Myths that we think we definitely know could appear in differing versions in the ancient world. One example is the marriage of Venus, Goddess of love, to Vulcan, the lame craftsman-God who forged Jupiter’s thunderbolts for him. Interestingly, they are shown as married to one another in the Odyssey, but not in the Iliad, a small but interesting snippet of potential evidence in the debate over whether the two poems were created by the same author. Anyway, by the time of Ovid and Augustus, and in Vigil’s Aeneid, the two were firmly spliced. Hear Ovid’s account of an adulterous affair between Venus and Mars, the glamorous war-God, here. (Could the trouble that Ovid got into with Augustus, leading to his exile to the back of beyond, have had something to do with the fact that the Emperor was campaigning against the looseness of morals in Rome, and that he claimed Venus as his many-times-great-Grandmother?)
In the Metamorphoses, Ovid retells the story of love and loss with his usual grace and charm hear the passage in the original Latin and follow in English here. Later, he will deal with the violent end of Orpheus, who renounces the love of women in his sadness and is torn to pieces by angry women in a Bacchanalian fury. In the illustration, by John William Waterhouse, nymphs find his head and his lyre, which have floated to the island of Lesbos.
Charles Baudelaire, a great poet of the modern era, turns like many others to the literature of the ancient world for an image which expresses his feelings about his artistic predicament. Hear his poem, “Les Plaintes d’un Icare”, read by Béatrice Damamme-Gilbert and follow in English here.
Although the myth of Icarus is now very familiar to us, it may have received less attention in the ancient world before Ovid celebrated it in his Metamorphoses. The earliest surviving literary references do not date from much before his time, and the difficulty of finding representations from earlier Greek vase painting may be another indication. You can hear Ovid’s treatment in the original and follow in English here.
A French poet, writing during the Renaissance, wants an example to illustrate how his travels have left him with an aching nostalgia for his home near the Loire. He finds two, and they come, not from his contemporary world, but from the myths of the Greeks and Romans – Odysseus, who had such a difficult journey home from the Trojan war, and Jason, who went to the edge of the known world to find the golden fleece.
Why does the poet, Joachim Du Bellay, turn as if by second nature to the ancient world for his material? Because, like most western poets and writers from the Renaissance up until the first half of the twentieth century, he was steeped in ancient Roman and Greek culture and literature, and fundamentally influenced by them. This creates a challenge if you want to know and understand “modern” European writers like Du Bellay. but, like all but a tiny minority in the UK today, you have never studied an ancient language or read any of the Latin and Greek classics in the original. One purpose of Pantheon Poets is to offer you a way to bridge this gap. Part of the difficulty is that ancient languages work in very different ways to modern ones, and rules governing how poetry was written are also very different and hard to convey in translation to a modern reader. So Pantheon Poets offers ancient poetry with the original text, an English translation and a recorded performance – as ancient poetry was most often composed with performance, rather than silent reading, in mind. Taken together, these offer a much more authentic encounter with great literature from the ancient world than that available purely from modern literary translations.
Hear Du Bellay’s poem “Heureux qui comme Ulysse”, one of the most beloved in the French language, in the original, and follow in English, here
Horace describes a welcome-home party for the homecoming of Numida, probably a soldier, from Spain. Horace makes it very clear that there is no shortage of drink, and that love (or sex, at least) is definitely in the offing; he himself, a little incongruously, seems more of an onlooker than a partygoer. The floating couples in the illustration come from a Pompeiian fresco. Hear the poem in the original Latin and follow in English here.
In Apollo’s newly-dedicated temple, Horace prays for the things that matter to him. The dedication has been an important public occasion, but his poem has a very personal feel, as he looks ahead to an old age to which he is resigned – provided he retains health, his mental faculties and the ability to write and enjoy poetry. Hear Horace’s original Latin and follow in English here.
In the illustration , a fresco from Pompeii, a cithara player cradles her instrument.
Diana and Apollo, brother and sister, were both associated with the bow; Diana as Goddess of the hunt, Apollo because he could be the bringer of sickness and death, an attribute with which he appears at the opening of Homer’s Iliad when the Greek leaders refuse to restore his priest’s daughter to her father. Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, dedicated a temple to Apollo in 28 BCE, which very likely prompted this piece; Horace might well also have felt a particular affinity with Apollo as the God of Poetry. The illustration shows a sacrifice to Diana from the House of the Vetti at Pompeii. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
In an ode in which Horace is referencing a poem by Alcaeus, one of his most revered early Greek models, he not only commends wine – in moderation – but also reminds us of its dangers. As an example, he gives the wedding of the legendary hero and friend of Theseus, Pirithous, at which the centaurs who had been invited got drunk and molested the bride, triggering a pitched battle.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
In a piece which seems to have been written at a dangerous point some years before Horace launched his first three books of odes in 23 BCE, he turns for help to the Goddess Fortuna, while recognising that the fortunes that she has in store for Rome after a long period of civil wars could be bad as well as good. This ode seems as deeply and personally felt as any that Horace wrote, and is surely no mere literary exercise.
In the illustration, from a mediaeval manuscript of the Carmina Burana, Fortuna governs the cycle of life.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.