Prayer to Apollo

Horace's ode written for the dedication of the temple of Apollo on the Palatine in 28 BC — the poet's own prayer at the new shrine.

It is built entirely as a catalogue of negations. The middle of the ode (which falls behind the seam in this card) lists what the poet does not ask for: not the rich cornfields of Sardinia, not Calabrian herds, not Indian ivory, not gold, not vineyards. Only at the very end, in four lines, comes what he does ask: health, a clear mind, and an old age "neither disgraceful nor without the lyre".

The device is not rhetorical but substantive. The prayer becomes a way of going through everything a person ordinarily wants and refusing it item by item. One addresses the god in order to separate the necessary from the superfluous.

The last word of the ode is cithara, the lyre. The poet asks the god of poetry for the right to remain a poet to the end.