Boethius’s reminder that there are higher truths which transcend the turmoil of human life seems apt to the age of Covid. See the poem here and the illustrated blog here.
Callimachus, the great Greek elegist, remembers his friend Heraclitus, a poet over the seas, and his nightingales (his poetry): hear the Greek and follow in English here. On one of his very best days the Victorian, William Johnson Cory, wrote the verse translation below.
They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed;
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.
As the Aeneid slowly approaches its climax, a new combatant enters the strife between Aeneas’s Trojans and the Latins, led by Turnus. She is Camilla, a powerful huntress and warrior beloved of Diana, the Goddess of the chase: sadly, she is foredoomed to die in the battle. Today’s extract tells of the strange circumstances under which her father dedicated her to the Goddess as a baby. Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here.
Today’s new poem is the famous first appearance of the saying “carpe diem”, early in Horace’s Odes. It means “seize the day”, doesn’t it? Yes, and so many other possible things that it is ultimately untranslatable. Read more, hear the Latin and follow in English here.
Close to the beginning of Horace’s first book of Odes, this ode is the first in which he develops the theme of carpe diem: spring is lovely, and the right time to sacrifice to the country God Faunus, but time is short and death inevitable. All sombre enough, but this piece has some hidden meanings. Sestius and Horace are probably old acquaintances, and there may be some little jokes here at his expense – along with an implied compliment to Augustus and his readiness to let bygones be bygones. Read more, hear Horace’s poem performed in Latin and follow in English here.