The odes of Horace
Horace is his own biographer. All the material facts of his personal history are to be gathered from allusions scattered throughout his poems. A memoir, attributed to Suetonius, of somewhat doubtful authenticity, furnishes a few additional details, but none of the moment, either as to his character or career.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus, his father was a freedman, and it was considered that he had been a slave of some member of the great family of the Horatii, whose name, in accordance with common usage, he had assumed. But this theory has latterly given place to the suggestion, based upon inscriptions, that he was a freedman of the town of Venusia, the modern Venosa, the inhabitants of which belonged to the Horatian tribe.
The question is, however, of no importance in its bearings on the poet's life. The elder Horace had received his manumission
In his amatory verses, the same distinction is visible. Horace writes much about love, but he is never thoroughly in love. None of his erotic poems is vivified by those gushes of emotion which animate the love poetry of the poets we have named and of other modern songwriters.
Never indeed was loveless ideal or intense in a poet of unquestionable power. Horace is not in- sensible to feminine attractiveness. The pie had too much taste for that. Indeed no writer hits off with greater neatness the portrait of beauty or conjures up more skilfully before his reader an image of seductive grace. But his tone is more that of a pleased spectator than of one who has loved deeply.
Even in what may be assumed to be his earliest poems, the fire of genuine passion is wanting. Hor- ace's ardour seems never to have risen above the transient flush of desire.
At no period of his life, so far as can be inferred from his writings, was he a man to suffer from
The Odes (Latin: Carmina) are a collection of four books of Latin lyric poems by Horace. The Horatian ode format and style has been emulated since by other poets. Books 1 to 3 were published in 23 BC. A fourth book, consisting of 15 poems, was published in 13 BC.
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