Epicurean philosophy, to which Horace inclines, regards the gods as too remote and indifferent to take a hand in human affairs. Accordingly, he has not been conscientious about their worship, but now he is forced to change his mind by a personal response to an overwhelming natural phenomenon: a thunderclap that feels big enough to shake the Mediterranean world far to east and west, and coming out of a clear sky. Epicureans like himself, he feels, are wrong after all in assuming that gods do not intervene in the world, and should remember that both good and bad fortunes are in their hands, and might at any moment be changed.
Horace does not state these messages in plain terms, but conveys them obliquely by allusion in a poem that reads less like a public utterance than a personal meditation. Professor Mayer points out, in his Cambridge edition, echoes of the (to Horace) modern Epicurean master, Lucretius’s “De Rerum Natura”; and of Hesiod, the ancient Greek poet of the origins of the gods, representing traditional belief. Some critics have argued that Horace’s recantation of the Epicurean world view here should not be taken at face value, considering the frequency with which it is reflected elsewhere in his work. Perhaps they do not make enough allowance for the human capacity to come to different conclusions about the same issue at different times and under different circumstances.
Taenarus is the modern Cape Matapan on the Peloponnese, where an entrance to the nether world was reputed to exist; Atlas was used here as representing the far western limit of the known world.
Metre: Alcaic.
See the illustrated blog post here.
To listen, press play: