Horace was probably of the Sabellian hillman stock of Italy's central highlands. His father had once been a slave but gained freedom before Horace's birth and became an auctioneer's assistant. He also owned a small property and could afford to take his son to Rome and ensure personally his getting the best available education in the school of a famous fellow Sabellian named Orbilius (a believer, according to Horace, in corporal punishment). In about 46 BC Horace went to Athens, attending lectures at the Academy.

After Julius Caesar's murder in March 44 BC, the eastern empire, including Athens, came temporarily into the possession of his assassins Brutus and Cassius, who could scarcely avoid clashing with Caesar's partisans, Mark Antony and Octavian (later Augustus), the young great-nephew whom Caesar, in his will, had appointed as his personal heir. Horace joined Brutus' army and was made tribunus militum, an exceptional honor for a freedman's son.

In November 42, at the two battles of Philippi against Antony and Octavian, Horace and his fellow tribunes (in the unusual absence of a more senior officer) commanded one of Brutus' and Cassius' legions. After their total defeat and death, he fled back to Italy--controlled by Octavian--but his father's farm at Venusia had been confiscated to provide land for veterans. Horace, however, proceeded to Rome, obtaining, either before or after a general amnesty of 39 BC, the minor but quite important post of one of the 36 clerks of the treasury (scribae quaestorii). Early in 38 BC he was introduced to Gaius Maecenas, a man of letters from Etruria in central Italy who was one of Octavian's principal political advisers. He now enrolled Horace in the circle of writers with whom he was friendly. Before long, through Maecenas, Horace also came to Octavian's notice.

During these years Horace was working on Book I of the Satires, 10 poems written in hexameter verse and published in 35 BC. The Satires drew on Greek roots, stating Horace's rejection of public life firmly and aiming at wisdom through serenity.

He discusses ethical questions: the race for wealth and position, the folly of extremes, the desirability of mutual forbearance, and the evils of ambition. His 17 Epodes were also under way. Mockery here is almost fierce, the metre being that traditionally used for personal attacks and ridicule, though Horace attacks social abuses, not individuals. The tone reflects his anxious mood after Philippi.

In the mid-30s he received from Maecenas, as a gift or on lease, a comfortable house and farm in the Sabine hills (identified with considerable probability as one near Licenza, 22 miles [35 kilometres] northeast of Rome), which gave him great pleasure throughout his life. After Octavian had defeated Antony and Cleopatra at Actium, off northwestern Greece (31 BC), Horace published his Epodes and a second book of eight Satires in 30-29 BC.

Then, while the victor, styled Augustus in 27 BC, settled down, Horace turned, in the most active period of his poetical life, to the Odes, of which he published three books, comprising 88 short poems, in 23 BC. Horace, in the Odes, represented himself as heir to earlier Greek lyric poets but displayed a sensitive, economical mastery of words all his own.

He sings of love, wine, nature (almost romantically), of friends, of moderation; in short, his favourite topics. Some of the Odes are about Maecenas or Augustus: although he praises the ancient Roman virtues the latter was trying to reintroduce, he remains his own master and never confines an ode to a single subject or mood. At some stage Augustus offered Horace the post of his private secretary, but the poet declined on the plea of ill health. Notwithstanding, Augustus did not resent his refusal, and indeed their relationship became closer.

The last ode of the first three books suggests that Horace did not propose to write any more such poems. (He was possibly disappointed with their reception following publication in 23 BC.)

The last of his epistles (in Book II, published 20-19 BC) - literary "letters" that were more mature and profound versions of the Satires--certainly announces an abandonment of "frivolous" lyric poetry for this more moralistic kind of verse.

Very shortly afterward, he set to work on three further epistles (much longer than any in the first book), all relating in different ways to poetic activities.

In these, Horace abandoned all satirical elements for a sensible, gently ironical stance, though the truisms praising moderation are never dull in his hands.

