The Complete Odes and Epodes

by Horace

  EURUS The east wind.

  EUTERPE The Muse of flute-playing.

  FABRICIUS An eminent man in the early history of Rome.

  FALERNIAN Falernus was a district in Campania. Falernian wine was strong and highly prized.

  FATES There were three Fates. The first assigned each person’s destiny; the second span the thread of his life; the third cut it at his death.

  FAUNUS The Italian shepherd-god; identified with Pan.

  FORENTUM A town in Apulia.

  FORMIAE A town in Latium (the region about Rome). It gave its name to a highly regarded wine.

  FURIES Supernatural, vengeful females who harried the guilty.

  GADES Cadiz.

  GAETULIA A North African territory adjoining Numidia.

  GALAESUS A river near Tarentum, the Spartan colony on the ‘heel’ of Italy.

  GANYMEDE A beautiful boy carried off by an eagle to be Zeus’ (Jupiter’s) cupbearer and catamite.

  GARGANUS (Monte Gargano) A mountain ridge in Apulia.

  GELONI A nomadic Scythian tribe.

  GENITALIS ‘Bringer of birth’. Mentioned in the Centennial Hymn; the title is not found elsewhere.

  GETAE A Thracian tribe.

  GIANTS Sons of Heaven and Earth (Uranus and Ge). They rebelled against Zeus (Jupiter), but were defeated and buried beneath mountains and volcanoes. Often identified or confused with the Titans.

  GRATIA One of the three Graces.

  GROSPHUS Pompeius Grosphus, mentioned as an honest friend in Epistles I.12.22, and known to be a Sicilian.

  GYAS A Giant.

  HAEDUS ‘The kid’: a constellation rising in October.

  HANNIBAL The brilliant Carthaginian commander who brought his army (with elephants) over the Alps in 221 B.C., advanced through northern Italy and nearly captured Rome itself. He then campaigned in Italy for sixteen years.

  HASDRUBAL Younger brother of Hannibal. Defeated by C. Claudius Nero at the Italian river Metaurus in 207 B.C.

  HEBRUS (a) A Thracian river. (b) Neobule’s (unknown) lover in III.12.

  HECTOR Eldest son of Priam king of Troy. Trojan hero of Homer’s Iliad.

  HELEN Wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta. Her abduction by Paris, son of Priam (king of Troy) was the proximate cause of the Trojan war. Her father was Zeus (Jupiter) in the form of a swan, her mother Leda. Like her brothers Castor and Pollux, she was hatched from an egg.

  HELICON A mountain in Boeotia, sacred to the Muses.

  HERCULES One of the greatest mythological heroes, famous for his Twelve Labours.

  HESPER The evening star.

  HESPERIA Italy. (Hesperian: western, Italian.)

  HIPPOLYTE See Peleus.

  HIPPOLYTUS Son of Theseus, king of Athens. He was fanatically celibate and worshipped only Artemis (Diana). Phaedra, his stepmother, who desired him, in her fury contrived his violent death.

  HYADES A constellation of seven stars.

  HYDASPES A tributary of the Indus.

  HYDRA A many-headed monster. Its destruction was the second of Hercules’ Twelve Labours. His difficulty was that as one head was cut off, two others grew.

  HYLAEUS A Centaur.

  HYMETTUS A mountain in Attica, famous to this day for its honey.

  HYPERBOREAN ‘Beyond the north’; this adjective denotes an imaginary region conceived of as an earthly paradise.

  IAPIX A west wind.

  ICARUS (ICARIA) Son of Daedalus, who made him wings of feathers and wax. Icarus flew too near the sun; the wax melted, he fell and drowned, and Daedalus buried him on the island known thereafter as Icaria. Likewise the eastern Aegean became the Icarian sea.

  ICCIUS In Epistles I.12 he is the steward of Agrippa’s estates in Sicily. Otherwise unknown.

  IDOMENEUS The king of Crete who fought for the Greeks at Troy.

  ILIA Rhea Silvia was the mother (Mars was the father) of Romulus and Remus. She was a Vestal Virgin and the daughter of Numitor, king of Alba Longa. Later she was also called Ilia (‘the Trojan’, from Ilium, Troy), and was said to be the daughter of Aeneas, so as to fit in with the preferred legend of the origin of Rome.

  ILITHYIA A Greek goddess of childbirth.

  ILIUM Troy.

  ILLYRIA A art of what we now know as Yugoslavia.

  INACHUS Legendary first king of Argos.

  IOLCOS A part of Thessaly, notorious for witchcraft. The home of Jason.

