Quintus Horatius Flaccus, (December 8, 65 BC - November 27,

8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the

leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.

[edit] Life
Born in Venosa or Venusia, as it was called in his day, a small
town in the border region between Apulia and Lucania,
Horace was the son of a freedman, but he himself was born
free. His father owned a small farm at Venusia, and later
moved to Rome and worked as a coactor, a kind of middleman
at auctions who would pay the purchase price to the seller
and collect it later from the buyer and receive 1% of the
purchase price from each of them for his services. The elder
Horace was able to spend considerable money on his son's
education, accompanying him first to Rome for his primary
education, and then sending him to Athens to study Greek
and philosophy. The poet later expressed his gratitude in a
tribute to his father. In his own words (note that some of the
beauty is lost in translation): Horace received an education at
Rome under L. Orbilius Pupillus, and then in Athens, at the
Academy, where he met Cicero
If my character is flawed by a few minor faults, but is
otherwise decent and moral, if you can point out only a few
scattered blemishes on an otherwise immaculate surface, if no
one can accuse me of greed, or of prurience, or of profligacy, if
I live a virtuous life, free of defilement (pardon, for a moment,
my self-praise), and if I am to my friends a good friend, my
father deserves all the credit... As it is now, he deserves from
me unstinting gratitude and praise. I could never be ashamed
of such a father, nor do I feel any need, as many people do, to
apologize for being a freedman's son. Satires 1.6.65-92

After the assassination of Julius Caesar, Horace joined the

army, serving under the generalship of Brutus. He fought as a
staff officer (tribunus militum) in the Battle of Philippi.
Alluding to famous literary models, he later claimed that he
saved himself by throwing away his shield and fleeing. When
an amnesty was declared for those who had fought against
the victorious Octavian (later Augustus), Horace returned to
Italy, only to find his estate confiscated; his father had
probably died by then. Horace claims that he was reduced to
poverty. Nevertheless, he had the means to purchase a
profitable life-time appointment as a scriba quaestorius, an
official of the Treasury, which allowed him to get by
comfortably and practice his poetic art.
Horace was a member of a literary circle that included Virgil
and Lucius Varius Rufus, who introduced him to Maecenas,
friend and confidant of Augustus. Maecenas became his
patron and close friend, and presented Horace with an estate
near Tibur in the Sabine Hills, contemporary Tivoli. He died in
Rome a few months after the death of Maecenas, in 8 BC.
Upon his death bed, having no heirs, Horace relinquished his
farm to his friend and Emperor Augustus, to be used for
Imperial needs. His farm is there today and is a spot of
pilgrimage for the literary elite.

[edit] Works
Horace is generally considered by classicists to be one of the
greatest Latin poets.

He wrote many Latin phrases that remain in use (in Latin or in

translation) including carpe diem, "seize the day"; Dulce et
decorum est pro patria mori; and aurea mediocritas, the
"golden mean."
His works (like those of all but the earliest Latin poets) are
written in Greek metres, from the hexameter, which was
relatively easy to adapt to Latin, to the more complex
measures used in the Odes, like alcaics and sapphics, which
were sometimes a difficult fit for Latin structure and syntax.
Chronologically, they are:

Sermonum liber primus or Satirae I [1] (35 BC)

Epodes [2] (30 BC)
Sermonum liber secundus or Satirae II [3] (30 BC)
Carminum liber primus or Odes I [4] (23 BC)
Carminum liber secundus or Odes II [5] (23 BC)
Carminum liber tertius or Odes III [6] (23 BC)
Epistularum liber primus [7] (20 BC)
Ars Poetica, or The Epistle to the Pisones [8] (18 BC)
Carmen Saeculare or Song of the Ages [9] (17 BC)
Epistularum liber secundus [10] (14 BC)
Carminum liber quartus or Odes IV [11] (13 BC)
Some highlights from his surviving work include:
[edit] Odes (or Carmina)
4 books

Carminum liber primus or Odes I [12] (23 BC)

Carminum liber secundus or Odes II [13] (23 BC)
Carminum liber tertius or Odes III [14] (23 BC)
Carminum liber quartus or Odes IV [15] (13 BC)

[edit] Epodes
1 book

Epodes [16] (30 BC)

[edit] Satires
2 books
With the Epistles, these are his most personal works and
perhaps the most accessible to contemporary readers since
much of his social satire is just as applicable today.

