Horace, Odes, 2,8: a question of tone

[hlawson38]

Context: Horace poetically scorches a devastatingly attractive femme fatale (have I got this right?)

ll. 5-8:

. . . sed tu simul obligasti
perfidum votis caput, enitescis
pulchrior multo iuvenumque prodis
publica cura.

My effort at translation:

but you bound yourself with oaths on your lying head
now, you seem more beautiful still
a public guardian of the young.

I read

publica cura

as savagely sarcastic. I guess that Horace means that this enchantress pretends to run an sort of salon, and shines forth as more beautiful the more she draws young men into her orbit. The more dangerous she is, the more beautiful she seems.

Is this an acceptable reading?

[Qimmik]

I think iuuenum publica cura means "the public [i.e., , common to the entire populus, universal] object of attention [cura] of young men", "the object of attention of all young men". This is appositive to the understood subject of prodis, i.e., tu.

prodis -- from prodeo, "go forward"

simul -- Edited: see correction below. "as soon as"

obligasti caput -- you have bound yourself by swearing on your head/life"

perfidum -- this is enallage (I think that's the term). The adjective is attached to caput instead of uotis. Her head isn't perfidious--it's the oaths that are false.

Very crudely:

"as soon as you have bound your lying head with oaths, i.e., as soon as [simul] you have forsworn yourself [by telling multiple lovers that each is the sole object of her affections], you shine forth much more beautiful still and go forward as the object of attention of all young men" N.B.: Edited per correction below.

The point is that her perfidy doesn't result in any punishment or harm (as the poet humorously suggests it should). The gist of the first stanza: "if you were in the slightest way punished (by getting a black tooth or a white nail, for example) for your perfidy, I'd believe it; but . . . "

The tone is more humorous than sarcastic.

[hlawson38]

Thanks for the reading Qimmik. I see *now* that L&S endorse your reading of both words of "publica cura", while for each citing the very place under discussion. Before now I had read translations concurring with your reading, but I couldn't understand how that meaning was construed--that's why I submitted the query. Usually, when a passage stumps me (a frequent occurrence), a translation shows me how to get out of the ditch, but not this time.

[Qimmik]

iuuenum publica cura -- I'd venture to say that there is a subtle double entendre here. The apparent meaning is the one I suggested above: Barine is the universal object of attention of young men. However, the last stanza suggests that Barine''s attractions and her ability to manipulate her lovers with lies make her a cause for public concern--publica cura--about the behavior of young men and the good order of the community: mothers have reason for concern about their young sons, elderly fathers are concerned about their sons wasting their money on Barine, newly married young women are concerned about their husbands being delayed on their way home by a whiff (aura) of Barine--there's even a suggestion that the new brides remain virgins because their husbands are busy with Barine.

Three stages of young men: pubescent teens (iuuenci), more mature but still unmarried young men, and husbands.

So the tone is one of humorous exaggeration, and all of this is implied in a few words with typical Horatian compression.

The more you think about a Horatian ode, the more you see packed into it.

[Qimmik]

Correction: looking at this again, I realized that simul in v. 5 means "as soon as": "as soon as you have bound [or in English, we'd more likely use the present tense: "as soon as you bind"] your lying head with oaths, you shine forth more beautiful, and you move on as the universal object of attention of young men."

I just hope mwh didn't see my dumb error before I corrected it.

[hlawson38]

Correction: looking at this again, I realized that simul in v. 5 means "as soon as": "as soon as you have bound [or in English, we'd more likely use the present tense: "as soon as you bind"] your lying head with oaths, you shine forth more beautiful, and you move on as the universal object of attention of young men."

I just hope mwh didn't see my dumb error before I corrected it.

Another difficulty for me with this passage was the several meanings of "simul". So the stanza gave me three different words, each with several meanings.

So my takeaway is:

simul: doesn't always mean "at the same time".
cura: can mean a "a person cared about".
publica: can mean "common", in the sense of shared among many.

I put this kind of problem down to solitary self-tuition. Classroom instruction affords many corrections, by a person, which is more vivid in the memory. Moreover, you hear the mistakes of the other students, and the corrections.

Besides that, I find Lewis and Short difficult, because the examples are usually untranslated. One of the things I like about Gaffiot's student dictionary (I can read French assez bien) is the aptness of the examples, and the fact that G. translates them into easy French.

[Qimmik]

Simul often means "as soon as". However, you have to be careful about publica and cura. You need to remember that Horace is a poet, and he frequently stretches the meaning of an ordinary word (as well as syntax) for poetic purposes. That's one way he achieves poetic compression and allusiveness. Prose writers would not use publica or cura in the way Horace does here, and I'm not sure any other poets do, either (I haven't checked L&S). In reading poetry you have to be alert to the possibility that words may be used in ways that are different from their ordinary use.

The advantage of L&S and the Oxford Latin Dictionary is that they break down the range of usages of a particularly word, identifying authors and registers. Those dictionaries let you see how Horace's use of publica and cura here are unusual. This is particularly important in classical Latin, which has a somewhat limited vocabulary and puts many individual words to multiple uses. Often these dictionaries provide glosses on words as they are used in specific passages, which can frequently be very helpful.

[hlawson38]

The advantage of L&S and the Oxford Latin Dictionary is that they break down the range of usages of a particularly word, identifying authors and registers. Those dictionaries let you see how Horace's use of publica and cura here are unusual. This is particularly important in classical Latin, which has a somewhat limited vocabulary and puts many individual words to multiple uses. Often these dictionaries provide glosses on words as they are used in specific passages, which can frequently be very helpful.

Yes, I get this point, and agree with it. Perseus lets you see the L&S definitions fairly easily. Besides that, I downloaded the offline Glossa verson of L&S. It can be made to run quite well under Linux, by means of wine, a program that lets Linux run many Windows programs.

Tell me a little how you use L&S. The defintion of cura as Glossa presents it on my computer screen must be about 100 lines long. If I start at the beginning, and proceed brute-force, line-by-line, I am in for a lot of hard work. By the time I get back to the text under study, I will have lost my train of thought, the mental definition of the problem which sent me to the dictionary to start with.

[Qimmik]

I'm not sure what the Glossa version looks like, but this version breaks out the various meanings of each word in categories:

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/Reference/l ... short.html

You can generally scan the categories until you find something suitable without working through all the citations. Usually you'll have some idea of what you're looking for, so you can scan the English meanings relatively quickly.

The elementary version of L&S (by either Lewis or Short alone) might be better for your purposes. It has the various meanings of each word, with shorter, author-identified quotations that give some context, and without citations.

[Qimmik]

simul: doesn't always mean "at the same time"

"As soon as" is more or less equivalent to "at the same time".

[hlawson38]

Thanks again for your speedy help, Qimmik.

[Qimmik]

One other point about this poem, and in particular about its tone:

This is a private conversation between Horace and Barine. I think we're to imagine that Barine has just sworn to Horace--by the ashes of her mother! by all the stars in the sky!--that he is her only love, or at least the lover she loves most of all--and maybe that Horace is one of those who have previously threatened that he would never return to her house; and maybe we're even to imagine that this conversation is taking place in bed immediately after sex.

Once you read this as a private conversation between Barine and Horace, the implication follows, I think, that, like all the other men attracted to Barine, Horace is unable to keep himself from being taken in by her manipulative lies, in full knowledge of their falsehood, and that the list of infatuated lovers in the last stanza includes Horace himself. So maybe we're to read this poem as not just about Barine's deception but about Horace's willful self-deception, too.

Of course, this is poem and the character of Barine (like all the young ladies of easy virtue that populate Horace's poems) are fictions, but, with a little imagination on the part of the reader, this rings true to life. Horace was no stranger to the ways of the world.

Horace, by the way, is said to have had his bedroom walls and ceiling covered with mirrors, so that he could watch himself having sex from all angles, but this seems to be taking place chez Barine. Who knows what enticements she had at her disposal!