Once again, Horace lays claim in an ode to credit for his achievement in poetry. In 17 BCE, the regime of Augustus staged the secular games, a festival celebrated only once in the lifetime of any living person. One of the central features was the performance by a choir of well-born Roman boys and girls of the carmen saeculare, a once-in-a-century song, and the honour of composing it fell to Horace. His use of his own name at the close, the only place at which it appears in the Odes, is the clearest possible indication of his pride. Both the carmen and this ode are in the same, Sapphic, metre and strongly feature the Gods who were the children of Latona, Artemis and Apollo. Here as elsewhere in the Odes, Horace treats Apollo with special devotion and reverence as the source and patron of his poetic gift.
Horace’s chillingly unsympathetic description of the cruel nature of Achilles presumably owes something to the legend that the imperial family nurtured of its Trojan (and divine) origins via Aeneas, son of the Trojan Anchises and the Goddess Venus. Why no mention of Achilles’s invulnerability except for his heel? Because that part of the myth appears first only in the first century CE, after Horace’s time and maybe 1,000 years after the stories which were to become the Iliad began to coalesce in Greek poetic culture.
Like the preceding poem, Ode 4.5, the poem contains stylistic echoes of the Greek poet Pindar and his praise-poems for eminent men, one of a number of genres for which he was famous. Niobe’s fourteen sons and daughters were killed with arrows by Apollo and Artemis as punishment for boasting that she was happier in her children than the Gods’ mother, Latona. As punishment for trying to rape Latona, the giant Tityos was consigned to Hades, where vultures eternally tore his liver.
See the illustrated blog post here.
Reading coming soon.