Horace was a Roman poet who lived from 65 to 8 B.C. We call him Horace in English, but to his contemporaries and fellow countrymen he was Quintus Horatius Flaccus. Among his poetry are four books of odes (known in Latin as "carmina"), containing just over one hundred individual poems (103, to be exact). In one of these odes (3.30) Horace bragged that his poetry would live as long as Vestal Virgins climbed the Capitoline Hill in Rome. You won't find any Vestal Virgins in Rome today, but Horace's odes are still read and enjoyed, more than 2000 years after he wrote them.
The odes cover a variety of themes. You'll find invitations to dinner, praises of wine, women, and song, descriptions of holiday celebrations, patriotic exhortations, philosophical musings, hymns, and much more.
In The Twilight of the Idols, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the odes of Horace:
Up to the present I have not obtained from any poet the same artistic delight as was given me from the first by a Horatian ode. In certain languages that which is obtained here cannot even be hoped for. The mosaic of words in which every word, by sound, by position and by meaning, diffuses its force right, left and over the whole, that minimum in the compass and number of signs, that maximum thus realized in their energy,--all that is Roman, and if you will believe me, it is noble par excellence. All other poetry becomes somewhat too popular in comparison with it - mere sentimental loquacity.
These pages are aids to anyone who wants to experience the artistic delight Nietzsche was talking about. The only way to experience this delight is to read slowly, word by word, the odes themselves. Delight in the odes of Horace is found by reading Horace, not in reading books or articles about Horace. But as with any ancient author, help is sometimes needed, and each of the accompanying pages contains a synopsis, the Latin text, a crib (unworthy to be called a translation), and some notes (unworthy to be called a commentary). Most of the parallel passages in the notes are translated. Some pages also have sections labelled Apparatus (indicating where the words of Horace have been recovered by conjecture) and Survival (with translations, paraphrases, parodies, or echoes from English literature).
I've made a special effort to collect English translations for the odes on these pages. Some odes have as many as a dozen translations. Study and comparison of these translations (with each other and with the Latin originals) can be an instructive exercise. My own personal favorites are the little-known translations by Franklin P. Adams (1881-1960).
These pages can be read, understood, and (I hope) enjoyed by those who know no Latin at all, as well as by those whose high school or college Latin is rusty. The number of people with even rudimentary knowledge of Latin is small these days, when most high schools and colleges don't even offer Latin as an elective, alas. The study of Latin may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it should at least be on the menu. Although these pages are aimed chiefly at novices, perhaps even professional scholars may find a thing or two on these pages which they have forgotten, or maybe never knew.
I have no academic affiliation and no easy access to a university library, and so I have been forced to rely heavily on a few school editions and other books in my possession, namely:
It's not necessarily a disadvantage to be confined to just a few books. If you're deprived of what James Willis once called the "meta-classics," that unending stream of books and articles about the classics, you're forced to rely on bare texts, a dictionary, a grammar, and your own wits. It's worth something to grapple with ancient texts with minimal aid.
I decided to write these pages after finding what a dearth of information about the odes of Horace there was on the Internet. You often hear ill-informed people claim that the World Wide Web is the sum of all human knowledge, but many areas of scholarship (including classical studies) are still poorly represented.
One thing you won't find on these pages is a plethora of links to other pages on the World Wide Web. At some point, you must arrive at a place where there is some real information, or your search will be in vain. Endlessly following links ultimately leads nowhere. There are a few links to images of art works or archaeological artifacts illustrating various aspects of Horace's odes.
Another thing you won't find here is literary criticism, especially of the deconstructionist, post-modernist, Lacanian, Derridean, or Foucaultian variety, with which I have no sympathy whatsoever. Here's a sample of the kind of gibberish I mean, by Felix Guattari (1930-1992):We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.If you like this sort of thing, try the Postmodernism Generator, a piece of software by Andrew C. Bulhak, which produces it automatically.
Give me the old-fashioned appreciations of Horace any day, like those of W.Y. Sellar (Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Horace and the Elegaic Poets) and T.R. Glover (Horace, a Return to Allegiance).
Each page is supposed to be self-contained, and so you may find some material repeated from page to page.
These pages will start out small, and I'll try to add to them as time permits. I hope you'll be helped by them to find delight in the odes of Horace. But, dear reader, I wrote them first for my own pleasure, and only secondarily for yours.