Horace - The complete Odes and Epodes: with the Centennial hymn

THE COMPLETE ODES AND EPODES

ADVISORY EDITOR: BETTY RADICE

Q UINTUS H ORATIUS F LACCUS was born in late 65 B.C. at Venusia in Apulia. His father, though once a slave, had made enough money as an auctioneer to send his son to well-known teachers in Rome and subsequently to the university at Athens. There Horace joined Brutuss army and served on his staff until the defeat at Philippi in 42 B.C. On returning to Rome, he found that his father was dead and his property had been confiscated, but he succeeded in obtaining a secretarial post in the treasury, which gave him enough to live on. The poetry he wrote in the next few years impressed Virgil, who introduced him to the great patron Maecenas in 38 B.C. This event marked the beginning of a life-long friendship. From now on Horace had no financial worries; he moved freely among the leading poets and statesmen of Rome; his work was admired by Augustus, and indeed after Virgils death in 19 B.C. he was virtually Poet Laureate. Horace died in 8 B.C. , only a few months after Maecenas.

W. G. S HEPHERD was born in Kent in 1935. He was educated at Brentwood School and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read the English tripos, graduating in 1958. During National Service he was commissioned in the Royal Artillery. Nowadays he lives at Southgate, in North London, with his wife, daughter and two sons, and in 1991 retired from working as a contracts executive in a major electronics firm. He plays the piano and clavichord a great deal mainly late baroque and classical music. Four volumes of his poetry have been published: Sun, Oak, Almond, I (1970), Evidences (1980), Self-Love (1982) and The First Zone of the Growth Furnace (1984). His translation of Propertiuss Poems was published in the Penguin Classics series in 1985.

B ETTY R ADICE read classics at Oxford, then married and, in the intervals of bringing up a family, tutored in classics, philosophy and English. She became joint editor of the Penguin Classics in 1964. As well as editing the translation of Livys The War with Hannibal she translated Livys Rome and Italy, the Latin comedies of Terence, Plinys Letters, Erasmuss Praise of Folly and The Letters of Abelard and Heloise for the Penguin Classics. She edited and introduced Edward Gibbons Memoirs of My Life for the Penguin English Library, edited and annotated her translation of the younger Plinys works for the Loeb Library of Classics, and translated from Italian, Renaissance Latin and Greek for the Officina Bodoni of Verona. She collaborated as a translator in the Collected Works of Erasmus in preparation by the University of Toronto, edited an eight-volume production of Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the Folio Society, and compiled the Penguin Reference Book Whos Who in the Ancient World. Betty Radice, who was an honorary fellow of St Hildas College, Oxford, and a vice-president of the Classical Association, died in 1985.

HORACE

The Complete Odes and Epodes with the Centennial Hymn

TRANSLATED, WITH NOTES, BYW. G. SHEPHERD

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BYBETTYRADICE

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This translation first published 1983

Translation copyright W. G. Shepherd, 1983

Introduction copyright Betty Radice, 1983

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 9781101492727

For Michael Benson and Peter Whigham

It is unfashionable today to look into a poets background to gain a better appreciation of his poetry; and yet such places as Rydal Water, Laugharne, the Lincolnshire wolds, and Oxford still branchy between towers in spite of an increasingly base and brickish skirt gave something to their poets to carry through life and to influence their writing. The difficulty with the poets of ancient Greece and Rome is that, more often than not, we simply do not know enough about them as individuals to be able to guess at the influences at work on them, possibly because they chose to tell us little or nothing. Sulmo mihi patria est, wrote Ovid, and his statue stands in modern Sulmona; but Rome, not the Abruzzi, was his spiritual home. Juvenal too was evidently quick to leave his native Aquinum in Volscian country for all that Rome could offer him. Mantuan Virgil is, of course, one exception; another is Horace, about whom we know a good deal. Horace enjoyed writing about himself, either quite factually in his longer conversational poems, or in teasing hints in his lyric odes. Three places move in and out of his poetry: the small provincial town in southern Italy where he spent his early childhood; Rome at a time of political upheaval and literary activity; and his refuge from the pressures of urban life the villa and small farm he owned in the pleasantly wooded Sabine hills not far from modern Tivoli.

Horace fixes the date of his birth himself in addressing his faithful wine-jar that was born like me when Manlius was consul (III.21). Lucius Manlius Torquatus and Lucius Cotta were consuls in 6665 B.C. The Life of Horace which Suetonius included in his biographies of the poets adds the day: 8 December. There the familiar hills of Apulia are scorched as usual by the Scirocco, which Horace calls by its regional name, Atabulus (Satires I.5.778); there he was born by sounding Aufidus (IV.9.2), the river Ofanto, which provides the powerful simile of Odes IV. 14.258:

As bullish Aufidus rolls on,

flowing by the realms of Apulian Daunus,

and rages and threatens the cultivated fields

with horrifying floods

One of his grand Pindaric odes (111.4) moves straight from an invocation of the Muse Calliope to the poets childhood in the Muses special care:

As Fraenkel remarks (Horace, p. 274), the three townlets named were presumably unknown to anyone who had not lived in that far-off part of Italy. And in the coda to Odes III his confidence in his monument more lasting than bronze shows him as a prophet expecting honour in his own country: