The charm of this little masterpiece is hard to convey in translation – as ever with Horace’s odes, it depends largely on the dance of the metre, which can’t be paralleled in English. The form that it takes, an invocation to a deity (Piplis is one of the haunts of the muses), is also less familiar and natural in the modern, than it was in the ancient, world. The piece expresses Horace’s pride in his standing as a stylistic innovator – the “new strains” in the last stanza – while acknowledging his debt to the poet Alcaeus, the originator, five centuries before, of the metre that Horace is using here in a new Roman form. The poem and the garland for which he asks are one and the same, and he is celebrating both the divine inspiration of the muses and his own poetic skill.
See the illustrated blog post here.
To listen, press play: