Volume 45, Number 10 · June 11, 1998
Horace, Our Contemporary
By Bernard Knox
Horace in English
edited by D.S. Carne-Ross, by Kenneth Haynes, with an introduction by D.S. Carne-Ross
Penguin, 560 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The Odes of Horace
bilingual edition, translation by Ferry David
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 344 pp., $35.00
It is now a little over two thousand years since the death in 8 BC of Quintus Horatius Flaccus, the poet familiarly known to English-speaking readers as Horace. Those two millennia saw the fulfillment of the bold prediction that Horace made in the final poem of the third book of his Odes: 'I shall not wholly die; a great part of me will escape the death goddess.'[1] In fact, all of him has survived, unlike the work of Gallus and Varius, members, as he was, of the literary circle of Maecenas, of which we have only pitiful fragments. The entire corpus of Horace's quite voluminous output continued to be copied throughout the dark age that saw the disappearance of large sections of the work of Livy, Tacitus, and Petronius. Horace became a school text for Western Europe as he had been for imperial Rome; whether in the original, in translations, or in adaptations, his work had a large effect on the development of Western culture. The influence of Horace on the English-speaking world is explored in all its many-sided splendor in the first of the books under review; the second offers a new, and most welcome, translation of Horace's most loved poems, the four books of the Odes.
Review, 4620 words
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