Horace uses the metaphor of a ship in stormy seas to express his hope that Rome will win through to safety in a time of danger. Hear the Ode performed in the original Latin and follow in a new English translation here.
The illustration, by Rembrandt, is of Christ in the storm on the Sea of Galilee. If you happen to see this painting anywhere, please tell the Isabella Gardner Stewart Museum in Boston – it was stolen from them in 1990 and has not been returned.
Many of Horace’s Odes are performed and translated on Pantheon Poets, but the first poems in the first Book, published in 23 BCE have a particularly important function. The very first Ode makes two very important points at the outset: the debt and affection that Horace feels for his great patron and friend Maecenas, to whom he effectively dedicates the whole collection; and the tremendous ambition that Horace has to create a new and distinctively Roman form of poetry, based on the great Greek lyric models of the past.
In the illustration as in Horace’s poem, a satyr dances in a typically Greek pastoral setting.
Hear Horace’s poetry performed in the original Latin and follow in a new English translation here.
In today’s Ode, Horace exclaims at the futility and presumption of the rich, who go in for grand building works, even encroaching on the sea in places like the luxurious seaside resort of Baiae. He prefers the simple life on his Sabine farm.
Horace uses Hipponactean metre, an unusual one found only here among his works. Hear his Latin performed in the original and follow in English here.
Today sees a new sound recording in our post of the opening lines of Homer’s Odyssey. Hear Homer’s Greek and follow in English translation here.
The illustration shows the Sorceress, Circe, who is only one of the many dangers that Odysseus encounters on his … well … Odyssey.
Horace makes a sweet, epigrammatic poem on a theme from the Greek models he so admires. Chloe wants to continue to stick close to her mother, but needs to realise that the time for love and adulthood is upon her.
Hear Horace’s Latin performed in the original and follow in English translation here.
Horace’s modesty, and the Muse who commands his unwarlike lyre, warn him not to risk damage to the reputations of the Emperor Augustus and Agrippa, his chief general, by trying to celebrate them by writing about themes that belong in epic verse – that is beyond his scope. Or so he says …
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
Catullus’s shortest poem, and one of his most famous, is his epigram about loving and hating simultaneously. Hear it in Latin and follow in English here.
Pyrrha the femme fatale has a new lover, who has yet to find out that the experience is not destined to be all calm weather and plain sailing. Horace speaks as someone who has survived shipwreck in Pyrrha’s stormy waters, and in gratitude for his escape has hung his wet clothes on the temple wall as a thank-offering to the God of the sea (Neptune, or Cupid?)
In the illustration a more famous siren, Cleopatra, awaits a visit from Mark Antony.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
A middle-aged Horace attempts, in the last Book of his Odes, to seduce Phyllis, who will, he says, be his last love. He just might be describing a real attraction, with the names changed, or be reworking a Greek model as a purely literary exercise: we will never know, but the poetry is beautiful, and vintage Horace. Hear his Latin and follow in a new English translation here.
The illustration is a Greek girl, by the classicising Victorian painter, Alma-Tadema.