Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Ancient History and Latin Expert. Gill is a Latinist, writer, and teacher of ancient history and Latin. Updated October 24, Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Gill, N. Although he wrote in many different meters and of different themes, the odes often express ordinary thoughts and sentiments with a deceptive finality and simplicity.
Alexander Pope wrote of them saying, "what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed. In it, Horace advises poets to read widely, to strive for precision, and to find the best criticism available. Along with Virgil, Horace is the most celebrated of the Augustan poets.
Auden , Robert Frost , and many others. National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem. Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers. He says that he fled from the battle, leaving his shield behind: whether this is literally true or merely a literary convention intended to recall to the reader similar passages in the Greek lyric poets Archilochus and Alcaeus, and also perhaps designed to show that he was never a very significant figure in the resistance to Augustus, is a matter of dispute.
After the defeat at Philippi, Horace was a ruined man. His short military career was at an end; he was an officer of a defeated army and, technically at least, an enemy of the victorious Octavian later Augustus , Mark Antony, and Lepidus.
His father was apparently dead, and the estate which had come to Horace was confiscated to provide allotments for the soldiers of the victorious army on their demobilization. He was soon pardoned in the general amnesty granted by Octavian and then managed to obtain a position as a clerk in the treasury, which kept him from starvation.
Whether he had written verse before, we do not know, but he now turned to writing verses in the hope of attaining recognition and patronage, and it is to this period that the earliest Epodes and Satires, full of the scenes and acquaintances of a rather bohemian life, belong. Horace was soon rewarded. Among the friends he made were the poets Varius and Virgil, who was then engaged in writing the Eclogues.
Through them he secured, probably in 39 or 38 B. Horace was awkward and stammered, and Maecenas, as usual, kept his own counsel; Horace felt that he had failed in his efforts. Nine months later, however, Maecenas wrote to him, and he was admitted to the circle of Maecenas's friends.
In 35 B. Meanwhile, Horace was growing in Maecenas's favor and eventually in that of the future emperor Augustus. In 37 B. Horace accompanied Maecenas, along with Virgil and Varius, on a diplomatic mission to Brundisium Brindisi , the discomforts and incidents of which are commemorated in one of the most famous satires of Book I. Sometime later, probably in 34 or 33 B. Thereafter Horace led a life of comfort and retirement in the company of his books and good friends, including many of the most prominent men in Roman political and literary life, and the major events of his life were the publication of his various books: the first three books of his Odes in 23 B.
In the last years of his life, probably after the composition of the fourth book of the Odes, he wrote his Ars poetica. Horace died on Nov. Suetonius related that at one time Augustus had offered Horace the position of private secretary; but Horace, who had by then acquired a love of leisure and lazy habits totally unsuited to regular work Suetonius says that Horace lay in bed until 10, which is even more indolent than it would be today, since the Romans were up by dawn , also had the tact, and confidence in the Emperor's good graces, to refuse without offending.
His influence on the Carolingian Renaissance can be found in the poems of Heiric of Auxerre and in some manuscripts marked with neumes, possibly intended as an aid to the memorization and discussion of his lyric meters. Ode 4. The hymn became the basis of the solfege system — an association with western music quite appropriate for a lyric poet, though the language of the hymn is Prudentian rather than Horatian.
The German scholar, Ludwig Traube, once dubbed the tenth and eleventh centuries The age of Horace aetas Horatiana , and placed it between the aetas Vergiliana of the eighth and ninth centuries, and the aetas Ovidiana of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a distinction supposed to reflect the dominant classical Latin influences of those times.
It was over-schematized: Horace was a substantial influence in the ninth century as well, and it seems Traube had focused on Horace's Satires. Medieval scholars also over-schematized: they associated 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.
Despite its naivety, the schematism involved an appreciation of Horace's works as a collection, the Ars Poetica, Satires and Epistles appearing to find as much favour as the Odes. Dante referred to him as Orazio satiro, an epithet perhaps reflecting the special status that the Satires and Epistles had attained by the later Middle Ages, and he awarded him a privileged position in the first circle of Hell, with Homer, Ovid and Lucan.
One measure of Horace's popularity is the large number of quotes from all his works found in almost every genre of medieval literature, and the number of imitators composing in ancient quantitative Latin meter. The most prolific imitator of his Odes was the Bavarian monk, Metellus of Tegernsee, who composed a large collection of poems dedicated to the patron saint of Tegernsee Abbey, St Quirinus, around the year He imitated all 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 genre.
The content of his poems however was restricted to simple piety. Among the most successful imitators of Horace's hexameters was another Germanic author, calling himself Sextus Amarcius, around , who composed four books, the first two exemplifying vices, the second pair mainly virtues, modelled on Horace's Satires and Epistles and exhibiting some of the stylistic differences between the two genres.
Petrarch is a key figure in the transition from imitations of Horace in quantitative Latin meter to imitations 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 meters based on accentual rhythms including stressed Latin and vernacular languages may have considered their work a natural sequel to Horace's metrical variety.
Montaigne made constant and inventive use of Horatian quotes. The sixteenth century in western Europe was also an age of translations except in Germany, where Horace wasn't translated until well into the next century. The first English translator was Thomas Drant, who placed translations of Jeremiah and Horace side by side in Medicinable Morall, , the same year that the Scot George Buchanan paraphrased the Psalms in a Horatian context.
Ben Jonson put Horace on the stage in 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. Age of Enlightenment During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or the Age of Enlightenment, neo-classical culture was pervasive and English literature in the middle of that period has been dubbed Augustan.
It is not always easy to separate out Horace's influence during those 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 two in Leiden, one in Frankfurt and again in 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, splendide mendax, sapere aude, nunc est bibendum, carpe diem the latter perhaps being the only one still in common use today , quoted even in works as prosaic as Edmund Quincy's A treatise of hemp-husbandry 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 What friendly Muse will teach my Lays To emulate the Roman fire?
Justly to sound a Caeser's praise Demands a bold Horatian lyre. 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. 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 Marvel took inspiration from Horace's Odes 1.
Samuel Johnson took particular pleasure in reading The Odes. He even emerged as "a quite Horatian Homer" in his translation of the Iliad.
Horace appealed also to female poets, such as Anna Seward Original sonnets on various subjects, and odes paraphrased from Horace, 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: Quos procax nobis numeros, jocosque Musa dictaret?
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. He also removed the ending of Odes 4. 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. Horace maintained a central role in the education of English-speaking elites right up until the s. 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 Canto iv, 77 Then farewell, Horace, whom I hated so Not for thy faults, but mine; it is a curse To understand, not feel thy lyric flow, To comprehend, but never love thy verse.
The Roman poet was presented in the nineteenth century as an honourary English gentleman. William Thackery produced a version of Odes 1. Horace was translated by Sir Theodore Martin biographer of Prince Albert but minus some ungentlemanly verses, such as the erotic Odes 1. Lord Lytton produced a popular translation and William Gladstone also wrote translations during his last days as Prime Minister.
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