At first sight, this is a conventional little piece. A man suddenly finding himself gripped by passions that he thought were dead is a stock theme of both Roman and Greek poetry. The references to Scythians and Parthian warriors imply that the speaker wants to be writing about epic themes and the distractions are preventing him. There is something unusual here, however. If this were a love-poet like Propertius or Tibullus, the point would probably be the woman’s unavailability, a problem that the speaker would be keen to solve. Here, the indications are that she may well be available, but, unusually, the speaker wants to slow things down – though he does not seem to be saying “no”.
The closeness of the association between Venus’s divine actions and Glycera as the human woman in whom they are personified is very striking, especially towards the end of the poem: grammatically, the blood sacrifice in the last line could be read as placating either or both of them, though it is hard for a modern reader to judge whether such ambiguity might be intentional on Horace’s part.
See the illustrated blog post here.
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