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).
Hear the poem in Horace’s original Latin and follow in English here.
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.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
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.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
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.
Juno bears a deep grudge against the House of Cadmus, founder of the city of Thebes, and seeks an avenger to destroy Cadmus’s daughter Ino and her husband, Athamas. The choice falls on Tisiphone the Fury. Tisiphone is no less sinister than the darkness and vapours of the Hell that she inhabits. Ovid’s description of the terrifying avenger, with her head and arms covered in serpents, and of the savagery with which she inflicts on Athamas a madness which drives him to murder his children, is one of his most striking set-pieces. Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English here.
Photo courtesy Bari’ bin Farangi under CC BY-SA 4.0
A little poem complaining at the grossness of sex and the dejection that can follow it is credibly ascribed to Gaius Petronius Arbiter, sometime favourite of the aesthete-Emperor Nero. It is better, says the poem, to stick to kissing. Hear this curious piece, which shares something of the outlook of the decadents of the late nineteenth century, and follow in English, here.
The illustration is an artist’s impression Petronius’s final moments as he died by an elaborate suicide after his fall from grace, in an illustration from Sienkiewicz’s novel, Quo Vadis?
Boethius’s fifth-century version of the Orpheus and Eurydice legend is more than just a literary exercise: it is a meditation on light, darkness, life and death written in prison by a man who knew that a grim death awaited him soon.
Hear Boethius’s Latin and follow in English here.
Myths that we think we definitely know could appear in differing versions in the ancient world. One example is the marriage of Venus, Goddess of love, to Vulcan, the lame craftsman-God who forged Jupiter’s thunderbolts for him. Interestingly, they are shown as married to one another in the Odyssey, but not in the Iliad, a small but interesting snippet of potential evidence in the debate over whether the two poems were created by the same author. Anyway, by the time of Ovid and Augustus, and in Vigil’s Aeneid, the two were firmly spliced. Hear Ovid’s account of an adulterous affair between Venus and Mars, the glamorous war-God, here. (Could the trouble that Ovid got into with Augustus, leading to his exile to the back of beyond, have had something to do with the fact that the Emperor was campaigning against the looseness of morals in Rome, and that he claimed Venus as his many-times-great-Grandmother?)
In the Metamorphoses, Ovid retells the story of love and loss with his usual grace and charm hear the passage in the original Latin and follow in English here. Later, he will deal with the violent end of Orpheus, who renounces the love of women in his sadness and is torn to pieces by angry women in a Bacchanalian fury. In the illustration, by John William Waterhouse, nymphs find his head and his lyre, which have floated to the island of Lesbos.