Horace’s second Ode reflects on the world of Rome turned upside down by civil war and restored to an even keel by the Emperor Augustus. Hear Horace’s Latin performed and follow in translation here; see the illustrated blog post here.
See the new Latin poetry selection here, with pieces from Boethius, Horace and Virgil.
On Horace’s Sabine farm, unmolested by her brutal urban boyfriend, Tyndaris sings of Penelope and Circe among the peace and joys of the countryside.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
Anticipating literary immortality, Horace imagines himself as a swan whose song will be heard all over the known world. Hear his Latin and follow in English here as he concludes his second book of Odes.
This Roman fresco of Leda and the swan was found in Pompeii in 2018.
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.