Horace

Horace (born December 65 bc, Venusia, Italy—died Nov. 27, 8 bc, Rome) was an outstanding Latin lyric poet and satirist under the emperor Augustus. The most frequent themes of his Odes and verse Epistles are love, friendship, philosophy, and the art of poetry.

Life

Horace was probably of the Sabellian hillman stock of Italy’s central highlands. His father had once been a slave but gained freedom before Horace’s birth and became an auctioneer’s assistant. He also owned a small property and could afford to take his son to Rome and ensure personally his getting the best available education in the school of a famous fellow Sabellian named Orbilius (a believer, according to Horace, in corporal punishment). In about 46 bc Horace went to Athens, attending lectures at the Academy. After Julius Caesar’s murder in March 44 bc, the eastern empire, including Athens, came temporarily into the possession of his assassins Brutus and Cassius, who could scarcely avoid clashing with Caesar’s partisans, Mark Antony and Octavian (later Augustus), the young great-nephew whom Caesar, in his will, had appointed as his personal heir. Horace joined Brutus’ army and was made tribunus militum, an exceptional honour for a freedman’s son.

In November 42, at the two battles of Philippi against Antony and Octavian, Horace and his fellow tribunes (in the unusual absence of a more senior officer) commanded one of Brutus’ and Cassius’ legions. After their total defeat and death, he fled back to Italy—controlled by Octavian—but his father’s farm at Venusia had been confiscated to provide land for veterans. Horace, however, proceeded to Rome, obtaining, either before or after a general amnesty of 39 bc, the minor but quite important post of one of the 36 clerks of the treasury (scribae quaestorii). Early in 38 bc he was introduced to Gaius Maecenas, a man of letters from Etruria in central Italy who was one of Octavian’s principal political advisers. He now enrolled Horace in the circle of writers with whom he was friendly. Before long, through Maecenas, Horace also came to Octavian’s notice.

During these years, Horace was working on Book I of the Satires, 10 poems written in hexameter verse and published in 35 bc. The Satires reflect Horace’s adhesion to Octavian’s attempts to deal with the contemporary challenges of restoring traditional morality, defending small landowners from large estates (latifundia), combating debt and usury, and encouraging novi homines (“new men”) to take their place next to the traditional republican aristocracy. The Satires often exalt the new man, who is the creator of his own fortune and does not owe it to noble lineage. Horace develops his vision with principles taken from Hellenistic philosophy: metriotes (the just mean) and autarkeia (the wise man’s self-sufficiency). The ideal of the just mean allows Horace, who is philosophically an Epicurean, to reconcile traditional morality with hedonism. Self-sufficiency is the basis for his aspiration for a quiet life, far from political passions and unrestrained ambition.

In the 30s bc his 17 Epodes were also under way. Mockery here is almost fierce, the metre being that traditionally used for personal attacks and ridicule, though Horace attacks social abuses, not individuals. The tone reflects his anxious mood after Philippi. Horace used his commitment to the ideals of Alexandrian poetry to draw near to the experiences of Catullus and other poetae novi (New Poets) of the late republic. Their political verse, however, remained in the fields of invective and scandal, while Horace, in Epodes 7, 9, and 16, shows himself sensitive to the tone of political life at the time, the uncertainty of the future before the final encounter between Octavian and Mark Antony, and the weariness of the people of Italy in the face of continuing violence. In doing so, he drew near to the ideals of the Archaic Greek lyric, in which the poet was also the bard of the community, and the poet’s verse could be expected to have a political effect. In his erotic Epodes, Horace began assimilating themes of the Archaic lyric into the Hellenistic atmosphere, a process that would find more mature realization in the Odes.

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In the mid-30s he received from Maecenas, as a gift or on lease, a comfortable house and farm in the Sabine hills (identified with considerable probability as one near Licenza, 22 miles [35 kilometres] northeast of Rome), which gave him great pleasure throughout his life. After Octavian had defeated Antony and Cleopatra at Actium, off northwestern Greece (31 bc), Horace published his Epodes and a second book of eight Satires in 30–29 bc. In the first Satires Horace had limited himself to attacking relatively unimportant figures (e.g., businessmen, courtesans, and social bores). The second Satires is even less aggressive, insisting that satire is a defensive weapon to protect the poet from the attacks of the malicious. The autobiographical aspect becomes less important; instead, the interlocutor becomes the depository of a truth that is often quite different from that of other speakers. The poet delegates to others the job of critic. The denunciations do not always seem consistent with Horace’s usual point of view, and sometimes it is hard to tell when Horace is being ironic and when he is indulging in genuinely serious reflection.

