There is perhaps some friendly exaggeration in the contrast that Horace draws between his own wine-drinking opportunities and those of his eminent friend and patron, Maecenas, but he offers the best he has, along with his affection and a flattering memory of a great occasion. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
The illustration, from Herculaneum, is an advertisement for a wine-bar, showing the prices of the vintages on offer.
Horace’s modesty, and the Muse who commands his unwarlike lyre, warn him not to risk damage to the reputations of the Emperor Augustus and Agrippa, his chief general, by trying to celebrate them by writing about themes that belong in epic verse – that is beyond his scope. Or so he says …
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
Horace wrote today’s new poem as his sign-off from the Odes and his claim to lyric fame. Hear and follow it here.
When he wrote this poem, Horace believed he had completed the Odes, and felt fully entitled to claim pride and credit for them for himself and his muse: in fact he had another book to go. The picture of Melpomene, to whom the poem is dedicated, is by the Austrian painter Alexander Rothaug.
Hear the Latin and follow in English here.
This is Pantheon Poets’s selection of twenty-eight of Horace’s poems in the order in which they appear in his four Books of the Odes. Click on the description of each Continue Reading
Many of Horace’s Odes are performed and translated on Pantheon Poets, but the first poems in the first Book, published in 23 BCE have a particularly important function. The very first Ode makes two very important points at the outset: the debt and affection that Horace feels for his great patron and friend Maecenas, to whom he effectively dedicates the whole collection; and the tremendous ambition that Horace has to create a new and distinctively Roman form of poetry, based on the great Greek lyric models of the past.
In the illustration as in Horace’s poem, a satyr dances in a typically Greek pastoral setting.
Hear Horace’s poetry performed in the original Latin and follow in a new English translation here.
Horace’s second Ode paints a vivid picture of the time of troubles that Rome, beset by civil war, has suffered, before turning to identify and praise her saviour – the new Emperor, Augustus. The praise is lavish by our standards – it identifies the Emperor with a God on Earth – but there is no particular need to suspect Horace, an old republican, but now completely associated with the new regime and its leaders, of insincerity. The stability and peace provided by the new order would have been welcome to very many, as its durabilty – Augustus was to rule for a further 37 years after the date of this poem – shows.
Hear Horace’s Latin performed in the original and follow in English here.
The illustration, from the Ara Pacis, consecrated in 13 BC, is a symbolic representation of the peace and prosperity that Augustus’s reign has brought.