In my reading, I often come across an epigraph from the Roman poet, essayist, satirist, and critic Horace – always wise, appropriate, and slightly skeptical because Horace looked at life realistically. He also knew how to flatter patrons without seeming too self-serving. He was clever, practical, and passionate about his writing. But who knew that he dwelt so much on sex, some of it so salacious and filthy I can’t quote it? Back in the day, students were expected to learn his odes, satires, and epistles. But they weren’t exposed to his complete texts.
Of course, Classics scholars know about Horace’s paeans to drink and fornication. Count among them and make prominent Peter Stothard, the former editor of The London Times and The Times Literary Supplement, whose recent book, Horace: Poet on a Volcano, for Yale University Press’s “Ancient Lives Series” engages in its fullness, frankness, and modernity.
Sir Peter, knighted in 2003, for services to the newspaper industry, not only depicts in his own dazzling prose Horace’s poetic, political, and personal life but also the bloody history of his time. The book is an elegantly written biography of a famous, but still little-known, man by the general public. Horace’s full name was Quintus Horatius Flaccus – the Roman nickname, “flaccus,” not uncommon, meaning flabby, and Horace was indeed short and fat.
Born in humble circumstances to an ex-slave who saw to it that his son was educated, Horace rose on the strength of his own perseverance, talent, and confidence to become number two in prestige during the reign of Augustus, after his contemporary, the great epic poet of The Aeneid, Vergil. Horace’s years, 65 BCE to 8 BCE, cover key moments in ancient Roman history - the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, 44 BCE, and the subsequent battles of Philippi, where the defeat of Brutus marked the end of the Roman Republic, and soon after the battle of Actium where Octavian, who became the Emperor Augustus, vanquished Antony and Cleopatra. To say that these years were defined by wars and prostitution of all kinds would be an understatement. To note that Horace managed friendships with antagonists, Brutus and Augustus, is saying a lot about his character.
Sir Peter presents Horace in Latin and then in his own translations, some published here for the first time, with their unexpected ironic shifts in perspective and sly insinuations of self. It’s a device that makes Horace’s work sound modern. And then there are Sir Peter’s fascinating endnotes, end notes almost an additional book. What a time – almost every minute of which seems to have been given over to “murder, torture, looting and rape” -And drinking! A time when witches would torture young boys to death to produce aphrodisiacs.
The book is called Poet on a Volcano, a reference to the pre-Socratic mystic Empedocles, who, as legend has it, threw himself into Mt. Etna, believing that he was immortal and would rise again as a God. Horace may have been living on the edge, near volcanic political action. But no way would this originator of the phrase Carpe Diem – seize the day – have thrown himself over a cliff. That would have meant for him to stop writing. Impossible. He died, at the age of 56, as many did, from plague. But his legacy – important today in a world of diminished reading – was a belief in the purpose and power of poetry to capture immediate moments for posterity.
