The Odes and Carmen Saeculare

Summary

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 library's text is John Conington's rhymed verse translation, first published in 1863, which turns each ode into English stanzas. Book I opens with a dedication to Maecenas, Horace's patron, and moves through invitations, warnings and portraits: the girl Pyrrha who will break a new lover's heart, snowy Mount Soracte calling for a fire and wine, and the ode to Leuconoe that ends with the advice to seize the present day, the famous carpe diem. The upright man of the Integer vitae ode needs no weapons because his innocence protects him. Book II gathers poems of moderation and mortality: the golden mean that avoids both the miser's hovel and the palace, the river of years that no piety can stop in the ode to Postumus, and the poet's hope of being changed into a swan. Book III begins with the six Roman Odes, Horace's most serious civic poems, which call young Romans back to frugality, courage, justice, reverence for the gods and steadiness before mobs and tyrants; the second contains the line that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. The book ends with Horace's proud claim that he has raised a monument more lasting than bronze. Book IV, written at the emperor's request, praises Augustus and his stepsons and returns to spring, age and the fame that poetry gives. Throughout, Horace speaks as a friend at table: urbane, self-mocking, aware of death, grateful for a small Sabine farm, and suspicious of greed and ambition. For Christian readers the Odes offer the finest pagan picture of natural wisdom about contentment and the brevity of life, and they invite comparison with Ecclesiastes and with the teaching of Jesus on treasure and tomorrow. Medieval monks copied them, Renaissance schoolboys memorised them, and English poets from Milton to Tennyson imitated them.

Top Lessons

• The golden mean

  Horace praises the man who avoids both extremes of wealth and want and who keeps a steady heart in good and bad fortune. This is the classical virtue of temperance in lyric form.

• Seize the day

  The ode to Leuconoe tells her not to pry into the future but to use the present well. Readers have taken this as a call to pleasure, but Horace mainly urges wise use of limited time.

• Poetry and lasting fame

  In the last ode of Book III Horace claims his verse will outlast pyramids. The Odes ask what in a human life can last.

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