In the fourth and last Book of his Odes, produced, we are told, at Augustus’s bidding a decade after the first three, a now middle-aged Horace is wooing a woman who, he says, will be his last love. Her name, and the name of the young man she would like as a lover, are Greek – Phyllis and Telephus – so the likelihood is that the inspiration for this Ode is literary rather than personal, or that, if Horace does have real people in mind, he has disguised them under Greek aliases. A Phyllis appears several times in the Eclogues of Virgil, to whom the next Ode in Book 4 is dedicated, so Horace may have chosen the name as a compliment to him. A Telephus appears as a lover once or twice in other Odes, never with anything to mark him out as a real person. In myth his name belonged to someone who was wounded by Achilles’s spear, then cured by rust from it, so the implication is that his affections may be changeable.
As often with Horace, a great deal of the artistry and charm of this beautiful poem lies in its intricate word-order and in the play of the metre, which are impossible to mimic convincingly in English. This helps to explain why Horace, though probably the greatest poet on PantheonPoets.com after Homer, is one of the hardest to appreciate in translation alone.
The metre, Sapphics, is distinctly musical, in keeping with the musical references at the end of the poem. References to myth include Phaethon, who unwisely borrowed his father Apollo’s chariot, and was first burnt when he drove too close to the sun, then blasted by Jupiter’s thunderbolt: you can find Ovid’s version of the story here. Pegasus, the winged horse, was tamed by Bellerophon, but threw him when he presumed to try to fly up to the realm of the Gods on Olympus.
This is the only piece in the final book of the Odes in which Horace mentions his friend and patron Maecenas, who by this time was not in such high favour as previously with the Emperor Augustus.
Metre: Sapphic.
See the illustrated blog post here.
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