Ode 1.25: A Poetic Analysis

There is nothing more terrifying than an aging woman. Or so society argues. The fear of the female hag -- wrinkly, pruning, and sagging with age -- has been one so embedded into the patriarchal psyche that entire industries have been buoyed by the simple promise that they can erase the markers of time from the female figure. Beauty and skincare are the first that come to mind, promoting ineffective or even poisonous "remedies" to help a woman maintain a "childlike glow." Yet this near-pederastic obsession with the willowy girl as opposed to her grown, womanly counterpart has sunk its teeth into another industry altogether: entertainment.

Indeed, within an industry that systematically relegates women to subpar supporting roles, there has been one niche in which women can take on the role of the protagonist: hag horror. While the subject of this analysis is not to provide a comprehensive history of the genre, which dates back to the era of black-and-white films, I'd like to provide two examples. First, the Substance. Although intended to deride the way society only values the youthful, feminine creature, Coralie Fargeat's film betrays this sentiment when the most terrifying scene of the movie is an image of one sagging breast. I screamed while watching it, and I wasn't screaming at the backlash that older women endure; I was screaming at the woman herself. Our second example, however, is a far cry from modern-day film entirely, but nonetheless had the same cultural significance during its heyday that hag horror possesses now: Horace's Ode 1.25. Through their comparison, I hope to illuminate just how far we've come since Horace's era (which is to say, not far at all).

The Poem Itself

*English translation by A.S. Kline, chief translator of "Poetry in Translation"

Latin Text

Parcius iunctas quatiunt fenestras

iactibus crebris iuvenes protervi,

nec tibi somnos adimunt, amatque

ianua limen,

quae prius multum facilis movebat

cardines. Audis minus et minus iam:

"Me tuo longas pereunte noctes

Lydia, dormis?"

Invicem moechos anus arrogantis

flebis in solo levis angiportu,

Thracio bacchante magis sub inter-

lunia vento,

cum tibi flagrans amor et libido,

quae solet matres furiare equorum,

saeviet circa iecur ulcerosum,

non sine questu,

laeta quod pubes hedera virenti

gaudeat pulla magis atque myrto,

aridas frondes hiemis sodali

dedicet Euro.

English Translation

Now the young men come less often, violently

beating your shutters, with blow after blow, or

stealing away your sleep, while the door sits tight,

hugging the threshold,

yet was once known to move its hinges, more than

readily. You’ll hear, less and less often now:

‘Are you sleeping, Lydia, while your lover

dies in the long night?’

Old, in your turn, you’ll bemoan coarse adulterers,

as you tremble in some deserted alley,

while the Thracian wind rages, furiously,

through the moonless nights,

while flagrant desire, libidinous passion,

those powers that will spur on a mare in heat,

will storm all around your corrupted heart, ah,

and you’ll complain,

that the youths, filled with laughter, take more delight

in the green ivy, the dark of the myrtle,

leaving the withering leaves to this East wind,

winter’s accomplice.

Part I: Theme & Voice

Ode 1.25's Lydia is not so different from Demi Moore's Elizabeth Sparkle. Sparkle, whose day job is a televised aerobics instructor, likely satiates the same need for a male audience as Lydia's prostitution: exposure to the female figure. While Sparkle makes considerably more than Lydia and her fellow prostitutes would have in ancient Rome, both have a similarly short career lifespan. As long as they are deemed beautiful, they can continue to make a living. Fortunately for Lydia (as we all know how Sparkle's story tragically ended), there was no magic potion that could promise her eternal youth one out of every two weeks. She simply had to ignore her aging until its physical signs betrayed her confidence. Yet, we never see Lydia grappling with aging out of her profession, only Horace's perspective (that of an onlooker as well as, quite probably, a client), which, uncharacteristic of the groundbreaking poet, is stale: time humbles the woman and leaves her worthless.

