Horace

• 1. Introduction

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  Quintus Horatius Flaccus, the poet the English-speaking world calls Horace, once described himself as a man who fled the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC without his shield. He was no born aristocrat. He was the free-born son of a former slave, a man who clawed his way up to become the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus. The rhetorician Quintilian later judged his Odes the only Latin lyrics worth reading, praising a poet who could be lofty yet full of charm and grace. How does a freedman's son, an officer on the losing side of a civil war, end up a spokesman for the regime that defeated him? And was that friendship genuine, or was Horace, in John Dryden's phrase, merely "a well-mannered court slave"? His career ran straight through Rome's change from a republic to an empire, and he left behind more about his own character and way of life than any other great poet of antiquity.

• 2. A Freedman's Son

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  His father had likely been a slave for at least part of his life, possibly a Venusian taken captive in the Social War of 91 to 88 BC. The man was evidently gifted. He won his freedom, improved his standing, and worked as a coactor, which scholia explain as a coactor argentarius, an auctioneer with the functions of a banker. He paid sellers from his own funds and recovered the sum with interest from buyers. This father spent a small fortune on his son's education. He even accompanied Horace to Rome to oversee his schooling and moral development. Horace repaid the debt in a poem the German scholar Eduard Fraenkel called the best memorial by any son to his father. In it Horace wrote that if his character was decent and free of greed and profligacy, his father deserved all the credit. He added that he felt no need, as many people did, to apologize for being a freedman's son. He never once mentioned his mother in his verses, and may have known little about her. Perhaps she too had been a slave.

• 3. The Town Of Venusia

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  Venusia, Horace's home town, lay on a trade route in the region of Lucania at the border with Apulia. Various Italic dialects mingled there, and this mix perhaps sharpened the boy's feeling for language. He could have known Greek words even as a child, and later he mocked the jumbled Greek and Oscan spoken in neighbouring Canusium. A colony of Romans or Latins had reportedly been installed in Venusia after the Samnites were driven out early in the third century, according to a local tradition Horace himself reported. So he could have felt himself a Roman, though there are also signs he regarded himself as a Samnite or Sabellus by birth. Army veterans may have been settled there at the cost of local families uprooted by Rome for their part in the Social War. Like Italians in every age devoted to their home towns, Horace carried Venusia with him. Images of that childhood setting recur throughout his poems, and one of the schoolbooks he probably studied was the Odyssia of Livius Andronicus, taught by a master he remembered as Orbilius.

• 4. Athens And Philippi

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  At nineteen Horace arrived in Athens, the great centre of learning, and enrolled in The Academy founded by Plato but now dominated by Epicureans and Stoics. He lounged with the elite of Roman youth, among them Marcus, the idle son of Cicero. There he also absorbed the ancient tradition of Greek lyric poetry, then largely the preserve of grammarians, with access easier in Athens than in a Rome whose public libraries had not yet been built by Asinius Pollio and Augustus. Rome's troubles followed him. Marcus Junius Brutus came to Athens seeking support for the republican cause, attending lectures and recruiting young students, Horace among them. Horace was made tribunus militum, one of six senior officers of a legion, a post usually reserved for men of senatorial or equestrian rank, which stirred jealousy among his well-born fellows. In 42 BC at the Battle of Philippi, Octavian and Mark Antony crushed the republican forces. Horace recorded it as a day of embarrassment, when he fled without his shield, though his self-deprecating humour invites doubt. The comparison he drew is uncanny. His hero Archilochus had also lost a shield in a part of Thrace near Philippi, in the very region where Horace's die-hard comrades finally surrendered, on Thasos.

