Horace: Odes IV and Carmen Saeculare (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics)

Cyanippus, Zeuxippus and Troilus, with Polycrates added as a coda: τοῖς μὲν πέδα κάλλεος αἰέν | καὶ σύ, Πολύκρατες, κλέος ἄφθιτον ἑξεῖς | ὡς κὰτ ἀοιδὰν καὶ ἐμὸν κλέος ‘These have a share in beauty always: you too, Polycrates, will have undying fame as song and my fame can give it’ (tr. Campbell). But at least Polycrates does receive his praise, abbreviated as it is, while Censorinus gets nothing that could go by that name.
Kovacs 2009 has argued for a lacuna, in which the actual praise would have appeared, before the final couplet, a proposition that would cut the knot and normalize what may rather always have been a strange encomium. He elicits support from the fact that the MSS are unanimous in giving us a 34-line poem, which therefore offends against Meineke's Law. August Meineke in his 1834 edition divided the poems up into quatrains, so applying to his edition his observation that, with the exception of 4.8, all of the Odes, stichic and strophic poems alike, consist of a total of lines divisible by four. Those who have otherwise attempted to remove this anomaly have resorted to one of two procedures: remove six lines or remove two. The task of removing two lines is a relatively straightforward one. Line 17 (see n.)