Harry Eyres,Horace and Me: Life Lessons from an Ancient Poet

Reviewed by: Aaron W Godfrey, Stony Brook University, USA

Horace and Me is a delightful work that defies classification. It is a memoir, a work of literary criticism, a romp through the Italian countryside and a cogent examination of how the Roman poet Horace is relevant today.

It begins as the author brings the old Loeb Classical Library edition of Horace through airport security (I carried the same edition through military service and travel in Europe more than 50 years ago). He starts, as Horace himself says, ‘in medias res,’ reminding the reader that the odes of Horace were composed by a middle-aged poet who wrote from ‘the privileged ridge of middle age from which you can see both slopes – the one you have climbed up so slowly and uncertainly from childhood and the one you are destined to stumble down, all too quickly, toward the dark waters of the sluggish Styx’ (p. 19).

Horace is a notoriously difficult poet to translate, to catch the meaning and music of his words. Nietzsche describes the Odes as a ‘mosaic of words,’ an accurate assessment of the difficult task of a translator. Horace is a poet that mature people value. Many years ago a young friend teaching Latin for the first time complained that Horace was ‘boring and stuffy.’ I advised her to ‘hang in,’ and when she reached the age of 40, her opinion would change. She did persist, and Horace has become a cherished friend. This past semester my students wrote in their course evaluations that Horace was ‘too hard and too much. Ovid was better.’ I advised them that if they kept up their study of Latin and reached 40, Horace would begin to speak to them.

Eyres looks at Horace from several perspectives: wine, friendship, the countryside, and religion. The author's first link with Horace was through wine, because his father was a wine merchant. Horace loved wine, and his selections that mention wine are central to many of the poet's odes – wine for celebration of Cleopatra's defeat, cheap Sabine wine for friendship, and a nine-year-old Alban wine to commemorate Phyllis, ‘the last of (his) loves!’

In ‘Among the Centurion's Sons,’ Eyres credits the same Flewitt and Pantin text I used in the first Latin class I taught with his introduction to Latin poetry. School youth will always favor Catullus and his passionate affair with Clodia (Lesbia) and the violent emotional changes from hating to loving, but one grows up and Horace is the antidote, as the author discovered. Horace is the poet of balance, of ‘the golden mean,’ and one who values friendship highly. He also celebrates the country life. His Sabine farm provided him with creative solitude, beauty and a place to entertain friends. Horace found Rome compelling, but was pleased to return to his farm. The charming fable of ‘The Country Mouse and the City Mouse’ tells of the pull in both directions: ‘When in Rome you pine for the country; when in the country you praise Rome’ (p. 155).

Horace and Me includes translations of some of Horace's odes in modern context. Some are successful, while others fall flat, demonstrating how difficult it is to translate Horace without losing the beauty or dignity of the original.

Eyres praises the Italian landscape, taking time to visit Horace's birthplace at Venusia (Venosa) and the reputed location of the Sabine farm.

Religion played a part in Horace's life – not the traditional religion of Rome, but recognition of the minor gods: Mercury, the god of culture, Venus, goddess of love, Bacchus, god of wine, and the household gods, the Lares and Penates. Eyres relates to this, swerving from traditional Christianity to Buddhism, which does not demand belief in any deity but seems to provide answers to anxiety in meditation and self-awareness.

Horace and Me is an excellent read that successfully places Horace in a contemporary setting. The author retranslates carpe diem as ‘taste the day,’ reminding the reader to live and savor without looking back with nostalgia or hoping in vain for a future which may never happen.