BiblioVault - Books about Horace

Actium and Augustus

The Politics and Emotions of Civil War

Robert Alan Gurval

University of Michigan Press, 1998

On 2 September 31 B.C.E., the heir of Julius Caesar defeated the forces of Antony and Cleopatra in a naval engagement at Actium. Despite the varied judgments this battle received in antiquity, common opinion held that Actium marked the start of a new era, a turning point in Roman history and, indeed, in Western civilization.
Actium and Augustus marks a turning point as well. Robert Alan Gurval's unusual approach is to examine contemporary views of the battle and its immediate political and social consequences. He starts with a consideration of the official celebration and public commemoration of the Actian victory and then moves on to other questions. What were the "Actian" monuments that Octavian erected on the battle site and later in Rome? What role did the Actian victory play in the political formation of the Principate and its public ideology? What was the response of contemporary poetry? Throughout, this volume concentrates on contemporary views of Actium and its results.
Written to include the general reader, Actium and Augustus presents a thoughtful examination of a complex period. All Greek and Latin quotations are translated, and extensive illustrations present graphic evidence about the issues Romans faced.
Robert Alan Gurval is Associate Professor of Classics, University of California, Los Angeles, and has been a recipient of the Rome Prize awarded by the American Academy in Rome.

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Horace between Freedom and Slavery

The First Book of Epistles

Stephanie McCarter

University of Wisconsin Press, 2015

During the Roman transition from Republic to Empire in the first century B.C.E., the poet Horace found his own public success in the era of Emperor Augustus at odds with his desire for greater independence. In Horace between Freedom and Slavery, Stephanie McCarter offers new insights into Horace's complex presentation of freedom in the first book of his Epistles and connects it to his most enduring and celebrated moral exhortation, the golden mean.

She argues that, although Horace commences the Epistles with an uncompromising insistence on freedom, he ultimately adopts a middle course. She shows how Horace explores in the poems the application of moderate freedom first to philosophy, then to friendship, poetry, and place. Rather than rejecting philosophical masters, Horace draws freely on them without swearing permanent allegiance to any—a model for compromise that allows him to enjoy poetic

renown and friendships with the city's elite while maintaining a private sphere of freedom. This moderation and adaptability, McCarter contends, become the chief ethical lessons that Horace learns for himself and teaches to others. She reads Horace's reconfiguration of freedom as a political response to the transformations of the new imperial age.

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Odes

Horace, Translated with commentary by David R. Slavitt

University of Wisconsin Press, 2014

The Odes of Horace are a treasure of Western civilization, and this new English translation is a lively rendition by one of the prominent poet-translators of our own time, David R. Slavitt. Horace was one of the great poets of Rome’s Augustan age, benefiting (as did fellow poet Vergil) from the friendship of the powerful statesman and cultural patron Maecenas. These Odes, which take as their formal models Greek poems of the seventh century BCE—especially the work of Sappho and Alcaeus—are the observations of a wry, subtle mind on events and occasions of everyday life. At first reading, they are modest works but build toward a comprehensive attitude that might fairly be called a philosophy. Charming, shrewd, and intimate, the voice of the Odes is that of a sociable wise man talking amusingly but candidly to admiring friends.
This edition is also notable for Slavitt’s extensive notes and commentary about the art of translation. He presents the problems he encountered in making the translation, discussing possible solutions and the choices he made among them. The effect of the notes is to bring the reader even closer to the original Latin and to understand better how to gauge the distance between the two languages.

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Odes and Epodes

Horace

Harvard University Press, 2004

Monumental verse.

The poetry of Horace (born 65 BC) is richly varied, its focus moving between public and private concerns, urban and rural settings, Stoic and Epicurean thought. The Loeb Classical Library edition of the great Roman poet’s Odes and Epodes boasts a faithful and fluid translation and reflects current scholarship.