Sermonum liber primus or Satirae I [17] (35 BC)

Sermonum liber secundus or Satirae II [18] (30 BC)

[edit] Letters or Epistles

2 books

With the Satires, these are his most personal works, and
perhaps the most accessible to contemporary readers.

Epistularum liber primus [19] (20 BC)

Ars Poetica, or The Epistle to the Pisones [20] (18 BC)
Epistularum liber secundus [21] (14 BC)
One of the Epistles is often referred to as a separate work in
itself, the Ars Poetica. In this work, Horace forwards a theory
of poetry. His most important tenets are that poetry must be
carefully and skillfully worked out on the semantic and formal
levels, and that poetry should be wholesome as well as
pleasant. This latter issue is often referred to as the dulce et
utile, which is Latin for the sweet and useful. (This work was
first translated into English by Queen Elizabeth I).

[edit] Carmen Saeculare

Carmen Saeculare or Song of the Ages

[edit] In later culture

Dante, in Inferno ranks him side by side with Lucan, Homer,
Ovid and Virgil (Inferno, IV,88).
Is the main character of the Oxford Latin Course.
A fifth book of Odes was published in 1921, written by
Rudyard Kipling and Charles Graves.
In the film Red Dragon, Hannibal Lecter quotes him.
In the Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law episode entitled
"Gone Efficien...t", Harvey's frenetic attempt at efficiency is
stymied by having to wait for the closing arguments of a
drawling defence attorney who, in summation of his
arguments, insists on quoting Horace at length.
[edit] English translators
Perhaps the finest English translator of Horace was John
Dryden, who successfully adapted most of the Odes into verse
for readers of his own age. These translations are favored by
many scholars despite some textual variations. Others favor
unrhymed translations.
Ars Poetica was first translated into English by Queen
Elizabeth I.

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Augustus (Latin:
IMPERATOR•CAESAR•DIVI•FILIVS•AVGVSTVS;a[›] September
23, 63 BC – August 19, AD 14), born Gaius Octavius Thurinus
and prior to 27 BC, known as Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus
after adoption (Latin: GAIVS•IVLIVS•CAESAR•OCTAVIANVS),
was the first emperor of the Roman Empire, who ruled from
27 BC until his death in 14 AD. The young Octavius was
adopted by his great uncle, Julius Caesar, and came into his
inheritance after Caesar's assassination in 44 BC. The
following year, Octavian joined forces with Mark Antony and
Marcus Aemilius Lepidus in a military dictatorship known as
the Second Triumvirate. As a Triumvir, Octavian effectually
ruled Rome and most of its European possessions as an
autocrat, seizing consular power after the deaths of the
consuls Hirtius and Pansa and having himself perpetually re-
elected. The Triumvirate was eventually torn apart under the
competing ambitions of its rulers: Lepidus was driven into
exile, and Antony committed suicide following his defeat at
the Battle of Actium by the armies of Octavian in 31 BC.

The town originated in Roman times when it was known as

Venusia. It was captured by the Roman Republic in the
Samnite Wars, and in 190 BC the Appian way was extended to
the town. The Roman poet Horace was a native of Venusia.
Venosa is a town and comune in the province of Potenza, in the
Southern Italian region of Basilicata,
A freedman is a former slave who has been manumitted or
emancipated
coactor, a kind of middleman at auctions who would pay the
purchase price to the seller and collect it later from the buyer
and receive 1% of the purchase price from each of them for his
services
Marcus Junius Brutus (85 –42 BC), or Quintus Servilius Caepio
Brutus, was a Roman senator of the late Roman Republic. He is
best known in modern times for taking a leading role in the
assassination conspiracy against Julius Caesar.[1]
The Battle of Philippi was the final battle in the Wars of the
Second Triumvirate between the forces of Mark Antony and
Octavian (the Second Triumvirate) against the forces of Julius
Caesar's assassins Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius
Longinus in 42 BC, at Philippi in Macedonia. The Second
Triumvirate declared this civil war to avenge Julius Caesar's
murder.
The battle consisted of two engagements in the plain west of
the ancient city of Philippi. The first occurred on the first week
of October; Brutus faced Octavian, while Antony's forces were
up against those of Cassius. At first, Brutus pushed back
Octavian and entered his legions' camp. But to the south,
Cassius was defeated by Antony, and committed suicide after
hearing a false report that Brutus had also failed. Brutus rallied
Cassius's remaining troops and both sides ordered their army to
retreat to their camps with their spoils, and the battle was
essentially a draw, but for Cassius' suicide.
Sermonum Liber primus (also known as "Satires I"), is a
collection of ten satirical poems written by the Roman poet
Horace. Composed in dactylic hexameters, Horace's Satires
explore the secrets of human happiness and literary perfection.
Published probably in 35 BCE and at the latest by 33 BCE, the
first book of Satires represents Horace's first published work,
and it established him as one of the great poetic talents of the
Augustan Age.

