In an unconventional but moving ode in which the speaker is a drowned sailor, pleas for burial are combined with reflections on the inevitability of death. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here; see the illustrated blog post here.
Horace has had an unexpected encounter with a wolf: it has run from him although it is a monster and he is unarmed. Horace puts this down to the upright life he leads and the honest love he feels for his mistress, Lalage. Hear the Latin and follow in English here. The lovely wolf photograph is by Gary Kramer of the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
After Dido’s banquet in the royal palace of Carthage, Aeneas has agreed to her request to tell the story of the fall of Troy and the years of his wanderings with his Trojan comrades-in-arms. He has just embarked on the episode of the Trojan horse, and is recalling how King Priam, and the Trojans were ticked into bringing it into the city by Sinon, who claims to hate the Greeks and narrowly to have escaped death at their hands as a human sacrifice. In fact, he is a Greek agent, and a very skilful one.
The illustration is a first-century CE wall painting from Pompeii, showing the Trojans bringing the horse into their city.
Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here.
Odysseus (seen here on a later visit to the underworld) and his companions are released from the wooden horse within the walls of Troy and the scene is set for the fall of the city. Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here.
In the first elegy in his first Book, the first century BCE poet Tibullus has been extolling the virtues of a simple farming life in the country to Delia, his difficult mistress. By way of a sentimental imaginary deathbed scene, he draws the threads together with a reminder of the inevitability of ageing and death, and suggests that he and she should enjoy love and each other while the times still allow.
Hear Tibullus’s Latin and follow in English here.
The illustration is the opening of a fifth-century manuscript in the Vatican of the Eclogues of Virgil, another poet who sang the virtues of country living there and in his work on farming, the Georgics.
Horace’s poem is addressed to his friend Septimius and praises the attractions of Tarentum on the heel of Italy, to which Septimius seems to have a connection. Hear it with a translation here.
Illustration: Maria, Testa di donna (Taranto), CC BY-SA 2.0
Horace makes a sweet, epigrammatic poem on a theme from the Greek models he so admires. Chloe wants to continue to stick close to her mother, but needs to realise that the time for love and adulthood is upon her.
Hear Horace’s Latin performed in the original and follow in English translation here.