Horace

This article is about the Roman poet. For other uses, see Horace (disambiguation).

Horace, as imagined by Anton von Werner
Born	Quintus Horatius Flaccus 8 December 65 BC Venusia, Lucania, Roman Republic
Died	27 November 8 BC (age 56) Rome, Roman Empire
Resting place	Rome
Occupation	Soldier, scriba quaestorius, poet
Language	Latin
Nationality	Roman
Genres	Lyric poetry
Notable work(s)	Odes, Satires, Ars Poetica
Influenced Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan Boscán Almogáver, Torquato Tasso, Pierre de Ronsard, Luis de León

Quintus Horatius Flaccus (8 December 65 BC – 27 November 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus. The rhetorician Quintillian regarded his Odes as almost the only Latin lyrics worth reading, justifying his estimate with the words: "He can be lofty sometimes, yet he is also full of charm and grace, versatile in his figures, and felicitously daring in his choice of words."

Horace also crafted elegant hexameter verses (Sermones and Epistles) and scurrilous iambic poetry (Epodes). The hexameters are playful and yet serious works, leading the ancient satirist Persius to comment: "as his friend laughs, Horace slyly puts his finger on his every fault; once let in, he plays about the heartstrings". Some of his iambic poetry, however, can seem wantonly repulsive.

His career coincided with Rome's momentous change from Republic to Empire. An officer in the republican army that was crushed at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC, he was befriended by Octavian's right-hand man in civil affairs, Maecenas, and became something of a spokesman for the new regime. For some commentators, his association with the regime was a delicate balance in which he maintained a strong measure of independence (he was "a master of the graceful sidestep") but for others he was, in John Dryden's phrase, "a well-mannered court slave".

His poetry became "the common currency of civilization", and he still retains a devoted following, despite some stigmatization after World War I (perhaps due to popular mistrust of old-fashioned patriotism and imperial glory, with which he was identified, fairly or unfairly). Horatian studies have become so diverse and intensive in recent years that it is probably no longer possible for any one scholar to command the whole range of arguments and issues.

Life

Most of what we know about Horace the man is based on self-disclosures in his poetry and a short biography probably written by Suetonius. He even has some claims to being the world's first autobiographer Recent scholarship tends to frown on biographical interpretations of literature (critical analysis reveals an author's mask or persona, not necessarily the real person) but Horace seems to be quite open about himself, he mentions events that are verifiable and some inferences about the man thus seem valid.

Born in the small town of Venusia in the border region between Apulia and Lucania (Basilicata), Horace was the son of a freed slave, who owned a small farm in Venusia, and later moved to Rome to work as a coactor (a middleman between buyers and sellers at auctions, receiving 1% of the purchase price from each 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:

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 likely having died by then. Horace claims that he was reduced to poverty. Nevertheless, he had the means to gain a profitable lifetime appointment as a scriba quaestorius, an official of the Treasury, which allowed him to 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). Horace died in Rome at age 56 a few months after the death of Maecenas. Upon his death bed, having no heirs, Horace relinquished his farm to his friend, the emperor Augustus, for imperial needs, and it stands today as a spot of pilgrimage for his admirers.

Works

Horace's works, like those of all but the earliest Latin poets, are written in Greek metres, ranging from the hexameters which were relatively easy to adapt into Latin to the more complex measures used in the Odes, such as alcaics and sapphics, which were sometimes a difficult fit for Latin structure and syntax.

