As in Ode 1.5, the speaker has loved and lost. The lover in the earlier poem had moved on: in this one, he is still burning in the fires of jealousy. Horace could hardly have written the piece without knowing how jealousy feels, but the Greek names are as always a clue that he is probably writing more from a literary than a personal viewpoint. There was a legendary warrior called Telephus who was wounded by Achilles’s spear, then later cured by rust from it. By using the name here, Horace may be giving us a witty clue that we are dealing with someone whose passion doesn’t last. We have already met a Lydia in Ode 1.8, distracting another likely young man from athletics and military training.
What the translation calls the “last secret” (“quinta pars”, or “fifth part”) of Venus’s nectar is probably a spiritual element in which Pythagoreans believed in addition to the four physical ones that made up the world: fire, air, earth and water. The speaker’s “heart” is actually his liver, which was regarded as the seat of the emotions.
The language at the end of the poem is so compressed and the word-order so intricate that, like many of Horace’s most memorable passages, it is impossible to translate literally into coherent English.
See the illustrated blog post here.
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