Culture | Latin verse

In praise of poetry

Lessons from a Latin versifier

Horace and Me: Life Lessons from an Ancient Poet. By Harry Eyres. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 236 pages; $25. Bloomsbury; £16.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

IN HIS autobiography, “Something of Myself”, Rudyard Kipling wrote that he was taught for two years at school to loathe the Roman poet Horace. He then forgot him for the next two decades, and came “to love him for the rest of my days and through many sleepless nights”. Few people today learn any Latin, and fewer still study the language in the way that schoolchildren were once compelled to do. But carpe diem (“seize the day”), dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (“it is sweet and noble to die for one’s country”), nil desperandum (“do not despair”) and nunc est bibendum (“now we must drink”) are just a handful of quotations from the “Odes”, the four books of lyric poems in Latin by Horace, that are familiar to the modern reader.

Born in 1958, Harry Eyres had an old-fashioned classical education at Eton College and Cambridge University. In this beguiling book he describes how, like Kipling, he came back to Horace, and to himself. Like Horace he is a poet and a lover of wine, music and the rural landscape. He has great sympathy with the man who was born in southern Italy into comparatively humble circumstances, received the best education that his family could afford, and survived the violent upheavals of the last century BC. On the wrong side at the battle of Philippi, a bloody turning-point in the history of Rome, he lived to enjoy the friendship of the great Augustus and, in common with Virgil, the patronage of the emperor’s friend Maecenas.

With the lightest of touches Mr Eyres sketches his own life and examines that of Horace. Wine for his father was a passion, he himself was introduced to it at the age of eight, and it was his first strong link with Horace. Many of the author’s skilful new translations of the odes touch on wine, its creation and consumption. Later, as Mr Eyres began to ponder the questions of existence, the excesses of a superficial society, the problem of how to live well and the inevitability of death, he came to realise that even after 2,000 years, Horace, his old nemesis, can provide some answers.

Horace may have “rather enjoyed being pointed at, as a kind of celebrity, the minstrel of the Roman lyre, halfway between Bob Dylan and Seamus Heaney”, writes Mr Eyres. But he was a philosopher as well as a poet—and his beautiful and pithy verse is as relevant now as it was then. Horace understood the hollowness at the heart of unparalleled prosperity and the way money makes for a false god. He wrote about the benefits of recognising inescapable limits and of the sanity of being content with quod satis est (“what is enough”).

Mr Eyres begins and ends his book in the departure lounge of an airport. His companion is his small, battered edition of the “Odes”. In one of them Horace made the outrageous claim that they were time-proof. This delightful book demonstrates that he was right. Hopefully, its seductive interweaving of a modern life and an ancient one will encourage a wider readership of this most appealing of Latin writers, even if only in translation.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "In praise of poetry"

The march of protest

From the June 29th 2013 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

Discover more

Could your marriage survive a shipwreck?

“Maurice and Maralyn”, a new book about a couple stranded almost four months at sea, makes you wonder

What lies behind Beyoncé’s country turn?

The star singer has always been a canny interpreter of musical trends


Museums are becoming more expensive

Will it kill off future patronage and attendance?