Tag: horace

The snows are fled away

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A E Housman was a professor of Latin as well as a famous poet of the life of the English countryside. Because of these twin talents, his translation of Horace’s “Diffugere nives” (Ode 4.7) captures its sentiment and mood perfectly although he uses English poetic techniques and convention which could hardly be more different than those of Latin poetry. All the more reason to encounter Latin poetry in the original, with a reading and a translation, at Pantheon Poets.

In the illustration, Theseus and Pirithous, whose legendary friendship is referred to at the end of the poem, rid the land of robbers and liberate abducted women.

See and hear Horace’s original alongside Housman’s translation here.

The unhappy spirit

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In an unconventional but moving ode in which the speaker is a drowned sailor, pleas for burial are combined with reflections on the inevitability of death. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here; see the illustrated blog post here.

Time for love, Chloe

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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.

Two garlands and a cup of wine

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In the last poem of his first book of Odes, Horace celebrates with a drink in the shade of a closely tangled vine, served by a single slave. Both wear myrtle crowns for the occasion, chosen for their simplicity, as Horace stresses. The garland that the beautiful Antinous wears in this bust from the British Museum is of ivy, sacred to Bacchus/Dionysus.

Hear Horace’s poem in his original Latin and follow in English here.

Wealth does not buy happiness

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Odi profanum volgus et arceo, omne capax movet urna nomen, post equitem sedet atra cura – “I despise the profane crowd, I banish them”; “(Destiny’s) capacious urn shakes every name together”; “behind the rider sits black Care”. These, among Horace’s most famous phrases, all occur in the first poem in his third book of Odes. It is “carpe diem” with a difference: the more you have, the more there is for you to worry about, and the answer is to be content with modest comforts and avoid the temptations of greed and excess. It is no coincidence that, at the time, the Emperor Augustus was championing a return to simpler, ancestral, Roman values. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.

Wine and friendship

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Horace offers his friend and patron Maecenas friendship, simple wine and a memory of a cherished occasion. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here; see the illustrated blog post here.

Wine the consoler

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Greece is beautiful, says Horace, but Tibur – home of the Famous Plancus – is more beautiful still, says Horace. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here; see the illustrated blog post here.

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