Odes 1.25

Lydia’s tragedy

This poem about the decline of a woman’s love life comes in Horace’s Odes shortly after a poem about a young woman on the brink of hers, with a poem about bereavement in between. It is on a theme that was a standard in the ancient world: beautiful but unaccommodating women getting their comeuppance as they age and lose their looks. The subtleties are hard for a modern reader to be sure about. Is the speaker in the poem just sneering, or is he the detached observer of a tragic turn of events? The answer turns on the flavour that a few words would have had for a native speaker of the first century BCE, notably “iecur ulcerosum” – “infected liver” or “wounded heart”? I have chosen the gentler option for the translation, but I may be wrong. Modern editors, and still more their Victorian predecessors, find much to criticise in the poem’s ethics. I find it extremely moving, not just for the beauty of its images from nature, but also because it can be read as the sort of unflinching and objective look at the impersonal cruelty of life that Thomas Hardy might have written had he worn the toga, rather than tweeds.

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Parcius iunctas quatiunt fenestras
iactibus crebris iuvenes protervi
nec tibi somnos adimunt amatque
ianua limen,

quae prius multum facilis movebat
cardines. audis minus et minus iam:
“me tuo longas pereunte noctes,
Lydia, dormis?”

invicem moechos anus arrogantis
flebis in solo levis angiportu
Thracio bacchante magis sub inter-
lunia vento,

cum tibi flagrans amor et libido,
quae solet matres furiare equorum,
saeviet circa iecur ulcerosum
non sine questu,

laeta quod pubes hedera virenti
gaudeat pulla magis atque myrto,
aridas frondes hiemis sodali
dedicet Euro.

The rowdy youngsters throw things to rattle your closed shutters less often and less persistently now than they used to.

They leave you to sleep undisturbed, and your door, which used to be so obliging about moving on its hinges, hugs the frame. Less and less now, you hear, “I’m yours and I’m dying, Lydia, how can you sleep the long nights through?”

Soon it will be your turn to weep, old and ignored in an empty alleyway, at the arrogance of lovers, while longing, and the kind of blazing desire that drives mares to madness, rages around your ravaged heart with more fury than a Thracian wind in the dark of the moon.

Prompting you to complain that the gay young fellows prefer their ivy green and their myrtle fresh and dark, and that they consign dried-up leaves to the east wind, winter’s messmate.

More Poems by Horace

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