Phaethon’s ride in the chariot of his father, the Sun, has brought catastrophe as he sets the world ablaze. Now Jupiter intervenes to fell him with a thunderbolt before the damage goes from bad to worse.
The illustration by Giovanni Bernardi shows his fall, his sisters, who are turned to poplar trees on his burial mound, and his friend Cycnus, who will be transformed in to a swan.
Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English here.
Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English here.
In the illustration by Karl Bryullov, Apollo himself demonstrates how it should be done.
Ovid vividly tells the tragic story of Phaethon, the son of the Sun God, Phoebus Apollo, who unwisely dared to try to drive his father’s fiery chariot across the sky.
Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English here, as Phaethon sets out on his doomed adventure.
To be continued …
Many Roman writers, including Propertius, were all but forgotten for much of the two thousand years that separates them from the present day. Westbrook wrote a sonnet about the process, part labour-of-love by a few dedicated scholars, part pure luck, through which Propertius’s work has survived: read it here.
Two contrasting Victorian takes on death – fulfilment and release as a lark sings over a gorgeous sunset, or the murderous “Ruffian on the stair”?
Read the two very different poetic visions here.
Tennyson combines his admiration for Milton’s poetry with his love of ancient poetry, and in particular his love of Alcaics, the Greek metre that Horace used for his loftiest themes in the Odes. You can decide for yourself how far the experiment succeeds, and use the links to compare Tennyson’s poem to some of Horace’s poems in the same metre, here.
The English poet John Westbrook turns his attention from classical subjects to more contemporary issues: world population and the environment. See his “7,000,000,001” here.
The illustration by Emil Keyser is entitled “Expulsion from the Garden of Eden”.
A E Housman was a professor of Latin as well as a famous poet of the life of the English countryside. Because of these twin talents, his translation of Horace’s “Diffugere nives” (Ode 4.7) captures its sentiment and mood perfectly although he uses English poetic techniques and convention which could hardly be more different than those of Latin poetry. All the more reason to encounter Latin poetry in the original, with a reading and a translation, at Pantheon Poets.
In the illustration, Theseus and Pirithous, whose legendary friendship is referred to at the end of the poem, rid the land of robbers and liberate abducted women.
See and hear Horace’s original alongside Housman’s translation here.
As Horace brings the final book of his Odes to an end, an idealised Roman family of the future gathers to sing Augustus’s praises and give thanks for the peace and the imperial power that he has brought to Rome.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.