It is about ten years after Horace signed off his first three books of Odes in Greek lyric metres with a poem declaring that his task was done. Now there is a fourth book, of which this is the first poem. Horace says he is reluctant, and no longer the right age – he would have been fifty a couple of years before this Ode was written – to write this sort of poetry. The elegant set-piece on the praise of Venus and the compliment to Paulus Maximus, a powerful public figure who was Consul in 11 BCE, are framed by an opening and a conclusion which purport to tell us how the ageing Horace now feels about love. The beginning suggests that he would rather it were over and done with, but the ending, with its dream-sequence of longing for a beloved who seems now attainable, now elusive, contradicts this. Whether the poem expresses the middle-aged Horace’s true feelings, or whether it is no more than a characteristically skilled literary fiction, we don’t know, but it is a powerful piece.
See the illustrated blog post with a mosaic of Ganymede from Sousse in North Africa here.
To listen, press play: