Horace tells a writer of sad love elegy to put grief behind him and celebrate the latest victories of the emperor Augustus. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here; see the illustrated blog post here.
As the God of music, poetry and the lyre, Apollo is the patron deity of Horace the poet – though, as at the beginning of Homer’s Iliad, he has a more forbidding aspect as the archer-God whose arrows bring disease and death. In an ode offering philosophical life-lessons to Licinius, Horace uses this double aspect as a metaphor for the ups and downs of life, both of which we should be prepared to take as they come.
The illustration, of an Attic red-figure vase in the Met attributed to the Berlin painter, shows an extraordinarily detailed lyre, almost a technical drawing – note the plectrum, attached to the instrument by a thread to prevent it getting lost.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
An important part of Horace’s project in the odes was to use his poetic skills to celebrate Augustus, and to contribute to consolidating his standing in Roman society as an object of supreme veneration and deference. Hear an early example of a poem of fulsome praise for the first Emperor from the first book of Odes in Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
The magnificent “Blacas” cameo, named after a previous possessor, was probably made soon after Augustus’s death and is in the collection of the British Museum.
You can’t believe a word that Barine says, but she’s so lovely, who cares? Hear Horace’s ode in Latin and follow in English here.