The admirable new commentary on the first book of Horace's Odes by Nisbet and Hubbard opens with the intriguing sentence, ‘The Odes of Horace are too familiar to be easily understood.’ In the opinion of the present writer, Carm. III. 1 is a fine example of what Mr Nisbet had in mind. None of Horace's poems can be more familiar than the first ‘Roman’ ode, and there is a huge literature dealing with all the Roman odes. Yet some obvious questions remain unsolved and even unasked. Part 1 of this paper was directly inspired by Mr Nisbet's intimation that students of Horace have become inattentive readers of Horace. Both the question there raised and my answer to it will probably be controversial. Part II is a reopening of a case that I presented in an earlier volume of Yale Classical Studies. In that publication I raised objections to the identification of Necessitas (III. 1. 14) with ‘Death the Leveler’. Since my objections appear to have escaped the notice of editors and commentators hitherto, I am presenting them once more in a revised and expanded form.