The reception of Horace's work has varied from one epoch to another and varied markedly even in his own lifetime.
Odes 1–3 were not well received when first 'published' in Rome, yet Augustus later commissioned a ceremonial ode for the Centennial Games in 17 BC and also encouraged the publication of
Odes 4, after which Horace's reputation as Rome's premier lyricist was assured. His Odes were to become the best received of all his poems in ancient times, acquiring a classic status that discouraged imitation: no other poet produced a comparable body of lyrics in the four centuries that followed (though that might also be attributed to social causes, particularly the parasitism that Italy was sinking into). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ode-writing became highly fashionable in England and a large number of aspiring poets imitated Horace both in English and in Latin. In a verse epistle to Augustus (Epistle 2.1), in 12 BC, Horace argued for classic status to be awarded to contemporary poets, including Virgil and apparently himself. In the final poem of his third book of Odes he claimed to have created for himself a monument more durable than
bronze ("Exegi monumentum aere perennius",
Carmina 3.30.1). For one modern scholar, however, Horace's personal qualities are more notable than the monumental quality of his achievement: Yet for men like
Wilfred Owen, scarred by experiences of
World War I, his poetry stood for discredited values: The same motto,
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, had been adapted to the ethos of martyrdom in the lyrics of early Christian poets like
Prudentius. These preliminary comments touch on a small sample of developments in the reception of Horace's work. More developments are covered epoch by epoch in the following sections.
Antiquity Horace's influence can be observed in the work of his near contemporaries,
Ovid and
Propertius. Ovid followed his example in creating a completely natural style of expression in hexameter verse, and Propertius cheekily mimicked him in his third book of elegies. His
Epistles provided them both with a model for their own verse letters and it also shaped Ovid's exile poetry. His influence had a perverse aspect. As mentioned before, the brilliance of his
Odes may have discouraged imitation. Conversely, they may have created a vogue for the lyrics of the archaic Greek poet
Pindar, due to the fact that Horace had neglected that style of lyric (see
Influence and Legacy of Pindar). The iambic genre seems almost to have disappeared after publication of Horace's
Epodes. Ovid's
Ibis was a rare attempt at the form but it was inspired mainly by
Callimachus, and there are some iambic elements in
Martial but the main influence there was
Catullus. A revival of popular interest in the satires of Lucilius may have been inspired by Horace's criticism of his unpolished style. Both Horace and Lucilius were considered good role-models by
Persius, who critiqued his own satires as lacking both the acerbity of Lucillius and the gentler touch of Horace.
Juvenal's caustic satire was influenced mainly by Lucilius but Horace by then was a school classic and Juvenal could refer to him respectfully and in a round-about way as "
the Venusine lamp".
Statius paid homage to Horace by composing one poem in Sapphic and one in Alcaic meter (the verse forms most often associated with
Odes), which he included in his collection of occasional poems,
Silvae. Ancient scholars wrote commentaries on the lyric meters of the
Odes, including the scholarly poet
Caesius Bassus. By a process called
derivatio, he varied established meters through the addition or omission of syllables, a technique borrowed by
Seneca the Younger when adapting Horatian meters to the stage. Horace's poems continued to be school texts into late antiquity. Works attributed to
Helenius Acro and
Pomponius Porphyrio are the remnants of a much larger body of Horatian scholarship. Porphyrio arranged the poems in non-chronological order, beginning with the
Odes, because of their general popularity and their appeal to scholars (the
Odes were to retain this privileged position in the medieval manuscript tradition and thus in modern editions also). Horace was often evoked by poets of the fourth century, such as
Ausonius and
Claudian.
Prudentius presented himself as a Christian Horace, adapting Horatian meters to his own poetry and giving Horatian motifs a Christian tone. On the other hand,
St Jerome, modelled an uncompromising response to the pagan Horace, observing: "
What harmony can there be between Christ and the Devil? What has Horace to do with the Psalter?" By the early sixth century, Horace and Prudentius were both part of a classical heritage that was struggling to survive the disorder of the times.
Boethius, the last major author of classical Latin literature, could still take inspiration from Horace, sometimes mediated by
Senecan tragedy. It can be argued that Horace's influence extended beyond poetry to dignify core themes and values of the early Christian era, such as self-sufficiency, inner contentment, and courage.
Middle Ages and Renaissance (in praise of Augustus). Classical texts almost ceased being copied in the period between the mid sixth century and the
Carolingian revival. Horace's work probably survived in just two or three books imported into northern Europe from Italy. These became the ancestors of six extant manuscripts dated to the ninth century. Two of those six manuscripts are French in origin, one was produced in
Alsace, and the other three show Irish influence but were probably written in continental monasteries (
Lombardy for example). By the last half of the ninth century, it was not uncommon for literate people to have direct experience of Horace's poetry. His influence on the
Carolingian Renaissance can be found in the poems of
Heiric of Auxerre and in some manuscripts marked with
neumes, notations that may have been an aid to the memorization and discussion of his lyric meters.
Ode 4.11 is neumed with the melody of a hymn to
John the Baptist,
Ut queant laxis, composed in
Sapphic stanzas. This hymn later became the basis of the
solfege system (
Do, re, mi...)an association with western music quite appropriate for a lyric poet like Horace, though the language of the hymn is mainly Prudentian. Stuart Lyons argues that the melody in question was linked with Horace's Ode well before
Guido d'Arezzo fitted
Ut queant laxis to it. Ovid does testify to Horace's use of the lyre while performing his Odes. The German scholar
Ludwig Traube once dubbed the tenth and eleventh centuries
The age of Horace (
aetas Horatiana), and placed it between the
aetas Vergiliana of the eighth and ninth centuries, and the
aetas Ovidiana of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Horace was a substantial influence in the ninth century as well, and Traube concentrated too much on Horace's
Satires. Almost all of Horace's work found favour in the Medieval period, with scholars associating Horace's different genres with the different ages of man. A twelfth-century scholar encapsulated the theory: "...Horace wrote four different kinds of poems on account of the four ages, the
Odes for boys, the
Ars Poetica for young men, the
Satires for mature men, the
Epistles for old and complete men." It was then thought that Horace had composed his works in the order in which they had been placed by ancient scholars. This schematism involved an appreciation of Horace's works as a collection, the
Ars Poetica,
Satires, and
Epistles appearing to find favour as well as the
Odes. The later Middle Ages, however, gave special significance to
Satires and
Epistles, considered Horace's mature works.
Dante referred to Horace as
Orazio satiro, and he awarded him a privileged position in the first circle of Hell, with
Homer, Ovid, and
Lucan. Horace's popularity is revealed in the large number of quotes from all his works found in almost every genre of medieval literature, and also in the number of poets imitating him in
quantitative Latin meter. The most prolific imitator of his
Odes was the Bavarian monk,
Metellus of Tegernsee, who dedicated his work to the patron saint of
Tegernsee Abbey,
St Quirinus, around the year 1170. He imitated all of Horace's lyrical meters then followed these up with imitations of other meters used by Prudentius and Boethius, indicating that variety, as first modelled by Horace, was considered a fundamental aspect of the lyric genre. The content of his poems however was restricted to simple piety. Among the most successful imitators of
Satires and
Epistles was another Germanic author, calling himself
Sextus Amarcius, around 1100, who composed four books, the first two exemplifying vices, the second pair mainly virtues.
Petrarch is a key figure in the imitation of Horace in accentual meters. His verse letters in Latin were modelled on the
Epistles and he wrote a letter to Horace in the form of an ode. However he also borrowed from Horace when composing his Italian
sonnets. One modern scholar has speculated that authors who imitated Horace in accentual rhythms (including stressed Latin and vernacular languages) may have considered their work a natural sequel to Horace's metrical variety. In France, Horace and
Pindar were the poetic models for a group of vernacular authors called the
Pléiade, including for example
Pierre de Ronsard and
Joachim du Bellay.
Montaigne made constant and inventive use of Horatian quotes. The vernacular languages were dominant in
Castilia and
Portugal in the sixteenth century, where Horace's influence is notable in the works of such authors as
Garcilaso de la Vega,
Juan Boscán,
Sá de Miranda,
Antonio Ferreira, and
Fray Luis de León, the last writing odes on the Horatian theme
beatus ille (
happy the man). The sixteenth century in western Europe was also an age of translations (except in Germany, where Horace wasn't translated into the vernacular until well into the seventeenth century). The first English translator was
Thomas Drant, who placed translations of
Jeremiah and Horace side by side in
Medicinable Morall, 1566. That was also the year that the Scot
George Buchanan paraphrased the
Psalms in a Horatian setting.
Ben Jonson put Horace on the stage in 1601 in
Poetaster, along with other classical Latin authors, giving them all their own verses to speak in translation. Horace's part evinces the independent spirit, moral earnestness, and critical insight that many readers look for in his poems.
