When it comes to love, Horace always keeps a certain distance – he doesn’t go all in like Catullus on Lesbia or Propertius on Cynthia – and he usually has a lesson to draw alongside any pleasure that he takes. This little poem is a prime example. The girls’ names are Greek and probably generic; the Calabrian touch at the end is all of a piece with Horace’s project of naturalising Greek poetic forms in Roman culture.
There is an attractive tradition that the Albius to whom the poem is addressed was the poet Tibullus, but modern scholarship finds the evidence for this skimpy.
The metre is second Asclepiad.
See the illustrated blog post here.
To listen, press play: