# rapiamus, amici, Occasionem de die



## Casquilho

I'm studying Horace's epode 13, and I would to know why does he use upper case initials with some words:

rapiamus, amici, Occasionem de die - Let's seize, friends, Opportunity from this day
levare diris pectora Sollicitudinibus - to release (or to relieve) [our] bosoms of the awful Concerns

Is there a stylistical reason for he treating these nouns as proper ones?


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## CapnPrep

Horace is not doing anything here… The use of upper case initials is the choice of the modern editor, working from medieval manuscripts (we have nothing from Horace's time), and it varies greatly from one edition to the next. In this case, _Occasionem_ and _Sollicitudinibus_ are capitalized just because they are at the beginning of the line (again, depending on the edition).


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## Casquilho

Boy! I would never think of that! The verses are thus:

 [...] nunc mare, nunc silvae
Threicio Aquilone sonant. rapiamus, amici,
Occasionem de die dumque virent genua
et decet [...]

perfundi nardo iuvat et fide Cyllenea
levare diris pectora Sollicitudinibus,
nobilis ut grandi [...] 

As Horace works with fixes metres (as a translator says, second archilochian here on epode xiii, whatever that means), I would think the lines disposition would be preserved by those copists monks which preserved for us the classical literature. But, if the upper case is as you've explained it, why my edition capitalizes just these two nouns (aside proper nouns, as Achaemenio and Thetide), and starts with lower case all the extant lines except for the first and fourth?


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## CapnPrep

Casquilho said:


> But, if the upper case is as you've explained it, why my edition capitalizes just these two nouns (aside proper nouns, as Achaemenio and Thetide), and starts with lower case all the extant lines except for the first and fourth?


Yes, the capitalization in your edition seems particularly idiosyncratic. If it's not explained by the editor somewhere, and if you can't discern any pattern in the other poems, then it might just remain a mystery…

By the way, the 2nd Archilochian strophe is a dactylic hexameter followed by an iambelegus, which is a trochaic dimeter catalectic with anacrusis followed by a Lesser Antilochian. Which is a dactylic trimeter catalectic…  The point of all this is that the Antilochian verse (the "iambelegus" part) can be written as one line or split over two lines, depending on the manuscript/edition. You can confirm this by browsing through different published versions of this Epode, e.g. on Google Books. You will find both two-line and three-line strophes.


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## Casquilho

Thank you, I'll seek for other editions and compare them.


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## relativamente

Maybe the reason for capitalizing this words is because romans considered as gods or godesses many abstract concepts. Really the number of gods and godesses was astonishing as you can read in Augustinus's  De civitate Dei.Those gods many times were also represented in statues or paintings. Since the Spanish saying "la ocasión la pintan calva" so you cannot grab her by the hair once she has gone away and you have to seize her as he passes by


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## Casquilho

Indeed, Oportunity/Occasion appears personified, with this idea of grabbing her by the hair, in Shakespeare's Othello, if I be not wrong. I thought that too, that Horace was personifying these concepts. It's a good hipothesis.


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## CapnPrep

Casquilho said:


> I thought that too, that Horace was personifying these concepts.


Again, there is no way to know how Horace wrote these lines (or more to the point, how he would have written them if he had known the concept of upper- and lowercase letters, which he did not). At best, you can choose to entertain the hypothesis that whoever prepared your edition thought that the abstractions _Occasio_ and _Sollicitudines_ deserved to be personified (but for some reason not _senectus_ in the same poem).


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## Stoicorum_simia

Casquilho said:


> Indeed, Oportunity/Occasion appears personified, with this idea of grabbing her by the hair, in Shakespeare's Othello, if I be not wrong. I thought that too, that Horace was personifying these concepts. It's a good hipothesis.



The idea came originally from a famous hellenistic statue of Kairos (Opportunity, critical moment in Greek) by Lysippos which showed the personified concept in this way. Kairos is masculine, but in Latin he became Occasio which of course is feminine. The point is made in the late collection _Disticha Catonis,_ which was very well-known in the Middle Ages: 'Rem tibi quam nosces aptam dimittere noli / Fronte capillata, post est occasio calva'. (2.26 or 27 in some editions).Also in English we have the proverbial advice 'Take time by the forelock'. 
But I am not sure whether this has anything to do with the capitalisation in your edition!


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