Horace has had a narrow escape: a tree on his estate has fallen and nearly crushed him. It was a serious matter for him – afterwards he celebrated his good luck on the anniversary of the incident every year – but he also uses the opportunity to heap half-humorous curses on the man who planted it. He reflects, rightly then and now, that you can manage risks that you know, but others may still catch you unawares. Then, pivoting to what he might have seen in Hades had he gone there, he evokes Alcaeus and Sappho (pictured) bringing everything to a halt with the beauty of their song. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
Horace has met a young woman, fiercely attractive and extremely unsettling. He is definitely interested, but appeals to the Gods of love and wine, Bacchus and Venus, to let him take matters more slowly and with a level head.
The illustration, from Pompeii, shows Venus and her lover, Mars.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
Jupiter has saved Aeneas’s fleet from burning and his father Anchises appears with an invitation to visit him in the Elysian fields. The illustration, by William Blake Richmond, shows Anchises in his younger days when he first met Aeneas’s mother, the Goddess Venus. Hear the poem here.
Horace shows respect and affection in this invitation-poem to his patron Maecenas and pays a compliment to the future Emperor Augustus into the bargain.
Hear the Latin and follow in English here.
Catullus thought that Suffenus was a dud as a poet but – against form – was prepared to make allowances for the inability that we all have, as humans, to see ourselves as we are. The illustration shows that even real talent may get carried away by its own publicity …
Hear the Latin and follow in English here. The photograph of Oscar Wilde is by Sarony.
In Apollo’s newly-dedicated temple, Horace prays for the things that matter to him. The dedication has been an important public occasion, but his poem has a very personal feel, as he looks ahead to an old age to which he is resigned – provided he retains health, his mental faculties and the ability to write and enjoy poetry. Hear Horace’s original Latin and follow in English here.
In the illustration , a fresco from Pompeii, a cithara player cradles her instrument.
In a piece which seems to have been written at a dangerous point some years before Horace launched his first three books of odes in 23 BCE, he turns for help to the Goddess Fortuna, while recognising that the fortunes that she has in store for Rome after a long period of civil wars could be bad as well as good. This ode seems as deeply and personally felt as any that Horace wrote, and is surely no mere literary exercise.
In the illustration, from a mediaeval manuscript of the Carmina Burana, Fortuna governs the cycle of life.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.