Horace: A Very Short Introduction

Abstract This book provides an introduction to the poetry of Horace (Q. Horatius Flaccus), a Roman poet active in the second half of the 1st century bce. It sketches the eventful period in which he lived and wrote, when a destructive civil war was giving way to peace established by the first emperor, Augustus, and describes the poetic works he composed over three decades with the support of Augustus and his right-hand man Maecenas. These works reflect these interesting circumstances, but they also represent an effort to reinvent longstanding poetic modes in a form suitable for Horace’s day. Thus his Odes give Rome for the first time a corpus of lyric poetry modelled on a Greek tradition of lyric verse that had thrived at least 400 years earlier, and in various ways promote a lyric ethos of peaceful sociability in Horace’s contemporary city, while his satires adapt the work of his great Roman predecessor in the form, Lucilius, a charismatic figure from the free Republic of a century earlier, for the rather different circumstances of the Augustan age. This is sophisticated poetry that is very alive to its own character and past, then, and elucidating this aspect clarifies what it has to say about circumstances in Horace’s Rome. After an introductory chapter setting the scene of Horace’s life, the rise of Augustus, and the role of literary convention, chapters are devoted to Horace’s Satires, Epodes, Odes, and Epistles, including the Ars Poetica, descriptions of the collections being illustrated with translated passages from the poems. A final chapter picks up on hints throughout the book of Horace’s remarkable popularity in modern times, the perception of the Roman poet as a model of good sense and a source of human consolation and pithy moral maxims, a reputation founded upon an appreciation of his consummate powers of memorable composition.