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Horace

HORACE:

Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known in the English speaking world as Horace, was born in 65BC and the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.

Born at Venosa or Venusia, as it was called in his day, a small town in the border region between Apulia and Lucania, Horace was the son of a freedman, but he himself was born free. His father worked as a coactor, that is, a kind of middleman at auctions who would pay the purchase price to the seller and collect it later from the buyer and receive 1% of the purchase price from each of them for his services.

Although Horace portrays him as a poor, honest farme, his father's business was actually one of the ways for former slaves to amass wealth. Not surprisingly, the elder Horace was able to spend considerable money on his son's education, accompanying him first to Rome for his primary education, and then sending him to Athens to study Greek and philosophy. The poet later expressed his gratitude in a touching tribute to his father. In his own words (note that some of the beauty is lost in translation):
If my character is flawed by a few minor faults, but is otherwise decent and moral, if you can point out only a few scattered blemishes on an otherwise immaculate surface, if no one can accuse me of greed, or of prurience, or of profligacy, if I live a virtuous life, free of defilement (pardon, for a moment, my self-praise), and if I am to my friends a good friend, my father deserves all the credit... As it is now, he deserves from me unstinting gratitude and praise. I could never be ashamed of such a father, nor do I feel any need, as many people do, to apologize for being a freedman's son.

After the assassination of Julius Caesar, Horace joined the army, serving under the generalship of Brutus. He fought as a staff officer, a tribunus militum, in the Battle of Philippi. Alluding to famous literary models, he later claimed that he saved himself by throwing away his shield and fleeing. When an amnesty was declared for those who had fought against the victorious Octavian, who late became Augustus, Horace returned to Italy, only to find his estate confiscated; his father had probably also died. Horace claims that he was reduced to poverty.

He nevertheless had the means to purchase a profitable life-time appointment as a scriba quaestorius, an official of the Treasury, which allowed him to get by comfortably and practice his poetic art.

Horace was a member of a literary circle that included Virgil and Lucius Varius Rufus; they introduced him to Maecenas, friend and confidant of Augustus. Maecenas became his patron and close friend, and presented Horace with an estate near Tibur in the Sabine Hills, contemporary Tivoli.

Upon his death bed, having no heirs, Horace relinquished his farm to his friend and Emperor Augustus, to be used for Imperial needs. His farm is there today and is a spot of pilgrimage for the literary elite.

Horace is generally considered by classicists to be, along with Virgil, among the greatest of the Latin poets.

He wrote many Latin phrases that remain in use (in Latin or in translation) including carpe diem, "pluck the day"; Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori; and aurea mediocritas, the "golden mean."

His works, like those of all but the earliest Latin poets, are written in Greek metres, from the hexameter, which was relatively easy to adapt to Latin, to the more complex measures used in the Odes, like alcaics and sapphics, which were sometimes a difficult fit for Latin structure and syntax.

SOME NOTED WORKS:

Sermonum liber primus or Satirae I,
Sermonum liber secundus or Satirae II,
Carminum liber primus or Odes I,
Carminum liber secundus or Odes II,
Carminum liber tertius or Odes III,
Epistularum liber primus,
Ars Poetica, or The Epistle to the Pisones,
Carmen Saeculare or Song of the Ages,
Epistularum liber secundus,
Carminum liber quartus or Odes.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM HIS SURVIVING WORKS:

Odes, or Carmina,
Carminum liber primus or Odes I,
Carminum liber secundus or Odes II,
Carminum liber tertius or Odes III,
Carminum liber quartus or Odes IV.

2 books With the Epistles are featured below, these are his most personal works, and perhaps the most accessible to contemporary readers unable to appreciate the verbal magic of the Odes.

Sermonum liber primus or Satirae I,
Sermonum liber secundus or Satirae II.

His most important tenets are that poetry must be carefully and skillfully worked out on the semantic and formal, and that poetry should be wholesome as well as pleasant. This latter issue is often referred to as the dulce et utile, which is Latin for the sweet and useful. The work below was first translated into English by Queen Elizabeth I.

Carmen Saeculare
Carmen Saeculare or Song of the Ages.

Dante, in Inferno, ranks himself side by side with Lucan, Homer, Ovid and Virgil in his work, Dante's Inferno.

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