This is an unusual ode: full of references to characters and incidents from Homer’s Iliad, it deals exclusively with mythical themes which mainly belong in epic, a form which Horace usually says is not for him. It is not addressed to someone, as the odes usually are, and there is no clear relevance to contemporary events – another disastrous couple, Mark Antony and Cleopatra, hover somewhere in the background, perhaps, but the correspondences are not particularly close. As usual, there is the possibility that Horace is paying tribute in his new Roman style to Greek poetry that has not survived – one ancient commentator suggests that there is a reference to the poet Bacchylides. There is a lot of scholarly controversy over what the poem “means” in its historic context, but perhaps it would be forgivable simply to take it at face value as an experiment in treating epic material in (for Romans) novel, lyric metre. it certainly works extremely well in those terms.
Metre: (third) Asclepiad, three standard twelve-syllable lines followed by an eight-syllable glyconic.
See the illustrated blog post here.
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