Abstract
Two closely-linked problems - one textual, the other interpretive - have long bedevilled readers of Horace Carm. 4.2.45-52. The first involves the text of line 49, which was conjectura1ly emended in the OCT of Wickham and Garrod, and has actually been obelised by Shackleton Bailey in his Teubner. The second problem concerns the addressee of o Sol pulcher, o laudande in lines 46-7.
I would like in this essay, first, to discuss the spectrum of emendations proposed for line 49; second, to sketch out a structural analysis of the entire ode, inot which lines 45-52 will fit sensibly; and third, to offer a new rhetorical analysis that will make sense of the poem overall and (particularly) of the test I have adopted for the lemma. This analysis is fundamentally linked to the interpretation of Sol in line 46, as we shall see.