Age of Enlightenment During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or the
Age of Enlightenment,
neoclassical culture was pervasive.
English literature in the middle of that period has been dubbed
Augustan. It is not always easy to distinguish Horace's influence during these centuries (the mixing of influences is shown for example in one poet's pseudonym,
Horace Juvenal). However a measure of his influence can be found in the diversity of the people interested in his works, both among readers and authors. New editions of his works were published almost yearly. There were three new editions in 1612 (two in
Leiden, one in
Frankfurt) and again in 1699 (
Utrecht, Barcelona,
Cambridge). Cheap editions were plentiful and fine editions were also produced, including one whose entire text was engraved by
John Pine in
copperplate. The poet
James Thomson owned five editions of Horace's work and the physician
James Douglas had five hundred books with Horace-related titles. Horace was often commended in periodicals such as
The Spectator, as a hallmark of good judgement, moderation, and manliness, a focus for moralising. His verses offered a fund of mottoes, such as
simplex munditiis (elegance in simplicity),
splendide mendax (nobly untruthful),
sapere aude (dare to know),
nunc est bibendum (now is the time to drink), and
carpe diem (seize the day, perhaps the only one still in common use today). His works were also used to justify commonplace themes, such as patriotic obedience, as in James Parry's English lines from an Oxford University collection in 1736: Horatian-style lyrics were increasingly typical of
Oxford and
Cambridge verse collections for this period, most of them in Latin but some like the previous ode in English.
John Milton's
Lycidas first appeared in such a collection. It has few Horatian echoes yet Milton's associations with Horace were lifelong. He composed a controversial version of
Odes 1.5, and
Paradise Lost includes references to Horace's 'Roman'
Odes 3.1–6 (Book 7 for example begins with echoes of
Odes 3.4). Yet Horace's lyrics could offer inspiration to
libertines as well as moralists, and neo-Latin sometimes served as a kind of discrete veil for the risqué. Thus for example
Benjamin Loveling authored a catalogue of
Drury Lane and
Covent Garden prostitutes, in Sapphic stanzas, and an encomium for a dying lady "of salacious memory". Some Latin imitations of Horace were politically subversive, such as a marriage ode by
Anthony Alsop that included a rallying cry for the
Jacobite cause. On the other hand,
Andrew Marvell took inspiration from Horace's
Odes 1.37 to compose his English masterpiece
Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, in which subtly nuanced reflections on the execution of
Charles I echo Horace's ambiguous response to the death of
Cleopatra (Marvell's ode was suppressed in spite of its subtlety and only began to be widely published in 1776).
Samuel Johnson took particular pleasure in reading
The Odes.
Alexander Pope wrote direct
Imitations of Horace (published with the original Latin alongside) and also echoed him in
Essays and
The Rape of the Lock. He even emerged as "a quite Horatian Homer" in his translation of the
Iliad. Horace appealed also to female poets, such as
Anna Seward (
Original sonnets on various subjects, and odes paraphrased from Horace, 1799) and
Elizabeth Tollet, who composed a Latin ode in Sapphic meter to celebrate her brother's return from overseas, with tea and coffee substituted for the wine of Horace's
sympotic settings: Horace's
Ars Poetica is second only to
Aristotle's
Poetics in its influence on literary theory and criticism. Milton recommended both works in his treatise
of Education. Horace's
Satires and
Epistles however also had a huge impact, influencing theorists and critics such as
John Dryden. There was considerable debate over the value of different lyrical forms for contemporary poets, as represented on one hand by the kind of four-line stanzas made familiar by Horace's Sapphic and Alcaic
Odes and, on the other, the loosely structured
Pindarics associated with the odes of
Pindar. Translations occasionally involved scholars in the dilemmas of censorship. Thus
Christopher Smart entirely omitted
Odes 4.10 and re-numbered the remaining odes. He also removed the ending of
Odes 4.1.
Thomas Creech printed
Epodes 8 and
12 in the original Latin but left out their English translations.
Philip Francis left out both the English and Latin for those same two epodes, a gap in the numbering the only indication that something was amiss. French editions of Horace were influential in England and these too were regularly
bowdlerized. Most European nations had their own 'Horaces': thus for example
Friedrich von Hagedorn was called
The German Horace and
Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski The Polish Horace (the latter was much imitated by English poets such as
Henry Vaughan and
Abraham Cowley). Pope
Urban VIII wrote voluminously in Horatian meters, including an ode on
gout.
