Tag: horace

Bacchus is a God for whom Horace seems to feel a particular affinity. Both in this Ode, coming near what Horace intended to be the completion of his collection of Roman poems in the tradition of the great Greek lyricists, and elsewhere (in Ode 2.29), it is hard not to feel that a degree of real religious feeling is at work. Modern readers may naturally regard the political message of the poem – the apotheosis of Augustus – with a touch of cynicism, but there is no conclusive evidence for regarding it as insincere, and the poem carries a persuasive emotional charge.

Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.

Ode 4.12 is controversial among commentators. It is addressed to a “Virgil”: some argue that this can’t possibly be the author of the Aeneid, although we know that he and Horace were good friends, and the ancient life of Horace says that it was Virgil who introduced him to his great patron, Maecenas. Their reasoning is that Virgil died in 19 BCE, before the date of Odes book 4, and Horace would never have implied that he was a hanger-onto the rich or preoccupied with money, as this poem can be read to do. Others argue that it couldn’t possibly be anyone else, given of echoes of Virgil’s work that can be seen in Horace’s poem, and that anything seemingly uncomplimentary in the piece is no more than friendly banter.

To see what we think, see our introduction to the poem, plus the poem and our translation, here.

The illustration of a Roman bird comes from a first-century fresco.

A literary exercise or a cry of pain? Either way, Horace’s ode to jealousy packs a powerful punch into a short poem. In the illustration by John Singer Sargent, the furies are tormenting Orestes.

Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.

We are in heaven. It is some time since the fall of Troy – Romulus, descendant of Trojan refugees from the fall of the city, has founded Rome and been rescued from mortality by his father, Mars, the God of War. In one of a series of poems at the beginning of Horace’s third book of Odes on Rome as it is, and (according to the moral and political programme of the new Emperor, Augustus) as it should be, Horace makes the point that Rome enjoys the divine seal of approval – her founder sits in Olympus as one of the Gods (and is reserving a place there for the Emperor  Augustus). In the illustration, an ancient Roman bronze, the she-wolf suckles Romulus and his brother Remus.

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.