse Pegasus. IV.2 Anyone who tries to rival Pindar, Jullus,1 counts on wings wax-fastened through the skill of Daédalus—to o=er to the glitt’ring sea his name.2 Like a river running down a mountain, which the rains have swelled beyond its known banks, Pindar seethes and rushes on immense in depth of expression, worthy of the laurel of Apollo,3 whether in audacious dithyrambs he pours forth new words and is borne along in verse free in meter, or he sings of gods or kings born of the blood of gods, by whom the Centaurs justly were laid low, by whom...