When Horace has addressed Maecenas before in the odes there has been warmth but distance: the grateful respect and subordination of a (comparatively) poor artist for a patron who is rich, and one of the most powerful public figures of his age. This poem is fundamentally different. The first line brings us up short with what could have been dialogue between an old married couple, and the distance between the two men vanishes, to be replaced by a moving picture of ardent and intimate friendship. No wonder that the ancient “Life” of Horace tells us that Maecenas, at his death, left a request to Augustus to be no less mindful of Horace than he would have been of Maecenas himself. The references to Saturn and applause in the theatre relate to Maecenas’s recovery from an illness from which he had seemed likely to die; Horace’s close shave with the tree is the subject of Ode 2.13, which is also on Pantheon Poets.
See the illustrated blog post here.
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