In a mysterious little poem, Horace warns his friend, Aelius, that there will be rain on the following day so he and his farm workers should get in some dry firewood and plan for a day off. The forecaster is a crow, which to the ancients was proverbial both as being long-lived, and as a predictor of rain.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
Illustration: Dosseman CC by-SA 4.
“The more a man denies himself gain, the more he will get from the gods.,” Horace tells his audience. This is all in line with the central teachings of Epicurean philosophy: aim for sufficiency and the absence of discomfort, rather than excess which arouses envy and wealth which brings care. The life which Horace represents as so frugal is none other than his own, led on his famous Sabine farm, a present from his wealthy patron and dear friend Maecenas, to whom the poem is addressed. Talking down the value of the gift to the extent that Horace does here could be seen as tactless, but, clearly, the warmth and closeness of their personal bond could cope with it. One of the examples that Horace quotes of wealth causing trouble is the story of Danae, to seduce whom Jupiter turned into a shower of gold, fathering the hero Perseus, shown with Andromeda, whom he rescued from a sea-monster, in this fresco from Pompeii.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
An old woman is insisting on chasing boys who are more her daughter’s age and cramping the style of the young girls on whom she is forcing her company. Whether Horace’s poem is a piece of pure comedy or something more, the moralising tone, albeit light-hearted, is in line with the return the traditional moral standards which Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome, hoped to reintroduce to the (sometimes freewheeling) upper classes. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
The illustration comes from a Roman sculpture of an old woman.
The mental process by which Horace makes the link between the power of poetry and the story of the Danaids is a little mysterious, but the two are narrated in the first and second halves of this piece. All but one of the fifty daughters of Danaus, acting on his orders, murdered their husbands on their wedding night. We first find them in Hades, where their eternal punishment is to try to fill a huge jar with water, only for it to pour forever out through a hole in the bottom. The implied message to Lyde, the girl whom the speaker in the poem is pursuing, includes both a carrot and a stick: if she complies, she will be merciful and kind, like the one Danaid who did not commit the crime; if she is cruel, she will deserve some punishment for the hardness of her heart. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
It is 24 BCE, and Horace calls on Augustus’s family, and Rome in general, to welcome him on return from campaigning in Spain. The first half of the poem refers to one reason to be particularly glad: Augustus had been ill, and rumours were even circulating that he might actually have died. A further reason, pictured in the second half, is more personal to Horace. He is free to celebrate at home with wine and female company, free from the fear and the risk of renewed civil strife that might have followed Augustus’s death. The poem ends with an oblique reference, which no Roman would have missed, to the battle of Philippi. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
In the classical world, being Greek did not mean living in Greece: Greek cities had been founded throughout Asia Minor, as far west as Italy and what is now France, and as far south as Cyrene in North Africa. When Cyrene’s King Arkesilas was the winning owner in the chariot race at Delphi in 462 BCE, the famous Theban poet, Pindar, wrote his longest and most elaborate poem to commemorate the victory. This was much more than a sporting event: the games were a sacred occasion, and, to Pindar and his contemporaries, success was less a matter of luck and hard training than of divine favour and the aristocratic qualities which could come only from a long and noble pedigree. Pindar usually included a myth in his victory odes, and in this one it is the story of Jason and the golden fleece, the earliest written account of the story that survives. His victory odes are choral pieces, which would have been sung at a victory celebration to musical accompaniment. They, and a much broader output of which little now survives, were a significant influence on later Roman poets including Horace and Catullus, who would presumably have encountered them in written form or through recitation. Hear an extract in Pindar’s Greek with an English translation here. The illustration shows the finest team that never ran: the four ancient bronze horses now at St Mark’s in Venice.
Lydia has moved on and now idolises Calais, while her ex-lover now dotes on Thracian Chloe. The two exes vie with one another to celebrate how happy they are and the virtues of their new loves, but is the old flame really dead? Hear their dialogue in Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
In this, the only poem that Horace (or any other Latin poet) ever wrote in the unusual metre of ionicus a minore, a young girl is distracted from her spinning and weaving by a handsome horseman who embodies all the martial skills and values that Augustus was keen to encourage in the Romans of his time. She (or is it Horace?) compares him to Bellerophon, the mythical rider who tamed Pegasus, the winged horse. The illustration is a Roman mosaic discovered in Autun.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
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.