Horace’s near miss with a falling tree is a central feature of autobiography in his work. The abuse he piles on it and the man who planted it, and the Hades scene in the latter part of the poem, both are semi-comic, but both also have a serious point to make as well. He took the threat of the tree seriously enough to celebrate the anniversary of his lucky escape every year, while the Hades passage gives him an opportunity to doff his hat to two of his models and heroes, Greek lyric poets of five hundred years before: Sappho, who needs no introduction; and Alcaeus, poet, warrior and deposer of tyrants, and originator of the Alcaic metre that Horace uses in this and many other odes. In between the two episodes, Horace muses on the point, as true now as it was then, that you can be as careful as you like about the dangers implicit in your way of life, but it may be something unforeseen that gets you in the end.
The motif of Hell’s prisoners and their jailers stopped in their eternal tracks by the beauty of song was used by Virgil in his treatment of the Orpheus myth in the fourth book of his Georgics, in a passage which provided a model for Horace here and elsewhere in the Odes, and also, no doubt among others, for his younger contemporary Ovid in the Metamorphoses and, in a moving passage written by the poet under sentence of death, by Boethius in the sixth century.
Metre: Alcaics.
See the illustrated blog post here.
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