The English poet John Westbrook turns his attention from classical subjects to more contemporary issues: world population and the environment. See his “7,000,000,001” here.
The illustration by Emil Keyser is entitled “Expulsion from the Garden of Eden”.
Many Roman writers, including Propertius, were all but forgotten for much of the two thousand years that separates them from the present day. Westbrook wrote a sonnet about the process, part labour-of-love by a few dedicated scholars, part pure luck, through which Propertius’s work has survived: read it here.
Horace’s beautiful poem advises Dellius to make the best of life while it lasts.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
The lovers (or spouses) Asterie and Gyges are parted for the winter, and Gyges’s landlady is threatening to tell tales on him to her husband if he will not sleep with her – she sends a go-between to remind him that similar things happened to others in myth – not only the hero Bellerophon, but also Peleus, the father of Achilles. Asterie need not worry about Gyges’s faithfulness, as it turns out, but Horace feels the need to offer a word of advice to her as well.
In the illustration, Peleus struggles to maintain a hold on Thetis, Achilles’s mother, who was a goddess and a shape-shifter.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
See how Mount Soracte stands white with the deep snow … this is perhaps Horace’s most benign and attractive version of the carpe diem theme, with the stress on wine, warmth and love, rather than the inexorable journey to the grave. See and hear the poem here.
“The more a man denies himself gain, the more he will get from the gods.,” Horace tells his audience. This is all in line with the central teachings of Epicurean philosophy: aim for sufficiency and the absence of discomfort, rather than excess which arouses envy and wealth which brings care. The life which Horace represents as so frugal is none other than his own, led on his famous Sabine farm, a present from his wealthy patron and dear friend Maecenas, to whom the poem is addressed. Talking down the value of the gift to the extent that Horace does here could be seen as tactless, but, clearly, the warmth and closeness of their personal bond could cope with it. One of the examples that Horace quotes of wealth causing trouble is the story of Danae, to seduce whom Jupiter turned into a shower of gold, fathering the hero Perseus, shown with Andromeda, whom he rescued from a sea-monster, in this fresco from Pompeii.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.