Odes

Book IV

Book IV 155 1 Not another engagement, Venus! After so long an armistice? I beg you! I ask you to show me mercy. I am not the man I was back in Cinara’s sweet reign. You are the cruel mother of our desires, but I have done good service for fifty years. I am no green recruit and can scarcely hear the orders you issue to younger men who welcome them and are eager to do battle. Do you want a new heart to inflame? Go to Paullus Maximus’ house, gliding down through the air with your team of swans. He’s noble, young, good-looking, all you could ask for in a most eloquent advocate, fit to carry your proud banner and plant it wherever you may direct. His rivals can spend more money than he, but he will be the victor in these rough scrums. He’ll laugh as he sets your marble statue up in a shrine with a roof of fragrant citron branches at his Alban lake villa. There, you will breathe incensed air and listen to pleasant strains of syrinx and lyre 156 Book IV and Berecynthian oboe. Youngsters, acknowledging your divinity, will dance in triple time in the Frankish style. But as for me, I’m afraid no willing woman or pretty boy can attract my interest, nor even a congenial wit and spirit after a long, bibulous evening. No one will deck my wrinkled brow with garlands of leaves and pretty fragrant flowers. And yet, dear Ligurinus, why does a tear well from my lid and slide down my cheek as I write these lines? Why do words fail me so that I fall suddenly silent? In my dreams sometimes I hold you close or chase you along the grass of the Campo to watch you jump into the cold river. Ihave not had any important decisions to make in this one. Its simplicity and the turn at the end remind me of Cavafy. The only crux was in the last line, in which dure (hard) is grammatically attached to Ligurinus but is juxtaposed with aquas (water), so there is a suggestion that both of them are hardhearted . Inasmuch as rivers are an obvious metaphor for time, both modifications are reasonable; perhaps one could say that one slides into the other. The best I could come up with was to make the river cold, which would also cool down Ligurinus. 2 It’s a dangerous enterprise to compete with Pindar. You rise up on wings that Daedalus waxed and the chances are that disaster will undo you and you’ll soon splash down 157 Book IV into the glassy sea. I tell you, Iullus, think of a mountain stream, swollen by snowmelt, a turbulent cataract roaring along. That’s Pindar in his dazzling dithyrambs, carried along by the meter’s swing and singing of gods, heroes and kings, the death of Centaurs, the flame of the dreaded Chimaera and how it was quenched, or of chariot races and boxers at the games who brought the palms of victory home from Elis—the equals of gods. Or he can sing his dirges for young bridegrooms, hurried to Orcus and leaving behind them widows, weeping and mourning the loss of such strength of body and powers of mind that all men praised them to the skies but now disappeared. A breeze ruffles the feathers of those serene swans at the spring of Dirce where once Pindar sat as he wrote his epinician odes— as if he were there. And when they take flight, it is as if the poet himself were ascending. Do you not see it, Iullus? I am a mere honeybee clumsy and loud as I light to sip from thyme in the woods and riverbanks around me in Tivoli’s lushness and, in my labored making, try to suggest some of his soaring lyrics’ supple grace. 158 Book IV The quill you write with is more ambitious than mine and you can celebrate Caesar’s return to Rome as he marches up the Capitoline Hill with the fierce Sygambri in chains behind him. What have the fates or the gods given to us in the world better than him? Even if you imagine a golden age somehow returning, how could they exceed such a gift? That is surely your subject—these days of joy in the Forum and public...