Two epistles make up a second book, and the third, the Epistles to the Pisos, was also known, at least subsequently, as the Ars poetica. These last three epistles embody literary criticism in a loose, conversational frame, the "Epistle to Florus" (Book II, Epistle 2) choosing to explain why Horace abandoned lyric poetry for "philosophy." The best poems, Horace thought, edify as well as delight; the secret of good writing is wisdom (implying goodness); the poet needs teaching and training to give of his best.

The "Epistle to Florus" may have been written in 19 BC, the Ars poetica (consisting of nearly 30 maxims for young poets' guidance) in c. 19-18 BC, and the last epistle of Book I in 17-15 BC. This last named is dedicated to Augustus, from whom there survives a letter to Horace in which the Emperor complains of not having received such a dedication hitherto.

In the last epistle contemporary poetry is asserted against Rome's earlier literary background, but this was doubtless a defense of Horatian methods.

By this time Horace was virtually in the position of poet laureate, and in 17 BC he composed the Secular Hymn (Carmen saeculare) for ancient ceremonies called the Secular Games, which Augustus had revived to provide a solemn, religious sanction for the regime and, in particular, for his moral reforms of the previous year.

The hymn was written in a lyric metre, Horace having resumed his compositions in this form; he next completed a fourth book of 15 Odes, mainly of a more serious (and political) character than their predecessors.

The latest of these poems belongs to 13 BC. In 8 BC Maecenas, who had been less in Augustus' counsels during recent years, died. One of his last requests to the Emperor was: "Remember Horace as you would remember me." A month or two later, however, Horace himself died, after naming Augustus as his heir.

He was buried on the Esquiline Hill near Maecenas' grave.

During the latter part of his life, Horace had been accustomed to spend the spring and other short periods in Rome, where he appears to have possessed a house.

He wintered sometimes by the southern sea and spent much of the summer and autumn at his Sabine farm or sometimes at Tibur (Tivoli) or Praeneste (Palestrina), both a little east of Rome. A short "Life of Horace," of which the substance apparently goes back to Suetonius, a biographer of the 2nd century AD, quotes a jocular letter he received from Augustus, from which it emerges that the poet was short and fat. He himself confirms his short stature and, describing himself at the age of about 44, states that he was gray before his time, fond of sunshine, and irritable but quickly appeased.

Influences, personality, and impact.

To a modern reader, the greatest problem in Horace is posed by his continual echoes of Latin and, more especially, Greek forerunners.

The echoes are never slavish or imitative and are very far from precluding originality. For example, in one of his satires Horace wrote what looks at first like a realistic account of a journey made to Brundisium (Brindisi, on Italy's "heel") in 37 BC.

Two of the incidents, however, prove to have been lifted--and cleverly adapted--from a journey by the earlier Latin satirist Lucilius. Often, however, Horace provides echoes that cannot be identified since the works he was echoing have disappeared, though they were recognized by his readers.

Another disconcerting element is provided by Horace's own references to his alleged models.

Very often he names as a model some Greek writer of the antique, preclassical, or classical past (8th-5th centuries BC), whom he claims to have adapted to Latin--notably, Alcaeus, Archilochus, and Pindar.

Yet his style of writing is much nearer to that of the more "modern," refined, and scholarly Greek writers of the Hellenistic, Alexandrian period (3rd and 2nd centuries BC), though to these (as to certain important Latin predecessors) his acknowledgments are selective and inadequate.

If this continuous relationship with the literary tradition is borne in mind, together with certain other factors that preclude wholly direct expression, such as the political autocracy of the time and Horace's own detached and even evasive personality, then it does become possible, after all, to deduce from his poetry certain conclusions about his views, if not about his life.

The man who emerges is kindly, tolerant, and mild but capable of strength; consistently humane, realistic, astringent, and detached, he is a gentle but persistent mocker of himself quite as much as of others.

His attitude to love, on the whole, is flippant; without telling the reader a single thing about his own amorous life, he likes to picture himself in ridiculous situations within the framework of the appropriate literary tradition--and relating, it should be added, to women of Greek names and easy virtue, not Roman matrons or virgins.

