Horace

Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Venusia, 65 BC – Rome, 8 BC), known in English as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric and satirical poet in Latin and one of the most influential writers of antiquity. He lived through Rome's transition from republic to empire under Augustus, and his work has remained a constant reference in European culture for its balance of reflection, wit and formal polish.

He was born in Venusia, now Venosa, on the border between Apulia and Lucania, an area where several Italic dialects were spoken. His father had been a slave who gained his freedom and prospered as an auctioneer, and who spent a considerable sum on his son's education, eventually taking him to Rome. There Horace studied grammar and rhetoric, and later went to Athens to complete his philosophical training, where he first encountered Epicureanism. After Julius Caesar's assassination he joined the republican side under Brutus and served as a military tribune. After the defeat at Philippi in 42 BC he returned to Italy, where his father's estate had been confiscated. He took a minor civil service post and began to write poetry.

His friendships with Virgil and Lucius Varius Rufus introduced him to the circle of Maecenas, the adviser of Augustus, who gave him his protection and a country estate in the hills near Tivoli. Horace accepted the support but declined a post as the emperor's personal secretary, true to his Epicurean ideal of independence. Some critics see him as a poet of the regime who kept a measure of distance; others see a courtier who was too accommodating. Either way, his work reflects the tension between public life and the longing for retreat.

His output is usually divided into two periods. In the first he wrote the Satires, conversational and moral in tone and rich in autobiographical detail, and the Epodes, iambic poems of social criticism, some biting and others serenely lyrical, including the one that opens with "Beatus ille", which gave its name to the praise of rural life. In the second he wrote the Odes, four books containing 104 poems in which he adapted Greek lyric metres and themes to Latin, above all those of Alcaeus, Sappho and Anacreon. In them he sets out his philosophy: the value of moderation, the "golden mean", friendship, acceptance of adversity and the wisdom of enjoying the present, summed up in "carpe diem". Finally he wrote the Epistles, reflective works of moral and philosophical content, among them the so-called Art of Poetry, which laid down principles of literary craft that shaped criticism for centuries.

His influence was enormous. The themes and commonplaces he created, such as the praise of the retired life and carpe diem, were taken up again and again in later literature, and since the Renaissance it is hard to find a European poem untouched by his forms or topics. Spanish poets such as Garcilaso de la Vega and Fray Luis de León adopted them, and the Art of Poetry shaped classical literary theory for centuries.