Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 BC), the son of a freedman from Venusia, was educated in Rome and Athens, fought for Brutus at Philippi, and was introduced by Virgil to Maecenas, who became his patron and gave him a farm in the Sabine hills. He wrote the Satires, Epodes, four books of Odes, the Epistles and the Art of Poetry, and became, with Virgil, the classic poet of Augustan Rome.
23 BC (Books I-III); 17 BC (Carmen Saeculare); c. 13 BC (Book IV) · Ancient · Poetry
The Odes are Horace's four books of lyric poems, the first three published together in 23 BC and the fourth about ten years later, printed here with the Carmen Saeculare, the hymn he wrote for the Secular Games of 17 BC. Horace boasted that he was the first to bring the metres of the Greek lyric poets Alcaeus and Sappho into Latin, and his hundred and three odes range from drinking songs and love poems to hymns to the gods and grave public poems on the state of Rome after the civil wars.
The Art of Poetry, known by its Latin title Ars Poetica, is a verse letter of about 476 lines that Horace addressed to a Roman nobleman named Piso and his two sons, probably late in his life. Ancient readers also called it the Epistle to the Pisos, and by the time of the teacher of rhetoric Quintilian it already bore the title Ars Poetica.