In one of the most famous moments of European history, Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon.
Hear Lucan’s Latin and follow in English here.
As civil war threatens, the poet Lucan sums up the protagonists: Pompey (pictured) has popularity, authority and the advantages of a mighty reputation, but Caesar has something more.
See and hear Lucan’s Latin from his De Bello Civile and follow in English here.
In the coming days Pantheon Poets will be posting a short series of extracts from Lucan’s poem. Lucan, forced to commit suicide in his mid-twenties by the Emperor Nero, pulls no punches on his account of the struggle between Julius Caesar and his adversary, Pompey the Great. As a prelude, read more about Lucan and his work on his poet page here.
All of the Horace Odes on Pantheon Poets – currently 20 of them – are now available as a single selection arranged consecutively in Book order. Access it here and use the links to hear the poetry in the original Latin and follow in English translation.
In early 1914, Thomas Hardy unwittingly foreshadows the madness of the Great War. See and hear Hardy’s poem here: the reader is Harry MacFarland.
In the fourth Book of the Georgics, Virgil’s poem on farming and the countryside, he describes the life of bees. Hear his Latin and follow in English here.
Exploring the powerful sexual drive that acts on both people and animals, Virgil in his Georgics uses mares as his example of the creatures most sensitive of all to its compulsion. The illustration (a stallion not a mare, but from this angle it might be either) is the famous racehorse Whistlejacket, painted by George Stubbs. Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in John Dryden’s seventeenth-century English here.
Glande sues laeti redeunt: the pigs come home regaled with acorns … in Virgil’s rural paradise, even the livestock live off the fat of the land. The swineherd knocking down mast from the trees for his animals is from a famous late-mediaeval Book of Hours, the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry.
Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in John Dryden’s charming but not very faithful 17th century translation here.