See Horace’s poem here and the blog post with a beautiful illustration from Tarentum’s Greek history here.
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.
When the first three books of Horace’s Odes were published in 23 BCE, the first Emperor, Augustus, was leading an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to bring the wealthy Roman elite back to the austere standards of life which laid the foundations for the greatness of the city. Horace, not necessarily insincerely, included more than one poem in his collection which chimed with this theme. Whether he would really have been happy if the law had required him to roof his house with nothing but turf is perhaps open to question.
The illustration is the oath of the Horatii by Jean-Louis David.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
Looking for an example to show why wealth is not necessarily the key to happiness, Horace chooses Phraates, who was restored to the throne of Parthia in 25 BCE. The message is that the crown and authority of a king must always be uncertain: only the man who can maintain a philosophical indifference to such things can truly possess them.
The illustration shows a famous mosaic from Pompeii of Alexander the Great defeating King Darius, an earlier holder of the “throne of Cyrus” at the battle of Issus, some three centuries before Horace’s time.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
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.
This ode is addressed to one of Horace’s brother-poets, a love-elegist called Valgius. Read literally, it seems to urge Valgius to come to terms with the loss of a male lover, Mystes, but it may be more about the kind of poetry that Valgius has been writing than a real-life bereavement. “Mystes” is a Greek name and means someone who has been initiated into religious mysteries such as those practised at Eleusis in Greece. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
The illustration is a 4th century BCE votive plaque from Eleusis showing a scene from the mysteries, photo George E. Koronaios, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.
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.
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.