To his male friends, however--the men to whom his Odes are addressed--he is affectionate and loyal, and such friends were perhaps the principal mainstay of his life. The gods are often on his lips, but, in defiance of much contemporary feeling, he absolutely denied an afterlife.

So "gather ye rosebuds while ye may" is an ever recurrent theme, though Horace insists on a Golden Mean of moderation--deploring excess and always refusing, deprecating, dissuading.

Some of his modern admirers see him as the poet of the lighter side of life; others see him as the poet of Rome and Augustus. Both are equally right, for this balance and diversity were the very essence of his poetical nature.

But the second of these roles is, for modern readers, a harder and less palatable conception, since the idea of poetry serving the state is not popular in the West--and still less serving an autocratic regime, which is what Horace does. Yet he does it with a firm, though tactful, assertion of his essential independence.

Not only is he unwilling to become Augustus' secretary, but, pleading personal inadequacy, he also gracefully sidesteps various official, grandiose poetic tasks, such as the celebration of the victories of Augustus' admiral Agrippa.

And he refers openly to his own juvenile military service against the future Augustus, under Brutus at Philippi. He himself ran away, he characteristically says, and threw away his shield. But that, equally characteristically, turns out to be copied from a Greek poet--indeed from more than one. It is not autobiography; it is a traditional expression of the unsuitability of poets--and of himself--for war.

The whole poem absolves Horace of any possible charge of failing, because of his current Augustan connections, to maintain loyalty to his republican friends.

Horace's intellectual formation had to a large extent been completed before the Augustan regime began; yet he came to admire Augustus sincerely and deeply, owing him many practical benefits. But, above all, he deeply admired him for ending a prolonged, nightmarish epoch of civil wars.

So great was that achievement that Horace, at least, had no eye for any crudities the new imperial regime might possess.

This was one of the ages when people wanted order more than liberty, though Augustus was an adept at investing his new order with a sufficient respect for personal freedom and a sufficient facade of republican institutions to set most men's minds at rest.

He also restored the temples, and to Horace, though he probably did not believe in the gods whose names he called upon, the religious traditions and rituals of the Roman state seemed an integral, venerable part of Rome's greatness.

The Emperor was on more delicate ground when he sought, by social legislation, to purify personal morals and to protect and revive the Roman family. But here, too, Horace, in spite of his own erotic frivolity, was with him, perhaps because of the famous austerity of his Sabine stock.

And so the Secular Hymn contains a specific allusion (poetically not altogether successful) to these reforms.

Yet, before the hymn, Horace had already written the magnificent Roman Odes, numbers one to six of Book III--a great tribute to Augustus' principate, perhaps the greatest political poetry that has ever been written.

But these Odes are by no means wholly political, for much other material, including abundant Greek and Roman mythology, is woven into their dense, compact, resplendent texture. This cryptic, riddling sonority is the work of a poet who saw himself as a solemn bard (vates), a Roman reincarnation of Pindar of Thebes (518-438 BC), a stately Greek lyricist. Pindar increasingly becomes Horace's model in the further state odes of his fourth and last book.

After Horace's Secular Hymn, his works were known and appreciated by all educated Romans. Already at the time of Horace's death, his Odes were suffering the fate he deprecated for them and had become a school textbook.

But their excellence was so great that they had few ancient lyrical successors, until some early Christian writers--Ambrose, Prudentius, and Paulinus--occasionally echoed Horace's forms, though with a difference in spirit.

Thereafter, the medieval epoch had little use for the Odes, which did not appeal to its piety, although his Satires and Epistles were read because of their predominantly moralistic tones.

The Odes came into their own again with the Renaissance and, along with the Ars poetica, exerted much influence on Western poetry through the 19th century. The English Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, hailed the lines of the Odes as:

Jewels five-words-long
That on the stretch'd forefinger of all Time
Sparkle for ever.

The many-facetted intricacy of these "jewels" has challenged translators throughout the centuries; in spite, or because, of their not wholly conquerable problems, every ode has been translated hundreds - perhaps thousands - of times. And still new versions, some of them admirable, continue to appear.