Horace
Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics
BBC
4.8 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2020
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Join Natalie Haynes and guests for half an hour of comedy and the Classics from the BBC Radio Theatre in London.
Natalie is a recovering comedian who is a little bit obsessive about Ancient Greece and Rome. Each week she takes a different figure from the Ancient World and tells their story through a mix of stand-up comedy and conversation.
Today she stands up in the name of Horace, the Roman poet who made friends of his enemies through the beauty of his writing, whom we all still quote today, often without realising. You know that bit of Latin in the Wilfred Owen poem? That's Horace. The son of a freedman, Horace was a master at avoiding political controversy. He was no looker, being by his own account short and fat, but he definitely had a racy side (think mirrors on the ceiling).
A town mouse, a country mouse, and a lot of gossip from a thousand years ago.
With special guests novelist and poet Ben Okri and classicist Professor Llewelyn Morgan. Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:05.1 | Ladies and gentlemen, today I am standing up for Horace. |
| 0:17.6 | The Roman poet Horace was born on the 8th of December 65 BCE. |
| 0:22.4 | That is unnervingly specific for this program. |
| 0:25.5 | We just happen to know the exact date. |
| 0:27.3 | He's born in Venusia in southern Italy. |
| 0:29.6 | His full name, Quintus Horatius Flacchus. |
| 0:32.8 | And unlike most ancient poets, especially unlike other Latin love poets, |
| 0:37.2 | Horace is not posh. |
| 0:39.5 | This differentiates him from Catullus, Ovid, Tbilus, Perthus. |
| 0:43.4 | They are all upper-class men. |
| 0:45.6 | Horace is the son of a freed man, i.e. his father had been a slave. |
| 0:51.1 | His father was freed before Horace was born. |
| 0:53.2 | That's why Horace is a citizen and not |
| 0:55.2 | himself a slave. Slave's children would have been then slaves. What's really interesting about this, |
| 1:00.7 | I thought we would start with Horace's childhood since very unusually we know something about it, |
| 1:05.0 | because Horace is a very autobiographical poet, is that he and his father have what seems an |
| 1:09.3 | almost anachronistically close relationship. |
| 1:12.7 | So in satire six, he writes satires at the start of his career most probably. |
| 1:16.4 | He talks about his dad, an auctioneer, taking him to school every day. |
| 1:21.3 | His father, in other words, was acting as a pedagogos. |
| 1:24.0 | The word pedagogue means to lead a child. |
... |
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