In a reference which few modern readers would recognise without the help of a learned commentary, the mathematician and sage, Pythagoras, makes an appearance in an ode which Horace, unusually, puts in the mouth of someone else, a drowned sailor who reflects on the inevitability of death while appealing to a passing mariner for the burial rites which would allow him to cross the river Styx into the underworld. Pythagoreans believed in reincarnation, and Horace refers very obliquely to an anecdote in which Pythagoras was supposed to have recognised in Hera’s temple in Argos a shield which belonged to him in a previous life as Euphorbus, a fighter in the Trojan war.
In a fresco from the tomb of Eurydice 1, Queen of Macedon, Persephone, Queen of the underworld, rides with Hades in his chariot.
Hear this unconventional and mysterious poem in Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