• 5. Maecenas And The Sabine Farm

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  Octavian offered an early amnesty, and Horace quickly accepted it. Returning to Italy, he found his father's estate in Venusia confiscated for the settlement of veterans, the same loss Virgil suffered in the north around that time. Horace claimed poverty drove him to poetry, though versifying paid nothing directly. He secured a sinecure as scriba quaestorius at the aerarium, or Treasury, a post profitable enough to be purchased even by members of the ordo equester. It was Virgil, already admitted to the privileged circle around Maecenas, who opened the door. After a discreet interval, Horace too was accepted. He depicted the process as honourable, built on merit and leading to true friendship, though one scholar called him "a sharp and rising young man, with an eye to the main chance." In 37 BC he traveled with Maecenas to Brundisium, a journey he wrote up as charming encounters but which was in fact political, with Maecenas en route to negotiate the Treaty of Tarentum with Antony. Maecenas later gave him the famous gift of his Sabine farm, including income from five tenants, near the river at Licenza. By then Horace had attained the status of eques Romanus, a Roman knight.

• 6. Odes And Epistles

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  Odes 1 to 3 drew their forms and themes from Greek lyric poetry of the seventh and sixth centuries BC. The name Augustus, which Octavian assumed in January of 27 BC, first appears in Odes 3.3 and 3.5. In the years that followed, political allusions touched foreign wars in Britain, Arabia, Hispania, and Parthia, and he greeted Augustus on his return to Rome in 24 BC as a beloved ruler. Yet the public reception of those Odes disappointed him. He blamed jealous courtiers and his own isolation from literary cliques, and perhaps that letdown turned him toward verse letters. In the final poem of his first book of Epistles, he revealed himself as forty-four years old in the consulship of Lollius and Lepidus, that is 21 BC, and described himself as of small stature, fond of the sun, prematurely grey, quick-tempered but easily placated. According to Suetonius, the second book of Epistles was prompted by Augustus, who wanted a verse epistle addressed to himself. Augustus had even asked Horace to serve as his personal secretary, a role the poet refused while still complying with the request for a verse letter. He also wrote the Carmen Saeculare, to be sung in a temple of Apollo for the Secular Games that Augustus revived.

• 7. Borrowed Greek Voices

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  Archilochus in the Epodes, Lucilius in the Satires, and Alcaeus in the Odes gave Horace his models, classics he followed before broadening his scope. He proudly claimed to bring the spirit of Archilochus into Latin but, unlike Archilochus, without persecuting anyone. Where the Greek presented himself as a serious foe of wrongdoers, Horace aimed for comic effect and played the weak, ineffectual critic, symbolized by his surrender to the witch Canidia in the final epode. He was the first Latin poet to make consistent use of Alcaic meters and the themes of love, politics, and the symposium. Lucilius offered a sharper contrast. A senator's son, Lucilius could castigate his peers with impunity and wrote with blunt frankness, even a kind of metrical vandalism. Horace was merely a freedman's son who had to tread carefully, so he chose an oblique, ironic satire aimed at stock characters and anonymous targets. His libertas was the private freedom of a philosophical outlook, not a political privilege. His Epodes belong to iambic poetry, the blame poetry meant to shame fellow citizens into a sense of their social obligations. The Satires also carry strong Epicureanism, and the sentiment carpe diem lies behind his punning on his own name, Horatius and hora, in Satires 2.6.

• 8. Monument More Durable Than Bronze

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  Suetonius preserved gossip that the walls of Horace's bedchamber were covered with obscene pictures and mirrors, so he saw erotica wherever he looked. The poet died at fifty-six, not long after his friend Maecenas, and was laid to rest near his tomb. Both men left their property to Augustus, an honour the emperor expected of his friends. In the final poem of his third book of Odes, Horace claimed to have built for himself a monument more durable than bronze, "Exegi monumentum aere perennius." The boast held. His Odes became the best received of all his poems in antiquity, gaining a classic status that discouraged imitation for the four centuries that followed. Ode 4.11 was later set to the melody of the hymn Ut queant laxis, the same Sapphic hymn that became the basis of the solfege system, Do, re, mi. Centuries on, his line Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori would be turned against him by Wilfred Owen, scarred by the First World War, who used Horatian text to question patriotism itself. From a freedman's son who fled at Philippi to a voice still being translated by thirty-six poets in a 2002 edition of the Odes, Horace remains, as one modern scholar put it, less a monument than a recognizable voice marked by its unsentimental humanity.