#think H would have appreciated the numeric resonance of 1.24 to 4.12 as well. i mean positionally perhaps he did

[tautline-hitch]

also realized while rereading Aeneid 6 that the way Horace uses Orpheus-summoning-Eurydice to address Virgil in Odes 1.24 really matches nothing in Georgics 4 so closely as it matches Aeneas's plea to the sibyl:

si potuit Manis accersere coniugis Orpheus Threicia fretus cithara fidibusque canoris (Aen. 6.119–20)

"If Orpheus availed to summon his wife's shade, strong in his Thracian lyre and tuneful strings..." (Fairclough)

quid si Threicio blandius Orpheo auditam moderere arboribus fidem num vanae redeat sanguis imagini...? (Odes 1.24.13–15)

"What if you could play more charmingly than Thracian Orpheus the lyre once heeded by the trees? Would blood return to the empty wraith...?" (Rudd)

the conditional, the epithet, fidem / fidibus, the fact that V cuts off the question (the next line moves off to Castor & Pollux) but H completes the thought (a very Horatian 'well, and?').......

thinking about what this means in light of dates (probably just that H was reading Aeneid 6 in early draft, which doesn't seem implausible at all; less likely but more interesting, V responding to H responding to V). but also thinking about Odes 4.12 again. what it means to address the dead man whom you instructed not to mourn too long for the dead. and, because This Is How Literature Works—at least if you insist on striking your head on the stars—to keep doing it after you yourself have died.

... Eurydicen vox ipsa et frigida lingua, a miseram Eurydicen! anima fugiente vocabat Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripae. (Geo. 4.525–27)

Eurydice that voice and cold tongue called Ah poor Eurydice with dying breath Eurydice the riverbanks returned