Q. Horatius Flaccus
The poet of the golden mean
65 BC – 8 BC
Quintus Horatius Flaccus was born in 65 BC in Venusia, on the border between Apulia and Lucania, the son of a freedman — a former slave — who had made enough money as an auctioneer's agent to give his boy the best education Italy could offer. Horace never forgot this: his father's devotion, his own improbable social ascent, and the precariousness of status in Roman society are recurring themes in his poetry.
He studied in Rome and then in Athens, where he was caught up in the political crisis following Caesar's assassination. He joined Brutus's army and fought at Philippi in 42 BC — on the losing side. He came home to find his father's property confiscated. It was, he later said, poverty that drove him to write verse.
His early works, the Satires and Epodes, are sharp, conversational poems that established his voice: witty, self-deprecating, morally serious but never preachy. Through them he attracted the patronage of Maecenas, Augustus's great minister of culture, who gave him the Sabine farm that became both his home and his most famous subject.
The Odes, published in 23 BC, are his masterpiece. Adapting the metres and themes of Greek lyric poetry — Alcaeus, Sappho, Pindar — to Latin, Horace created a body of lyric verse that has no rival in Roman literature. The range is extraordinary: drinking songs and hymns, love poems and political odes, meditations on mortality and celebrations of friendship. The famous phrase carpe diem comes from Odes 1.11; the equally famous exegi monumentum from Odes 3.30.
Horace died on 27 November 8 BC, just weeks after Maecenas. Augustus is said to have mourned him.
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