As in the opening poem in Horace’s second book of Odes, a theme here is the unsuitability of lyric poetry as a medium for epic themes of war and high politics. In that poem Horace was disingenuous, because it demonstrated that he could in fact handle precisely those themes with great virtuosity: here the stress is more on the descriptions of love, beauty and desire in the second half, all standard lyric territory, where the proper names are all places and people famous for their wealth. He takes the opportunity to fit in compliments to his great patron, Maecenas, and the future Emperor Augustus, along the way.
The Victorian commentator T E Page, pointing out that the two names scan identically, thought that Licymnia was really Maecenas’s wife, Terentia, but it is hard to imagine one of the grandest of Roman grandes dames behaving in the way that Horace describes.
Metre: Asclepiad.
See the illustrated blog post here.
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