Give or take some particularly nice touches in the descriptions of spring in the first third, this Ode at first glance looks like a standard “carpe diem” poem which would have been easier to like had it concentrated slightly more on current pleasures and less on the grim inevitability of death. Why is it here, in prime position very close to the beginning of Horace’s first book of Odes?
The answer lies in the dedicatee, Sestius, a rich (“beatus”) entrepreneur, some of whose interests may be reflected in the poem’s references to activities like shipping and workshops. He was a consul in the year in which Horace’s first three books of Odes are believed to have been “published”, 23 BCE. In his young days, he had soldiered with Brutus against Octavian and Mark Antony in the war that followed Julius Caesar’s assassination. The fact that Octavian, now Augustus, has appointed him to the highest traditional office of State says a great deal for the new Emperor’s magnanimity, and his openness to reconciliation with past opponents. So Horace’s dedication is sending an unspoken, but powerful, message about contemporary politics and Augustus’s regime, and paying an oblique compliment to Augustus himself.
Horace, too, had fought with Brutus against Octavian, so it is not at all unlikely that he and Sestius had known one another for years and were on friendly terms. This would give scope for personal references and humour, not all of which would be obvious to us. The phrase “vitae summa brevis” (life’s short sum), for example, might allude to Sestius’s appointment, as became common under Augustus, being a “suffect” consulship: this meant that he served only a few months, rather than a full year.
Garlanded heads are “shining” because of the Roman practice of anointing with perfumed dressings. The Cyclopes were Vulcan’s workers, labouring in workshops conventionally located under volcanoes to forge thunderbolts for Jupiter. This is a spring activity because Jupiter will need the thunderbolts when the summer storms arrive. Faunus, a countryside God, had a festival in the City on 13 February, which seems a plausible time for signs of spring showing themselves.
The metre is couplets of an Archilochius major followed by an iambic trimeter catalectic. We do not know why Horace chose this very rare form: perhaps he had a Greek model in mind that we do not know about.
See the blog post with a Roman painting of Faunus/Pan here.
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