Now builds her nest the melancholy bird Swains of sleek flocks on the young grass reclined, These, O my Virgil, are the days of thirst; One tiny box of spikenard will draw forth Quick! if such merriments delight thee, come But put aside delays and care of gain, Warned, while yet time, by the dark death-fires; mix 1 'Quod male barbaras Regum est ulta libidines.' Most authorities, Orelli amongst them, take 'male' with 'ulta'viz., that the bird, whether Philomela or Procne, avenged too cruelly (nimis atrociter) the guilt of Tereus. I have translated accordingly, but am by no means sure that male' should not be taken, as Macleane suggests, with 'barbaras '-viz., the too barbarous, or evilly barbarous, lusts of kings. The bird is the eternal reproach to the house of Cecrops, not on account of the severity of her vengeance, but on ac Nidum ponit, Ityn flebiliter gemens, Æternum opprobrium, quod male barbaras Dicunt in tenero gramine pinguium Adduxere sitim tempora, Virgili; Nardi parvus onyx eliciet cadum, Ad quæ si properas gaudia, cum tua Verum pone moras et studium lucri, Dulce est desipere in loco. count of the atrocity of the crimes she avenged. Most commentators of authority agree that the bird here meant is the swallow, not nightingale. Ritter understands by 'flebiliter' the swallow's inarticulate twitter. * Sulpiciis horreis.' The Sulpician wine-vaults were famous, and the scholiast Porphyrion says they were still the great magazines for wine and oil in his day, under the name of the Galban cellars. Ritter considers that Orelli is mistaken in supposing that Horace intimates that he will buy the wine there; and maintains that he refers to his own cask, which had been warehoused in the Sulpician magazine. ODE XIII. TO LYCE, A FADED BEAUTY. No subject of inquiry can be less interesting to a critic of good sense than that on which so many learned disputants have wasted their time-viz., who among the ladies celebrated by Horace were real persons or imaginary; and who are to be admitted into or rejected from the genuine catalogue of his loves? We have absolutely no data to go upon. There is no reason, except that he chooses to apply the same name to both, to suppose that the Lyce over whose ruined charms he now exults was the Lyce of whose cruelty he complains, Lib. III. Od. x.; nay, I believe that most recent scholars are pretty well agreed that the ode last mentioned was an artistic exercise, imitated from the Greek They have heard my prayers, Lyce, the gods; Yet still, setting up for a beauty, serenades. Thou wouldst tipple and frisk with the young; Courting, maudlin, with tremulous chant, O'er the bloom on the cheeks of young Chia, For he roosts not on oaks without sap; He is chilled by the snow of grey tresses, There is an opposition between Lyce's tremulous quaver, 'cantu tremulo,' and Chia's musical skill, doctæ psallere,' which can only, perhaps, be made clear by some slight paraphrase, as is attempted in the last line of the stanza, in translation. serenades. But, so far as mere conjecture from internal evidence may be allowed, the present ode seems to have in it a tone of earnestness which warrants a belief that the Lyce addressed was a real person. In the three concluding stanzas, the bitterness of sarcasm is tinged with a certain melancholy pathos which appears to indicate the memory of a former passion; and the direct reference to Cinara― to whom all interpreters agree in considering Horace was attached (whether or not he celebrates her under names of the same metrical quantity, Lalage, Glycera, &c.)-gives a peculiar air of individual truthfulness to the poem. Be this as it may, the ode is remarkable for its eternal applicability to a type in female character, and is replete with beauties of expression. The image in the last stanza is extremely striking. The simile is so simple that one might fancy it would have occurred to any poet, yet it is so expressed as to be quite original. CARM. XIII. Audivere, Lyce, di mea vota, di Ludisque et bibis impudens, Et cantu tremulo pota Cupidinem Doctæ psallere Chia Pulchris excubat in genis.1 Importunus enim transvolat aridas Quercus, et refugit te, quia luridi Dentes, te quia rugæ Turpant et capitis nives. DD Sparkling gems, and the purples of Cos,1 Rapid Time has interred in our annals, Whither fled is the beauty? alas! Where the bloom? where the movement of grace? Breathing loves, which stole me from myself, Blest successor to Cinara thou, Gracious form,3 for arts pleasing renowned? To be rival in age to the crow, That the young, glowing yet, may behold, 1 Horace speaks of the robes from Cos in Sat. I. ii. line 100, as so transparent that they left nothing to conceal. Tempora, quæ semel Notis condita fastis Inclusit volucris dies.' 'Horace means to say that the days she has seen are all buried, as it were, in the grave of the public annals (as Acron says), and there any one may find them, but she cannot get them back. It is a graphic way of identifying the years, and marking their decease, to point to the record in which each is distinguished by its consuls and its leading events. "Notis" merely expresses the publicity and notoriety of the record by which the lapse of time is marked.'-MACLEANE. 'Notaque et artium Gratarum facies?' ""Facies" does not mean the face alone, but the whole form and presence. "Facies autem totam corporis speciem significat."'-DILLENBURGER. See, too, Orelli's note. |