While the theme – moral rearmament as the key to preventing the recommencement of civil war – is familiar from many other odes, this one is unusual. The message is direct and unvarnished. There are no gods, no myths, no addressee, no Muses or reflections on poetical art to soften or distract from it. The unnamed “you” whom Horace speaks to is a generic Roman who either commits the faults that the poem describes, or stands by while others do. The unnamed man at the middle of the poem who can put a bridle on excess is clearly Augustus, who tried, with limited success early in his reign, to legislate for a return to more traditional and austere social and moral values. The poem, coming as what Horace intended to be his final book of odes draws towards its end, could not be more emphatic or nakedly political.
How closely the standards proposed may have been reflected in Horace’s own life is an interesting question. He was unmarried, but writes like a man with a sex-life, though none of the poems which have love-making in them can be taken to be crudely autobiographical. In the poetry, which of course cannot be taken literally, many of his potential partners appear to be professionals, and none is clearly married to someone else. The ancient “Life of Horace” paints him as a highly-sexed person, giving such details as a bedroom with mirrored walls, on what authority we do not know. How the unmarried Horace, and others in a similar position, managed that side of life in a society built on slavery is not the most comfortable subject for speculation.
Metre: (second) Asclepiad, couplets in which a standard twelve-syllable line is preceded by an eight-syllable glyconic.
See the illustrated blog post here.
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