We know that Horace and the poet Virgil were friends: is he the addressee here? Some say, absolutely not, because he died in 19 BCE, some years before Odes 4 came out, and Horace would surely not publish something after a friend’s death that implied that he was a hanger-on and a money-grubber. Others say that it can’t be anyone but the poet, because there are echoes of Virgil’s work, and the tone is to be taken as banter between friends, not snide criticism. For our money, it is most likely a piece written when both poets were younger and making their way – the Virgilian echoes are of the earlier Eclogues and Georgics, not the later Aeneid – included by the older Horace in this collection as a tribute to his dead friend.
The bird reference is to a myth according to which Tereus, a king of Thrace, raped Philomela, sister of his Athenian wife Procne, and cut out her tongue so that she could not denounce him. With Philomela’s help, Procne in revenge killed her own and Tereus’s son, Itys, cooked him and served him to Tereus to eat. Various of the characters were changed into birds: Here Procne, the “bird of sorrow”, is probably a swallow; Philomela (“lover of song”) became the nightingale.
Metre: Asclepiad.
See the illustrated blog post here.
Reading coming soon.