  ITYS Tereus, king of Thrace married Procne (daughter of Pan-dion, king of Athens) and subsequently raped her sister Philomela and cut out her tongue. Philomela told Procne what had happened by weaving the message into a tapestry. In revenge the two women killed Itys, the son of Tereus and Procne, and served up his flesh to his father. Tereus pursued the sisters, but the gods intervened and turned all three into birds, Tereus becoming a hoopoe (a royal bird), Procne a nightingale and Philomela a swallow. (The details of the myth vary considerably from one source to another.)

  IXION A king of the Lapiths who tried to rape Juno, Jupiter’s queen, and was consequently bound to a perpetually turning wheel in the underworld.

  JASON Son of Aeson, king of Iolcos in Thessaly. He assembled the heroic Argonauts and set out with them to fetch the Golden Fleece. He succeeded with the help of Medea. She also helped him at Colchis to carry out the task set by King Aeëtes (her father): to yoke a pair of fire-breathing bulls and sow dragon’s teeth.

  JOVE See Jupiter.

  JUBA (11) King of Numidia during Horace’s lifetime.

  JUGURTHA A king of Numidia; after many Roman victories in North Africa, Jugurtha was killed in 104 B.C.

  JULUS See Antonius.

  JUNO Queen of heaven, wife and sister of Jupiter.

  JUPITER (JOVE) King (or father) of the gods; especial guardian of Rome.

  LAMIA In III.17 probably L. Aelius Lamia, city prefect much later, in A.D. 32.

  LAMUS Legendary king of the Laestrygonians; mentioned in Odyssey 10.

  LANUVIUM A hill in Latium alongside the Appian Way.

  LAOMEDON An early king of Troy who employed Apollo and Poseidon (Neptune) to build the walls of his city, and then refused to pay them.

  L APITHS A primitive Thessalian tribe who fought and won a famous drunken battle against the Centaurs at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia.

  LARES Spirits of the dead, worshipped at crossroads and in the home as guardian deities – ‘household gods’.

  LATIUM The district of Italy where Rome is situated.

  LATONA The mother (Jupiter was the father) of Apollo and Diana.

  LENAEAN ‘God of wine’, Greek epithet of Dionysus (Bacchus).

  LEO A star rising in July.

  LESBOS (LESBIAN) The island of Lesbos was the home of Alcaeus and Sappho, the Greek lyric poets whom Horace regarded as his models, and whose characteristic metres he adapted to the Latin language in his Odes.

  LETHE One of the four rivers of the underworld. To drink its water was to obliterate memory.

  LIBER Italian god of wine-making, identified with Bacchus.

  LIBITINA Goddess of death.

  LICINIUS A. Terentius Varro Murena Licinius, brother of Proculeius and of Maecenas’ wife Terentia; consul in 23 B.C.

  LICYMNIA Pseudonym for Terentia, wife of Maecenas.

  LIRIS A river in Latium.

  LOLLIUS M. Lollius, consul in 21 B.C. Defeated by the Sygambri in 17 B.C. on the Rhine frontier. Though accused of bribery and rapacity, he remained a friend of Augustus.

  LUCERIA A town in Apulia famous for its wool.

  LUCINA The name of Juno in her capacity of goddess of childbirth.

  LUCRETILIS A mountain near Horace’s Sabine farm.

  LUCRINUS A lake near Naples. Its oysters were considered a delicacy.

  LUNA ‘The moon’, Diana.

  LYCAEUS A mountain in Arcadia.

  LYCAMBES Though he had promised to do so, Lycambes refused to give his daughter in marriage to the poet Archilochus, who avenged himself in such bitter lampoons on Lycambes that the la
tter hanged himself.

  LYCIA A territory in Asia Minor to the south of Troy. It sent troops to assist Troy in the war against the Greeks.

  LYCURGUS A king of Thrace who opposed the entry of Dionysus (Bacchus) into his territory. The god punished him with madness and death.

  LYDIA A territory in Asia Minor.

  MAECENAS C. Maecenas, diplomat and personal friend of Augustus. Patron of Horace (also of Virgil, Propertius and others), to whom he gave his Sabine estate.

  MAEVIUS Unknown victim of Horace’s invective in epode 10-possibly the poetaster attacked by Virgil in Eclogues 3.90.

  MANES Deified shades of the dead.

  MANLIUS L. Manlius Torquatus, consul in 65 B.C., the year of Horace’s birth.

  MARCELLUS The family of the Marcelli was distinguished from the Punic wars onward. One Marcellus was an eminent general against Hannibal. Another was the son-in-law of Augustus.

  MARICA A local goddess worshipped in the marshlands at the mouth of the Liris, a river in Latium.

  MARS God of war; father of Romulus.

