If you want to live well, says Horace, then avoid extremes, accept the worst if it comes, but hope for the best. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here; see the illustrated blog post here.
In a mysterious little poem, Horace warns his friend, Aelius, that there will be rain on the following day so he and his farm workers should get in some dry firewood and plan for a day off. The forecaster is a crow, which to the ancients was proverbial both as being long-lived, and as a predictor of rain.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
Illustration: Dosseman CC by-SA 4.
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.
One of the most loved poems in Book 4 of Horace’s odes is “diffugere nives”, Ode 4.7. Season always follows season, it says, but the times of human life, by contrast, are not renewed indefinitely. Ultimately, we are dust and shadow: not even the greatest of mortals can rescue themselves or those they love from the bonds of the underworld. It is rather gloomy for our taste, good for a funeral or memorial, but dampening to the spirits. The next poem, 4.8, is very much less well-known, but it brings a contrasting measure of hope: physically, we cannot live for ever, but there is a way in which our merits and achievements can, if they are immortalised by art, including the art of the poet. It is a message that slips under the radar even for many who know Horace’s work well, but it clearly mattered to Horace a great deal because he positions it right in the middle of the Book and uses a metre that he reserves exclusively for special occasions. See Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
The illustration is a Roman copy of an earlier statue of Pothos, personification of desire, by Scopas, the sculptor whom Horace mentions as the master of his art.