Epodes of Horace
The word is now mainly familiar from an experiment of Horace
in the second class, for he entitled his fifth book of odes
Epodon liber or the Book of Epodes. He says in the course of
these poems, that in composing them he was introducing a new
form, at least in Latin literature, and that he was imitating the
effect of the iambic distichs invented by Archilochus.
Accordingly, we find the first ten of these epodes composed in
alternate verses of iambic trimeter and iambic dimeter, thus:
"At o Deorum quicquid in caelo regit Terras et humanum
genus;"
In the seven remaining epodes Horace diversified the
measures, while retaining the general character of the
distich. This group of poems belongs mostly to the early
youth of the poet, and displays a truculence and a
controversial heat which are absent from his more mature
writings. As he was imitating Archilochus in form, he
believed himself justified, no doubt, in repeating the
sarcastic violence of his fierce model. The curious thing is
that these particular poems of Horace, which are really
short lyrical satires, have appropriated almost exclusively
the name of epodes, although they bear little enough
resemblance to the epode of early Greek literature.
Sermonum liber secundus (also known as "Satires II"), is a
collection of eight satirical poems that the Roman poet Horace
published in 30 BCE as a sequel to his successful first book of
satirical poems, Satires I, published five years previous. Just like
the earlier collection, the second book also addresses the
fundamental question of Greek Hellenistic philosophy, the
search for a happy and contented life. In contrast to Satires I,
however, many of this book's poems are dialogues in which the
poet allows a series of pseudo-philosophers, such the bankrupt
art-dealer turned Stoic philosopher Damasippus, the peasant
Ofellus, the mythical seer Teiresias, the poet's own slave Dama,
to espouse their (erroneous) philosophy of life

The Odes (Latin Carmina) are a collection in four books of Latin

lyric poems by Horace. Books 1 to 3 were published in 23 BC.
According to the journal Quadrant, they were "unparallelled by
any collection of lyric poetry produced before or after in Latin
literature." [1] A fourth book, consisting of 15 poems, was
published in 13 BC.
The Odes were developed as a conscious imitation of the short
lyric poetry of Greek originals. Pindar, Sappho, Alcaeus,
Archilochus and Alcmaeon are Horace's models; his genius lay
in applying these older forms to the social life of Rome in the
age of Augustus.
The Roman writer Petronius, writing less than a century after
Horace's death, remarked on the curiosa felicitas (studied
spontaneity) of the Odes (Satyricon 118). The English poet
Alfred Lord Tennyson declared that the Odes provided "jewels
five-words long, that on the stretched forefinger of all Time /
Sparkle for ever" (The Princess, part II, l.355).
The earliest positively-dated poem in the collection is I.37 (an
ode on the defeat of Cleopatra at the battle of Actium, clearly
written in 30 BCE), though it is possible some of the lighter
sketches from the Greek (e.g. I.10, a hymn to the god Mercury)
are contemporary with Horace's earlier Epodes and Satires. The
collected odes were first published in three books in 23 B.C.
[edit] Book 1
Book 1 consists of 38 poems. Notable poems in this collection
include:
I.3 Sic te diva potens Cypri, a proempticon (travel poem)
addressed to contemporary poet Virgil.
I.4, Solvitur acris hiems a hymn to springtime in which Horace
urges his friend Sestius vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat
incohare longam (Life's brief total forbids us cling to long-off
hope)
I.5, Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa, on the coquettish Pyrrha,
famously translated by John Milton.
I.11, Tu ne quaesieris, a short rebuke to a woman worrying
about the future; it closes with the famous line carpe diem,
quam minimum credula postero (seize the day, put as little trust
as possible in the future).
I.22, Integer vitae, an amusing ode that starts as a solemn
praise of honest living and ends in a mock-heroic love song.
I.33, Albi, ne doleas, a consolation to the contemporary poet
Tibullus over a lost love.
[1]
[edit] Book 2
Book 2 consists of 20 poems. Notable poems in this collection
include:
II.14, Eheu fugaces, an ode to Postumus on the futility of
hoarding up treasure that begins Eheu fugaces, Postume,
Postume, labuntur anni! (alas, the fleeting years glide away,
Postumus, Postumus)
[2]
[edit] Book 3
Book 3 consists of 30 poems.
The ancient editor Porphyrio read the first six odes of this book
as a single sequence, one unified by a common moral purpose
and addressed to all patriotic citizens of Rome. These six
"Roman odes", as they have since been called, share a common
meter and take as a common theme the glorification of Roman
virtues and the attendant glory of Rome under Augustus. Ode
III.2 contains the famous line "Dulce et decorum est pro patria
mori," (It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country). Ode
III.5 Caelo tonantem credidimus Jovem makes explicit
identification of Augustus as a new Jove destined to restore in
modern Rome the valor of past Roman heroes like Marcus
Atilius Regulus, whose story occupies the second half of the
poem.
Besides the first six Roman Odes, notable poems in this
collection include:
III.13, O fons Bandusiae, a celebrated description of the
Bandusian fountain.
III.29, Tyrrhena regum progenies, an invitation for the patron
Maecenas to visit the poet's Sabine farm.
III.30, Exegi monumentum, a closing poem in which Horace
brags Exegi monumentum aere perennium (I have raised a
monument more permanent than bronze).
[3]
[edit] Book 4
Horace published a fourth book of Odes in 13 BC consisting of
15 poems. Horace acknowledged the gap in time with the first
words of the opening poem of the collection: Intermissa,
Venus, diu / rursus bella moves (Venus, you return to battles
long interrupted). Notable poems in this collection include:
IV.7 Diffugere nives, an ode on the same springtime theme as
I.4. Contrasts between these two odes show a change in
Horace's attitude with age.
IV.10 O crudelis adhuc, an ode to young Ligurinus on the
inevitability of old age that hints at a homosexual relationship
Epistularum liber primus (First Book of Letters) is the seventh
work by Horace, published in the year 20BC. The phrase
"sapere aude" (dare to be wise) comes from this collection of
poems
Ars Poetica is a term meaning "The Art of Poetry" or "On the
Nature of Poetry". Early examples of Ars Poetica by Aristotle
and Horace have survived and have since spawned many other
poems that bear the same name. Three of the most notable
examples, including the work by Horace, are as follows.
Ars Poetica (also known as "The Art of Poetry", Epistula Ad
Pisones, or Letters to Piso) was a treatise on poetics. It was first
translated into English by Ben Jonson, Three quotes in
particular are associated with the work:

 "in medias res", or "into the middle of things"; this

describes a popular narrative technique that appears
frequently in ancient epics and remains popular to this day

 "bonus dormitat Homerus" or "even Homer nods"; an

indication that even the most skilled poet can make
continuity errors

 "ut pictura poesis", or "As is painting so is poetry", by

which Horace meant that poetry (in its widest sense,
"imaginative texts") merited the same careful interpretation
that was, in Horace's day, reserved for painting.
The latter two quotes occur back-to-back, near the end of the
treatise
The Carmen Saeculare (Latin for "Secular Hymn" - "Song of the
Ages"), sometimes known as the Carmen for short, is a hymn
written by the poet Horace. It was commissioned by the Roman
emperor Augustus in 17 BC. The mythological and religious
odes propose the
restoration of the tradition, the glorification of the gods:
Jupiter, Diana, Venus
Horace
Horace (65-8 B.C.), or Quintus Horatius Flaccus, was a Roman
lyric poet, satirist, and literary critic. He is generally considered
one of the greatest lyric poets of the world.
Horace's boast was to have been "the first to have brought over
Aeolian song to Italian measures, " that is, to have used the
forms and themes of the great lyric poets of Greece in Latin.
Although this is not technically correct (Catullus preceded him
by a generation), it was nevertheless true that he was the first
consistently to imitate and emulate the poets of the great
classical age of the Greek lyric, that is, Alcaeus and Sappho, and
to adapt the lyric form to patriotic and philosophical themes,
rather than to the expression of feelings of love and other
personal emotions. The almost total loss of the early lyric
poetry of Greece has left Horace as the main transmitter of this
tradition to poets of later ages, over whom his influence has
been profound ever since his own time.
Horace was born on Dec. 8, 65 B.C., at Venusia (Venosa) on the
borders of Lucania and Apulia. His father was a freedman,
probably of old Italian stock, and had retired on his savings as
an auctioneer's clerk to live on a small farm there. He had,
however, high ambitions for Horace, who was apparently his
only son, and took him to Rome, where he studied under the
famous grammaticus Orbilius. Orbilius left Horace with the
impression of numerous floggings and a deep distaste for Livius
Andronicus and the early Latin poets. Horace's father himself
served as his paedagogus, an office usually reserved for a slave,
whose job it was to accompany a boy to and from school and in
general to protect him from moral and physical dangers.
Horace later paid tribute to his father for this care and
attention, attributing whatever good there might have been in
his character to the effects of this tutelage.
After his work with Orbilius, and presumably after advanced
training under a rhetor, although this is never mentioned by
Horace, he went to Athens for further study. As far as we know,
his father did not accompany him, and he may have died before
Horace's departure. At Athens, Horace studied Greek literature
and philosophy and seems to have mingled on fairly easy terms
with the other Roman students at what was then little more
than a university town. The news of Caesar's assassination in 44
aroused great enthusiasm in the student colony there, who,
filled with the romantic idealism of youth, saw in Brutus and
Cassius the embodiment of the ideal of the tyrannicide,
exemplified in the old Athenian heroes Harmodius and
Aristogeiton, who were constant subjects for school exercises
and were praised in the teachings of the philosophical schools.

