Horace: the story on HearLore

Horace

Quintus Horatius Flaccus was born on the 8th of December 65 BC in the town of Venusia, a place where the rugged terrain of Lucania met the trade routes of Apulia. His origins were far from the polished marble of Rome; his father was a freedman, likely a Venutian captured during the Social War, who rose from slavery to become a prosperous auctioneer known as a coactor. This man, who spent a small fortune on his son's education and accompanied him to Rome to oversee his moral development, instilled in Horace a deep sense of gratitude and a strict moral code that would permeate his life's work. Horace never mentioned his mother in his verses, suggesting she may have been a slave like his father, leaving the boy to navigate a world where his social standing was precarious yet his potential was undeniable. The linguistic diversity of his hometown, with its mix of Italic dialects and Greek influences, gave him an early appreciation for language that would later distinguish his poetry. He grew up hearing the jargon of mixed Greek and Oscan spoken in neighboring Canusium, a background that enriched his feeling for words and allowed him to poke fun at the linguistic confusion of his peers. This humble beginning stood in stark contrast to the towering literary legacy he would eventually build, proving that a freedman's son could rise to become the leading lyric poet of the Roman Empire.

The Flight From Philippi

In 42 BC, the young Horace found himself on the losing side of a civil war that would define the rest of his life. As a tribunus militum, one of the senior officers of a legion, he fought for the republican cause under Marcus Junius Brutus, the man who had assassinated Julius Caesar. The Battle of Philippi was a disaster for the republicans, crushed by the forces of Octavian and Mark Antony. Horace later recorded the day as one of personal embarrassment, admitting that he fled the battlefield without his shield, a cowardly act that he would later use to identify himself with famous Greek poets like Archilochus who had also abandoned their shields. This incident, however, became a turning point. Octavian offered an early amnesty to his opponents, and Horace quickly accepted it, returning to Italy to find his father's estate in Venusia confiscated to pay for the settlement of veterans. Reduced to poverty, he was forced to try his hand at poetry, though he knew there was no money to be had from versifying at that time. Instead, he sought future prospects through contacts with other poets and their patrons. He obtained a sinecure as a scriba quaestorius, a civil service position at the Treasury, which was profitable enough to be purchased by members of the equestrian order and not very demanding in its workload. It was during this period of uncertainty and financial struggle that he began writing his Satires and Epodes, laying the groundwork for a career that would eventually make him the voice of a new empire.

When and where was Horace born?

Quintus Horatius Flaccus was born on the 8th of December 65 BC in the town of Venusia. This location represents the meeting point of the rugged terrain of Lucania and the trade routes of Apulia.

What happened to Horace during the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC?

Horace fought for the republican cause under Marcus Junius Brutus during the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC. He later admitted to fleeing the battlefield without his shield, an act of cowardice he used to identify himself with famous Greek poets like Archilochus.

Who was Horace's patron and what gift did he receive?

Maecenas, Octavian's right-hand man, became Horace's patron and provided him with material support and encouragement. Maecenas gave Horace a Sabine farm that included income from five tenants, which may have ended his career at the Treasury.

When were Horace's Odes books 1 through 3 published?

Horace's Odes books 1 through 3 were composed around 23 BC. He adapted their forms and themes from Greek lyric poetry of the seventh and sixth centuries BC, employing complex measures including alcaics and sapphics.

How did Horace's influence extend into the Christian era?

Horace's influence extended into the Christian era through authors like Prudentius who adapted Horatian meters to his own poetry and gave Horatian motifs a Christian tone. By the early sixth century, Horace and Prudentius were both part of a classical heritage that was struggling to survive the disorder of the times.

When did Horace's work survive the period between the mid sixth century and the Carolingian revival?

Horace's work probably survived in just two or three books imported into northern Europe from Italy during the period between the mid sixth century and the Carolingian revival. These became the ancestors of six extant manuscripts dated to the ninth century.

