Why does Horace couple (no pun intended) the name of Glycera with those of the goddess of love and the god of commerce? I think we can guess. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
Horace is ribbing an acquaintance, Iccius, for abandoning philosophy in the hope of getting rich quick from military campaigning. Horace’s matter-of-fact acceptance of imperial ambition, slavery and military conquest is completely normal for him and his contemporaries, but highlights some of the less attractive aspects of the times and society in which he lived.
This boy with perfumed hair is Zeus’s favourite, Ganymede, from a 5th century BCE Attic ceramic.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
Horace pays reverence to the divine favour that (he says) he enjoys from the Muses, while asserting his poetic skill and gift for innovation in a small masterpiece which he presents as a floral garland for a dear Friend, Lamia.
Hear Horace’s original Latin and follow in English here.
In this Ode, a dramatic monologue, Horace’s protagonist is keeping the peace at a vaguely Greek drinking-party that threatens to degenerate into a brawl. He distracts his companions by ribbing one of the company about a current love-affair – with a woman who, in the speaker’s opinion at least, is a spectacularly bad choice.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
There is perhaps some friendly exaggeration in the contrast that Horace draws between his own wine-drinking opportunities and those of his eminent friend and patron, Maecenas, but he offers the best he has, along with his affection and a flattering memory of a great occasion. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
The illustration, from Herculaneum, is an advertisement for a wine-bar, showing the prices of the vintages on offer.
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.
Horace usually avoids the great traditional themes and stories of epic poetry, but here he uses the new lyric style that he has developed from Greek predecessors to create an innovative poem about the Trojan war.
In a fresco from Pompeii, Helen boards a ship for Troy.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
Roman boxers fought with gloves designed to inflict the maximum damage on one another: the cestus, heavy leather strapping studded with lead around knuckles and forearms. In the games that Aeneas holds in Book 5 of the Aeneid in memory of his father, Anchises, Entellus, a great athlete but now old and slow, takes on Dares, the fast and nimble young champion.
The illustration shows the aftermath of the bout in a Roman mosaic. Learn the significance of the bull, and hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English, here.
Aeneas has spotted Helen of Troy, whose elopement with Paris caused the war and the destruction of Troy, lying low in the burning ruins. He has an angry impulse to kill her, but now his divine mother, Venus, intervenes to tell him that the city has fallen by the will of the Gods and that he must go home and save his family.
Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here.