Horace has had a narrow escape: a tree on his estate has fallen and nearly crushed him. It was a serious matter for him – afterwards he celebrated his good luck on the anniversary of the incident every year – but he also uses the opportunity to heap half-humorous curses on the man who planted it. He reflects, rightly then and now, that you can manage risks that you know, but others may still catch you unawares. Then, pivoting to what he might have seen in Hades had he gone there, he evokes Alcaeus and Sappho (pictured) bringing everything to a halt with the beauty of their song. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
Horace implies that his great friend and patron Maecenas has been asking him to write lyric verse on unsuitable themes, including the victories of Augustus and the deeds of the legendary heroes of myth, including Hercules – shown, courtesy of the Met, on a fifth-century BCE kylix attributed to the painter Onesimos. You can do better justice to Augustus’s achievements yourself in prose, says Horace – I will stick to more familiar lyric territory and sing the praises of the lovely Licymnia.
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Another variation on Horace’s favourite theme of carpe diem – seize the day, though the verb has more subtle meanings – harvest it like a crop, for example, or pluck it like a flower. Wine in the shade is better than fretting about what is happening on Rome’s frontiers, which are a very long way away. The Greek drinker in the illustration is on an Attic red-figure wine cup, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. They have a fine collection and excellent online access to it, so pay them a visit.
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As the God of music, poetry and the lyre, Apollo is the patron deity of Horace the poet – though, as at the beginning of Homer’s Iliad, he has a more forbidding aspect as the archer-God whose arrows bring disease and death. In an ode offering philosophical life-lessons to Licinius, Horace uses this double aspect as a metaphor for the ups and downs of life, both of which we should be prepared to take as they come.
The illustration, of an Attic red-figure vase in the Met attributed to the Berlin painter, shows an extraordinarily detailed lyre, almost a technical drawing – note the plectrum, attached to the instrument by a thread to prevent it getting lost.
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This ode is addressed to one of Horace’s brother-poets, a love-elegist called Valgius. Read literally, it seems to urge Valgius to come to terms with the loss of a male lover, Mystes, but it may be more about the kind of poetry that Valgius has been writing than a real-life bereavement. “Mystes” is a Greek name and means someone who has been initiated into religious mysteries such as those practised at Eleusis in Greece. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
The illustration is a 4th century BCE votive plaque from Eleusis showing a scene from the mysteries, photo George E. Koronaios, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.
In one of his odes, Horace refers to the legend that Thetis, the mother of Achilles, hid him disguised as a girl in the household of King Lycomedes of Skyros to prevent him from going to his death in the Trojan war; but that Odysseus and Diomedes tricked him into revealing himself by making him think the palace was under attack (he grabbed a weapon).
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Photo by Chappsnet, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Xanthias the Phocian is in love with a slave. What does Horace think? What he says is reassuring and supportive on the surface, but, as TE Page the Victorian commentator pithily remarks, the intention is clearly satirical throughout. As part of his (apparently) supportive reasoning, Horace quotes examples from among Greek heroes who fought the Trojan War – one of them Achilles, who was captivated by the captive Briseis but had her confiscated by Agamemnon to replace a priest’s daughter whom he had to return to her father to appease Apollo, as related at the beginning of Homer’s Iliad. This was the cause of Achilles’s withdrawal from the fighting and the starting-point of the events that ensue in Homer’s great epic.
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The illustration form a Roman fresco shows the parting of Achilles and Briseis. (Photo ArchaiOptix, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Looking for an example to show why wealth is not necessarily the key to happiness, Horace chooses Phraates, who was restored to the throne of Parthia in 25 BCE. The message is that the crown and authority of a king must always be uncertain: only the man who can maintain a philosophical indifference to such things can truly possess them.
The illustration shows a famous mosaic from Pompeii of Alexander the Great defeating King Darius, an earlier holder of the “throne of Cyrus” at the battle of Issus, some three centuries before Horace’s time.
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Horace opens his second book of odes with a resounding tribute to a fellow writer, Gaius Asinius Pollio. Pollio was what we sometimes call a Renaissance man. Until 39 BCE, he was a major political and military figure, who held the consulship and earned a triumph by his military success: thereafter, he was distinguished as a tragic playwright before picking up the threads of a history of the civil wars which his predecessor, Sallust, had died without completing. Though Horace demurs, the poem is a fine example of his ability to deal vividly in lyric verse with subject-matter usually regarded as the domain of epic poetry. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.