Read literally, this ode seems to be encouraging a friend to put a bereavement behind him, but if someone has really died, it seems rather callous here and there. Caius Valgius Rufus, the addressee, was mentioned as a literary figure in various ancient sources including Horace himself (in the earlier Satire 1.10), and the mention of his “mournful strains” suggests that his lost Mystes is someone that he is writing love elegy to or about. This opens up the possibility that Mystes might be real or imaginary or a bit of both, as with Propertius’s Cynthia and Catullus’s Lesbia, and so might or might not in real life have been carried off, either by death or a rival of Valgius’s. The tone of Horace’s piece is more understandable if he is gently joking with Valgius for being too gloomy in his poetry rather than referring to a real-life bereavement, but we can’t be entirely sure. We might have a better idea if we could read Valgius, but virtually none of his work survives.
Nestor and Troilus are legendary characters from the Trojan war; Niphates is a mountain range in modern Kurdistan, and the Gelonians were Scythians from the modern Ukraine. The poem must have been written after January 27 BCE, when the title “Augustus” was conferred on Octavian.
Metre: Alcaics.
See the illustrated blog post here.
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