Horace opens his second book of odes with a resounding tribute to a fellow writer, Gaius Asinius Pollio. Pollio was what we sometimes call a Renaissance man. Until 39 BCE, he was a major political and military figure, who held the consulship and earned a triumph by his military success: thereafter, he was distinguished as a tragic playwright before picking up the threads of a history of the civil wars which his predecessor, Sallust, had died without completing. Though Horace demurs, the poem is a fine example of his ability to deal vividly in lyric verse with subject-matter usually regarded as the domain of epic poetry. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
A historian of the civil wars
