Iambics are a poetic metre which, by long Greek and Roman tradition going back at least to the poet Archilochus in the seventh century BCE, was used for personal attacks and lampoons. Horace used them in earlier work, but now he makes it clear that he has moved on. This poem, which is written in much more sophisticated metre, Alcaics, itself belongs to a poetic genre which stems from early Greek lyric: the palinode, or recantation. The beauty to whom the poem is addressed, and her beautiful mother, seem likely to have been a real mother and daughter whom Horace wanted to compliment – why invent such a detail – but their identity is obscure.
The mood of the poem is calm and conciliatory, renouncing the anger and hostility with which iambic poetry was associated, although it consists of a dense web of references to violence and excess from nature, religion and myth. This juxtaposition is probably designed to mirror a central idea from Epicurean philosophy: that the greatest happiness comes from peace of mind generated by a moderate approach to life and the avoidance of fear and pain.
Cybele was a goddess originally from Asia Minor, who is said to have been introduced to Rome as a result of an oracle during the second war against Carthage at the end of the third century BCE. Her worship involved ecstatic ritual, eunuch priests and armed dancers (the Corybants). Noricum, which included much of modern Austria and Slovenia, was famous for fine steel. The lion is a reference to a myth in which Prometheus (“forethought”) and his brother Epimetheus (“afterthought”) were creating the animals. Epimetheus used up all the characteristics available before they got round to humans. Prometheus filled the gap by taking parts of the human make-up from all the other animals, giving humankind a composite character owing something to each of them. Thyestes was the uncle of Agamemnon and Menelaus, mythical Greek hero-kings of the Trojan war. In the darkest and most famous event in Thyestes’s long feud with his brother, Atreus, Atreus murdered Thyestes’s sons and served them to him at a feast. Marking the line of a new city’s walls with the plough was part of foundation ritual, so that driving a plough over a conquered city’s walls is symbolic of its utter annihilation. The image would certainly have called to mind the total destruction of Carthage and the massacre or enslavement of its people by a Roman army at the end of the third Punic war in 146 BCE.
All of these references would have been instantly clear to an educated audience of Horace’s time, and I suspect that not many tears would have been shed for the Carthaginians.
See the illustrated blog post here.
To listen, press play:
