Abstract

Stephanie West suggested in a note in this journal, 280) that the presence of an anecdote in Lodovico Guicciardini's sixteenth-century L'Hore di Ricreatione furnishes a parallel for the fable alluded to by Horace, Ep. 1.2.42–3: ‘Rusticus exspectat dum defluat amnis: at ille / labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum.’ The parallels, and a third from nineteenth-century Sicily, allow her to imagine a tale, ‘part of Italian traditional lore’, already extant in Horace's time and presumably transmitted in rural regions down to Guicciardini and the Sicilian story-teller.