The mental process by which Horace makes the link between the power of poetry and the story of the Danaids is a little mysterious, but the two are narrated in the first and second halves of this piece. All but one of the fifty daughters of Danaus, acting on his orders, murdered their husbands on their wedding night. We first find them in Hades, where their eternal punishment is to try to fill a huge jar with water, only for it to pour forever out through a hole in the bottom. The implied message to Lyde, the girl whom the speaker in the poem is pursuing, includes both a carrot and a stick: if she complies, she will be merciful and kind, like the one Danaid who did not commit the crime; if she is cruel, she will deserve some punishment for the hardness of her heart. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
It is 24 BCE, and Horace calls on Augustus’s family, and Rome in general, to welcome him on return from campaigning in Spain. The first half of the poem refers to one reason to be particularly glad: Augustus had been ill, and rumours were even circulating that he might actually have died. A further reason, pictured in the second half, is more personal to Horace. He is free to celebrate at home with wine and female company, free from the fear and the risk of renewed civil strife that might have followed Augustus’s death. The poem ends with an oblique reference, which no Roman would have missed, to the battle of Philippi. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
In the classical world, being Greek did not mean living in Greece: Greek cities had been founded throughout Asia Minor, as far west as Italy and what is now France, and as far south as Cyrene in North Africa. When Cyrene’s King Arkesilas was the winning owner in the chariot race at Delphi in 462 BCE, the famous Theban poet, Pindar, wrote his longest and most elaborate poem to commemorate the victory. This was much more than a sporting event: the games were a sacred occasion, and, to Pindar and his contemporaries, success was less a matter of luck and hard training than of divine favour and the aristocratic qualities which could come only from a long and noble pedigree. Pindar usually included a myth in his victory odes, and in this one it is the story of Jason and the golden fleece, the earliest written account of the story that survives. His victory odes are choral pieces, which would have been sung at a victory celebration to musical accompaniment. They, and a much broader output of which little now survives, were a significant influence on later Roman poets including Horace and Catullus, who would presumably have encountered them in written form or through recitation. Hear an extract in Pindar’s Greek with an English translation here. The illustration shows the finest team that never ran: the four ancient bronze horses now at St Mark’s in Venice.
Lydia has moved on and now idolises Calais, while her ex-lover now dotes on Thracian Chloe. The two exes vie with one another to celebrate how happy they are and the virtues of their new loves, but is the old flame really dead? Hear their dialogue in Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
In this, the only poem that Horace (or any other Latin poet) ever wrote in the unusual metre of ionicus a minore, a young girl is distracted from her spinning and weaving by a handsome horseman who embodies all the martial skills and values that Augustus was keen to encourage in the Romans of his time. She (or is it Horace?) compares him to Bellerophon, the mythical rider who tamed Pegasus, the winged horse. The illustration is a Roman mosaic discovered in Autun.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
By Horace’s day, the paraklausithuron – a would-be lover’s complaint outside a locked door – was an established poetical theme. We should probably take this bravura variation on the theme, with all its clues and puzzles about the scenario that Horace hints at without spelling out, as literature rather than autobiography. “Lyce”, a nickname that Horace uses in two other poems, carries a flavour of loose living: there is no particular narrative continuity between the three pieces to suggest that we are dealing with the same Lyce in all.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
Is the Roman to whom this poem is addressed, blameless for the crimes of the City but bound to atone for them, Augustus? Mentioned by name or not, this poem, with its dual emphasis on piety and rebuilding temples contrasted with the loose living of the current generation would immediately have made an audience think of him, since civic building and moral reform were high among his public priorities in the years following the defeat of Cleopatra and Mark Antony at the battle of Actium. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
The lovers (or spouses) Asterie and Gyges are parted for the winter, and Gyges’s landlady is threatening to tell tales on him to her husband if he will not sleep with her – she sends a go-between to remind him that similar things happened to others in myth – not only the hero Bellerophon, but also Peleus, the father of Achilles. Asterie need not worry about Gyges’s faithfulness, as it turns out, but Horace feels the need to offer a word of advice to her as well.
In the illustration, Peleus struggles to maintain a hold on Thetis, Achilles’s mother, who was a goddess and a shape-shifter.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
In his longest ode, the fourth in a series of six weighty Alcaics reviewing the social, political, moral and military condition of the world of Rome, Horace claims divine inspiration when he uses the example of the war between the Gods and the Titans in Greek mythology to assert that revolt against just authority is unwise and will lead to retribution. The lessons for Rome in the 20s BCE, when Octavian/Augustus, was consolidating his power, are not hard to see.
On an Attic bell-crater of circa 470 BCE, Zeus fells the Titan Porphyrion with a thunderbolt.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.