Also like Virgil in his separate style, Horace used his talent to reference and support the programme of political and social renewal and change that Augustus pursued throughout his long period of supremacy.
Horace was born in Venusia in Apulia, in the South of Italy, in 65 BCE. His father was a freedman, so the family had been slaves in the not too distant past: now he was a free man, making enough money as an auctioneer to give Horace an education including university at Athens. (Social mobility of this kind is an interesting feature of Roman society.) That was where Horace became involved with the losing side, led by Brutus and Cassius, before the battle of Philippi, where he escaped with his life in 42 BCE.
In the aftermath, he is said to have managed to find a civil service job back in Italy to keep the wolf from the door until he was introduced around 39 BCE to Maecenas, whom we have already met as the great literary patron of the age and senior aide to Octavian. That seems to have led to an intimacy which lasted until both died in 8 BCE. The poems are full of grateful and affectionate references to Horace’s friend: gratitude for the “Sabine Farm” which Maecenas gave to Horace is a recurring theme.
Horace’s reputation chiefly rests on his four collections of Odes, or lyric poems, the first three of which appeared between 30 and about 23 BCE and the fourth after a long interval in about 13 BCE. His other work is of high, but not comparable, quality and interest. Some find his self-regard, submission to the prevailing political régime and technical formalism off-putting. They may have a point, but his ability to put his finger on a point with perfect economy and emotional power, and the delicacy and flair with which he uses Greek verse forms, make him unique. He is one of the great poets of any age, but one of the hardest to appreciate solely through translations, which can reproduce his words, but not the musicality and beauty of the metrical effects which are essential to his art.
See and hear Pantheon Poets’ full selection of Horace’s Odes in Book order here.
No contemporary copies of these Latin poets’ work survive, so we are lucky to have them. Find out more here.