Horace took pride in being the first Roman to write a body of lyric poetry. For models he turned to Greek lyric, especially to the poetry of Alcaeus, Sappho, and Pindar; but his poems are set in a Roman context. His four books of Odes cover a wide range of moods and topics. Some are public poems, upholding the traditional values of courage, loyalty, and piety; and there are hymns to the gods. But most of the Odes are on private themes: chiding or advising friends; speaking about love and amorous situations, often amusingly. Horace’s seventeen Epodes, which he called iambi, were also an innovation for Roman literature. Like the Odes they were inspired by a Greek model: the seventh-century iambic poetry of Archilochus. Love and political concerns are frequent themes; the tone is only occasionally aggressive. “In his language he is triumphantly adventurous,” Quintilian said of Horace; Niall Rudd’s translation reflects his different voices.

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Odes and Epodes

Horace

Harvard University Press

THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION.

Horace (b. 65 B.C.) claims the lyric poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus as models for his celebrated odes. His four books cover a wide range of moods and topics: friendship is the dominant theme of about a third of the poems; a great many deal with love and amorous situations, often amusingly; others deal with patriotic and political themes. The seventeen epodes, which Horace called iambi, were also inspired by a Greek model: the seventh century iambic poetry of Archilochus. As in the odes, love and politics are frequent themes; some of the epodes also display mockery and ridicule, of a harsher variety than we find in Horace's satires.

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The Odes of Horace

A Facsimile

William Morris

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2016

Profile of Horace

Shackleton Bailey D. R.

Harvard University Press, 1982

In this concise analysis, written with elegant wit, the greatest living textual critic of Latin authors offers new insight into the poetry of Horace.

Horace is best known for his four books of Odes, cherished for their lyric grace. His amiable persona is displayed more intimately in the moralizing verses of the Satires and Epistles. In a reading of all the poetry, but focusing especially on problematic areas, Shackleton Bailey examines Horace's art of self-presentation. A variety of themes are elucidated, from the poet's relations with his patron to Roman sexual attitudes. Close scrutiny is given to about thirty passages which, he argues, have been misread. An appended essay on a notable predecessor, the textual scholar Richard Bentley, is especially revealing on the art of classical scholarship.

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Satire and the Threat of Speech

Horace's Satires, Book 1

Catherine M. Schlegel

University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

In his first book of Satires, written in the late, violent days of the Roman republic, Horace exposes satiric speech as a tool of power and domination. Using critical theories from classics, speech act theory, and others, Catherine Schlegel argues that Horace's acute poetic observation of hostile speech provides insights into the operations of verbal control that are relevant to his time and to ours. She demonstrates that though Horace is forced by his political circumstances to develop a new, unthreatening style of satire, his poems contain a challenge to our most profound habits of violence, hierarchy, and domination. Focusing on the relationships between speaker and audience and between old and new style, Schlegel examines the internal conflicts of a notoriously difficult text. This exciting contribution to the field of Horatian studies will be of interest to classicists as well as other scholars interested in the genre of satire.

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Satires and Epistles

Horace

University of Chicago Press, 1959

The writings of Horace have exerted strong and continuing influence on writers from his day to our own. Sophisticated and intellectual, witty and frank, he speaks to the cultivated and civilized world of today with the same astringent candor and sprightliness that appeared so fresh at the height of Rome's wealthy and glory.

The Satires and Epistles spans the poet's career as a satirist, critic, and master of lyric poetry, as man of the world, friend of the great, and relentless enemy of the mediocre. "Horace," writes translator Smith Palmer Bovie, "is the best antidote in the world for anxiety. His Satires and Epistles demonstrate the good-humored freedom of a man who has cheerfully assumed the responsibility for making his own life not so much a 'success' as the occasion for a true enjoyment of virtue and knowledge." Bovie's impeccable translation, along with Clancy's edition of the Odes and Epodes, offers the reader a complete and modern Horace.

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Satires. Epistles. Art of Poetry

Horace

Harvard University Press

Artful hexameters.

Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65–8 BC) was born at Venusia, son of a freedman clerk who had him well educated at Rome and Athens. Horace supported the ill-fated killers of Caesar, lost his property, became a secretary in the Treasury, and began to write poetry. Maecenas, lover of literature, to whom Virgil and Varius introduced Horace in 39, became his friend and made him largely independent by giving him a farm. After 30 Horace knew and aided with his pen the emperor Augustus, who after Virgil’s death in 19 engaged him to celebrate imperial affairs in poetry. Horace refused to become Augustus’ private secretary and died a few months after Maecenas. Both lyric (in various metres) and other work (in hexameters) was spread over the period 40–10 or 9 BC. It is Roman in spirit, Greek in technique.

In the two books of Satires Horace is a moderate social critic and commentator; the two books of Epistles are more intimate and polished, the second book being literary criticism as is also the Ars Poetica. The Epodes in various (mostly iambic) metres are akin to the ‘discourses’ (as Horace called his satires and epistles) but also look towards the famous Odes, in four books, in the old Greek lyric metres used with much skill. Some are national odes about public affairs; some are pleasant poems of love and wine; some are moral letters; all have a rare perfection. The Odes and Epodes are found in LCL 33.

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A Symposion of Praise

Horace Returns to Lyric in Odes IV

Timothy Johnson

University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

Ten years after publishing his first collection of lyric poetry, Odes I-III, Horace (65 B.C.-8 B.C.) returned to lyric and published another book of fifteen odes, Odes IV. These later lyrics, which praise Augustus, the imperial family, and other political insiders, have often been treated more as propaganda than art. But in A Symposion of Praise, Timothy Johnson examines the richly textured ambiguities of Odes IV that engage the audience in the communal or "sympotic" formulation of Horace's praise. Surpassing propaganda, Odes IV reflects the finely nuanced and imaginative poetry of Callimachus rather than the traditions of Aristotelian and Ciceronian rhetoric, which advise that praise should present commonly admitted virtues and vices. In this way, Johnson demonstrates that Horace's application of competing perspectives establishes him as Pindar's rival.
Johnson shows the Horatian panegyrist is more than a dependent poet representing only the desires of his patrons. The poet forges the panegyric agenda, setting out the character of the praise (its mode, lyric, and content both positive and negative), and calls together a community to join in the creation and adaptation of Roman identities and civic ideologies. With this insightful reading, A Symposion of Praise will be of interest to historians of the Augustan period and its literature, and to scholars interested in the dynamics between personal expression and political power.

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Time and the Erotic in Horace's Odes

Ronnie Ancona

Duke University Press, 1994

In Horace’s Odes love cannot last. Is the poet unromantic, as some critics claim? Is he merely realistic? Or is he, as Ronnie Ancona contends, relating the erotic to time in a more complex and interesting way than either of these positions allows? Rejecting both the notion that Horace fails as a love poet because he undermines the romantic ideal that love conquers time and the notion that he succeeds becauses he eschews illusions about love’s ability to endure, this book challenges the assumption that temporality must inevitably pose a threat to the erotic. The author argues that temporality, understood as the contingency the male poet/lover wants to but cannot control, explains why love "fails" in Horace’s Odes.
Drawing on contemporary theory, including recent work in feminist criticism, Ancona provides close readings of fourteen odes, which are presented in English translation as well as in Latin. Through a discussion of the poet’s use of various temporal devices—the temporal adverb, seasonal imagery, and the lover or beloved’s own temporality—she shows how Horace makes time dominate the erotic context and, further, how the version of love that appears in his poems is characterized by the lover’s desire to control the beloved. The romantic ideal of a timeless love, apparently rejected by the poet, emerges here instead as an underlying element of the poet’s portrayal of the erotic. In a critique of the predominant modes of recent Horatian scholarship on the love odes, Ancona offers an alternative view that takes into account the male gender of the lover and its effect on the structure of desire in the poems. By doing so, she advances a broader project in recent classical studies that aims to include discussion of features of classical literature, such as sexuality and gender, which have previously escaped critical attention.
Addressing aspects of Horace as a love poet—especially the dynamics of gender relations—that critics have tended to ignore, this book articulates his version of love as something not to be championed or condemned but rather to be seen as challengingly problematic. Of primary interest to classicists, it will also engage the attention of scholars and teachers in the humanities with specializations in gender, sexuality, lyric poetry, or feminist theory.

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