If you are familiar with my other analyses, you will know that I often fall victim to extrapolating the themes of ancient poets into universal truths, and could have easily done so with Ode 1.25, arguing that Horace posits that time humbles all. However, I fear that this interpretation is disingenuous to the content and voice of this Ode, given that the poem does not mention the old man and instead refers to all of Lydia's clients as 'youth' (when a majority were likely far older than she). Indeed, it is only Lydia who is less desirable as she ages, a message the strikingly harsh, near-mocking tone of the ode conveys. Not only does Horace lament Lydia's decline, but his prophetic tone also implies that her lack of desirability is deserved —a necessary price women must pay after a lifetime of controlling men with their youthful beauty. Although positioning himself as a detached commentator, Horace's resentment towards Lydia, and, by extension, all her fellow 'hags', is undeniable. Much like the men of today, Horace is terrified of the aging woman and uses anger and an appeal to manhood in an attempt to conceal his fear.

Part II: Meter

Pacing is a key aspect that differentiates painful from entertaining cinema. Too fast-paced and the emotional messaging of a scene may fall flat, but slow down too much and the goldfish attention spans of modern-day moviegoers will spite you for it. As a director, you must know when to linger and when to sacrifice the beautiful shot in favor of keeping the plot progressing. The Substance would not have grossed over 82 million worldwide if it were three hours longer, sadly. But much like the pacing of a movie can illuminate where the director wants the audience's attention placed, the pacing of a work of literature serves the same purpose. Therefore, Ode 1.25's sapphic stanza is more than a rhetorical choice: it directly endorses Horace's backlash against Lydia and her contemporaries.

The sapphic stanza, a form consisting of three Sapphic hendecasyllables followed by a shorter Adonic line, is the form traditionally associated with lyrical love poetry (owing its name to the female love poet Sappho herself). In Ode 1.25, however, the form serves a markedly different purpose from its other uses, both within and outside of Horace's work. Rather than complement a writer's expression of love, the sapphic stanza of Ode 1.25 only heightens Horace's scorn of older women. By helping position the poem as a love poem originally, the form intensifies Horace's subversion of romantic tropes and regression into mockery of Lydia. Effectively, his use of the form reeks of an emasculated "artist" rhetorically asking his older pseudo-muse, "You really thought I was going to praise you?" Powerful men, both in ancient Rome and today, provide a resounding "no" in response.

Part III: Rhetoric

Imbuing Shame: Apostrophe & Rhetorical Question

Ode 1.25 contains one distinct use of apostrophe, or direct address, when it poses its scornful subject a rhetorical question. Horace asks Lydia, "Me tuo longas pereunte noctes/Lydia, dormis?" (translated as "Are you sleeping, Lydia, while your lover/dies in the long night?") after just the line prior telling her that she will hear this question less often as her age continues to preclude lovers from being seduced by her charm. Paradoxically, by using apostrophe and directly naming Lydia, Horace encourages the extrapolation of his theme to all older women, not just this one prostitute. Indeed, the "evil" that Horace is rejecting now has a name, but not a character, allowing said name to be easily substituted for any other. By granting her only one basic necessity of personhood and robbing her of any other defining characteristics, Horace creates the prey for men: a woman existing in feminine name only.

Yet Horace does not stop with naming Lydia, but instead asks her a question-- one she, obviously, is unable to answer. In doing so, Horace mocks Lydia and women of her ilk, depriving them of agency and relegating them to subservient punching bags, stripped of the power to speak out against their degradation. Horace deliberately ends the stanza with his question to Lydia, suspending the reader in momentarily fear that perhaps she will answer, then proceeding to reassure the men reading that this woman, much like all the other valued ones in their lives, is sufficiently silenced. To the old women the poem pertains to, Horace delivers a similar but slightly altered message: you must remain quiet, or else my poetic wrath will not cease.