The dating of Horace's works isn't known precisely and scholars often debate the order in which they were first 'published'. There are good arguments for the following order of publication:

• Satires 1 (c. 35–34 BC)
• Satires 2 (c. 30 BC)
• Epodes (30 BC)
• Odes 1–3 (c. 23 BC)
• Epistles 1 (c. 21 BC)
• Epistles 2 (c. 19 BC)
• Ars Poetica (c. 18 BC)
• Carmen Saeculare (17 BC)
• Odes 4 (c. 11 BC)

Reception

Horace, portrayed by Giacomo Di Chirico

The reception of Horace's work has varied from one epoch to another. In a verse epistle to Augustus (Epistle 2.1), in 12 BC, he argued for classic status to be awarded to contemporary poets, including Virgil and apparently himself, and in the final poem of his third book of Odes he claimed to have created for himself a monument more durable than bronze ("Exegi monumentum aere perennius", Carmina 3.30.1). For one modern scholar, his personal qualities are more notable than the monumental quality of his achievement:

"...when we hear his name we don't really think of a monument. We think rather of a voice which varies in tone and resonance but is always recognizable, and which by its unsentimental humanity evokes a very special blend of liking and respect. — Niall Rudd

Yet for men like Wilfred Owen, scarred by experiences of World War I, his poetry stood for discredited values:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The Old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

The same motto, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, was echoed much more sympathetically in the lyrics of early Christian poets, such as Prudentius, commending an ethos of martydom.

Appreciation of Horace's work varied markedly in his own lifetime. Odes 1–3 were not well received when first 'published' in Rome, yet Augustus later commissioned a ceremonial ode for the Centennial Games in 17 BC and encouraged the publication of Odes 4, after which Horace's reputation as Rome's premier lyricist was assured. His Odes were to become the best received of all his poems in ancient times, acquiring a classic status that discouraged imitation: no other poet produced a comparable body of lyrics in the four centuries that followed. In another age of Augustan literature, in the eighteenth century, and also in the century leading into it, ode-writing became highly fashionable in England and a large number of aspiring poets did dare to imitate him — both in English and in Latin.

These preliminary comments touch on a small sample of developments in the reception of Horace's work. More developments are covered epoch by epoch in the following sections.

Antiquity

Horace's influence can be traced in the works of his younger contemporaries, Ovid, who rivalled him in creating a completely natural style of expression in Latin verse, and Propertius, who cheekily mimicked him in his third book of elegies. Horace's Epistles may have inspired them to compose their own verse letters and probably influenced Ovid's exile poetry as well. Horace was critical of the unpolished style of his predecessor in satire, Lucilius, but this might merely have inspired renewed interest in the older poet. For Persius, and later for Juvenal, Horace and Lucilius offered different but equally valid approaches to satire — thus Persius described his own satires as lacking both Lucilian acerbity and Horace's gentler criticism. Juvenal's caustic satire was influenced mainly by Lucilius but Horace by then was a school classic and thus echoes of his work could be described by Juvenal in a round-about way as "themes worthy of the Venusine lamp".The success of Horace's Odes seems to have discouraged imitation, as mentioned before, and a revival of public interest in Pindar's odes might have been due to the fact that Horace had not attempted anything of that form (see Pindar#Influence and legacy). Statius paid homage to Horace by composing one poem in Sapphic and one in Alcaic meter (the verse forms most often associated with Odes), including both in his collection of occasional poems, Silvae. Meanwhile the iambic genre seems almost to have disappeared after publication of Horace's Epodes. Ovid's Ibis was a rare attempt at the form, inspired mainly by Callimachus, and there are some iambic elements in Martial but they owe more to Catullus than Horace. The Odes inspired ancient scholars to write commentaries on Horace's lyric meters. Ceasius Bassus was one such metrical theorist, as well as being a poet himself. By a process called derivatio, he varied established meters though the addition or omission of syllables, a practice that Seneca the Younger also employed when adapting Horatian meters to the stage.

Horace's poems continued to be school texts into late antiquity. Commentaries attributed to Helenius Acro and Pomponius Porphyrio are the remnants of a much larger body of Horatian scholarship. The latter arranged the poems in non-chronological order, beginning with the Odes, a privileged position due to their general popularity and/or their appeal to scholars who wrote treatises explaining their metrical virtuosity (the Odes generally kept this position in the medieval manuscript tradition and thus in modern editions also). Horace was often evoked by poets of the fourth century, such as Ausonius and Claudian. Approaching the fifth century, Prudentius, presented himself in the role of a Christian Horace, adapting Horatian meters and giving Horatian motifs a Christian tone, while St Jerome modelled an uncompromising response to pagan literature, observing: "What harmony can there be between Christ and the Devil? What has Horace to do with the Psalter?" By the early 6th century, Horace and Prudentius were both part of a classical heritage that was struggling to suvive the disorder of the times. Boethius, the last major author of classical Latin literature, could still take inspiration from Horace, sometimes mediated by Senecan tragedy. It can be argued that Horace's influence extended beyond poetry to dignify core themes and values, such as self-sufficiency, inner contentment and courage.

Middle Ages and Renaissance

The copying of classical texts virtually ceased in the period between the mid sixth century and the Middle Ages. Horace's work survived probably just in two or three books imported into northern Europe from Italy, these being the ancestors of six manuscripts dated to the ninth century. Two of the six extant manuscripts are French in origin, one was produced in Alsace, and the other three were probably due to Irish influence in continental monasteries (in Lombardy for example). By the last half of the ninth century, direct knowledge of Horace's poetry was not unusual. 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 4.11 is even neumed with the melody of a hymn to John the Baptist, Ut queant laxis, both composed in Sapphic stanzas. 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." It was even thought that Horace had composed his works in the order in which they had been placed by ancient scholars. 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.

A 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 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 1170. 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 was restricted to simple piety. Among the most successful imitators of Horace's hexameters was another Germanic author, calling himself Sextus Amarcius, around 1100, 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 Latin to vernacular imitations of Horace. His own 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. Other authors also imitated Horace in meters based on accentual rhythms, including stressed Latin and vernacular poems (one scholar has recently speculated that they considered accentual meters a natural sequel to Horace's metrical variety). In France, Horace and Pindar were the inspiration for a group of vernacular authors called the Pléiade, including for example Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay. Montaigne made constant and inventive use of Horatian quotes. The vernacular languages were dominant in Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth century, where Horace's influence is notable in the works of such authors as Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan Boscán Sá de Miranda, Antonio Ferreira and Fray Luis de León, the latter for example writing odes on the Horatian theme beatus ille (happy the man). 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, 1566, the same year that the Scot George Buchanan paraphrased the Psalms in a Horatian context. Ben Jonson put Horace on the stage in 1601 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 so pervasive that 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 1612 (two in Leiden, one in Frankfurt) and again in 1699 (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 prosaic publications such as Edmund Quincy's A treatise of hemp-husbandry (1765). 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 1736 (increasing use of Horatian-style lyrics in Oxford and Cambridge verse collections was typical for the period, most of them in Latin but some like the following in English):

What friendly Muse will teach my Lays

To emulate the Roman fire?

Justly to sound a Caeser's praise

Demands a bold Horatian lyre.

John Milton's Lycidas was another university ode. It was preceded in the original publication by a series of Latin odes from other contributors yet Lycidas has few Horatian echoes. However his associations with Horace lasted throughout his career. He composed a controversial version of Odes 1.5, Book 7 of Paradise Lost begins with echoes of Odes 3.4, and a recent study has shown that his epic has strong associations with Horace's 'Roman' Odes 3.1-6.Yet Horace's lyrics could offer inspiration to libertines as well as moralists, and neo-Latin sometimes served as a kind of discrete veil for the risqué. 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 1.37 to compose his English masterpiece Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, in which subtly nuanced reflections on the execution of Charles I echo Horace's ambiguous response to the death of Cleopatra (the ode nevertheless was suppressed and only began to be widely published in 1776). Samuel Johnson took particular pleasure in reading The Odes Not only did Alexander Pope write direct Imitations of Horace (published with the original Latin alongside), and echo him in Essays and The Rape of the Lock, 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, 1799) and Elizabeth Tollet, who celebrated in Horatian fashion the return of a loved-one from overseas by composing an ode in Sapphic meter, with tea and coffee substituted for the wine of an ancient symposium (in this case the loved-one is her brother):

Quos procax nobis numeros, jocosque Musa dictaret? mihi dum tibique Temperent baccis Arabes, vel herbis Pocula Seres	What verses and jokes might the bold Muse dictate? while for you and me Arabs flavour our cups with beans Or Chinese with leaves.

Horace's Ars Poetica is an apparently haphazard discussion on literature but its influence on the history of criticism is surpassed only by that of Aristotle's Poetics. Milton recommended both works in his treatise of Education. Horace's Satires and Epistles also had a huge impact on literary theory and criticism, influencing luminaries 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 fancifully with Pindar. Translations occasionally involved scholars in the dilemmas of censorship. Thus Christopher Smart entirely omitted Odes 4.10 and re-numbered the remaining odes, and he removed the ending of Odes 4.1. Thomas Creech printed Epodes 8 and 12 in the original Latin but left out the English translation, while Philip Francis left out both the English and Latin for those poems, a gap in the numbering being the only indication that something was amiss. French editions of Horace were influential in England and these too were regularly bowdlerized. Most European nations had their own 'Horaces': thus for example Friedrich von Hagedorn was called The German Horace and Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski The Polish Horace (the latter was much imitated by English poets such as Henry Vaughan and Abraham Cowley). Pope Urban VIII wrote voluminously in Horatian meters, including an ode on gout.

19th century, on

The 'Von Trapp Family': a semi-professional cast in a small town performance of The Sound of Music, Georgia, USA.
The solfege system (Do, Re, Mi), which is the theme of a song by the Von Trapp children, is just a small sample of Horace's all-pervasive influence on western culture, even among people who might never have heard the name Quintus Horatius Flaccus.

Horace maintained a central role in the education of English-speaking elites right up until the 1960s. 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.

William Wordsworth's mature poetry, including the preface to Lyrical Ballads, reveals Horace's influence in its rejection of false ornament and he once expressed "a wish / to meet the shade of Horace...". John Keats echoed the opening of Horace's Epodes 14 in the opening lines of Ode to a Nightingale.

The Roman poet was presented in the nineteenth century as an honourary English gentleman. William Thackery produced a version of Odes 1.38 in which Horace's questionable 'boy' became 'Lucy', and Gerard Manley Hopkins translated the boy innocently as 'child'. Horace was translated by Sir Theodore Martin (biographer of Prince Albert) but minus some ungentlemanly verses, such as the erotic Odes 1.25 and Epodes 8 and 12. Lord Lytton produced a popular translation and William Gladstone also turned his hand to the honourable task, during his last days as Prime Minister.

Edward FitzGerald]'s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, though formally derived from the Persian ruba'i, nevertheless shows a strong Horatian influence, since, as one moderm scholar has observed,"...the quatrains inevitably recall the stanzas of the 'Odes', as does the narrating first person of the world-weary, ageing Epicurean Omar himself, mixing sympotic exhortation and 'carpe diem' with splendid moralising and 'memento mori' nihilism." Matthew Arnold advised a friend in verse not to worry about politics, an echo of Odes 2.11, yet later became a critic of Horace's inadequacies relative to Greek poets, as role models of Victorian virtues, observing: "If human life were complete without faith, without enthusiasm, without energy, Horace...would be the perfect interpreter of human life." Christina Rossetti composed a sonnet depicting a woman willing her own death steadily, drawing on Horace's depiction of 'Glycera' in Odes 1.19.5-6 and Cleopatra in Odes 1.37. A. E. Housman considered Odes 4.7, in Archilochian couplets, the most beautiful poem of antiquity and yet he generally shared Horace's penchant for quatrains, being readily adapted to his own elegiac and melancholy strain. The most famous poem of Ernest Dowson took its title and its heroine's name from a line of Odes 4.1, Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae, as well as its motif of nostalgia for a former flame. Kipling wrote a famous parody of the Odes, satirising their stylistic idiosyncracies and especially the extraordinary syntax, but he also used Horace's Roman patriotism as a focus for British imperialism, as in the story Regulus in the school collection Stalky & Co., which he based on Odes 3.5. Wilfred Owen's famous poem, quoted above, incorporated Horatian text to question patriotism while ignoring the rules of Latin scansion. However there were few other echoes of Horace in the war period, possibly because war is not actually a major theme of Horace's work.

Both W.H.Auden and Louis MacNeice began their careers as teachers of classics and both responded as poets to Horace's influence. Auden for example evoked the fragile world of the 1930s in terms echoing Odes 2.11.1-4, where Horace advises a friend not to let worries about frontier wars interfere with current pleasures.

And, gentle, do not care to know

Where Poland draws her Eastern bow,

     What violence is done;

Nor ask what doubtful act allows

Our freedom in this English house,

     Our picnics in the sun.

The American poet, Robert Frost, echoed Horace's Satires in the conversational and sententious idiom of some of his longer poems, such as The Lesson for Today (1941), and also in his gentle advocacy of life on the farm, as in Hyla Brook (1916), evoking Horace's fons Bandusiae in Ode 3.13. Now at the start of the third millennium, poets are still absorbing and re-configuring the Horatian influence, sometimes in translation (such as a 2002 English/American edition of the Odes by thirty-six poets) and sometimes as inspiration for their own work (such as a 2003 collection of odes by a New Zealand poet).

Horace's Epodes have largely been ignored in the modern era, excepting those with political associations of historical significance. The obscene qualities of some of the poems have repulsed even scholars yet more recently a better understanding of the nature of Iambic poetry has led to a re-evaluation of the whole collection. A re-appraisal of the Epodes also appears in creative adaptations by recent poets (such as a 2004 collection of poems that relocates the ancient context to a 1950s industrial town).

See also

• Horatia (gens)
• Otium
• Translation
• Prosody (Latin)

References

• Arnold, Matthew (1970). Selected Prose. Penguin Books. ISBN 9780140430585. 
• Barrow, R (1949). The Romans. Penguin/Pelican Books. 
• Barchiesi, A (2001). Speaking Volumes: Narrative and Intertext in Ovid and Other Latin Poets. Duckworth. 
• Bischoff, B (1971). "Living with the satirists". Classical Influences on European Culture AD 500–1500. Cambridge University Press. 
• Bush, Douglas (1966). Milton: Poetical Works. Oxford University Press. 
• Flesch, William (2009). The Facts on File Companion to British Poetry, 19th Century. Infobase Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8160-5896-9. 
• Fraenkel, Eduard (1957). Horace. Oxford University Press. 
• Friis-Jensen, Karsten (2007). "Horace in the Middle Ages". The Cambridge Companion to Horace. Cambridge University Press. 
• Harrison, Stephen (2007). "Introduction". The Cambridge Companion to Horace. Cambridge University Press. 
• Harrison, Stephen (2007). "The nineteenth and twentieth centuries". The Cambridge Companion to Horace. Cambridge University Press. 
• Hooley, D (1997). The Knotted Thong: Structures of Mimesis in Persius. Ann Arbor. 
• Hutchinson, G (2002). "The publication and individuality of Horace's Odes 1–3". Classical Quarterly 52. 
• Kiernan, Victor (1999). Horace: Poetics and Politics. St Martin's Press. 
• Kupersmith, W (1985). Roman Satirists in Seventeenth Century England. Lincoln, Nabraska and London. 
• Loveling, Benjamin (1741). Latin and English Poems, by a Gentleman of Trinity College, Oxford. London. 
• Lyne, R (1986). "Augustan Poetry and Society". The Oxford History of the Classical World. Oxford University Press. 
• Mankin, David (1995). Horace: Epodes. Cambridge university Press. 
• McNeill, Randall (2010). Horace. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199805112. 
• Michie, James (1967). "Horace the Man". The Odes of Horace. Penguin Classics. 
• Money, David (2007). "The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries". The Cambridge Companion to Horace. Cambridge University Press. 
• Rivers, Elias (1983). Fray Luis de León: The Original Poems. Grant and Cutler. 
• Rossetti, Christina (2001). The Complete Poems. Penguin Books. 
• Rudd, Niall (1973). The Satires of Horace and Persius. Penguin Classics. 
• Syme, R (1986). The Augustan Aristocracy. Oxford University Press. 
• Talbot, J (2001). "A Horatian Pun in Paradise Lost". Notes and Queries 48 (1). Oxford University Press. 
• Tarrant, Richard (2007). "Ancient receptions of Horace". The Cambridge Companion to Horace. Cambridge University Press. 
• Tollet, Elizabeth (1755). Poems on Several Occasions. London. 

