Odes 3.10

Locked out

This is a paraklausithuron – Greek for the lament of a rejected suitor outside a closed door. The lady lives in a grand house and is married (though her husband is unfaithful and is probably away), which implies respectability. On the other hand, she seems to have a reputation as Horace does not seem to be her only suitor, Etruscans like her father were proverbial for loose living, and her name (“she-wolf”) has overtones of prostitution. And why does Horace warn her not to press her obstinacy too far or it will spoil her plans – the meaning of the rather odd image of the crane, which is probably proverbial – and threaten at the end to give up and go home if she persists, as though that might be unwelcome to her? Do they both know that she will let him in in the end, but is putting him through some sort of ritual ordeal first? No doubt deliberately, Horace keeps us guessing about the details of the scenario, while displaying the virtuosity with which he can handle a stock theme.

Metre: Asclepiad.

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Extremum Tanain si biberes, Lyce,
saevo nupta viro, me tamen asperas
porrectum ante foris obicere incolis
plorares Aquilonibus.

audis, quo strepitu ianua, quo nemus
inter pulcra satum tecta remugiat
ventis et positas ut glaciet nives
puro numine Iuppiter?

ingratam Veneri pone superbiam,
ne currente retro funis eat rota:
non te Penelopen difficilem procis
Tyrrhenus genuit parens.

o quamvis neque te munera nec preces
nec tinctus viola pallor amantium
nec vir Pieria paelice saucius
curvat, supplicibus tuis

parcas, nec rigida mollior aesculo
nec Mauris animum mitior anguibus:
non hoc semper erit liminis aut aquae
caelestis patiens latus.

Even if you were someone who drank from the faraway river Don, Lyce, married to a savage husband, still you would weep to expose me, stretched out outside your cruel doors, to the country’s north-east winds. Do you hear, with what a din your door and the grove of trees planted within your fine mansion are groaning in the wind, and how the weather-God in his cloudless pomp is freezing over the lying snow? Put your pride, distasteful to Venus, aside, or the drum of the crane may run free and the cable fly off backwards: your Etruscan parent did not father you to be a Penelope to say “no” to suitors – no, not you! O, although neither gifts, nor prayers, nor the blue-tinged pallor of lovers, nor your husband’s being deeply smitten with his Macedonian concubine will make you bend, spare your suppliants, though your character is no softer than the rigid oak and no gentler than the snakes of Mauretania: this side of mine will not put up for ever with this threshold and the rains from heaven

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