[A drill-bow in Horace, Odes 3.6.7]

With the short poem Odes 3.26 Horaces says--ostensibly--farewell to the subject of love. A symbol of his retreat is the order given to his followers: they ought to lay in the Temple of Venus the three objects which he has used in his night escapades struggling for the girls' love: lucida funalia (torches), vectis (jemmies), and arcus. The last words has been puzzling the scholars for centuries. Many took offence at the transmitted text and offered conjectures of their own. Some, however, defended arcus using different arguemtns, for instance that arcus refers to bows and arrows as weapons of the lascivious night-reveller. Also the author of this article retains arcus in the text. The context and grammatical construction let assume that also this noun denotes a tool of a burglar, preferably a drill driven by a fiddle-bow. Such instruments were use by carpenters, joiners, and surgeons. Apart from this, gigantic drill-bows were known among military machines. These were frequently applied in sieges. Horace might have seen descriptions and drawings of them in military handbooks which he presumably read in order to prepare himself for his short and rather inglorious career as an officer in the army of Caesar's murderers. For Romans without military experience who suddenly obtained a high rank at war this was a typical way of making good their shortcomings. The parallel between the siege of a town and the attack upon the beloved girl's house must be regarded as a poetic exaggeration; the reader should be amused by an impracticable idea. Furthermore, a possible connection between Horace's poem and the Heracles of Euripides is pointed out here for the first time. In Heracles 942-6 the hero, driven insane by Lyssa's work, asks for his bow, his arrows and siege instruments to take Mycenae, the fortress of his tormentor Eurystheus. In fact he brakes into his own bedroom and kills his spouse and his son.