The Voice Of The Empire

Horace's poetry became the voice of the new Roman Empire, a delicate balance between maintaining a strong measure of independence and serving as a spokesman for the regime. His work in the period 30, 27 BC began to show his closeness to the regime and his sensitivity to its developing ideology. In Odes 1.2, for example, he eulogized Octavian in hyperboles that echo Hellenistic court poetry. The name Augustus, which Octavian assumed in January of 27 BC, is first attested in Odes 3.3 and 3.5. In the period 27, 24 BC, political allusions in the Odes concentrated on foreign wars in Britain, Arabia, Hispania, and Parthia. He greeted Augustus on his return to Rome in 24 BC as a beloved ruler upon whose good health he depended for his own happiness. The public reception of Odes 1, 3 disappointed him, however, and he attributed the lack of success to jealousy among imperial courtiers and to his isolation from literary cliques. Perhaps it was this disappointment that led him to put aside the genre in favour of verse letters. He addressed his first book of Epistles to a variety of friends and acquaintances in an urbane style reflecting his new social status as a knight. In the opening poem, he professed a deeper interest in moral philosophy than poetry, and though the collection demonstrates a leaning towards stoic theory, it reveals no sustained thinking about ethics. Maecenas was still the dominant confidante but Horace had now begun to assert his own independence, suavely declining constant invitations to attend his patron. In the final poem of the first book of Epistles, he revealed himself to be forty-four years old in the consulship of Lollius and Lepidus, i.e. 21 BC, and described himself as of small stature, fond of the sun, prematurely grey, quick-tempered but easily placated. The second book of Epistles was prompted by Augustus, who desired a verse epistle to be addressed to himself. Horace refused the secretarial role but complied with the emperor's request for a verse letter, which may have been slow in coming, being published possibly as late as 11 BC.

The Legacy Of A Poet

Horace's influence extended far beyond his lifetime, shaping the literary landscape of the Roman Empire and beyond. His Odes were to become the best received of all his poems in ancient times, acquiring a classic status that discouraged imitation: no other poet produced a comparable body of lyrics in the four centuries that followed. His Epistles provided a model for their own verse letters and it also shaped Ovid's exile poetry. His influence had a perverse aspect. As mentioned before, the brilliance of his Odes may have discouraged imitation. Conversely, they may have created a vogue for the lyrics of the archaic Greek poet Pindar, due to the fact that Horace had neglected that style of lyric. The iambic genre seems almost to have disappeared after publication of Horace's Epodes. Ovid's Ibis was a rare attempt at the form but it was inspired mainly by Callimachus, and there are some iambic elements in Martial but the main influence there was Catullus. A revival of popular interest in the satires of Lucilius may have been inspired by Horace's criticism of his unpolished style. Both Horace and Lucilius were considered good role-models by Persius, who critiqued his own satires as lacking both the acerbity of Lucillius and the gentler touch of Horace. Juvenal's caustic satire was influenced mainly by Lucilius but Horace by then was a school classic and Juvenal could refer to him respectfully and in a round-about way as 'the Venusine lamp'. Statius paid homage to Horace by composing one poem in Sapphic and one in Alcaic meter, which he included in his collection of occasional poems, Silvae. Ancient scholars wrote commentaries on the lyric meters of the Odes, including the scholarly poet Caesius Bassus. By a process called derivatio, he varied established meters through the addition or omission of syllables, a technique borrowed by Seneca the Younger when adapting Horatian meters to the stage. Horace's poems continued to be school texts into late antiquity. Works attributed to Helenius Acro and Pomponius Porphyrio are the remnants of a much larger body of Horatian scholarship. Porphyrio arranged the poems in non-chronological order, beginning with the Odes, because of their general popularity and their appeal to scholars. Horace was often evoked by poets of the fourth century, such as Ausonius and Claudian. Prudentius presented himself as a Christian Horace, adapting Horatian meters to his own poetry and giving Horatian motifs a Christian tone. Prudentius sometimes alludesto the Odes in a negative context, as expressions of a secular life he is abandoning. Thus for example male pertinax, employed in Prudentius's Praefatio to describe a willful desire for victory, is lifted from Odes 1.9.24, where it describes a girl's half-hearted resistance to seduction. Elsewhere he borrows dux bone from Odes 4.5.5 and 37, where it refers to Augustus, and applies it to Christ. On the other hand, St Jerome, modelled an uncompromising response to the pagan Horace, observing: 'What harmony can there be between Christ and the Devil? What has Horace to do with the Psalter?' By the early sixth century, Horace and Prudentius were both part of a classical heritage that was struggling to survive the disorder of the times. Boethius, the last major author of classical Latin literature, could still take inspiration from Horace, sometimes mediated by Senecan tragedy. It can be argued that Horace's influence extended beyond poetry to dignify core themes and values of the early Christian era, such as self-sufficiency, inner contentment, and courage. Odes 3.3.1, 8 was especially influential in promoting the value of heroic calm in the face of danger, describing a man who could bear even the collapse of the world without fear. Echoes are found in Seneca's Agamemnon 593, 603, Prudentius's Peristephanon 4.5, 12 and Boethius's Consolatio 1 metrum 4.

