ODE VII.
TO MUNATIUS PLANCUS.
Other poets shall celebrate the famous Rhodes, or Mitylene, or Ephesus, or the walls of Corinth, situated between two seas, or Thebes, illustrious by Bacchus, or Delphi by Apollo, or the Thessalian Tempe.[1] There are some, whose one task it is to chant in endless verse the city of spotless Pallas, and to prefer the olive culled from every side, to every other leaf. Many a one, in honor of Juno, celebrates Argos, productive of steeds, and rich Mycenæ. Neither patient Lacedæmon so much struck me, nor so much did the plain of fertile Larissa, as the house of resounding Albunea, and the precipitately rapid Anio, and the Tiburnian groves, and the orchards watered by ductile rivulets. As the clear south wind often clears away the clouds from a lowering sky, now teems with perpetual showers; so do you, O Plancus,[2] wisely remember to put an end to grief and the toils of life by mellow wine; whether the camp, refulgent with banners, possess you, or the dense shade of your own Tibur shall detain you. When Teucer fled from Salamis and his father, he is reported, notwithstanding, to have bound his temples, bathed in wine, with a poplar crown, thus accosting his anxious friends: "O associates and companions, we will go wherever fortune, more propitious than a father, shall carry us. Nothing is to be despaired of under Teucer's conduct, and the auspices of Teucer:[3] for the infallible Apollo has promised, that a Salamis in a new land shall render the name equivocal.[4] O gallant
- ↑ Tempe, a pleasant vale in Thessaly, lying between the hills Ossa, Olympus and Pelion; the river Peneus running through the midst of it.
- ↑ Lucius Munatius Plancus, whose country-seat was Tibur, or at least near to it, and therefore not far from Horace's country-house. Watson.
- ↑ Teucer, the son of Seamander Cretensis, a king of Troy, who reigned with his father-in-law Dardanus, from whom the Trojans are called Teucri. But the Teucer meant here was the son of Telamon, an excellent archer; at his return from Troy, being banished by his father, he went to Cyprus, and built there a city, which he called Salamis, by the name of his own country. Watson.
- ↑ Which shall be so like that Salamis which we have left, in glory and grandeur, that it shall be difficult to distinguish them. San.
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