No one can read the odes without being struck with certain features wherein they differ from his other works. One of these is his constant employment of the Olympian mythology. Whatever view we may hold as to their appearance in the _Aeneid_, there can he no doubt that in the _Odes_ these deities have a purely fictitious character. With the single exception of Jupiter, the eternal Father, without second or equal even among the Olympian choir, [49] whom he is careful not to name, none of his allusions imply, but on the contrary implicitly disown, any belief in their existence. In the satires and epistles he never employs this conventional ornament. The same thing is true of his language to Augustus. Assuming the poet's license, he depicts him as the son of Maia, [50] the scion of kindly deities, [51] and a living denizen of the ethereal mansions. [52] But in the epistles he throws off this adulatory tone, and accosts the Caesar in a way befitting their mutual relations; for in declaring that altars are raised to him and men swear by his name, [53] he is not using flattery, but stating a fact. Another point of difference is his fondness in the Odes for commonplaces, _e.g._ the degeneracy of the age, [54] the necessity of enjoying the moment, [55] which he enforces with every variety of illustration. Neither of these was the result of genuine conviction. On the former he gives us his real view (a very noble and rational one) in the third Satire of the first book, [56] and in the _Ars Poetica_, as different as possible from the desponding pessimism of ode and epode. And the Epicurean maxims which in them he offers as the sum of wisdom, are in his _Epistles_ exchanged for their direct opposites: [56] "Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum, Sperne voluptates; nocet empta dolore voluptas." It is clear then that in the _Odes_, for the most part, he is an artist not a preacher. We must not look to them for his deepest sentiments, but for such, and such only, as admitted an effective lyric treatment.