While the victor of Actium, styled Augustus in 27 bc, settled down, Horace turned, in the most active period of his poetical life, to the Odes, of which he published three books, comprising 88 short poems, in 23 bc. Horace, in the Odes, represented himself as heir to earlier Greek lyric poets but displayed a sensitive, economical mastery of words all his own. He sings of love, wine, nature (almost romantically), of friends, of moderation; in short, his favourite topics.

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The Odes describe the poet’s personal experiences and familiarize the reader with his everyday world; they depict the customs of a sophisticated and refined Roman society that is as fully civilized as the great Hellenistic Greek cities. The unique charm of Horace’s lyric poetry arises from his combination of the metre and style of the distant past—the world of the Archaic Greek lyric poets—with descriptions of his personal experience and the important moments of Roman life. He creates an intermediate space between the real world and the world of his imagination, populated with fauns, nymphs, and other divinities.

Some of the Odes are about Maecenas or Augustus: although he praises the ancient Roman virtues the latter was trying to reintroduce, he remains his own master and never confines an ode to a single subject or mood. When he was composing the Odes, Horace was solidly linked to Maecenas and his circle, and Horace’s political verse seems to express the ideological commitments of the principate, Augustus’s government. He denounces corrupt morals, praises the integrity of the people of Italy, and shows a ruler who carries on his shoulders the burden of power. Other Augustan themes that appear in Horace’s lyric verse include the idea of the universal character and eternity of Roman political dominion and the affirmation of the continuity of the republican tradition with the Augustan principate. At some stage Augustus offered Horace the post of his private secretary, but the poet declined on the plea of ill health. Notwithstanding, Augustus did not resent his refusal, and indeed their relationship became closer.

The last ode of the first three books suggests that Horace did not propose to write any more such poems. The tepid reception of the Odes following their publication in 23 bc and his consciousness of growing age may have encouraged Horace to write his Epistles. Book I may have been published in 20 bc, and Book II probably appeared in 14 bc. These two books are very different in theme and content. Although similar to the Satires in style and content, the Epistles lack the earlier poems’ aggressiveness and their awareness of the great city of Rome. They are literary letters, addressed to distant correspondents, and they are more reflective and didactic than the earlier work. Book I returns to themes already developed in the Satires, while the others concentrate on literary topics. In these, Horace abandoned all satirical elements for a sensible, gently ironical stance, though the truisms praising moderation are never dull in his hands. The third book, the Epistles to the Pisos, was also known, at least subsequently, as the Ars poetica.

The first epistle of Book II, addressed to Augustus, discusses the role of literature in contemporary Roman society and tells of changing taste. The second, addressed to the poet and orator Julius Florus, bids farewell to poetry, describes a day in the life of a Roman writer and discourses on the difficulty of attaining true wisdom. Horace in these works has become less joyful and less poetic. Poets are quarreling, and Rome is no longer an inspiration. It is time for him to abandon poetry for philosophy.

The third book, now called Ars poetica, is conceived as a letter to members of the Piso family. It is not really a systematic history of literary criticism or an exposition of theoretical principles. It is rather a series of insights into writing poetry, choosing genres, and combining genius with craftsmanship. For Horace, writing well means uniting natural predisposition with long study and a solid knowledge of literary genres.

The “Epistle to Florus” of Book II may have been written in 19 bc, the Ars poetica in about 19 or 18 bc, and the last epistle of Book I in 17–15 bc. This last named is dedicated to Augustus, from whom there survives a letter to Horace in which the Emperor complains of not having received such a dedication hitherto.

By this time Horace was virtually in the position of poet laureate, and in 17 bc he composed the Secular Hymn (Carmen saeculare) for ancient ceremonies called the Secular Games, which Augustus had revived to provide a solemn, religious sanction for the regime and, in particular, for his moral reforms of the previous year. The hymn was written in a lyric metre, Horace having resumed his compositions in this form; he next completed a fourth book of 15 Odes, mainly of a more serious (and political) character than their predecessors. The latest of these poems belongs to 13 bc. In 8 bc Maecenas, who had been less in Augustus’ counsels during recent years, died. One of his last requests to the Emperor was: “Remember Horace as you would remember me.” A month or two later, however, Horace himself died, after naming Augustus as his heir. He was buried on the Esquiline Hill near Maecenas’ grave.

During the latter part of his life, Horace had been accustomed to spend the spring and other short periods in Rome, where he appears to have possessed a house. He wintered sometimes by the southern sea and spent much of the summer and autumn at his Sabine farm or sometimes at Tibur (Tivoli) or Praeneste (Palestrina), both a little east of Rome. A short “Life of Horace,” of which the substance apparently goes back to Suetonius, a biographer of the 2nd century ad, quotes a jocular letter he received from Augustus, from which it emerges that the poet was short and fat. He himself confirms his short stature and, describing himself at the age of about 44, states that he was gray before his time, fond of sunshine, and irritable but quickly appeased.