19th century on Horace maintained a central role in the education of English-speaking elites right up until the 1960s. A pedantic emphasis on the formal aspects of language-learning at the expense of literary appreciation may have made him unpopular in some quarters yet it also confirmed his influencea tension in his reception that underlies
Byron's famous lines from
Childe Harold (Canto iv, 77):
William Wordsworth's mature poetry, including the
preface to
Lyrical Ballads, reveals Horace's influence in its rejection of false ornament and he once expressed "a wish / to meet the shade of Horace...".
John Keats echoed the opening of Horace's
Epodes 14 in the opening lines of
Ode to a Nightingale. The Roman poet was presented in the nineteenth century as an honorary English gentleman.
William Thackeray produced a version of
Odes 1.38 in which Horace's 'boy' became 'Lucy', and
Gerard Manley Hopkins translated the boy innocently as 'child'. Horace was translated by
Sir Theodore Martin (biographer of
Prince Albert) but minus some ungentlemanly verses, such as the erotic
Odes 1.25 and
Epodes 8 and 12.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton produced a popular translation and
William Gladstone also wrote translations during his last days as Prime Minister.
Edward FitzGerald's
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, though formally derived from the Persian ''
ruba'i, nevertheless shows a strong Horatian influence, since, as one modern scholar has observed, "...the quatrains inevitably recall the stanzas of the 'Odes', as does the narrating first person of the world-weary, ageing
Epicurean Omar himself, mixing
sympotic exhortation and 'carpe diem' with splendid moralising and 'memento mori'
nihilism.
" Matthew Arnold advised a friend in verse not to worry about politics, an echo of Odes''
2.11, yet later became a critic of Horace's inadequacies relative to Greek poets, as role models of
Victorian virtues, observing: "
If human life were complete without faith, without enthusiasm, without energy, Horace...would be the perfect interpreter of human life."
Christina Rossetti composed a sonnet depicting a woman willing her own death steadily, drawing on Horace's depiction of 'Glycera' in
Odes 1.19.5–6 and Cleopatra in
Odes 1.37.
A. E. Housman considered
Odes 4.7, in
Archilochian couplets, the most beautiful poem of antiquity and yet he generally shared Horace's penchant for quatrains, being readily adapted to his own elegiac and melancholy strain. The most famous poem of
Ernest Dowson took its title and its heroine's name from a line of
Odes 4.1,
Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae, as well as its motif of nostalgia for a former flame.
Kipling wrote a famous parody of the
Odes, satirising their stylistic idiosyncrasies and especially the extraordinary
syntax, but he also used Horace's Roman patriotism as a focus for
British imperialism, as in the story
Regulus in the school collection
Stalky & Co., which he based on
Odes 3.5. Wilfred Owen's famous poem, quoted above, incorporated Horatian text to question patriotism while ignoring the rules of Latin
scansion. However, there were few other echoes of Horace in the war period, possibly because war is not actually a major theme of Horace's work. The Spanish poet
Miquel Costa i Llobera published his renowned collection of poems named
Horacianes, thus being dedicated to the Latin poet Horace, and employing Sapphics, Alcaics, and similar types of stanzas. (the symbol of the
Michelin tyre company) takes his name from the opening line of
Ode 1.37,
Nunc est bibendum. Both
W. H. Auden and
Louis MacNeice began their careers as teachers of classics and both responded as poets to Horace's influence. Auden for example evoked the fragile world of the 1930s in terms echoing
Odes 2.11.1–4, where Horace advises a friend not to let worries about frontier wars interfere with current pleasures. The American poet
Robert Frost echoed Horace's
Satires in the conversational and sententious idiom of some of his longer poems, such as
The Lesson for Today (1941), and also in his gentle advocacy of life on the farm, as in
Hyla Brook (1916), evoking Horace's
fons Bandusiae in
Ode 3.13. Now at the beginning of the
third millennium, poets are still absorbing and re-configuring the Horatian influence, sometimes in translation (such as a 2002 English/American edition of the
Odes by thirty-six poets) and sometimes as inspiration for their own work (such as a 2003 collection of odes by a New Zealand poet). Horace's
Epodes have largely been ignored in the modern era, excepting those with political associations of historical significance. The obscene qualities of some of the poems have repulsed even scholars yet more recently a better understanding of the nature of
Iambic poetry has led to a re-evaluation of the
whole collection. A re-appraisal of the
Epodes also appears in creative adaptations by recent poets (such as a 2004 collection of poems that relocates the ancient context to a 1950s industrial town). ==Translations==