We have seen praises of soldierly young men and their martial pursuits elsewhere in Horace: they have already been referenced in various ways, for example, in the second, fifth and sixth odes of the present book. They are typical of the old-fashioned, manly skills and attitudes that the Emperor Augustus wanted to reintroduce to Rome. Hebrus and Neobule are Greek names, and Lipara, from where Hebrus hails, is off Sicily in the historically Greek parts of southern Italy. The Cytherean is Venus and her winged boy is Cupid. Bellerophon was the rider of the mythical winged horse, Pegasus.
The most striking thing about this poem is its metre, known as ionicus a minore, which appears in Latin only here. It features in an earlier Greek poem, of which fragments survive, by Alcaeus, one of Horace’s idols: opinions differ about whether the two poems are likely to have had more than their metre in common, and about whether Horace as poet or the girl Neobule is the speaker in this one. The opening lines feel more like a girl’s lament, while the material about athletic exercises and the hunting scene sound more masculine, so perhaps Horace wants to keep us guessing.
See the illustrated blog post here.
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