By this term is understood the themes presented in Horace’s second epode on the happy country life.
To this class belongs the following poem (Epode 16), which, from internal evidence, appears to have been written B.
The word treason in the epode of the chorus of angels at the end of Act III.
Epode 53 The Apostacy of One, and but One Lady 54 Amyntor from beyond the Sea to Alexis.
The epode soon took a firm place in choral poetry, which it lost when that branch of literature declined.
In Latin poetry theepode was cultivated, in conscious archaism, both as a part of the ode and as an independent branch of poetry.
The Greek ode was commonly divided into the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode; the strophe and antistrophe being identical in structure, though varying in different odes, and the epode being of different structure.
But in an English Pindaric the elaborate correspondences and differences between strophe, antistrophe, and epodeare lost upon most readers, and even the critical reader derives from them a pleasure intellectual rather than sensuous.
The poet was Horace, who in the sixteenth epode had candidly expressed the fears of Roman republicans for Rome's capacity to survive.
The second strophe and second antistrophe are identical metrically with the first, the second epode with the first epode; and so on.
EPODE Not to know vice at all, and keep true state, Is virtue and not fate: Next to that virtue, is to know vice well, And her black spite expel.
The Strophes have a correspondent resemblance in their str[u]cture and numbers: and the Antistrophe and Epode also bear the same similitude.
The Poet seems, in the first Ode particularly, to design the Epode as a complete air to the Strophe and Antistrophe, which have more the appearance of Recitative.
The word Ode is Greek for a Song; Epode was merely a metrical term to express an ode which alternated in longer and shorter lines, and we may treat them all alike as Odes.
The fountain of Horatianism in Spain was the imitation of Epode II, Beatus Ille, by the Marquis de Santillana, one of Castile's two first sonneteers, in the first half of the fifteenth century.
Let the obnoxious Epode remain, to terrify such of your friends as are willing to be terrified.
EPODE II The Voice had ceas'd, the Phantoms fled, Yet still I gasp'd and reel'd with dread.
