Though Horace is a great poet, much loved and imitated in the past, he is very little read today. This is partly because he has never been translated into readable English that is also faithful to the Latin original. David West here provides such a translation of one of Horace's greatest works, and supports it with a basic commentary that will help newcomers to Horace--whether students or general readers--to understand how the poetry works.

Exuberantly mocking the vices and pretensions of his Roman contemporaries, Horace's Satires are stuffed full of comic vignettes, moral insights, and his pervasive humanity. Boasting famous episodes such as the fable of the town mouse and the country mouse and the grotesque dinner party given by the nouveau-riche Nasidienus, these poems influenced not only contemporaries such as Juvenal, but also English satirists from Ben Jonson to W. H. Auden. In the Epistles, Horace used the form of letters to explore questions of philosophy and how to live a good life. Perhaps the best-known epistle, "The...

Horace's first book of Satires is his debut work, a document of one man's self-fashioning on the cusp between Republic and Empire and a pivotal text in the history of Roman satire. It wrestles with the problem of how to define and assimilate satire and justifies the poet's own position in a suspicious society. The commentary gives full weight to the dense texture of these poems while helping readers interpret their most cryptic aspects and appreciate their technical finesse. The introduction puts Horace in context as late-Republican newcomer and a vital figure in the development of satire and...

In the first book of odes, Horace presents himself to his Roman readers in a novel guise, as the appropriator of the Greek lyric tradition. He aspired to add a new province to the empire of the national literature. The first book is designed both to establish Horace's engagement with his Greek predecessors and to create a role for lyric poetry in contemporary Rome. The collection of thirty-eight poems is therefore a dazzling feat of poetic appropriation and innovation, a blend of the public and the private voice of the poet. Classic Greek songs are evoked so as to provide a springboard for...

The poetry of Horace (born 65 bc) is richly varied, its focus moving between public and private concerns, urban and rural settings, Stoic and Epicurean thought. Here is a new Loeb Classical Library edition of the great Roman poet's Odes and Epodes, a fluid translation facing the Latin text. Horace took pride in being the first Roman to write a body of lyric poetry. For models he turned to Greek lyric, especially to the poetry of Alcaeus, Sappho, and Pindar; but his poems are set in a Roman context. His four books of odes cover a wide range of moods and topics. Some are public poems, upholding...

Horace saw the death of the Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire, and was personally acquainted with the emperor Augustus and the poet Virgil. He was famous during his lifetime, and continued to be posthumously, for his odes and epodes, his satires and epistles, and for Ars Poetica. This book deals with his life and work.