BOOK I-ODE I.

DEDICATORY ODE TO MÆCENAS,

It is doubtful whether this ode was composed as a dedicatory preface to the first three books, or only to Book 1.: the former supposition is more generally favoured. The poet condenses a rapid survey of the various objects of desire and ambition, commencing with the competition of the Olympic games, and passing from that reference to the Greeks, to the pursuits of his own countrymen in the emulation for power, the acquisition of riches, and so on, through the occupations and tastes of mankind in that busy world from which, at the close, he intimates that he himself is set apart.

The punctuation and construction of the fifth and sixth lines of the ode have been a matter of much dispute. Macleane, sanctioned by Mr. George Long--and Munro, supported by the emphatic advocacy of Dr. Kennedy' adopt the reading which puts an end to the sentence at 'nobilis,' and joins on 'Terrarum dominos evehit ad Deos' to what follows. By this reading, the lords of earth, or masters of the world, are neither (according to Orelli and most modern commentators) taken in apposition with 'Deos,' as in Ovid, Ep. ex Ponto, i. 9, 35, sq.—

'Nam tua non alio coluit penetralia ritu

Terrarum dominos quam colis ipse Deos ;'

nor, according to elder commentators, approved by Ritter, is the term applied to regal or lordly competitors in the Greek games, such as Gelo, Hiero, &c. Terrarum dominos '

Macleane understands to signify, with a tinge of irony, the Romans, styled by Virgil, Æn. i. 282, and Martial, xiv. 123, 'Romanos rerum dominos.' Fortified in my own judgment by authorities of such eminence, I accept this interpretation. From these lords of earth Horace immediately passes on to select representatives of the two great orders of proprietorsthe senatorial and the equestrian: a member of the first placing his happiness in the pursuit of the highest honours; a member of the second, which comprised in its ranks the chiefs of commercial enterprise, in the success of gigantic speculations.

According to the usual punctuation,' says Munro, ' verses 7-10 appear to me to have no construction at all; with mine, all is plain. In ancient Rome, too, as

Sprung from a race which mounts to kings, Mæcenas,
Shield and sweet ornament of life to me;

There are whose sovereign joy is dust Olympic
Gathered in whirlwind' by the car; the goal

Shunned by hot wheels; and the palm's noble trophy.--
Up to the gods it bears the lords of earth,
One-if the mob of Rome's electors fickle
Through triple honours to exalt him vie ;
One-if he harvest, stored in his own garner,
Whate'er from Libyan threshing-floors is fanned.
Treasures Attalic2 could not tempt the rustic,
Delving with ready hoe paternal glebes,
To cut, poor timorous mariner, a furrow
On seas Myrtoan with the Cyprian keel.

in

1 'Collegisse juvat.' To have gathered together or collected the scattered atoms of dust into a whirlwind-' pulvis collectus turbine,' Sat. I. iv. 31.

A proverbial phrase for great riches. The rustic here meant is the small peasant proprietor, like those cultivators by spade-labour now so common in France. The 'sarculum' was a lighter tool than a spade

in modern England, high office and vast wealth, more than aught else, raised men to the sky.'-MUNRO, Introduction, xxv. For the three odes in this measure I have employed in translation a metre consisting of our ordinary form of blank verse converted into a couplet by alternate terminations in a dissyllable and monosyllable; and though that is a very simple, and may seem at first a very slight, modification of a familiar rhythm, it will be found to constitute, in the regular recurrence of alternated terminals, a marked difference from the chime of our epic line, and is yet equally in unison with the laws of our prosody. I have adopted the same metre in my version of the more important epodes, and in a few of the other odes.

CARM. I.

