Odes 1.5
poem by Horace
Odes 1.5, also known as Ad Pyrrham ('To Pyrrha'), or by its incipit, Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa, is one of the Odes of Horace. The poem is written in one of the Asclepiadic metres and is of uncertain date; not after 23 BC.
Summary
To a coquette or flirt: What slender innocent youth enjoys your smiles to-day, and courts you, Pyrrha? (1–5) Alas, he does not yet suspect that you are fickle as the sea; your smile lures on his love to shipwreck (5–13). Thank Heaven I escaped betimes: in Neptune's temple I hang my dripping clothes as votive gift (13–16).
The text
Ambiguous Final Line
The last words of the ode, potenti ... maris deo 'to the god who has power over the sea' are found in the manuscripts and in the ancient commentator Porphyrio; nonetheless, Nisbet and Hubbard in their commentary (1970), following a conjecture of Zielinski (1901), suggest that the original reading may have been potenti ... maris deae 'to the goddess who has power over the sea', i.e. Venus. They compare Odes 3.26.4ff: barbiton hic paries habebit / laevum marinae qui Veneris latus / custodit 'this wall, which guards the left side of Venus of the Sea, will have my lyre', where in a similar way Horace's intention to give up love affairs is symbolised by his dedicating his lyre in the temple of Venus. They argue that Neptune has nothing to do with the metaphorical sea of love.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Odes 1.5” as poem by Horace. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as poem by Horace. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 5, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q19047186. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1970 and 1901.
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This entry incorporates text from “Odes 1.5” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.