Horace invites Maecenas to leave the cares of Rome and come to dinner. 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.
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.
It is 24 BCE, and Horace calls on Augustus’s family, and Rome in general, to welcome him on return from campaigning in Spain. The first half of the poem refers to one reason to be particularly glad: Augustus had been ill, and rumours were even circulating that he might actually have died. A further reason, pictured in the second half, is more personal to Horace. He is free to celebrate at home with wine and female company, free from the fear and the risk of renewed civil strife that might have followed Augustus’s death. The poem ends with an oblique reference, which no Roman would have missed, to the battle of Philippi. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.