We are in a world deriving from ancient Greece, where sexual liaisons between juvenile boys and adult men were acceptable. The poem is one of Horace’s shortest, and, as editors point out, its theme is a common one in Greek epigram. This makes it very possible that Ligurinus is a literary invention rather than a real person in Horace’s life, though he shares the name of the male beloved that the poet has pursued across the Campus Martius in his dreams in the first poem of this fourth book of odes. Ligurinus’s regrets in the last couplet are not straightforward to interpret. He does not seem simply to be missing his beardless good looks, which he mentions in the final line as something separate from what he is now experiencing mentally. Is he saying that he wishes that, when a boy, he had been kinder to hairy adult men, now that he has turned into one himself? Is he trying to adjust to new and unfamiliar adult sexual urges now that puberty is past, as Professor Richard F Thomas suggests in his Cambridge edition? An earlier commentator, T E Page, Victorian that he is, has nothing to say on the subject.
Metre: fifth Asclepiad (all greater Asclepiads).
See the illustrated blog post here.
Reading coming soon.