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By Horace’s day, the paraklausithuron – a would-be lover’s complaint outside a locked door – was an established poetical theme. We should probably take this bravura variation on the theme, with all its clues and puzzles about the scenario that Horace hints at without spelling out, as literature rather than autobiography. “Lyce”, a nickname that Horace uses in two other poems,  carries a flavour of loose living: there is no particular narrative continuity between the three pieces to suggest that we are dealing with the same Lyce in all.

Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.

Is the Roman to whom this poem is addressed, blameless for the crimes of the City but bound to atone for them, Augustus? Mentioned by name or not, this poem, with its dual emphasis on piety and rebuilding temples contrasted with the loose living of the current generation would immediately have made an audience think of him, since civic building and moral reform were high among his public priorities in the years following the defeat of Cleopatra and Mark Antony at the battle of Actium. 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.

In his longest ode, the fourth in a series of six weighty Alcaics reviewing the social, political, moral and military condition of the world of Rome, Horace claims divine inspiration when he uses the example of the war between the Gods and the Titans in Greek mythology to assert that revolt against just authority is unwise and will lead to retribution. The lessons for Rome in the 20s BCE, when Octavian/Augustus, was consolidating his power, are not hard to see.

On an Attic bell-crater of circa 470 BCE, Zeus fells the Titan Porphyrion with a thunderbolt.

Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.

We are in heaven. It is some time since the fall of Troy – Romulus, descendant of Trojan refugees from the fall of the city, has founded Rome and been rescued from mortality by his father, Mars, the God of War. In one of a series of poems at the beginning of Horace’s third book of Odes on Rome as it is, and (according to the moral and political programme of the new Emperor, Augustus) as it should be, Horace makes the point that Rome enjoys the divine seal of approval – her founder sits in Olympus as one of the Gods (and is reserving a place there for the Emperor  Augustus). In the illustration, an ancient Roman bronze, the she-wolf suckles Romulus and his brother Remus.

Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.

Anticipating literary immortality, Horace imagines himself as a swan whose song will be heard all over the known world. Hear his Latin and follow in English here as he concludes his second book of Odes.

This Roman fresco of Leda and the swan was found in Pompeii in 2018.

In a poem swearing friendship to his patron Maecenas, Horace declares that not even the fabled Chimera could tear them apart.

Hear this moving poem and follow in English here.

Horace is telling his rich friend Grosphus about the things that money cannot buy: peace of mind is the main one, but he also reminds Grosphus that exemption from ageing and death is not for sale either. The example he uses of age is the myth of Tithonus. He was a beautiful youth with whom Eos, winged goddess of the dawn, fell in love. He was a mortal, but Eos successfully begged the Gods to grant him immortality. They did, but, unfortunately, she forgot also to ask for eternal youth, meaning that Tithonus’s fate was to grow ever older and older, but never to die.

Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.

When the first three books of Horace’s Odes were published in 23 BCE, the first Emperor, Augustus, was leading an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to bring the wealthy Roman elite back to the austere standards of life which laid the foundations for the greatness of the city. Horace, not necessarily  insincerely, included more than one poem in his collection which chimed with this theme. Whether he would really have been happy if the law had required him to roof his house with nothing but turf is perhaps open to question.

The illustration is the oath of the Horatii by Jean-Louis David.

Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.