Horace opens his second book of odes with an address to Gaius Asinius Pollio, a political and military heavyweight who held the consulship in 40 BCE and celebrated a triumph in 39 BCE for a successful campaign against a people called the Parthini as Proconsul of Macedonia. He is believed to have held no further military or civil office, but remained a major public figure. He was a patron of Virgil, who praises him in the Eclogues, had a high reputation as a tragic playwright in the Greek tradition, and was a pioneer in organising public recitations of his writings. When this ode was written, he was taking up a work on the history of the civil wars as a continuation of the Histories of the historian Sallust, who had died with them incomplete in 35 BCE. (Neither work survives, bar some fragments of Sallust.) The wars are a subject on which Horace was passionate: his work often expresses a horror for them too vivid not to be sincere, a feeling no doubt shared by many war-weary Romans of the time.
The reference to Africa relates to the battle of Thapsus, a civil-war victory of Julius Caesar in 46 BCE. The closing sentiment of the poem – that the subject under discussion is too exalted for Horace’s lyric pen to cope with – is one that recurs several times in the odes. Often, as here, it is disingenuous, as Horace has just precisely demonstrated that epic themes are well within his range. Simonides of Ceos wrote the epitaph for the 300 Spartans who died fighting the Persians at Thermopylae in 480 BCE: “Stranger, go tell the Spartans that we lie here obedient to their word.”
The metre is Alcaics.
See the illustrated blog post here.
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