In this, the first poem in his first book of Odes, Horace does two things for the first, but by no means the last, time. First, he compliments his great friend and patron Maecenas, who was one of the Emperor Augustus’s right-hand men. At the other end of the poem, after listing diverse things that matter most to different people, he says what matters most to him: being recognised as the peer in Latin of the great Greek lyric poets of the past. It is his masterly adaptation of those Greek poets’ themes, and of the intricate metres in which they wrote, that marks Horace out as a great innovator, and one of the very greatest Latin writers.
This first Ode is a good illustration of how very different English and Latin are as languages to write poetry in. The translation cannot get near to the economy of the original: in Latin, one of Horace’s lines uses just under five words on average; the translation needs nine. We cannot replicate in English the concision of Horace’s Latin, the much greater flexibility of its word-order, the intricacy and elegance of its wordplay or the musicality and rhythmical quality of its metre. This is why it is worth listening to the original – which would have been composed with performance in mind – and not just relying on a translation, whether literal or literary, to explain what it is “about”.
North Africa provided a large share of Rome’s corn supply, hence the “African” threshing-floors; and Attalus was a King of Pergamon in the second century BCE who was famous for extreme luxury (and who left his kingdom to Rome in his will). Lesbos is mentioned because at least two of the most important Greek lyric poets that Horace took as his models – Alcaeus and Sappho – came from the island. Euterpe and Polyhymnia are Muses.
Metre: (first) Asclepiad, composed entirely of standard twelve-syllable asclepiadic lines.
See the illustrated blog post here.
To listen, press play: