In this ode, addressed to Augustus’s greatest military commander, my namesake Marcus Agrippa, Horace excuses himself from writing about Agrippa’s and the emperor’s wars and victories. They are subjects for epic poetry, and Varius is the poet for that: Horace just writes frivolous lyrics about love and parties.
But hang on a minute – four of the five stanzas in this little poem turn out to be about precisely those epic themes that Horace says he is not up to. He finds neat Latin ways to quote “the wrath of Achilles” and the “Odysseus the deceiver” from the openings of the Iliad and the Odyssey. He doffs his hat, not only to famous motifs and incidents like these, and Diomedes managing to wound gods in battle in Iliad Book 5, but also to a much less well-known character from Homer, the Cretan warrior Meriones. He is far from a major character in the Iliad, but he keeps cropping up – volunteering for a dangerous mission here, slaying a Trojan there, helping to cope with the aftermath of Patroclus’s death at Hector’s hands, making a mess of a chariot race in the funeral games but winning the archery contest. In fact, Horace seems to be using Meriones to make it quite clear that he knows a lot more than most about epic, and when he says at the end that he is “no more than usually frivolous,” he has in fact just been showing us that he is not really frivolous at all.
Add the fact that Horace has included gracefully-turned compliments to Varius the poet, Agrippa the general and Augustus himself, and it is clear that this deceptively simple little poem is tightly packed with subtlety, skill and meaning.
The metre is second Asclepiad – three standard, twelve-syllable, asclepiadic lines followed by one eight-syllable (“glyconic”) variant.
See the lllustrated blog post here.
To listen, press play: