Horace C.I.xv

"Horace C.I.xv." Manuscript, undated. In The Archaeology of the Soul, 2012.

Excerpt:

Four poems of Horace’s first book seem to be so placed as to represent a proportion. The fifth and sixth seem to be in the same relation to one another as the fourteenth and fifteenth; and the fifth and fourteenth in turn seem to be as related to each other as are the sixth and fifteenth Horace first calls our attention to this double relation through the repetition of metrical forms. The fifth is his first use of the fourth Asclepiadic stanza, the fourteenth is the second; the sixth is his first use of the third Asclepiadic, the fifteenth is the second. Indeed, since the two systems differ only in their third line, could not someone believe for a moment that xv continued xiv, and Nereus detained Paris among the Cyclades?