Prayer to Mercury

Horace's ode to Mercury is a hymn in the strict Greek sense, written on a model of Alcaeus. It is constructed as the Greeks constructed a hymn: address, then a chain of relative clauses listing what the god invented and did, and at the end his standing among the rest.

Te canam — I shall sing you. The poet announces the genre aloud: this is praise, not petition, and nothing will be asked here.

The list is drawn up without the slightest embarrassment. Mercury shaped the wild ways of new-made men by speech and by the palaestra — that is, he made civilisation; and he is also "the cunning one, whatever he has chosen to hide away by a joking theft" — that is, a thief. Between the culture-hero and the crook there is no qualification and no "but". An ancient hymn lists a god's properties without reconciling them.

The last stanza gives what makes Mercury unique: he settles pious souls in their glad seats and with his golden wand restrains the "weightless crowd" of the dead, and is therefore "pleasing to the gods above and to those below". One of the very few with access to both sides — and the whole ode leads there.

The […] marks an omission: the card gives the first two stanzas and the last. The reference has been corrected: the card cited lines 20-24, but the ode has only twenty.