This little Ode in Sapphic metre is the last in Book 1, and it and the first poem bookend this first collection of Odes with references to two garlands. In the first, after compliments to his patron Maecenas, Horace said he hoped to win a poet’s crown; in this one he is enjoying a drink in the shade in unpretentious style, after drawing his first volume successfully to a close. In this poem, the garland is myrtle; in the first it was ivy. There is a lot of argument between commentators about how much underlying significance those species might have had here. One thing that is clear, though, is that Horace has chosen myrtle for its simplicity, a point that he goes out of his way to stress. No wonder that he needs a rest: the preceding poem has been a tremendous tour de force, his magnificent Cleopatra Ode, celebrating Augustus’s victory over her and Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium, so his drink is well-earned. The scorn that Horace shows for eastern luxury may be an oblique reference to that great victory of the West over the East, and there are echoes of two of Horace’s recurring themes: the virtues of a simple life, and the wisdom of enjoying whatever modest pleasures are to hand.
Horace’s “boy” would have been a slave. I have described the sort of chaplet that Horace rejects as “fancy” in the translation because (Professor Roland Mayer tells us), if it was woven on lime-bast, the inner part of the bark, it would have been an elaborate commercial product using premium materials.
See the illustrated blog post here.
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