The Renaissance And Beyond

Classical texts almost ceased being copied in the period between the mid sixth century and the Carolingian revival. Horace's work probably survived in just two or three books imported into northern Europe from Italy. These became the ancestors of six extant manuscripts dated to the ninth century. Two of those six manuscripts are French in origin, one was produced in Alsace, and the other three show Irish influence but were probably written in continental monasteries. By the last half of the ninth century, it was not uncommon for literate people to have direct experience of Horace's poetry. His influence on the Carolingian Renaissance can be found in the poems of Heiric of Auxerre, who, like Prudentius, gave Horatian motifs a Christian context. Thus the character Lydia in Odes 3.19.15, who would willingly die for her lover twice, becomes in Heiric's Life of St Germaine of Auxerre a saint ready to die twice for the Lord's commandments. Ode 4.11 is neumed with the melody of a hymn to John the Baptist, Ut queant laxis, composed in Sapphic stanzas. This hymn later became the basis of the solfege system (Do, re, mi...), an association with western music quite appropriate for a lyric poet like Horace, though the language of the hymn is mainly Prudentian. The German scholar Ludwig Traube once dubbed the tenth and eleventh centuries The age of Horace, and placed it between the aetas Vergiliana of the eighth and ninth centuries, and the aetas Ovidiana of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Horace was a substantial influence in the ninth century as well, and Traube concentrated too much on Horace's Satires. Almost all of Horace's work found favour in the Medieval period, with scholars associating Horace's different genres with the different ages of man. A twelfth-century scholar encapsulated the theory: '...Horace wrote four different kinds of poems on account of the four ages, the Odes for boys, the Ars Poetica for young men, the Satires for mature men, the Epistles for old and complete men.' It was then thought that Horace had composed his works in the order in which they had been placed by ancient scholars. According to a medieval French commentary on the Satires: '...first he composed his lyrics, and in them, speaking to the young, as it were, he took as subject-matter love affairs and quarrels, banquets and drinking parties. Next he wrote his Epodes, and in them composed invectives against men of a more advanced and more dishonourable age...He next wrote his book about the Ars Poetica, and in that instructed men of his own profession to write well...Later he added his book of Satires, in which he reproved those who had fallen a prey to various kinds of vices. Finally, he finished his oeuvre with the Epistles, and in them, following the method of a good farmer, he sowed the virtues where he had rooted out the vices.' This schematism involved an appreciation of Horace's works as a collection, the Ars Poetica, Satires, and Epistles appearing to find favour as well as the Odes. The later Middle Ages, however, gave special significance to Satires and Epistles, considered Horace's mature works. Dante referred to Horace as Orazio satiro, and he awarded him a privileged position in the first circle of Hell, with Homer, Ovid, and Lucan. Horace's popularity is revealed in the large number of quotes from all his works found in almost every genre of medieval literature, and also in the number of poets imitating him in quantitative Latin meter. The most prolific imitator of his Odes was the Bavarian monk, Metellus of Tegernsee, who dedicated his work to the patron saint of Tegernsee Abbey, St Quirinus, around the year 1170. He imitated all of Horace's lyrical meters then followed these up with imitations of other meters used by Prudentius and Boethius, indicating that variety, as first modelled by Horace, was considered a fundamental aspect of the lyric genre. The content of his poems however was restricted to simple piety. Among the most successful imitators of Satires and Epistles was another Germanic author, calling himself Sextus Amarcius, around 1100, who composed four books, the first two exemplifying vices, the second pair mainly virtues. Petrarch is a key figure in the imitation of Horace in accentual meters. His verse letters in Latin were modelled on the Epistles and he wrote a letter to Horace in the form of an ode. However he also borrowed from Horace when composing his Italian sonnets. One modern scholar has speculated that authors who imitated Horace in accentual rhythms (including stressed Latin and vernacular languages) may have considered their work a natural sequel to Horace's metrical variety. In France, Horace and Pindar were the poetic models for a group of vernacular authors called the Pléiade, including for example Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay. Montaigne made constant and inventive use of Horatian quotes. The vernacular languages were dominant in Castilia and Portugal in the sixteenth century, where Horace's influence is notable in the works of such authors as Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan Boscán, Sá