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.
See the illustrated blog post here.
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