Mæcenas atavis edite regibus,

O et præsidium et dulce decus meum,
Sunt quos curriculo pulverem Olympicum
Collegisse juvat,' metaque fervidis
Evitata rotis, palmaque nobilis.
Terrarum dominos evehit ad Deos,
Hunc, si mobilium turba Quiritium
Certat tergeminis tollere honoribus;
Illum, si proprio condidit horreo
Quidquid de Libycis verritur areis.
Gaudentem patrios findere sarculo
Agros, Attalicis? condicionibus
Nunquam dimoveas, ut trabe Cypria

Myrtoum pavidus nauta secet mare.

or mattock (with which Forcellini observes that Horace here confounds it by synecdoche), and was used as a hoe for digging up weeds. The author of the article on 'Agriculture' in Smith's 'Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities' says that it was an implement by which, after covering up the seed, the husbandman loosened the roots of the young blades in order that air and moisture might gain free access.'

Seized by dismay, when with Icarian billows
Wrestle the blasts of stormy Africus,

The merchant sighs for ease and modest homestead
Nestled in fields beside his native town;

Schooled not to bear the pinch of straitened fortunes,1
Soon he refits his shattered argosies.

Lo, one who scorns not beakers of old Massic,

Nor lazy hours cut from the solid day,

Now with limbs stretched beneath the verdant arbute,
Now by soft well-head of nymph-hallowed streams.
Camps delight many; clarion shrill, deep trumpet
Commingling stormy melodies; and war,
Hateful to mothers. His young bride forgetting,
In wintry air the hunter stands at watch,
If start the deer in sight of his stanch beagles,
Or burst through close-knit toils the Marsian boar.
Me, prize of learned brows, the wreathen ivy,

Associates with the gods; me woodlands cool
And the light dance of nymphs with choral satyrs,
Set from the many and their world apart;
If with no checked and hesitating utterance
Euterpe lend her breath unto her flutes;
And for my touch the harp-strings heard in Lesbos
If Polyhymnia scorn not to retune.
But amid lyric bards if thou enrol me,

With crest uplifted I shall strike the stars.

'Indocilis pauperiem pati.' 'Pauperies' does not here mean what is commonly understood by poverty, but, as Macleane expresses it, 'a humble estate.' Macleane, indeed, states that "pauperies," "paupertas," "pauper," are never by Horace taken to signify privation, or anything beyond a humble estate.' This assertion is, however, too sweeping. In the lines (Epod. xvii. 47, 48),

'Neque in sepulcris pauperum prudens anus
Novendiales dissipare pulveres,'

'pauper' clearly means a person of the very poorest class. May not

Luctantem Icariis fluctibus Africum
Mercator metuens, otium et oppidi
Laudat rura sui; mox reficit rates
Quassas, indocilis pauperiem pati.1
Est qui nec veteris pocula Massici,
Nec partem solido demere de die
Spernit, nunc viridi membra sub arbuto
Stratus, nunc ad aquæ lene caput sacræ.
Multos castra juvant, et lituo tubæ
Permixtus sonitus, bellaque matribus
Detestata. Manet sub Jove frigido
Venator, teneræ conjugis immemor,
Seu visa est catulis cerva fidelibus,
Seu rupit teretes Marsus aper plagas.
Me doctarum hederæ præmia frontium
Dis miscent superis; me gelidum nemus
Nympharumque leves cum Satyris chori
Secernunt populo, si neque tibias
Euterpe cohibet, nec Polyhymnia
Lesboum refugit tendere barbiton.
Quod si me lyricis vatibus inseres,
Sublimi feriam sidera vertice.

the same be said of Pauperum tabernas' in contradistinction to • Regum turres'? Lib. I. Od. iv. 13, 14. The words' pauper,' 'pauperies,'' paupertas,' have, indeed, some of the elastic sense of our own Poor Man, or Poverty, which may imply only comparatively restricted means, or sometimes absolute want. The English language has expressions denoting the gradations of stinted circumstances correspondent to those in the Latin. The English has poverty, penury, destitution: the Latin, paupertas, inopia, egestas. So also the Greek language has revía, honourable poverty; Twуela, discreditable poverty; bea, destitution.