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Introduction
Horace’s Epode 7, a hypothetical
address by the narrator to the leaders of faction on the brink or inciting
further civil war, captures a form of patriotism which is willing to criticize
the country to which it is loyal. The lexical choices, such as “Latini
sanguis” and the “terram Romi”, use images associated
with pride in Rome. Mentions of the cities greatest enemies, the Carthaginians
and the Persians, reinforce nationalist sentiment; threats such as these
encourage unity by remind private citizens of the common need for protection.
However, the final verses leave the reader with a sense of impending doom,
as if the city could not hope to escape eventual self-annihilation.
The apostrophic nature of the Epode indicates that those in power have
no patience with such dissenting views. The “furor caecus”
of which the narrator accuses his addresses could refer to the exclusion
of criticism from the realm of patriotism, thence Horace’s expression
of these ideas through lyric, a private and personal form of poetry, as
opposed to in the public arena. G.K. Chesterton characterizes the aversion
to patriotic criticism, “A man who says that no patriot should attack
the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he
is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she
has fallen over it”. As a private expression of silenced constructive
criticism, Epode 7 speaks not only to audiences in nations approaching
civil war but to any society where questioning leadership or its ideology
amounts to anti-patriotism.
In the translation, references to geographical locations and other peoples
or myths, although they would be more familiar to an ancient audience
than a modern one, have been kept, both due to the lack of a sufficiently
well known modern parallel and to the relative familiarity of the places
and peoples to which Horace refers. An attempt will be made to preserve
the iambic meter and attention will be given to the multiple meanings
of the Latin verbs, especially rich in this poem, when rendering them
in English. The formal tone and clarity, should also be maintained; infrequent
use of elision distinguishes each word individually. Ideally, the English
version, like the original, should sound similar to oratory. With regard
to the language, archaic forms will not be used as the references within
the poem evoke the setting in which it was originally written and so that
the reader does not sense a greater distance between himself and the text.
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