Prayer to Venus

The first words of the fourth book of Odes, published some ten years after the first three. Horace is returning to the love poetry he had renounced, and addresses Venus like a discharged veteran served with fresh papers.

Intermissa, Venus, diu rursus bella moves? — after so long a truce, Venus, do you stir up wars again? Militia amoris, love as military service, is a commonplace of Roman elegy, but here it is taken seriously: intermissa has the precise sense of a suspension of hostilities, and the poet has years of service behind him.

Parce precor, precor — spare me, I pray, I pray. The doubling is ritual in origin: it was how a formula was strengthened (cf. juno-003). Here the repeated word sounds like a stammer, and the line breaks off on it.

What matters most is the direction of the request. Almost every prayer seeks a god's attention; this one asks that it be withdrawn. The move has occurred in this corpus already, and in Horace too — Faunus is asked to cross the field and go away (faunus-001). Both times the god is dangerous, and the best that can be expected of him is that he pass by.