ODES AND EPODES - HORACE (trans. by Niall Rudd)

I “studied” Latin for my entire high school career but it’s been a while since I’ve dipped my toes back into the classics. In my Latin classes, which I loved but was quite bad at, we followed the national program and studied Julius Caesar first, since he’s easy, it’s all stuff about how large the camps are and how many Gauls he killed on a given day, then moved onto Catullus and, a little Virgil. Catullus is great, very horny stuff, surprisingly funny, and very relatable 2000 years later in a way that the traditional emphasis on heroics one finds in something like Virgil is not. I’ve read a lot of Ovid in translation too, who is also fun and interesting. All that being said, I never translated any Horace or really read him in translation so I decided to break up some of my heavier reading (I’m deep into these Short Sun books as well as a 500+ page tome about India and the EIC) with some poetry. This volume was a scan of the classic (in both senses) Loeb library edition, ie those small red books with Latin on one side and English on the other, but, sadly, the scans were somewhat fucked up and some of the pages were out of order and/or missing. Either way, it was fun to look over some of the Latin and see how much I remember from a decade+ ago. Very little, it turns out, though I did remember the fact that Latin puts not importance on word order, which opens up a whole universe of poetic possibilities that are not present in English. The poems themselves were somewhat underwhelming; I came out of this thinking that Catullus and Ovid are very much better. It’s never as funny or sad as Catullus and never as far-out and mythologically dense as Ovid. That’s not to say there isn’t some good stuff. There’s constant references to far-away parts of the empire, from Britain to China, which is pretty mind-blowing to consider given how old these poems are. My favorite parts were the parts about wanting to live a quiet life in the country, sitting in the sun, enjoying your farm, letting the world pass you by. It’s amazing how frequently this desire comes up in ancient poetry, from Li Po to Virgil. Something to that, I suppose. There is an interesting line about how it feels good to be silly sometimes, which is a great sentiment to get passed down through the ages. It also includes the notorious “Dulce et Decorum est” line, which I would say has aged much less well. So while I wouldn’t put Horace in my top tier of Latin poets, he’s a good edition. 55 Odes.