Horace fought at Philippi then sang Augustus’s Rome
Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65–8 BC)—Horace—wrote Odes, hexameter Satires and Epistles, and sharp Epodes across Rome’s leap from republic to empire. An officer on the losing republican side at Philippi in 42 BC, he later found patronage that secured his voice. No ancient poet tells us more about himself.
He was born on 8 December 65 BC at Venusia, a trading town where Lucania met Apulia. His father had been a slave for part of his life, perhaps a local captured in the Social War or a Sabine taken in the Samnite Wars, yet poured a small fortune into the boy’s schooling and went with him to Rome to supervise it. Horace later honoured that devotion in verse, while his mother never appears in his poems at all.
At nineteen he went on to Athens and enrolled in the Academy, where Epicurean and Stoic teaching left a deep mark and he mixed with young Roman aristocrats such as Cicero’s son. When Brutus arrived recruiting after Caesar’s murder, Horace was made a military tribune, one of six senior officers in a legion and a post normally held by senators’ or knights’ sons.
After the republican defeat at Philippi he accepted Octavian’s amnesty, only to find his father’s estate confiscated for veterans, as Virgil’s was too. He blamed poverty for turning him to poetry, though verse paid nothing by itself; it brought him contacts, and eventually Maecenas, Octavian’s civil right-hand man, became his patron and gave him a country villa whose remains survive above the river at Licenza.
The Epodes, modelled on Archilochus, are blame poetry that shames archetypal citizens into their duties amid Rome’s decaying social bonds. The friendly hexameters of the Satires and Epistles and the polished lyric Odes completed a range that made him Rome’s leading lyric poet of the Augustan age.
Source: Horace