Dehumanizing the 'Hag': Metaphor

Throughout Ode 1.25, Horace employs many painfully obvious metaphors; yet, his most glaring offense is his comparison of Lydia to a wild animal. He writes, "cum tibi flagrans amor et libido,/quae solet matres furiare equorum,/saeviet circa iecur ulcerosum," which can be idiomatically translated as "while flagrant desire, libidinous passion,/those powers that will spur on a mare in heat,/ will storm all around your corrupted heart, ah." These three lines serve as a microcosm of the rest of the poem, making Horace's fear-turned-hatred of Lydia glaringly obvious. He compares her to a horse in heat, stripping her of her humanity and arguing that her sexual desire is different than that of men; the promiscuous woman is a violent freak of nature, not merely a human being fulfilling her needs. Unlike the men who use her services, who seemingly are exerting their manhood and emerge after intercourse much the same, Lydia, partaking in her profession, especially at such an old age, "corrupts" her being, rendering her subhuman and therefore an easy target for Horace's hatred.

In keeping with the theme of nature, Horace concludes his Ode with another metaphor for Lydia, this time emphasizing her decay. He writes, "laeta quod pubes hedera virenti/gaudeat pulla magis atque myrto,/aridas frondes hiemis sodali/dedicet Euro" (translated as "that the youths, filled with laughter, take more delight/in the green ivy, the dark of the myrtle,/leaving the withering leaves to this East wind,/winter’s accomplice) which, importantly, equates Lydia's degradation not just to her profession, but her age as well. Indeed, Horace juxtaposes the youthful, beautiful, lovely young prostitute (myrtle, in ancient Rome, was a common symbol of love and fertility) with the women of Lydia's age: withering and cold. She is, in his mind, now in winter, lacking her once beautiful leaves and discarded when the next season of new, blossoming, youthful trees comes along. It seems not to have crossed Horace's mind that the same trees that are barren in winter reinvent themselves in spring, becoming as decadent with leaves as they were the year prior. In his "natural" world, these trees are instead uprooted and disposed of, and the very natural act of a woman aging is hidden and reviled.

Constructing the "Objective" Onlooker: Prophetic Tone

Throughout Ode 1.25, Horace uses future-tense verbs to construct Lydia's decline as prophecy and establish his role as merely the deliverer of said fate. In lines such as "flebis in solo levis angiportu," translated as "as you tremble in some deserted alley," Horace's use of the verb "flebis" ("you will tremble") establishes Lydia's fate as inevitable. This prophetic tone, moreover, gives Horace an objective authority, masking his fear and resentment of Lydia within the guise of delivering a universal truth. Instead of acknowledging the power that society, specifically men within a patriarchal one, has to either validate or despise older women, Horace accepts the ideology that older women deserve to be scorned. In doing so, he ensures he cannot be called out for his prejudice against older women, invoking the age-old "don't shoot the messenger."

Part IV: Audience Reception

Horace was writing to an elite, wealthy, predominantly male Roman audience, who were likely well acquainted with prostitution (being the most sought-after clients). These men, much like Horace himself, looked down upon older prostitutes and older women writ large, opting instead to request the services of younger women to satiate their sexual needs (their wives unsurprisingly absent from their sexual lives). Yet these men, much like Horace himself, were not just disgusted by the sight of an old maiden; they were terrified of it. An aging woman signified a woman who, unlike her girlish counterpart, could not be controlled by older men in their life and instead was a sexual and social beast of her own. Ode 1.25 provided these men a shield for their fear, hiding underneath an objective lens whilst hurling destructive insults at ancient Roman women merely trying to survive within a society that structurally disadvantages them.

In Conclusion...

Ode 1.25 can be considered one of the seminal pieces of literature proposing that old women deserve to be feared and reviled. The impact of this verse extends beyond Horace's time; even as women have gained more rights and agency in modern-day society compared to their ancient Roman counterparts, our society continues to recoil in horror at the sight of a 'hag'. Migrating from literature to the silver screen, our society's repulsion at the sight of an old woman ostensibly refuses to be unlearned: even movies that appear to deconstruct the stereotype, such as The Substance, inadvertently promote the anti-aging sentiment for women in their attempts to scare the audience. Yet none of these works ever asks the question of why we are so petrified of the aging female form. I hope that, after reading this poetic analysis, you have a more well-formed answer. After all, it is in calling our fragile masculinity that the female 'hag' may finally be set free.

We hope you enjoyed this poetic analysis of Ode 1.25. Please leave any comments, questions, or concerns below, and be sure to recommend future poems for us to dive into!