Walter Savage Landor's exasperated marginal comment on line 13 of Horace, C. 1. 4 has sent modern commentators scurrying to the poem's defence. The skirmish has been won for Horace, but at the expense perhaps of magnifying the importance of line 13: A. Y. Campbell insisted that pallida mors, far from being irrelevant, was ‘the focus of the whole poem’.