Literature and history

come. Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 51, Horace and Augustine Poetry.

This is the second of two programs on the Roman poet Quintus Horatius Floccus, a writer who lived from 65 to 8 bc E. and witnessed firsthand the fall of the Roman Republic and the birth of the

Empire.

In our previous show we learned about Horace's life, how he was the son of a former slave, how his father

set him up with a good education in Rome and Athens, and how while studying in Athens in the

late 40s Horace joined the losing side of the Civil War,

eventually fleeing the Battle of Philippi in October of 42,

when he saw that Brutus' forces had no chance of victory.

We talked about how afterwards, with his family property stripped away,

Horace acquired a civil service job associated with the Roman Treasury, evidently an undemanding post

that allowed him time to work on his poetry and cultivate friendships with the poet Virgil

and later Virgil's lavishly wealthy patron Mycenus.

We read some of Horace's poems about the awful civil wars that he lived through, and we read some of Horace's poetry concerning the issue of patronage

itself, how Horace glorified Augustus and Mycenus in a number of poems and how elsewhere he seems to express more ambivalent

feelings about his obligations to the new imperial regime.

Generally, last time, we were most concerned with Horace in the context of the Civil Wars and

the birth of the Augustan regime.

In this show, we're going to focus a lot more closely on Horace's writings. Among many things, Horace was a

satirist, and satire to the later Roman scholar Quintilium was the quintessentially Roman genre and Horace was its greatest practitioner.

One of Horace's most frequent satirical targets is himself, and after talking about Horation satire in general and Horace's

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