Although it contains probably Horace’s most quoted line, this is quite a hard poem to follow. The first half is plain enough: as the Emperor Augustus has been advocating, young Romans should toughen up and soldier hard. The women watching the Roman fight from the city walls echo women watching heroes from the walls of Troy in Homer. Parthians had been a prospective enemy since inflicting a military disaster on Rome some years previously.
The focus shifting to Virtue and its independence from electoral opinion looks both like a compliment to Augustus, whose power comes, not from voters, but from his generally unquestioned acceptance as Rome’s first citizen, and like a criticism of the political class who have prevented some of the moral reforms that Augustus championed from being carried through. The passage towards the end about silence and the mystery cult of Ceres/Demeter is hard to interpret with certainty. Silence may be a proxy for doing what you are told (presumably by Augustus) without complaining, there may be reference to topical events that we do not understand, or the form of the poem may follow a lost Greek model – editors point out echoes of Simonides, a lyric poet of the sixth century BCE.
See Wilfred Owen’s first World War poem putting a quite different slant on “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” here.
See the illustrated blog post here.
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