Horace, Art of Poetry 136-142

nec sic incipies, ut scriptor cyclicus olim:
‘fortunam Priami cantabo et nobile bellum.’
quid dignum tanto feret hic promissor hiatu?
parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.
quanto rectius hic, qui nil molitur inepte:
‘dic mihi, Musa, virum, captae post tempora Troiae
qui mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes.’

And you shouldn’t start, as a writer of cyclic epic once did, ‘Of Priam’s fate I sing and a famous war.’ What could he bring forth great enough to match such an opening promise? The mountains will go into labour and bring forth… a ridiculous mouse! How much better this man is, who doesn’t exert himself inappropriately: ‘Tell me, o Muse, of the man who, after the time of Troy’s capture, saw many men’s customs and cities.’

The final lines are, of course, a translation of the opening of the Odyssey.

Horace, Epistles 1.2.40-43

dimidium facti qui coepit habet; sapere aude,
incipe. vivendi qui recte prorogat horam,
rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis; at ille
labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum.

He who makes a start has the job half done; dare to be wise! Begin! He who postpones the hour for living aright is a bumpkin waiting for the river to stop; but it flows and shall flow, rolling along for all ages.

Horace, Satires 1.6.107-109

obiciet nemo sordis mihi, quas tibi, Tilli,
cum Tiburte via praetorem quinque secuntur
te pueri, lasanum portantes oenophorumque.

No one will taunt me with ‘What stinginess!’ like they do with you, Tillius, when five slaves are following you – the praetor! – on the Tibur road, and carrying your chamber-pot and case of wine.

The pot is probably a chamber-pot, not a cooking-pot, as some would more squeamishly translate it.

Horace, Art of Poetry 390

Horace urges authors to avoid publishing their work too precipitately.

nescit vox missa reverti.

A word once uttered cannot be recalled.

Horace, Odes 4.9.25-6

vixere fortes ante Agamemnona
multi.

Before Agamemnon there lived many brave men. 

But, Horace goes on to say, they are no longer remembered because they were not celebrated in poetry. Agamemnon was lucky to have Homer memorialize him.

Horace, Art of Poetry 1-9

An abrupt and striking opening. My translation attempts to keep the emphasis in the first line’s chiasmus- structure.

humano capiti cervicem pictor equinam
iungere si velit et varias inducere plumas
undique collatis membris, ut turpiter atrum
desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne,
spectatum admissi, risum teneatis, amici?
credite, Pisones, isti tabulae fore librum
persimilem, cuius, velut aegri somnia, vanae
fingentur species, ut nec pes nec caput uni
reddatur formae.

If to a human head a painter should wish to join an equine neck, and to put mottled feathers everywhere on limbs brought together from all over the place – so that a woman, shapely in her upper part, ended foully in a dark-coloured fish – would you, my friends, keep back laughter when he admitted you to a viewing? Believe me, you Pisos, a book would be very similar to that painting, if it were to be fashioned out of fancies that are false, like a sick man’s dreams, so that neither foot nor head could be related to one single form.

Horace, Epistles 1.1.106-108

Horace characteristically ends his serious discussion of philosophy with a little joke.

ad summam, sapiens uno minor est Iove, dives,
liber, honoratus, pulcher, rex denique regum,
praecipue sanus – nisi cum pituita molesta est.

To sum up, the wise man is second only to Jupiter: he’s rich, free, honoured, in a word a king among kings, eminently healthy – except when he’s suffering with catarrh.

Horace, Odes 3.2.13

dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

To die for one’s country is a sweet and seemly thing.

Most familiar nowadays from Wilfred Owen’s poem, this line – ‘the old Lie’ – had already been much quoted. Here, for example, it is spoken by the 11th Lord Lovat at his execution following Culloden:

The story of Lovat’s life, and possibly also his great age, attracted an extraordinary crowd to witness his execution. A scaffold fell, causing the deaths of several people, on which Lovat grimly remarked, ‘The more mischief the better sport.’ When on ascending to the place of execution he saw the immense crowds beneath him, ‘Why,’ he said, ‘should there be such a bustle about taking off an old grey head that cannot get up three steps without two men to support it?’ Before placing his head on the block he, with characteristic appropriation of the noblest sentiments, repeated the line from Horace:

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

Quoted from Byways in the Classics (1905) by Hugh Platt, fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, a lovely little book I’ve mentioned before. The remaining bit of Lovat’s speech will be coming in a couple of days.

Horace, Epistles 1.2.1-4

Horace has been reading Homer again and finding it a profitable experience, better than reading philosophers.

Troiani belli scriptorem, Maxime Lolli,
dum tu declamas Romae, Praeneste relegi:
qui quid sit pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non,
planius ac melius Chrysippo et Crantore dicit.

While you, Lollius Maximus, have been declaiming at Rome, I have been rereading at Praeneste the writer of the Trojan War. He says better and more plainly than Chrysippus and Crantor what is beautiful, what is ugly, what is useful, what is not.

Chrysippus was the ‘second founder’ of Stoicism, Crantor was a follower of Plato who wrote 30,000 lines of commentary, according to Diogenes Laertius 4.24.

Horace, Odes 3.30.1-5

Horace ends his third book of Odes with some bragging about his poetry’s immortality. That we are reading him 2000 years later kind of proves he was right. 🙂

exegi monumentum aere perennius
regalique situ pyramidum altius,
quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens
possit diruere aut innumerabilis
annorum series et fuga temporum.

I have built a monument more enduring than bronze and taller than the pyramids’ royal site: neither can devouring rain nor furious northerly wind destroy it, nor the uncountable succession of the years and the flight of time.

The little pun on impotens is quite nice: the wind is both ‘furious’ (impotens in the sense of ‘unable to control itself’), but it is impotens (the basic sense of ‘powerless’, ‘ineffective’) in its inability to destroy the poetry.