This, the first in Horace’s third book, is a famous ode which includes several of his most enduring phrases. It is our old friend “carpe diem” again, but with a difference. As usual, inevitable death is in the background, but is not mentioned by name. The focus is more on the troubles that life can bring, even for the rich and ambitious – politicians, merchants, large-scale farmers, developers, rich men wanting to impress with big, flashy houses, even built out over the sea. The more you have, the more you have to worry about, is the message. The solution in this poem is not to eat, drink and be merry, but to be content with a sufficiency of good things – just like Horace and his beloved Sabine farm, a gift from his patron and friend Maecenas.
The beginning is unusually solemn: Horace claims to speak as a priest and a prophet as well as a poet, addressing the young, the future of Rome, with his salutary message, which reflects some of the basic ideas and values of Epicurean philosophy: living (comparatively) simply and avoiding both pain and excess. It is no coincidence that Augustus was conducting a campaign to bring back the simpler and more austere standards of earlier days. The lesson did not stick, as some of the enormous and luxurious buildings of his successors’ times would go to prove.
The “arbusta” that the wine-grower’s labourer plants are the trees which the Romans used to grow their vines onto. The naked sword and the Sicilian feasts are a reference to the story of the sword of Damocles, suspended over his unfortunate head by a single hair. Arcturus and the Kids are constellations that set and rise in late autumn and early winter, when the sailing season is over and only the greediest merchants can be tempted to brave rough seas and stormy weather. Building into the sea was a stock poetic example of excess and presumption. Phrygian stone may have been something used in powdered form as a medicament.
See the illustrated blog post here.
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