23–13 BC
The Odes, by the Roman poet Horace, are four books of short poems about love, friendship, the pleasures of wine and Nature, and the Roman virtues of dignity and serenity. Simple, restrained and dignified, but always passionate, they are the timeless poems of a man who thinks as well as feels; and they have inspired poets, artists and writers for the last 2000 years. If any one poet has shown us that it is possible to experience deep and lasting emotion but still live in the real world, it is Horace.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus, to give him his proper name, is relatively well documented, not least because the historian Suetonius wrote his life. So we know that he was born in 65 BC in Apulia, in the Latin-speaking heel of Italy, the son of a freed slave who had acquired a modest farm. He had a surprisingly good education, including a spell in Athens, and he was in Greece when the Roman Republic was convulsed by the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. In the subsequent civil war, at the age of about 21, he joined the army of Brutus and Cassius, two of the conspirators who had assassinated Caesar, and he fought at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC.
Their defeat by the forces of Mark Antony and Octavian – the future Emperor Augustus – marked the end of the Republic and seemed to do the same for Horace’s hopes of prosperity. The family farm had been seized, and Horace seemed to be not only penniless but also friendless. However, he obtained a pardon from the Augustan regime, and with the help of the wealthy literary patron Gaius Maecenas, he gained a junior government post – and wrote poetry.
All the works that Horace published have survived, and they include two books of satires and a volume of poems known as Epodes, a series of verses that wistfully suggest a new Golden Age might be found among the islands of the western ocean. He wrote an influential verse treatise on poetry, Ars poetica (The Art of Poetry), two books of verse letters and a hymn to the Roman gods, Carmen saeculare (The Song of the Ages), which was commissioned by Augustus himself for public games. Significantly, the early satires seemed to support Augustus’s declared intention of restoring traditional morality and promoting self-made men to stand alongside the traditional Republican aristocracy. Horace was balancing his own independent spirit with the practical need to be loyal to his patron and support the new ruler. Indeed, so successful was Horace in his conversion to Augustan Rome that he was offered the influential and profitable post of private secretary to the emperor: he turned it down, but with such grace that he managed to remain in official favour. By the time of his death, in 8 BC, Horace’s star was sufficiently high for his work to have become standard reading in the Roman syllabus.
Horace’s lyric poetry was written at what was both the dawn of the Roman Empire and a period of peace and cultural awareness, and he tried to set out a framework for Roman culture, which was already spreading across Europe. It was a time of astonishing literary achievement – Horace’s contemporaries included the poets Virgil (70–19 BC) and Ovid (43 BC–AD 17), the older orator-politician Cicero (106–43 BC), the historian Livy (59 BC–AD 17) and the rhetorician Seneca the Elder (c. 55 BC–c. AD 37).
The Odes appeared in four separate books, the first three (containing 88 poems) published when Horace was in his early forties. The fourth, with fifteen poems, appeared ten years later. Their themes were common enough, for Horace – as with many of his compatriots – was torn between a fascination with wealth, power and glory on the one hand, and an uneasy sense that the better life was one of bucolic calm and simplicity on the other. The Odes shiver with that tension, which was felt not just by the Romans of the 1st century BC, but by so many readers in the centuries to follow.
In the following extract from Horace’s first book of Odes, he urges the reader not to worry about the future or indulge in fortune-telling as the Babylonian astrologers do. In other words, ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’, as the 17th-century English poet Robert Herrick put it.
Ask not (’tis forbidden knowledge), what our destined term of years,
Mine and yours; nor scan the tables of your Babylonish seers.
Better far to bear the future, my Leuconoe, like the past,
Whether Jove has many winters yet to give, or this our last;
This, that makes the Tyrrhene billows spend their strength against the shore.
Strain your wine and prove your wisdom; life is short; should hope be more?
In the moment of our talking, envious time has ebb’d away.
Seize the present; trust to-morrow e’en as little as you may.
ODES 1, XI, TRANSLATED BY JOHN CONINGTON, 1870
Although Virgil’s masterpiece the Aeneid became the defining poetic epic of the Empire, it describes the way the Romans would like to have seen themselves, aspiring for grandeur and glory. Horace’s Odes, by contrast, deal with friendship, love and the simple life – as well as the harsher realities of politics.
Unusually for a Roman poet of the period, Horace himself takes a central role in his poems. They dramatize his personal experiences and depict his everyday world, although particular incidents are often drawn from earlier classical models. He mixes calm serenity with blazing passion: he can warn the reader to be guided by ‘the golden mean’, while in a different poem declaring that he prefers his wine triple-strength, urging: ‘I hate your penny-pinching handfuls – scatter roses generously!’
Horace referred to his odes as carminae, ‘songs’, although it is not certain whether they were set to music or simply recited to the accompaniment of a lyre. Their simplicity is deceptive, and their structure, adopting various metrical styles, was highly innovative for Rome. Horace was the first Roman poet to write a significant body of lyric verse, and he claimed to be the first to draw on the classical metres of 7th-century Greek poets Sappho and Alcaeus, and (in some of the more stately odes) the traditional master of the public ode in the 5th century, Pindar.
The Odes provided both an image of society in Horace’s own day and a model of patriotism and civilized values for the centuries that followed. However close to reality the character he presented in his poetry may have been, the restraint, affection, and easy-going irony that it exemplified were a lasting moral influence. Those qualities, along with Horace’s technical mastery, his occasional deprecating references to himself – he is no soldier, he suggests, and tells how he threw away his shield to escape at Philippi – and above all his all-embracing humanity have given his poetry enduring appeal.
For one thing, some of Horace’s lines have gained a life of their own, so we have, for example, Carpe diem! (‘Seize the day’) and Nil desperandum (‘No cause for despair’). The concept of aurea mediocritas, ‘the golden mean’, which Horace borrowed from the Greeks, remains familiar; and it is to Horace that the 19th century owed the popular aphorism dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (‘it is sweet and fitting to die for your country’), which was given a bitterly ironic twist as ‘the old Lie’ in Wilfred Owen’s famous war poem ‘Dulce et decorum est’ (see page 243/4).
But the literary influence of the Odes is much more than that of a collection of Latin tags. Five hundred years after his death they were being quoted by St Jerome, one of the first Latin translators of the Bible. In the early 14th century, Dante, in the Divine Comedy, placed Horace alongside Homer and Virgil as one of the three great poets of the ancient world. His influence is clear in the poems and plays of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, while his imitators over the centuries have included the Renaissance writers Ariosto and Montaigne, John Milton and Andrew Marvell from England in the 17th century, and Alexander Pope and John Dryden in the 18th. ‘Horace still charms with graceful negligence, / And without method talks us into sense,’ wrote Pope in his Essay on Criticism. The 18th-century polymath Voltaire was a French admirer, and Lord Byron – even though he referred to ‘Horace, whom I hated so’, thinking back on painful Latin lessons as a boy – offered his own versions of the Odes and other poems. The echoes are there in the poems of a quite different 19th-century poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, as well as in W.H. Auden in the 20th, who applauded Horace’s ability to look at ‘this world with a happy eye / but from a sober perspective’. As that quotation suggests, it was not only Horace’s technical skill and classical learning that attracted these and scores of other poets from all over Western Europe, but also the character of the poet that emerges in the Odes.
Horace knew that while life was ephemeral, words might be forever. In the third book of Odes he staked his claim to a long legacy with the words Exegi monumentum aere perennius / regalique situ pyramidum altius, which Ezra Pound translated a millennium later as ‘This monument will outlast metal and I made it / More durable than the king’s seat, higher than pyramids.’ And so it proved to be.