Today’s post is a poem by Westbrook on Propertius and his work’s journey from Augustan Rome to the present day. Read it here.
See the illustrated blog post here.
A middle-aged Horace attempts, in the last Book of his Odes, to seduce Phyllis, who will, he says, be his last love. He just might be describing a real attraction, with the names changed, or be reworking a Greek model as a purely literary exercise: we will never know, but the poetry is beautiful, and vintage Horace. Hear his Latin and follow in a new English translation here.
The illustration is a Greek girl, by the classicising Victorian painter, Alma-Tadema.
Listen to Yeats’s melancholy and beautiful poem “The Wild Swans at Coole” read by Harry McFarland here.