Horace, Odes iii. 14
The major puzzle which confronts readers of Odes iii. 14 is the relationship between the public celebration described in the first half of the poem and the private party proposed in the second. Both are responses to the one event—news that Caesar is not, as feared, dead, but has won a victory and is returning home from Spain—but they do not quite harmonize. It is not just that the one response is public and Roman, while the other is private and somewhat Greek, for there is nothing objectionable in this combination. Rather the disharmony lies in a number of contrasts which, taken singly, are slight, but together create an effect which is hard to define but hard to deny.