Quintus Horatius Flaccus (just Horace in English) was one of the leading poets of the Augustan Age. He is considered not only the finest of Latin lyric, but, along with Vergil and Ovid, among the greatest of all Roman poets.
Life
Horace was born at Venusia (modern Venosa, Italy) on 8 December 65 BCE to a freedman who worked for a tax farmer. He was sent to Rome to be educated by Lucius Orbilius Pupilius, and he later went on to study Platonism at the Academy in Athens.
During the civil war between Octavian’s and Antony’s forces, Horace fought on the losing side at the Battle of Philippi—famously memorialized in one of his odes (2.7)—and thus his lands, like Vergil’s and Tibullus‘, were confiscated and given to soldiers.
After a period of poverty, Horace joined the literary circle under Maecenas, one of Augustus’ closest advisers and a wealthy literary patron. He gained favor with Augustus, and was appointed to write the Carmen Saeculare for the ludi saeculares, an important festival that took place only once every one-hundred years, in 17 BCE.
Horace died on the 27th of November, 8 BCE, and willed his estate in Licenzia to Augustus.
Works
Horace was a prolific writer. He published the first book of Satirae (“Satires”) in the mid-30s BCE. Unlike his later successors Persius and Juvenal, Horace was hardly a moralist, and his satirical voice emphasized wit and cleverness over social commentary, taking jabs at caricatures rather than the public at large. Additionally, the Satirae are also called Sermones, Latin for “conversations,” which better reflects the nature of the poetry.
The Epodes, published a few years after the first book of the Satirae, are a collection of poems in various meters. The name refers to the form of the poems, in which longer and shorter lines form couplets. The poems are chiefly but not exclusively written in iambic meter, and were modeled after Archilochus. Despite the pedigree, Horace’s Epodes are tamer than Archilochus’ and lack his venom, even when they veer into invective.
Around 23 BCE, Horace published the first three books of the Odes (Lat. Carmina) as an experiment with lyric poetry (traditionally Greek poetry sung to a lyre). The Odes show strong influences from the lyric poetry of Alcaeus and, to a lesser degree, Sappho and Pindar.
These are among Horace’s most famous poems, and they included such memorable lines as carpe diem (“Seize the day”) and dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (“It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country”). The fourth book, characteristically more pious than the first three (though those are already more in-line with Augustan propaganda than either his Satires or Epodes), was written in 11 BCE, and appears to have been commissioned by the emperor himself.
His next works are the Epistles (Lat. Epistulae), letters on a variety of subjects composed in dactylic hexameter. Also in this period is the famous Ars Poetica (Eng. Art of Poetry), a poetic treatise on the art of poetry, written in the tradition of Aristotle’s Peripatetic school of poetic thought. The work may originally have been a standalone poem, though it was transmitted to us as the second book of the Epistles. One of the famous images in the Ars Poetica is that of a creature with the top of a woman and the bottom of a fish, representing the ugly cacophony of combining two disparate genres in the same poem. Throughout the Middle Ages, Horace’s Ars Poetica largely supplanted Aristotle’s original thesis on poetry.
Legacy
Horace was famous in his own day. His poetry was so well-liked that he was picked by Augustus to compose the Carmen Saeculare for the ludi saeculares.
While Horace was technically not the first Roman to write poetry modeled after the Greek lyric poets (Catullus preceded him by decades), he was the first to compose books of it (the four books of his Carmina), and he was particularly proud of that fact. However great his achievement was, no Roman afterward would take up his trailblazing. Though he is best known today for this endeavor, the ancients instead read him more for his Satires and Epodes. Indeed, later satirists (especially Persius, but also Juvenal) would draw on Horace’s compositions for their own, though they developed him in a very different direction.
Interestingly, the Ars Poetica was first translated into English by Queen Elizabeth I.
Memorable Quotes
Horace’s poetry, especially the Odes but throughout all his works, have produced a number of magnificent lines often borrowed and quoted throughout the ages, even to this day.
Nil sine magno vita labore dedit mortalibus.
“Life gives nothing without great labor to mortals.”
(Satires 1.9.58-59)
Nil desperandum.
“Never despair.”
Odes 1.7.27
Carpe diem.
“Seize the day.”
Odes 1.11.7
Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus.
“Now is the time for drinking, now the time for beating the loose earth with feet (i.e. dancing).”
Odes 1.37.1
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
“It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.”
Odes 3.2.13
Pulvis et umbra sumus.
“We are dust and shadow.”
Odes 4.7.16
Exegi monumentum aere perennius.
“I have erected a monument more lasting than bronze.”
Odes 3.30.1
Quoted with slight variation on the Minerva Mosaic at the Library of Congress (right)
Horace Online
Latin: PHI Latin Texts
English: Poetry in Translation
Further Reading
- Fraenkel, Eduard. 1957. Horace. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Highet, Gilbert. 1974. Masks and faces in satire. Hermes 102:321–337.
- Coffey, Michael. 1976. Roman satire. London: Methuen.
- Armstrong, David. 1989. Horace. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
- Levi, Peter. 1998. Horace: A life. New York: Routledge.
