Odes 1.18

The pleasures and dangers of wine

Another ode written in tribute to Alcaeus, one of Horace’s most revered Greek models. The advice in the first pair of lines appears in a surviving fragment, though we do not know how many or few other parallels there were. Who Varus, Horace’s first addressee, was is not clear. Catilus was one of the legendary founders of Tibur. In myth, brawls broke out at the wedding of Pirithous, king of the Lapiths, when a Centaur tried to rape Hippodameia, the bride. The various terms in which Horace addresses Bacchus are all cult names of his, Euhius deriving from a cry of ecstasy and Bassareus referring to the fox-skins that the maenads were said to wear. The things that Horace says he will not bring into the light are Bacchic cult-objects, kept when not in use in boxes with vine-leaf wrappings. Thracians were proverbial for hard drinking, and the Sithonians were a Thracian people: goodness knows what exactly they got up to, as Professor Roland Mayer, author of the current Cambridge Edition of Odes 1, observes.

The poem is written in greater Asclepiads, the uncommon longest form of the Asclepiadic line.

See the illustrated blog post here.

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Nullam, Vare, sacra vite prius severis arborem
circa mite solum Tiburis et moenia Catili;
siccis omnia nam dura deus proposuit neque
mordaces aliter diffugiunt sollicitudines.
quis post vina gravem militiam aut pauperiem crepat?
quis non te potius, Bacche pater, teque, decens Venus?
ac ne quis modici transiliat munera Liberi,
Centaurea monet cum Lapithis rixa super mero
debellata, monet Sithoniis non levis Euhius,
cum fas atque nefas exiguo fine libidinum
discernunt avidi. non ego te, candide Bassareu,
invitum quatiam nec variis obsita frondibus
sub divum rapiam. saeva tene cum Berecyntio
cornu tympana, quae subsequitur caecus amor sui
et tollens vacuum plus nimio gloria verticem
arcanique fides prodiga, perlucidior vitro.

Plant no other tree, Varus, about the kindly soil of Tibur and Catilus’s walls, in preference to the sacred vine – the Gods has given abstainers everything that makes life difficult, and only through the vine do gnawing worries dissipate. After wine, who harps on about the hardships of soldiering, or poverty? Who, rather, doesn’t speak of you, Father Bacchus, and you, lovely Venus? The brawl that the Centaurs fought out with the Lapiths when drunk with wine teaches the lesson, though, that no-one should abuse the gifts of Liber, who is moderate, and the Sithonians too are an example, with whom Euhius is so severe when, spurred on by their lust, they draw too fine a line between what is right and what is wrong. I will certainly not rouse you against your will, bright Bassareus, nor will I bring the objects that you keep hidden out from under their wrapping of dappled leaves into the light of day. Keep silent your wild drums and Cybele’s horn – blind self-love follows on them, and the vanity that lifts its empty head far, far too high, and “trust” of the kind, more transparent than glass, that keeps no secrets.

More Poems by Horace

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