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No more scurrility!

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In a charming poem tinged with darker themes and written in elegant Alcaic metre, Horace reflects on the destructive power of anger, and promises a lovely mother and her even lovelier daughter that he will never return to writing iambics – a metre famed among the Greeks and Romans for personal attacks and lampoons. In the illustration by the Japanese woodblock print designer Utamaro, a lovely mother teaches her even lovelier daughter the art of calligraphy.

Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.

Propertius is pining

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Cynthia is away, probably at the luxurious seaside resort of Baiae, with its entertainments, attractions and temptations. What is she up to? Propertius is afraid that the separation has broken the bond between them, and that a great love may be dead or dying. Not for the first or last time, his imagination is torturing him. Nevertheless he asserts – in the face of some of the evidence – that he is a one-woman man. Cynthia was the first, he says, and she will be his last.

Hear Propertius’s Latin and follow in English here.

The death of Phaethon

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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.

Phaethon

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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 …

Sextus Propertius, by Westbrook

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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.

Tennyson on Milton

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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.

Seven billion and one

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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”.