power of those divinities, the Manes*) and, brooding upon your restless breasts, I will deprive you of repose by terrible visions. And then the mob, from village to village, assaulting you on every side with stones, shall demolish all you filthy hags. Finally, the wolves and Esquilian † vultures shall scatter abroad your unburied limbs. Nor shall this spectacle escape the observation of my parents, who alas! must now survive me. AGAINST CASSIUS SEVERUS. Horace threatens to revenge himself on him for his maledictions. THOU cur, that art a coward against wolves, why do you persecute innocent strangers? why do you not, if you can turn your empty yelpings, hither, and attack me who will bite again? for, like a mastiff, or tawny grayhound, that is a friendly assistant to shepherds, I will drive with erected ears, through the deep snows, every brute that shall go before me. As for you, when you have filled the grove with your tremendous barking, you smell at the foot that is thrown to you. Have a care, have a care; for, very bitter against bad men, I erect my horns, ever ready for assault, like* him that was rejected as a son-in-law by the perfidious Lycambes, or the satiric enemy of Bupalus. What, if any cur attack me with malignant tooth, shall I only blubber like a boy that is incapable of revenging himself? * Manes, the geniuses of the dead, who had a kind of divinity ascribed to them. † The Esquiliæ were the public burying places, and also where the criminals were exposed after execution, and consequently the resort of birds of prey. ODE VII. TO THE ROMAN PEOPLE. WHITHER, whither, impious, are you rushing? or why are the swords drawn that were so lately sheathed? is there then too little of Roman blood spilled upon land and sea? and this, not that the Romans might burn the proud towers of envious Carthage, nor that the Britons, hitherto unassailed, might go down the Sacred Way bound in chains? but that, agreeably to the wishes of the Parthians, this city may fall by its own strength. And yet this barbarous method of fighting never obtained even amongst either wolves or savage lions, unless against a different species. Does blind phrensy, or your superior value, or some crime, hurry you on at this rate? answer me. They are silent; and livid paleness infects their countenances; and their stricken souls are stupified. This is the case: a cruel fatality, and the crime of fratricide have * Lycambes broke his word with the poet Archilochus, with regard to his daughter Neobule; upon which Archilochus composed so severe a satire against him, that both he and his daughter hanged themselves in despair. + Bupalus, a celebrated painter, having ridiculed the person of the poet Hipponax, by a portraiture he made of him, the bard in return wrote a most bitter invective against him. disquieted the Romans from that time, when the blood of the innocent Remus,* to be expiated by his descendants, was spilled upon the earth. ODE VIII. UPON A WANTON OLD WOMAN. Can you, grown rank and old, ask what unnerves my vigour? when your teeth are black, and old. age withers your brow with wrinkles, and your back sinks between your staring hip-bones, like that of an unhealthy cow. But, forsooth! your breast, and your fallen chest, full well resembling a broken-backed horse, provokes me; and a body flabby, and feeble knees supported by swollen legs. May you be happy, and may triumphal statuest adorn your funeral procession, and may no matron appear in public abounding with richer pearls. What follows, because the bookish Stoics sometimes love to indulge on silken pillows? are unlearned constitutions the less robust? or are their limbs less stout? but for you to raise an appetite in a stomach that is nice, it is necessary that you exert every art of language. * He was slain by his brother Romulus for ridiculing his wall, by leaping over it. + There was a privilege, termed the right of images, which permitted the statues of such ancestors of the deceased as had been dignified by public honours to be carried in the funeral procession. ODE IX. TO MÆCENAS. Horace celebrates the successes that preceded the victory at Actium. WHEN, O happy Mæcenas, shall I, overjoyed at Cæsar's being victorious, drink with you under the stately dome (for such is the will of Jupiter) the Cæcuban reserved for festal entertainments, whilst the lyre plays a tune, accompanied with flutes, that in the Doric, these in the Phrygian measure? as lately, when the Neptunian* admiral driven from the sea, and his navy burned, fled, after having menaced those chains to Rome, which, like a friend, he had taken off from perfidious slaves. The Roman soldiery (alas (alas! ye, our posterity, will deny the fact) enslaved to a woman,t carries pallisadoes and arms, and can be subservient to haggard eunuchs, and, amongst the military standards, the sun beholds a vile Egyptian canopy. Indignant at this, the Gauls turned two thousand of their cavalry, proclaiming Cæsar; and the ships of the hostile navy, going off to the left, lie by in port. Hail, thou god of triumph! you that delay the triumphal honours of golden chariots, and untouched heifers. Hail, thou god of triumph! you neither brought back a general equal to Cæsar from the Jugurthine war; nor from the African war, him, whose valour raised him a monument by conquered Carthage. Our * Pompey the Great had been a very successful admiral, which gave young Pompey the hint to style himself the son of Neptune. t Cleopatra. enemy, overthrown both by land and sea, has changed his purple vestments for mourning. And now he either seeks Crete, famous for her hundred cities, ready to sail with the winds unfavourable; or the Syrtes, harassed by the south; or else is driven by the uncertain sea. Bring hither, boy, larger bowls, and the Chian or Lesbian wine; or, what may correct this rising qualm of mine, fill me out the Cæcuban. It is my pleasure to dissipate care and anxiety for Cæsar's danger with delicious wine. ODE X. AGAINST MÆVIUS. Horace wishes that he may suffer shipwreck. THE vessel that carries the loathsome Mævius makes her departure with an unlucky omen. Be mindful, O south wind, that you buffet it about with horrible billows. May the gloomy east, turning up the sea, disperse its cables and broken oars. Let the north arise in as mighty fury as when he rives the quivering oaks on the lofty mountains; nor let a friendly star appear through the black night, in which the baleful Orion sets: nor let him be conveyed in a calmer sea, than was the Grecian band of conquerors, when Pallas turned her rage from burned Troy to the ship of impious Ajax.* O what a sweat is coming upon your sailors, and what a sallow paleness upon you, and that effemi * Ajax Oileus who debauched Cassandra in the temple of Pallas, which raised the indignation of that goddess against him. See Virg. Æn. l. v. 41-48. |