capture the recurrent cyclical rhythms of hourly, daily, monthly, seasonal, and
annual time, all of them squeezing on the individual’s forward movement toward
death (Carm.4.7.7 – 16):
immortalia ne speres, monet annus et almum
quae rapit hora diem:
frigora mitescunt Zephyris, uer proterit aestas
interitura simul
pomifer Autumnus fruges effuderit, et mox
bruma recurrit iners.
damna tamen celeres reparant caelestia lunae:
nos ubi decidimus
quo pater Aeneas, quo Tullus diues et Ancus
puluis et umbra sumus.The year warns you not to hope for immortality, and the hour that snatches
the life-giving day. The cold grows mild with the Zephyrs, summer treads
down spring, itself due to perish once apple-bearing autumn has poured out its
fruits, and soon inert winter runs back. The swift moons nonetheless restore
their heavenly losses; we, once we have fallen down where father Aeneas, rich
Tullus, and Ancus fell, are dust and shade.The sequence is introduced by the large unit of the year (7), followed by the hour
and day (8). There follow the four seasons, from the cold of winter in line 9 to the
very middle of winter again at the end of the round, with brumain line 12: not just
another word for “winter,” brumais precisely “the shortest day,” a contraction
(fittingly) ofbreuissima.^2 Next come the moons, standing for the months, which are
able to “restore” their losses (reparant,13). The recurrent prefix re- organizes the
whole structure of the poem, from the “return” of the grass in line 1 (redeunt) to
the “recurrence” of winter in line 12 (recurrit) to the triply negated “restoration” of
the individual human being in lines 23 – 24 (non, Torquate, genus, non te facundia,
non te/restituet pietas).^3 Our fate is to be “dust and shade” — exactly what the
moon would become if it suffered the fate it looks as if it suffers every month.
Virtually every unit of time that affects the individual is here.^4 Since they had no
seconds or minutes in use, the hour is the smallest unit Horace deploys.^5 He does
not mention the saeculum,which might seem an odd omission from the poet of the
Carmen Saeculare,until we reflect that the saeculumis not a unit of time an indi-
vidual can experience,by definition.
- Epilogue