  MARSI (MARSIANS) A central Italian tribe; noted soldiers, they rebelled against Rome in the Social War of 91 or 90–88 B.C.

  MASSAGETAE A Scythian tribe.

  MASSIC A highly regarded wine.

  MATINE Matinum was a coastal district of Apulia.

  MEDE Parthian.

  MEDEA Daughter of Aeetes, king of Colchis; a witch. She helped Jason win the Golden Fleece, and then returned with him to Iolcos, his home. After further vexations, the couple fled to Corinth. There Jason abandoned Medea for the daughter of King Creon. Medea killed the girl and her father with a poisoned robe and diadem, killed her own two children by Jason, and escaped in a dragon-drawn chariot first to Athens and then to Asia.

  MELPOMENE Strictly the Muse of tragedy and dirges, sometimes of poetry in general.

  MENELAUS King of Sparta. The abduction of his wife Helen by Paris was the proximate cause of the Trojan War, in which Menelaus participated.

  MERCURY Messenger of the gods; escort of the dead; patron of travellers and thieves; inventor of the lyre.

  MERIONES The charioteer of Idomeneus, king of Crete, at the siege of Troy.

  METAURUS The Italian river where Hasdrubal was defeated by C. Claudius Nero in 207 B.C. (This was the first Roman victory over the Carthaginians after a series of defeats.)

  METELLUS Q. Caecilius Metellus, consul in 60 B.C.

  MINERVA Goddess of war and domestic crafts, identified with Pallas Athene.

  MINOS Legendary king of Crete; son of Zeus (Jupiter); one of the three judges of the underworld.

  MITYLENE A city on the island of Lesbos.

  MONAESES A Parthian general.

  MURENA See Licinius.

  MYCENAE A city in Argos.

  MYGDON A prince of Phrygia.

  MYRMIDONS A bellicose Thessalian tribe who accompanied Achilles to the Trojan War.

  NAIADS River Nymphs.

  NEPTUNE The god of the sea.

  NEREIDS Sea Nymphs, daughters of Nereus.

  NEREUS A sea-god; father of the Nereids, including Thetis, mother of Achilles.

  NERO(S) Stepson(s) of Augustus: Tiberius (later emperor) and Drusus (who died in Germany in 9 B.C.)

  NESSUS Deianira, wife of Hercules, asked the Centaur Nessus to carry her over a river. He assaulted her and was shot by Hercules. Dying, he gave Deianira his bloody shirt, telling her it was a lovecharm. Years later when Hercules fell in love with another woman, Deianira sent him this shirt. He put it on and was seared, and killed himself (on a pyre) to end his agony. Then Deianira, too, committed suicide.

  NESTOR King of Pylos. He played an important part in the Greek campaign against Troy as adviser and ‘elder statesman’.

  NIOBE Daughter of Tantalus and mother of fourteen children, seven of each sex. She boasted that she was superior to Latona. In retribution all her children were killed by Apollo and Diana, the offspring of Latona.

  NIPHATES A river or mountain in Armenia.

  NIREUS A hero said in the Iliad to be the most handsome of the Greeks.

  NORICUM A region between the Danube and the Alps famed for the high quality of its steel.

  NOTUS South wind associated with storms.

  NUMA Numa Pompilius, Romulus’ immediate successor as king of Rome.

  NUMANTIA A town in Spain captured by P. Scipio Africanus after a siege lasting eight years.

  NUMIDIA A North African country to the south and south-west of Carthage; later a Roman province.

  NYMPHS Semi-divine women, tutelary spirits and personifications of natural objects – trees, rivers, etc.

  OLYMPUS A mountain in Greece, home of the gods.

  ORCUS (PLUTO) God of the underworld.

  ORICUS A port in Epirus.

  ORION A Giant from Boeotia, a keen hunter. Diana killed him for assaulting her. He gave his name to a constellation which sets in early November, usually a time of stormy weather.

  ORPHEUS A marvellous singer and lyrist. Apollo (who was in some versions of the story his father) gave him a lyre with which he was able to charm wild beasts and make rocks and trees follow him. He descended into the underworld in an ill-fated attempt to save his wife Eurydice from death.

  OTHO L. Roscius Otho carried a law in 67 B.C. that the first fourteen rows in the Theatre (next to the ‘orchestra’ where senators sat) should be reserved for knights, and so on according to degree.

  PACORUS A Parthian royal prince and general. He defeated a Roman army in 40 B.C.

  PACTOLUS A river in Lydia, said to have sands of gold.

  PACTUMEIUS The name of a Roman family or clan (gens).

  PAELIGNI A tribe inhabiting a mountainous district in central Italy.

  PALATINE One of the Seven Hills of Rome.