de Miranda, Antonio Ferreira, and Fray Luis de León, the last writing odes on the Horatian theme beatus ille (happy the man). The sixteenth century in western Europe was also an age of translations (except in Germany, where Horace wasn't translated into the vernacular until well into the seventeenth century). The first English translator was Thomas Drant, who placed translations of Jeremiah and Horace side by side in Medicinable Morall, 1566. That was also the year that the Scot George Buchanan paraphrased the Psalms in a Horatian setting. Ben Jonson put Horace on the stage in 1601 in Poetaster, along with other classical Latin authors, giving them all their own verses to speak in translation. Horace's part evinces the independent spirit, moral earnestness, and critical insight that many readers look for in his poems. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or the Age of Enlightenment, neoclassical culture was pervasive. English literature in the middle of that period has been dubbed Augustan. It is not always easy to distinguish Horace's influence during these centuries (the mixing of influences is shown for example in one poet's pseudonym, Horace Juvenal). However a measure of his influence can be found in the diversity of the people interested in his works, both among readers and authors. New editions of his works were published almost yearly. There were three new editions in 1612 (two in Leiden, one in Frankfurt) and again in 1699 (Utrecht, Barcelona, Cambridge). Cheap editions were plentiful and fine editions were also produced, including one whose entire text was engraved by John Pine in copperplate. The poet James Thomson owned five editions of Horace's work and the physician James Douglas had five hundred books with Horace-related titles. Horace was often commended in periodicals such as The Spectator, as a hallmark of good judgement, moderation, and manliness, a focus for moralising. His verses offered a fund of mottoes, such as simplex munditiis (elegance in simplicity), splendide mendax (nobly untruthful), sapere aude (dare to know), nunc est bibendum (now is the time to drink), and carpe diem (seize the day, perhaps the only one still in common use today). These were quoted even in works as prosaic as Edmund Quincy's A treatise of hemp-husbandry (1765). The fictional hero Tom Jones recited his verses with feeling. His works were also used to justify commonplace themes, such as patriotic obedience, as in James Parry's English lines from an Oxford University collection in 1736. Horatian-style lyrics were increasingly typical of Oxford and Cambridge verse collections for this period, most of them in Latin but some like the previous ode in English. John Milton's Lycidas first appeared in such a collection. It has few Horatian echoes, yet Milton's associations with Horace were lifelong. He composed a controversial version of Odes 1.5, and Paradise Lost includes references to Horace's 'Roman' Odes 3.1, 6. Yet Horace's lyrics could offer inspiration to libertines as well as moralists, and neo-Latin sometimes served as a kind of discrete veil for the risqué. Thus for example Benjamin Loveling authored a catalogue of Drury Lane and Covent Garden prostitutes, in Sapphic stanzas, and an encomium for a dying lady 'of salacious memory'. Some Latin imitations of Horace were politically subversive, such as a marriage ode by Anthony Alsop that included a rallying cry for the Jacobite cause. On the other hand, Andrew Marvell took inspiration from Horace's Odes 1.37 to compose his English masterpiece Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, in which subtly nuanced reflections on the execution of Charles I echo Horace's ambiguous response to the death of Cleopatra. Samuel Johnson took particular pleasure in reading The Odes. Alexander Pope wrote direct Imitations of Horace and also echoed him in Essays and The Rape of the Lock. He even emerged as 'a quite Horatian Homer' in his translation of the Iliad. Horace appealed also to female poets, such as Anna Seward and Elizabeth Tollet, who composed a Latin ode in Sapphic meter to celebrate her brother's return from overseas, with tea and coffee substituted for the wine of Horace's sympotic settings. Horace's Ars Poetica is second only to Aristotle's Poetics in its influence on literary theory and criticism. Milton recommended both works in his treatise of Education. Horace's Satires and Epistles however also had a huge impact, influencing theorists and critics such as John Dryden. There was considerable debate over the value of different lyrical forms for contemporary poets, as represented on one hand by the kind of four-line stanzas made familiar by Horace's Sapphic and Alcaic Odes and, on the other, the loosely structured Pindarics associated with the odes of Pindar. Translations occasionally involved scholars in the dilemmas of censorship. Thus Christopher Smart entirely omitted Odes 4.10 and re-numbered the remaining odes. He also removed the ending of Odes 4.1. Thomas Creech printed Epodes 8 and 12 in the original Latin but left out their English translations. Philip Francis left out both the English and Latin for those same