Per quas Latinum nomen et Italæ
Crevere vires, famaque et imperi
Porrecta majestas ad ortus
Solis ab Hesperio cubili.

Custode rerum Cæsare, non furor
Civilis aut vis exiget otium,

Non ira, quæ procudit enses,
Et miseras inimicat urbes.'

Non, qui profundum Danubium bibunt, Edicta rumpent Julia, non Getæ,

Non Seres, infidive Persæ,

Non Tanain prope flumen orti.

Nosque et profestis lucibus et sacris,
Inter jocosi munera Liberi,

Cum prole matronisque nostris,
Rite deos prius apprecati,

Virtute functos, more patrum, duces, Lydis remixto carmine tibiis,

Trojamque et Anchisen et almæ

Progeniem Veneris canemus.

THE EPODES

INTRODUCTION.

ORELLI, Dillenburger, and Macleane concur in accepting Franke's date for the publication of the book of Epodesviz., A.U.C. 724, when Horace was thirty-five years old. The poems contained in the book appear to have been written between 713 and the date at which they were published; and, no doubt, many of them were known to Horace's friends before publication. It is to these Epodes that Horace refers in the boast, Epist. i. 19-23, that 'He first introduced the Parian iambics, following the numbers and the spirit of Archilochus' (of Paros). Their title of Epode was not given to them (any more than that of Ode was given to the poems classed under that name) by Horace himself. Such designations are the inventions of some long-subsequent grammarian.

These poems are not lyrical in point of form, though they are occasionally so in point of spirit-especially, I think, the 13th Epode. They serve as an intermediate link between Horace's Odes and his earlier Satires.

The first ten Epodes are all in the same metre-alternate trimeter and dimeter iambics; they admit spondees only in the uneven places, and there is but one instance (ii. 35) in which an anapæst is admitted.

In the translation, the metre selected for the more im

portant of these Epodes has been employed in the version of a few of the graver odes-viz., the ordinary form of blank verse converted into a couplet by alternate terminations in a dissyllable and monosyllable.

In the lighter of these first ten Epodes-viz., Ep. vi. x.-I have thought that the variation of a more easy and rapid measure was necessary to represent the lively spirit of the Latin.

EE