Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus)

Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65–8 BC) was born at Venusia in southern Italy, the son of a freed slave. He was educated in Rome and Athens, fought on the losing side at Philippi (42 BC) under Brutus, and returned to Italy to find his family property confiscated. Through Virgil he met Maecenas, the great patron of the Augustan poets, who gave him a farm in the Sabine hills.

His Satires, Epodes, Odes and Epistles made him the leading lyric poet of Rome. The Odes, in four books, adapt the metres of the Greek lyricists Alcaeus and Sappho to Roman themes: wine and friendship, love, the brevity of life, the Augustan state. He also wrote the Carmen Saeculare for the Secular Games of 17 BC. The versions here are from John Conington's rhymed English translation of the Odes (which omits a few odes), C. S. Calverley's versions of a handful of odes, and Thomas Creech's 1684 English verse translation of the Odes, Epodes, Satires, Epistles and Art of Poetry.