In Juvenal's third satire the main speaker, Umbricius, delivers a speech of farewell as he prepares to leave Rome. In it, he mounts a sustained attack on life in the capital. By contrast, he praises Italian country towns, a combination of laudatio and vituperatio which is foreshadowed in the prefatory praise of provincial Cumae and denigration of Rome.

Lucretius’ juxtapositions of (per)manare (‘percolate’) and rarus (‘porous’), with reference to atomistic permeability and the ‘void’, imply derivation of manare from μανός (‘porous’). The ‘etymology’ thus created acknowledges a scientific debt to the early Atomists. It was later promulgated in Verrius’ De Significatu Verborum and is reflected, with echoes of Lucretius, in Horace’s programmatic Odes 4.1.

Odes4.2 ostensibly looks forward to two public events lying at some indeterminate point in the future, Augustus' return from campaign in Gaul, and a triumph over the Sygambri. The celebrations anticipated for these occasions frame the second half of the ode; but they do not supply its dramatic setting or timing, and the latter is evidently associated with the period following Augustus' departure for Gaul in summer 16b.c., or at any rate with a time when the Sygambri were felt still (...) to present an armed threat. The dramatic date need not however be identical with the time of writing, and it should not be assumed thatOdes4.2 was composed in 16. Indeed, as will be seen, it is most likely to be the retrospective product of a later period, around the time of Augustus' eventual return in July 13. On this view, the poem does not look forward to future events, but back to the time of Augustus' departure. (shrink)