two epodes, a gap in the numbering the only indication that something was amiss. French editions of Horace were influential in England and these too were regularly bowdlerized. Most European nations had their own 'Horaces': thus for example Friedrich von Hagedorn was called The German Horace and Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski The Polish Horace. Pope Urban VIII wrote voluminously in Horatian meters, including an ode on gout. Horace maintained a central role in the education of English-speaking elites right up until the 1960s. A pedantic emphasis on the formal aspects of language-learning at the expense of literary appreciation may have made him unpopular in some quarters, yet it also confirmed his influence, a tension in his reception that underlies Byron's famous lines from Childe Harold. William Wordsworth's mature poetry, including the preface to Lyrical Ballads, reveals Horace's influence in its rejection of false ornament, and he once expressed 'a wish / to meet the shade of Horace'. John Keats echoed the opening of Horace's Epodes 14 in the opening lines of Ode to a Nightingale. The Roman poet was presented in the nineteenth century as an honorary English gentleman. William Thackeray produced a version of Odes 1.38 in which Horace's 'boy' became 'Lucy', and Gerard Manley Hopkins translated the boy innocently as 'child'. Horace was translated by Sir Theodore Martin but minus some ungentlemanly verses, such as the erotic Odes 1.25 and Epodes 8 and 12. Edward Bulwer-Lytton produced a popular translation and William Gladstone also wrote translations during his last days as Prime Minister. Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, though formally derived from the Persian ruba'i, nevertheless shows a strong Horatian influence, since, as one modern scholar has observed, '...the quatrains inevitably recall the stanzas of the 'Odes', as does the narrating first person of the world-weary, ageing Epicurean Omar himself, mixing sympotic exhortation and 'carpe diem' with splendid moralising and 'memento mori' nihilism.' Matthew Arnold advised a friend in verse not to worry about politics, an echo of Odes 2.11, yet later became a critic of Horace's inadequacies relative to Greek poets, as role models of Victorian virtues, observing: 'If human life were complete without faith, without enthusiasm, without energy, Horace...would be the perfect interpreter of human life.' Christina Rossetti composed a sonnet depicting a woman willing her own death steadily, drawing on Horace's depiction of 'Glycera' in Odes 1.19.5, 6 and Cleopatra in Odes 1.37. A. E. Housman considered Odes 4.7, in Archilochian couplets, the most beautiful poem of antiquity, and yet he generally shared Horace's penchant for quatrains, being readily adapted to his own elegiac and melancholy strain. The most famous poem of Ernest Dowson took its title and its heroine's name from a line of Odes 4.1, Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae, as well as its motif of nostalgia for a former flame. Kipling wrote a famous parody of the Odes, satirising their stylistic idiosyncrasies and especially the extraordinary syntax, but he also used Horace's Roman patriotism as a focus for British imperialism, as in the story Regulus in the school collection Stalky & Co., which he based on Odes 3.5. Wilfred Owen's famous poem, quoted above, incorporated Horatian text to question patriotism while ignoring the rules of Latin scansion. However, there were few other echoes of Horace in the war period, possibly because war is not actually a major theme of Horace's work. The Spanish poet Miquel Costa i Llobera published his renowned collection of poems named Horacianes, thus being dedicated to the Latin poet Horace, and employing Sapphics, Alcaics, and similar types of stanzas. Both W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice began their careers as teachers of classics and both responded as poets to Horace's influence. Auden for example evoked the fragile world of the 1930s in terms echoing Odes 2.11.1, 4, where Horace advises a friend not to let worries about frontier wars interfere with current pleasures. The American poet Robert Frost echoed Horace's Satires in the conversational and sententious idiom of some of his longer poems, such as The Lesson for Today (1941), and also in his gentle advocacy of life on the farm, as in Hyla Brook (1916), evoking Horace's fons Bandusiae in Ode 3.13. Now at the beginning of the third millennium, poets are still absorbing and re-configuring the Horatian influence, sometimes in translation and sometimes as inspiration for their own work. Horace's Epodes have largely been ignored in the modern era, excepting those with political associations of historical significance. The obscene qualities of some of the poems have repulsed even scholars, yet more recently a better understanding of the nature of Iambic poetry has led to a re-evaluation of the whole collection. A re-appraisal of the Epodes also appears in creative adaptations by recent poets. Horace's Odes and the Mystery of Do-Re-Mi, Stuart Lyons, and other translations continue to bring his work to new audiences.