GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE

EPODES.

'LIBER EPODON,' 'Liber Vtus qui Epodon inscribitur,' are the titles by which this Book is headed in MSS, and cited by the grammatical and metrical writers of the 4th and 5th centuries, Marius Victorinus, Diomedes, Fortunatianus. The separate poems are called Odac. The word Epode (¿ñwôós) was a recognized metrical term for the shorter verse of a couplet, which is as it were the echo (enadera, 'accinitur') of the longer one, and then σvvekdoxis for the metre or poem (more properly 'carmen epodicum') in which such a sequence occurred'. Elegiac verses are thus admitted as Epodic by Victorinus (p. 2500), but in common use the term was appropriated to the couplet metres of Archilochus and their Horatian imitations. It may be noticed that such metres are not peculiar to the so-called 'Epodes.' Two of the couplets known specially by Archilochus' name occur only in the Odes (1. 4, and 4. 7); the latter is the one example of an 'Epodus' quoted from Horace by Terentianus Maurus.

Horace's own name for these poems is 'Iambi' (Epod. 14. 7, Od. 1. 16. 3 and 24, Epp. 1. 19. 25), a term which implied their character at least as much as their metre (cp. the Greek verb ■ Terent. Maur. (end of first century), p. 2422, Hephaestion (second century), p. 133 (ed. Gaisford). Mar. Vict. pp. 2505, 2618 foll.. Diomedes p. 481, Fortunat. p. 2009. The correlative pogous is applied sometimes to the first line of a couplet, as the Hexameter in Elegiacs, sometimes to the first line only when it is the shorter of the two, as in Od. 2. 18; but Epodus' is used often to cover such couplets as this. Various attempts have been made to find other meanings for the term 'Liber Epodon' as applied to Horace's poems. Scaliger (Poet. 1. 44), ignoring apparently the chronological difficulty, interpreted it to mean 'after Odes. Torrentius made the word a case of inhh, 'liber incantationum,' a general name given to the book from the character of two of its most important poems, Epod. 5 and 17.

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laußife, and scc Arist. Poct. c. 4, 5, cp. Hor. A. P. 79 'Archilochum proprio rabies armavit iambo').

All the indications of date to be discovered in the poems themselves fix them to the first period of his life as an author. Their references to current politics, both positively, as in the allusions to the war with Sextus Pompeius, and negatively, in the vagueness with which they deal with the general situation at home (see on Epod. 7 and 16), belong to the decade be tween the battles of Philippi and Actium. We notice in their style indications which point the same way-occasional harshnesses of construction, a redundancy of epithets, a tendency even in the best poems to poctical commonplace, we may add a grossness of subject and language, which his mature taste would have pruned away. The Epodes stand with the Satires at the opening of Horace's literary life-not unconnected with them in tone, nor in their literary antecedents, nor in their treatment in his hands. The Roman Satirist, he tells us, looked, for all but the poetical form of his composition, to Greek Comedy. In the Epode he has returned to the personal lampoon, the carliest use of poetry for purposes of attack and caricature, and that of which Comedy, according to Aristotle (Poct. 1. c.), was the development. It is in the taste which leads him for models to Lucilius and Archilochus, rather than in any bitterness of special poems, that we may trace probably his own description already referred to (Epp. 2. 2. 51; see Introd. to Books i-iii, § 1) of the personal motives that first drove him to write poetry. In any case it is characteristic of the man that his Satires should mellow and humanize into the Epistles, and that the Epodes should drop so carly their laμßiki idea, and soften and generalize into the Odes. The process in both cases is nearly complete before the name of the composition is changed.

Horace himself speaks (Epod. 14) of the Book as preparing for publication, and as having occupied some space of time in composition. The date of its publication is generally held to be fixed by the relation between Epod. 9 and Od. 1. 37 to the year B.C. 31-30.