The greatest Roman lyric poet

Horace and his near-death experience

Those who fall under the spell of Horace’s (65-27 BC) poetry find that it never leaves them. He wrote, among other things, four books of exquisitely crafted poems largely based on much earlier Greek poetic models. He called them carmina, songs. We have learned to call them, less directly, ‘odes’ (the word comes from Greek and simply means ‘songs’).

Horace’s 103 Odes cover a wide range of matter and feeling. There are love poems, abusive poems, political poems, moralising poems, and poems about nature, friendship, parties, and about poetry itself. One gets a sense of the kind of man Horace wants us to think he is - witty, thoughtful, wise, irreverent, loyal - but it’s hard to know who he really was. Even some of his autobiographical references seem to be drawn from Greek poetic models rather than from his own life.

I recalled Horace recently when I was at a friend’s house, sitting on a low divan behind which were two large flowerpots filled with plants. In the centre of the pots were lighted candles. I suddenly noticed my back getting hot, and looked round to see that one of the pots was on fire: the flame had caught the dry stalks of the plants and fire was soaring towards the ceiling! It took a few minutes to extinguish the fire with the help of a fire blanket (a useful accessory for those who use candles to create atmosphere in the home). Without quick action, the outcome could have been dire.

It reminded me immediately of the near-death experience Horace tells about himself. He was nearly brained by a falling tree on his estate, and he mentions the event twice in his Odes. In Odes 2.13 (that is no. 13 of book 2) he addresses the tree itself, and humorously suggests that it must have been planted by a maniacal murderer, since it nearly caused the death of its innocent owner.

Horace goes on to elaborate what he might have seen in the Underworld had he died. He refers to one of the Underworld judges, Aiakos, and among other things he suggests he would have encountered in the realms of good souls the two main, admired, models for his lyric poetry, Sappho and Alcaeus (both 7th-cent BC from the Greek island of Lesbos). Sappho was famous for her songs about her love for young women, Alcaeus for his poems of war and exile. I translate:

       How close I came to death’s abode
       and Aiakos's judgment seat,
       and saw those realms to good souls owed,
       heard Sappho with her lyre sweet

       of wanton maidens sing her tales;
       and you, Alcaeus, even more
       full-throated, rueing sea’s travails,
       the griefs of exile, blows of war!

     quam paene furvae regna Proserpinae
     et iudicantem vidimus Aeacum
     sedesque discriptas piorum et
     Aeoliis fidibus querentem

    Sappho puellis de popularibus
    et te sonantem plenius aureo,
    Alcaee, plectro dura navis,
    dura fugae mala, dura belli.      (Horace Odes

 2.13.21-8)

Horace suggests that he would have ended up, of course, in the ‘realms to good souls owed’, i.e. heaven rather than hell. Surely he might be granted a blessed afterlife with his beloved poets of Lesbos, in gratitude for his own lovely, witty poetry.