Horace (65 BCE - 8 BCE) was a Roman lyric poet, satirist and critic, and with Virgil the central literary figure of the Augustan age. [1] Writing in a wide range of Greek-derived metres, he produced the Satires, Epodes, Odes and Epistles, works that fixed the classical ideals of balance, restraint and craftsmanship for later European poetry. [2]
Early life and education
Quintus Horatius Flaccus was born on 8 December 65 BCE at Venusia, a town on the border of Apulia and Lucania in southern Italy. [1] His father was a freed slave who worked as an auctioneer's agent and who spent his modest means on his son's schooling, taking him to Rome to be educated among the children of far wealthier families. Horace later wrote about this debt with unusual directness.
He completed his education in Athens, studying Greek literature and philosophy at the Academy. The city's schools gave him the Epicurean and Stoic vocabulary that runs through his later verse. [2]
War, ruin and patronage
After the assassination of Julius Caesar, Horace joined the army of Brutus and served as a military tribune at the battle of Philippi in 42 BCE, on the losing side. Returning to Italy under an amnesty, he found his father's property confiscated and took a clerical post in the treasury, writing verse in his spare time. [1]
His early poems brought him to the attention of Virgil, who introduced him around 38 BCE to Maecenas, the wealthy adviser and cultural patron of Octavian. Maecenas gave Horace financial security and, later, a farm in the Sabine hills that became the emblem of the poet's ideal of modest independence. [2]
Major work
Horace's first collections were the Satires, conversational hexameter pieces on manners and morals, and the Epodes, sharper poems in iambic metres. [3] His reputation rests chiefly on the Odes, of which three books appeared in 23 BCE and a fourth in 13 BCE. In them he adapted the metres of the Greek lyric poets Alcaeus and Sappho to Latin, treating friendship, wine, love, mortality, the countryside and the achievements of the new Augustan order.
His later work turned to the verse letter. The Epistles include the long poem to the Piso family known since antiquity as the Ars Poetica, a discussion of poetic craft that became the most influential work of literary criticism in the Latin tradition. [2] In 17 BCE Augustus commissioned from him the Carmen Saeculare, a choral hymn for the Secular Games.
Later life and death
Horace never married and spent his final years dividing his time between Rome and the Sabine farm. He died in Rome on 27 November 8 BCE, only weeks after Maecenas, and was buried near him on the Esquiline Hill. [1]
Legacy
Horace has been continuously read, imitated and translated since antiquity, and the Ars Poetica shaped critical thinking from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century, when poets such as Alexander Pope reworked his manner for their own age. [3]
That last line, once a commonplace of patriotic instruction, was turned against itself by Wilfred Owen in 1917, an indication of how persistently Horace's language has remained in circulation. [1]
