A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter C

cursus honorum

Latin Phrases
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

The course of honors; the sequential ladder of political offices through which a Roman citizen advanced in public life.

Detailed Definition
Cursus honorum describes the structured progression of Roman political career from quaestor through aedile, praetor, and consul. In poetry, it appears both as a description of political ambition and as an ironic counterpoint to the alternative life of philosophical retreat or artistic dedication. Poets invoke it when exploring the relationship between public duty and private desire, ambition and contentment, the active and the contemplative life.
Example
Example in poetry:
Horace's Odes reflect an ironic distance from the cursus honorum — he chose the literary life over the political career, making poetry his form of public service; Virgil's portrait of Augustus in the Aeneid legitimizes the emperor's power partly by showing that his cursus honorum was divinely ordained from the very beginning of Roman history; A satirist like Juvenal maps the cursus honorum with savage irony — showing how the path of honor has become a path of corruption, flattery, and moral self-destruction; A student writing about ambition, career, and the shape of a life might use cursus honorum as a structuring concept — the poem tracing the successive stages of an ascent and questioning whether the summit reached was worth the climbing; Andrew Marvell's "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland" meditates on Cromwell's violent cursus honorum — the necessity and the cost of the path through destruction to power
Additional Notes
Cursus honorum literally means the course of honors and described the mandatory sequence of magistracies through which a Roman politician must pass: quaestor (financial administrator), aedile (public works and games), praetor (judicial officer), and consul (the highest regular magistracy), with the censorship and dictatorship as exceptional offices. Students should note that the cursus honorum was a deliberately paced structure: minimum ages were set for each office, and the sequence could not be skipped. This created a system in which the political career was itself a kind of poem with a prescribed structure. In poetry, the cursus honorum appears both as a model of structured ambition and as a satirical target — the hollow career of the man who achieves all the offices while missing all the substance of a good life. Related terms include the vita activa (the active life) versus vita contemplativa (the contemplative life), otium (leisure for intellectual pursuits), and negotium (public business).
Also Known As
course of honors ladder of offices sequence of magistracies
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