  PALINURUS The steersman of Ulysses’ (Odysseus’) ship, who fell overboard and was drowned. A cape in south-west Italy bore his name.

  PALLAS ATHENE Patron goddess of Athens, identified by the Romans with Minerva.

  PAN An Arcadian god, patron of shepherds and herdsmen. He was sometimes conceived of as a man-goat hybrid, amorous towards both sexes, and was associated with piping (i.e. upon the ‘Pan-pipes’)

  PANAETIUS A celebrated Stoic philosopher of the second century B.C.

  PAPHOS See Cyprus.

  PARCAE The Fates (q.v.).

  PARIS A son of Priam, king of Troy. His abduction of Helen, wife of Menelaus king of Sparta, was the proximate cause of the Trojan War.

  PARRHASIUS A celebrated Ephesian painter who flourished about 400 B.C.

  PARTHIA An empire located to the south-west of the Caspian Sea. Perhaps the most feared and hated rival of Rome during Horace’s lifetime.

  PATARA A place on the river Xanthus in Lycia (south of Troy) where Apollo had an oracle.

  PAULUS L. Aemilius Paulus was commander with Varro of the army defeated by the Carthaginians under Hannibal at Cannae in 216 B.C.

  PAULUS MAXIMUS Fabius Paulus Maximus, consul in 11 B.C.; a friend of Augustus and member of one of the oldest noble families.

  PEGASUS Divine winged horse. See Chimaera.

  PELEUS King of Thessaly, husband of Thetis and father of Achilles. He was slandered by a woman much as was Bellerophon, and left asleep on Mt Pelion to be eaten by wild beasts, but he survived with the aid of the Centaur Chiron.

  PELOPS King of Lydia. Tantalus was the father of Pelops who was the father of Atreus who was the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus.

  PENATES Divine guardians of the household stores – ‘household gods’.

  PENELOPE The faithful wife of Ulysses. The lover in III. 10 calls her ‘frigid’ because she resisted a multiplicity of suitors during her husband’s prolonged absence (see Homer’s Odyssey).

  PENTHEUS A king of Thebes who opposed the cult of Dionysus (Bacchus). The god’s followers killed him; his palace was overthrown in an earthquake.

  PHAETHON Son of Apollo (Phoebus). He stole his father’s sun-chariot, was unable to control it,
and was burnt to death.

  PHALANTHUS The Spartan adventurer who founded Tarentum.

  PHILIPPI City in East Macedonia, site of the battle in 42 B.C. where Brutus and Cassius, the leaders of the republican faction, were defeated and killed by Octavian (later Augustus). Horace fought under Brutus’ command. He refers to this in II.7.

  PHOCAEA Greek town in Asia Minor. The Phocaeans, being besieged in 534 B.C., decided to abandon their city and sank a lump of iron, vowing not to return until it floated to the surface.

  PHOEBUS ‘Shining one’, Apollo.

  PHRAATES (iv) A king of Parthia who was deposed by his subjects, but regained the throne by murdering his usurper Tiridates.

  PHTHIA A town in Thessaly associated with Achilles.

  PIERIA A district on the northern side of Mt Olympus in Thessaly, the home of the Muses.

  PINDAR Greek lyric poet (518–438 B.C.) famous for his odes.

  PIRITHOUS King of the Lapiths. See also Theseus.

  PLANCUS L. Munatius Plancus, consul in 42 B.C., the year of the battle of Philippi; the addressee of I.7, he was alleged to have proscribed his brother.

  PLEIADES A constellation rising in May and setting in November; associated with rain and storms.

  PLUTO (ORCUS) God of the underworld.

  POLLIO, C. ASINIUS A contemporary and friend of Horace; a writer of tragedies (none are extant); senator, advocate, patron of literature. He undertook a history of the Civil Wars from the consulship of Metellus in 60 B.C. (the year of the first Triumvirate) to the battle of Philippi in 42 B.C. See IV. 1.

  POLLUX See Castor.

  POLYHYMNIA The Muse of sacred song.

  POMPEIUS (? Varus) Horace’s friend of II.7, otherwise unknown.

  POMPILIUS See Numa.

  PONTUS A region south of the Black Sea famous for its timber.

  PORSENNA Lars Porsenna, Etruscan king of Clusium.

  PRAENESTE A hill-town near Rome.

  PRIAM King of Troy at the time of its sack by the Greeks under Agamemnon.

  PRIAPUS God of gardens, many of which contained his statue, ithyphallic and grasping a sickle, to frighten birds and thieves.

  PROCULEIUS C. Proculeius Varro Murena divided his property between his brothers, who had lost theirs in the civil wars.

  PROCYON A star rising in July.