Literature and history

welcome. Hello and welcome to literature and history. Episode 50, Our Brutal Age.

This is the first of two shows that will focus on the Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flachus, who lived from 65 to 8 bc.

A writer known to us today as Horace. Horace's diverse body of works went into circulation

between about 35 and 13 BC.

During these decades, the dead Julius Caesar's shrewd grand-nephew Octavian

fought his rival Mark Antney, defeated the famous general, and gradually assumed

sole control over the battered Roman Republic.

By the time Horace passed away in 8 BCE, Octavian had taken the title of Augustus, reorganized the military and its command service. The

Davidian had taken the title of Augustus, reorganized the military and its command structure,

altered the population and membership rules of the Senate,

cut new roads through the Italian Peninsula,

and bankrolled countless new public

building and infrastructure projects changed the way that the provinces were

governed and taxes were collected there, passed new laws related to marriage, adultery, childbearing, the freeing

of slaves and conferral of citizenship, massively expanded Rome's geographical footprint, and overall affected so many changes in the Roman

world that the years of his reign, 27 b.c.e. to 14 c.e. are in hindsight called the Augustine Age.

The Augustin Age will dominate the next dozen or so programs of our podcast.

Horace, Virgil, Ovid, and the poet's propirious and Tibolis all worked during the reign of Rome's first emperor.

Their lives were not only affected by the ways in which Augustus refashioned the Roman state.

They also had direct financial ties to the Emperor himself,

often having incentives for writing works that subtly or overtly endorsed the new

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