Short Military Career

When Brutus himself visited Athens some 6 months later,

Horace accepted his offer of a commission as a military tribune
and found himself, along with fellow students like Cicero's son
Marcus Tullius Cicero the Younger, an officer in Brutus's army.
Horace saw some action and was at the Battle of Philippi in 42
B.C., which destroyed the army of the assassins. 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.

Protégé of Maecenas

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.C., an introduction to Maecenas, the confidential adviser of
Octavian, a generous patron of literature who was especially
interested in obtaining the services of literary men for the
glorification of the new regime. 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.C. came Horace's first
published work, Book I of his Satires; a second book followed in
30 B.C.; and the Epodes were published, at Maecenas's
suggestion, in 29 B.C.
Meanwhile, Horace was growing in Maecenas's favor and
eventually in that of the future emperor Augustus. In 37 B.C.
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.C., Maecenas presented him with a farm in the
Sabine country, near Tibur (Tivoli), which not only provided him
with a modest competence and independence and leisure to
write but also was a major source of delight to him during the
rest of his life.
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.C., by which
time he was already recognized as being almost a poet
laureate; the first book of his literary and philosophical Epistles
in 20 B.C.; the frigid Carmen saeculare, composed under
commission to be sung at Augustus's revival of the Secular
Games in 17 B.C.; the second book of Epistles, published about
14 B.C.; and, at Augustus's express request, the fourth book of
the Odes, published perhaps in 13 B.C. 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. 27, 8 B.C.,
only a few weeks after the death of his friend and patron
Maecenas, who, on his deathbed, asked Augustus to remember
Horace as he would himself.
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. He also says that Augustus once wrote complaining
that Horace was not mentioning him and his regime's
accomplishments enough (this would not necessarily have been
considered immodest even for a private citizen at the time) and
asking further references to him. This was probably not long
before the writing of the Carmen saeculare, since Horace seems
to have felt that his literary activity was finished with the
publication of Book I of the Epistles, perhaps because of fears
for his health: we do not know when Augustus offered him the
private secretaryship.
Horace's Works

The Satires, Horace's first published works, although some of

the Epodes seem to be earlier, were called by Horace himself
sermonesas well as saturae. This combination of terms is
accurate in describing their nature. Sermones means
"discourses" or "essays, " with the emphasis on the
conversational nature of these works. Satura, on the other
hand, originally meant a mixture of some sort, a mingling of
diverse elements. It had no original sense of personal criticism
or attack, nor does it in Horace; in his use of the term he is
actually going back to an earlier form of satura, preceding his
exemplar, Lucilius.
In the Satires of Horace, the friend of and apologist for
Augustus, the faults and vices attacked are attacked in the
abstract; the persons mentioned are types, not recognizable
persons; and the geniality and humor with which such
characters as the boorish host who makes every conceivable
blunder in giving a dinner party or the bore who persists in
offering his services and forcing his attentions on Horace
cannot be compared to the loathing with which Juvenal pours
his scorn on his victims.
Horace, in his Satires, is at his best and most typical in the
anecdotal relation of his journey to Brundisium or in the satire
in which his slave Davus takes advantage of the license of the
Saturnalia to treat Horace to a pointed and detailed account of
his faults. It might be said that Horace is throughout more
interested in self-revelation and exploration than in the
exposure of public vices and faults.
The Epodes (or "lambs, " as Horace called them, from the meter
which predominates in the collection) have had the least
influence of any of his works. They seem to be mainly inspired
by Archilochus; part of them are satirical, in either the modern
or the usual Horatian sense, while others treat various themes -
an invitation to dinner, the delights of the country, politics - and
are more characteristic of the Odes.

