I don't have access to a dictionary at the moment so this is a bit off the cuff and may not be 100% correct.

egeo - need/lack (takes the ablative 'pane' (bread)).
'mellitis potiore placentis' is in the ablative as well.

Dear SeiTT,

this is hard to understand indeed. My solution:

egeo iam pane, potiore mellis placentis.

In the line before this, Horatius says, he does not like a kind of cake (libum), that is offered for the Gods, this is the critics against the Roman religion. An educated roman thought in those times, that their religious life was far from the one, that hm, would have been appreciated by their Gods -- because of the temples, statues, and all the complicated rituals etc. You can read in many writings (Tacitus and his Germania is a good place to start from, though Tacitus addresses the romans indirectly -- by showing the religion of the germans) that the romans don't adore their gods in the way they should (and once did), because they should express their adoration in the most primitive way, like the germans, and other barbarian tribes.

In the next line, after detesting the religious life of his contemporaries, Horatius criticizes their way of life. He writes that he already (iam) misses (egeo) the bread (pane), and then tells us, what kind of bread: better, stodgy, more delicious (potiore in ablative, like the pane) than the honey cake (mellitis placentis, also in ablative, because this is an ablativus comparationis). This honey cake is the symbol of the effeminate roman high society -- I think.

I hope I could help!

Péter

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Note added at 1 nap8 óra (2008-09-30 21:09:56 GMT)
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For Joseph:

I have never written, that Romans deemed their religion detestful. Read my post again. And Bringmann writes in Topoi in der taciteischen Germania (Göttingen, 1989, 59-78), that in that time educated people thought what I wrote. Verrius Flaccus, Julius Hyginus and Nigidius Figulus are -- let's be honest -- not the most important writers of their time. I know only Julius Hyginus. Where did he wrote, that the Romans adore their Gods properly (or anything about the religious life)? (And is there any important info in Nigidius Figulus' fragments about the religious life of the romans?)

About the unproper beliefs and religious things:

Cicero De div. 2, 51: "How can two haruspices, upon meeting, not
laugh at each other?"

Tacitus, Germania 9.: The Germans, however, do not consider it consistent with the grandeur of celestial beings to confine the gods within walls, or to liken them to the form of any human countenance. They consecrate woods and groves, and they apply the names of deities to the abstraction which they see only in spiritual worship. (This passage is clearly the critics of the romans, though they are not mentioned.)

Suetonius, Julius Caesar 77: "To such a pitch of arrogance did he proceed, that when a soothsayer announced to him the unfavourable omen, that the entrails of a victim offered for sacrifice were without a heart, he said, 'The entrails will be more favourable when I please [...]'"

Cicero, De nat. deor. 2, 28: For we are made acquainted with the forms, age, dress, and equipment of the gods, as also with their descents, marriages, relationships, and everything in them that has been reduced to the likeness of human frailty. Thus, they are brought before us with their minds a prey to disturbance, for we hear of their desires and sorrows and angers, and they have even, as the stories relate, had experience of wars and battles, not only, as in Homer, when they protected on one side or the other two opposing armies, but they have also waged their own personal wars, as with the Titans and Giants. These are things to which it is in the highest degree foolish to give either utterance or credit, and they abound in futility and the most utter triviality.

See Ovid and the persiflage of the apotheosis of Julius Caesar or Romulus, and the "mocking" at the Gods (in all of his ouvre).