In the last poem of his first book of Odes, Horace celebrates with a drink in the shade of a closely tangled vine, served by a single slave. Both wear myrtle crowns for the occasion, chosen for their simplicity, as Horace stresses. The garland that the beautiful Antinous wears in this bust from the British Museum is of ivy, sacred to Bacchus/Dionysus.
Hear Horace’s poem in his original Latin and follow in English here.
In detached mood, Horace takes a look at the predicament of a once-popular courtesan who has begun to lose her looks, and with them, the attention of the virile young lovers she craves. The illustration is a Roman funerary portrait from the second century CE.
Hear Horace’s original Latin and follow in English translation here.
Maybe ten years after the publication of his great three first books of Odes in 2023 BCE, Horace finds himself unexpectedly, and perhaps unwillingly, returning to the genre. He has been invited by Augustus to do so as a contribution to the glory of the new, but now very well established, imperial system, and invitations from that quarter are hard to refuse. The purpose of the second Ode in Horace’s new, fourth, book is primarily to celebrate Augustus by looking forward to a victory over a troublesome German tribe, the Sygambri, but he also takes the opportunity to put on record his critical appreciation of another great poet, Pindar. That, rather than dutifully fulsome praise of the Emperor, is what primarily makes this an attractive poem to a modern readership. Nevertheless, it is a good example of how the imperial regime approached establishing and augmenting its prestige through the arts, and the metre, singing and dancing along in Sapphics, make the piece attractive to listen to throughout. The triumph in the illustration is Caesar’s, one of a series painted by the Renaissance master, Mantegna. now in the royal collection at Hampton Court.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
Are the Olympian Gods – if they exist – too remote to take an interest in human affairs, as the followers of the Philosopher Epicurus thought? An awe-inspiring natural event causes Horace to think again about his beliefs. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
In this wall painting from Herculaneum, Zeus and Hera celebrate their marriage; see photo credits for licensing details.
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses there is often a sharp contrast between the elegance and charm of his style and the grim stories he tells. Book six, for example, has a sequence of episodes showing that it is unwise to cross either the Goddess Latona or Apollo and Artemis, her twin children by Jupiter. For performing flawlessly in a weaving contest against Artemis, Arachne has been turned into a spider. For belittling Latona’s divinity and her prowess as a mother, Niobe has been turned to stone by grief, having seen her fourteen children killed by Apollo and Artemis, and her husband, Amphion, die by suicide. In a grimly comic touch, an onlooker then tells the story of a group of peasants who were turned into frogs by Latona for denying her water. Now another recalls, almost in passing, the forfeit paid by the satyr and master aulos-player Marsyas for losing a musical contest: Apollo, the winner, skinned him alive.
‘quid me mihi detrahis?’ inquit;
‘a! piget, a! non est’ clamabat ‘tibia tanti!’
clamanti cutis est summos direpta per artus,
nec quicquam nisi vulnus erat; cruor undique manat …
“Why are you pulling me apart?” he cries, “Aaah! I wish I hadn’t done it! Aaah! No flute is worth as much as this!” he yelled. And as he did so, his skin was ripped off past the ends of his limbs and he was nothing but one big wound, and everywhere the blood flows … ”
Hear Ovid’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.
Catullus’s suggestion for solving problems that may arise when an older man takes a young bride is to throw him off a bridge into a swamp. Hear Catullus’s Latin and follow in English here. The illustration is from a fresco showing a wedding in the first century BCE.
Where and how did we get hold of Catullus? There are clues in this photo of the opening page of the Oxford text.
On the right, the footnotes above the line give details of ancient writers who quoted from the two poems above. There are a lot, which is useful for textual scholars and shows how well-known Catullus was in antiquity. The notes below the line are about places where the various manuscripts that we depend on for our text of Catullus have wording which differs from that chosen by the editor for the Oxford text. There are a lot of these too, considering that they deal with only thirteen lines of poetry, and this implies that the strength of the manuscript evidence is not particularly great. That is borne out by the left-hand page, which describes the manuscript evidence itself. This amounts to four manuscript copies of Catullus made as late as the fourteenth century. They all lead back to one manuscript, known as V – for Verona, because it existed there around the end of the first millennium. That manuscript was lost centuries ago, but it is the one and only known line of transmission through which Catullus, copied and re-copied many times with varying degrees of accuracy, survived from antiquity. If the Verona manuscript had been lost before, rather than after, being copied, we would have found ourselves with no complete Catullus poems except one (no. 62, a wedding-hymn, which survived separately in an anthology), in other words, without Lesbia and her sparrow and her kisses. It is a chilling thought.
Our last post was the poem that some commentators think was the first that Catullus wrote to Lesbia. Now we present the poem that may mark the end of the affair in bitterness and insult, written in a metre (Sapphics, developed on Lesbos more than five hundred years earlier by the poetess Sappho) that Catullus uses nowhere except in these two pieces. Perhaps as a final insult, perhaps because they are good and very tolerant friends, his messengers are two men who are used to some pretty gross treatment at his hands.
Hear Catullus’s Latin and follow in English here.