The Odes

It is generally considered that Horace's greatest achievement,

and one of the greatest achievements of all poetry, was the
first three books of the Odes. They are in many different meters
and on many different themes, although some themes and
types recur again and again - the pleasures of convivial drinking
and conversation with friends; the joys (as distinct from the
passions) of love (with a singularly unreal collection of girls);
the shortness of life and the inevitability and finality of death;
rather conventional hymns to the gods; and praises of the
benefits and wisdom of Augustus's policies for the restoration
of civil order and public morality, especially in the noble and
stately first six odes of Book III, the "Roman Odes."
These "Roman Odes, " if overpraised in the past, remain worthy
of praise; they are not likely now, however, to attract the
unqualified and unexamined assent to their assumptions they
once received. The official Carmen saeculare and Book IV,
largely official and national, are generally of less value: the
additional nonofficial poems of Book IV, usually considered little
more than filler, include, however, what many consider the
greatest of all his poems, the magnificent Odes IV, 7, on the
inevitability of death. Here, as in general, Horace's supreme
achievement is the expression of ordinary thoughts and
sentiments with perfection and finality: this is the true classical
ideal, expressed by Alexander Pope as saying "what oft was
thought, but ne'er so well expressed."
The Epistles of Book I are similar to the Satires, except that they
are all written as letters, rather than as conversations and
dramatizations of scenes. They are more reflective and
philosophical in tone than the Satires and seem, as was
indicated above, to have been meant as Horace's final
statement, beyond which he did not intend to write more. In
the last years of his life, however, he returned to the epistolary
form to discuss his views on the nature of literature.
The second book of the Epistles consists of only two letters: the
first, addressed to the Emperor, contains a sketch of the history
of early Roman literature, which Horace prefers to the work of
more recent writers, and an analysis of the inherent flaws of
Romans which worked against the development of a great
literature - coarseness of temperament, carelessness in
composition, and the degenerate taste of readers; the second is
largely autobiographical but also contains some remarks on the
development of style, stressing the need for careful choice of
diction and the essentiality of unremitting revision until perfect
ease and aptness is obtained.
The Ars poetica (Art of Poetry), the last of Horace's works, is in
form a letter to the Pisones, probably the sons of Lucius
Calpurnius Piso, based on a lost Hellenistic treatise. It is divided
into three parts, discussing, respectively, poetry in general, the
form of the poem, and the poet. Throughout, suitability - of
subject, of form and language to the subject, of thought and
dialogue to the character - is stressed, and the poet is advised
to read widely in the best models, to be meticulous in his
composition, and to submit his work to the best criticism which
he can obtain.
A very large part of the poem is concerned with the drama, and
Horace's descriptions and precepts, hardened into unbreakable
laws, had a great influence in and after the Renaissance,
especially in setting the rigid rules which French classical drama
imposed on itself. The poem as a whole, in fact, seems to the
modern reader to suffer because it has been so often quoted
and adapted, and its teachings so absorbed into the elements
of criticism, that it must perforce seem hackneyed. Few works
of literary criticism have ever had an influence approaching that
of the Ars poetica or have contained such sound advice.

Further Reading

There have been several important books on Horace in English

in recent years. Eduard Fraenkel, Horace (1957), provides the
most masterly overall account of Horace's works. Sensitive
attention to the lyric poems is given by L. P. Wilkinson, Horace
and His Lyric Poetry (1945; 2d ed. 1951); N. E. Collinge, The
Structure of Horace's Odes (1961); and Henry Steele Commager,
Jr., The Odes of Horace: A Critical Study (1962). Two studies that
deal with the Satires and Epistles are C. O. Brink, Horace on
Poetry (1963), and Niall Rudd, The Satires of Horace: A Study
(1966). See also Jacques Perret, Horace (1964); G. M. A. Grube,
The Greek and Roman Critics (1965); and David West, Reading
Horace (1967). Among the older works are W. Y. Sellar, Roman
Poets of the Augustan Age: Horace and the Elegiac Poets
(1892); John Francis D'Alton, Horace and His Age: A Study in
Historical Background (1917); Grant Showerman, Horace and
His Influence (1922); Tenney Frank, Catullus and Horace: Two
Poets in Their Environment (1928), to be used with care; and J.
W. H. Atkins, Literary Criticism in Antiquity, vol. 2 (1934).