Horace

Biography

Horace, whose full name was Quintus Horatius Flaccus, was a Roman poet, the great lyric poet of the age of Augustus. He was born in 65 BC in Venusia, in the south of Italy, the son of a freed slave who took him to Rome to be taught by the best teachers, and he went on to study philosophy in Athens. There, after the murder of Julius Caesar, he joined the army of Brutus and fought as an officer at Philippi in 42 BC; when the republicans lost, he came home to find his father’s land taken from him. He found work as a clerk in the treasury, and his first poems won him the friendship of Virgil, who introduced him to Maecenas, the great patron of poets, who later gave him a farm in the Sabine hills.

In his Satires and Epistles he talks in an easy, ironic voice about how to live well, and his four books of Odes brought the metres of Greek lyric poetry into Latin. They hold some of the most quoted lines of Latin poetry, from carpe diem, seize the day, to the golden mean and the proud boast that he had raised a monument more lasting than bronze. In 17 BC Augustus chose him to write the hymn for the Secular Games, and his letter on the art of poetry, the Ars Poetica, guided poets and critics for centuries. He died in Rome in 8 BC, less than two months after Maecenas, and was buried beside him on the Esquiline Hill.