Stephen Harrison (ed), A Companion to Latin Literature, Blackwell Publishing (2008)

Stephen Harrison (ed), A Cambridge Companion to Horace, Cambridge University Press (2007)

Further Reading

• Davis, Gregson (1991). Polyhymnia the rhetoric of Horatian lyric discourse. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0520910303. 
• Fraenkel, Eduard (1957). Horace. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 
• Horace (1983). The complete works of Horace. Charles E. Passage, trans. New York: Ungar. ISBN 0804424047. 
• Johnson, W.R. (1993). Horace and the dialectic of freedom : readings in Epistles 1. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0801428688. 
• Lyne, R.O.A.M. (1995). Horace : behind the public poetry. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. ISBN 0300063229. 
• Lyons, Stuart (1997). Horace's Odes and the Mystery of Do-Re-Mi. Aris & Phillips. 
• Lyons, Stuart (2010). Music in the Odes of Horace. Aris & Phillips. 
• Michie, James (1964). The Odes of Horace. Rupert Hart-Davis. 
• Newman, J.K. (1967). Augustus and the New Poetry. Brussels: Latomus, revue d’études latines. 
• Noyes, Alfred (1947). Horace: A Portrait. New York: Sheed and Ward. 
• Perret, Jacques (1964). Horace. Bertha Humez, trans. New York: New York University Press. 
• Putnam, Michael C.J. (1986). Artifices of eternity : Horace's fourth book of Odes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0801418526. 
• Reckford, Kenneth J. (1969). Horace. New York: Twayne. 
• Rudd, Niall, ed (1993). Horace 2000: a celebration : essays for the bimillennium. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. ISBN 047210490X. 
• Sydenham, Colin (2005). Horace The Odes. Duckworth. 
• West, David (1997). Horace The Complete Odes and Epodes. Oxford University Press. 
• Wilkinson, L.P. (1951). Horace and His Lyric Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Translations

• John Dryden successfully adapted three of the Odes (and one Epode) into verse for readers of his own age. Samuel Johnson favored the versions of Philip Francis. Others favor unrhymed translations.
• In 1964 James Michie published a translation of the Odes—many of them fully rhymed—including a dozen of the poems in the original Sapphic and Alcaic metres.
• More recent verse translations of the Odes include those by David West (free verse), and Colin Sydenham (rhymed).
• Ars Poetica was first translated into English by Ben Jonson and later by Lord Byron.
• Horace's Odes and the Mystery of Do-Re-Mi Stuart Lyons (rhymed) Aris & Phillips ISBN 9780856687907

External links

• Full text (in Latin): Horace’s Satirae (= Satires), Epistolae (= Epistles, Letters), etc. From archive.org. Retrieved 13 September 2010.
• Works by Horace at Project Gutenberg
• Common sayings from Horace]
• The works of Horace at The Latin Library
• Selected Poems of Horace
• The Perseus Project — Latin and Greek authors (with English translations), including Horace
• Biography and chronology
• Horace's works: text, concordances and frequency list
• SORGLL: Horace, Odes I.22, read by Robert Sonkowsky
• Translations of several odes in the original meters (with accompaniment).
• A discussion and comparison of three different contemporary translations of Horace's Odes
• Some spurious lines in the Ars Poetica?