Selections from Horace Satires: An Edition for Intermediate Students (Bloomsbury Classical Languages)

121 Pages·2019·4.871 MB·

by  John Godwin (editor)

Selections from Horace Satires
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Selections from Horace Satires:
An Edition for Intermediate
Students
I.1 lines 1–12, 28–100; I.3 lines 25–75;
II.2 lines 1–30, 70–111
With introduction, commentary
notes and vocabulary
by John Godwin
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in Great Britain 2018 as Horace Satires: A Selection
This edition first published in the United States of America 2019
Copyright © John Godwin, 2018, 2019
Cover image © DEA / C. SAPPA / Getty
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Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
Text 21
Commentary Notes 29
Vocabulary 81
vi
Preface
This book is intended to assist students of Latin who have mastered
the basics and who are now ready to start reading some Latin verse
and developing their skills and their understanding. The notes assume
that the reader has studied the Latin language at beginner’s level, but
the vocabulary list glosses every word in the text and the Introduction
assumes that the reader is coming to Horace for the very first time. To
assist with the comprehension of the Latin, the vocabulary at the end
of the book includes line references to places where a particular word
has a different meaning from the one found in basic dictionaries, and
it is worth consulting the vocabulary whenever the meaning is not
fully explained in the commentary. Tricky phrases are explained and
translated in the commentary and it is important that the student also
uses the vocabulary to be certain of the meaning of every word so
that the music and the emphases of the verse can be fully appreciated.
The commentary seeks to elucidate the background and the literary
features of this highly artistic text, while also helping the reader to
understand how the Latin words fit together into their sentences.
My thanks are due above all to Alice Wright and her team at
Bloomsbury who have been a model of efficiency and enthusiasm
and a delight to write for. My thanks also go to Dr Emily Gowers of St
John’s College, Cambridge and the two anonymous readers who both
read the whole of this book in draft form and made many highly useful
comments which saved me from error as well as pointing me towards a
better reading of the text.
John Godwin
Shrewsbury 2017
viii
Introduction
Horace and his times
Horace was born into a world on the verge of dramatic change. When
Quintus Horatius Flaccus was born on 8 December 65 bc in Venusia
in southern Italy, the son of an ex-slave as he tells us in his poems (e.g.
Satires I.6.6), Rome was a republic governed by the Senate and People
of Rome (SPQR). By the time he died fifty-seven years later in 8 bc
the state was ruled by a single man, Augustus, and the republic had
become a ‘principate’. Power was moved from the hands of the senate
and people to the court of the princeps who had gained his position
by defeating the men who had in 44 bc murdered his adoptive father
Julius Caesar, and then by defeating his rival Mark Antony at the
battle of Actium in 31 bc. The poet went from being a total outsider
whose appearance was not always à la mode (Epistles I.1.94–7) to
being in effect the poet laureate who was asked to compose for the
Secular Games in 17 bc, his personal change in position being a small
reflection of the major changes at work in Roman politics of the time.
His father was clearly a man of some means with his own land
and a job as a coactor (auctioneering manager); he was rich enough
to send young Horace to be schooled in Rome and then to university
in Athens, which is where he was in 44 bc when the news of Caesar’s
assassination broke. Horace joined up with the forces of Brutus,
one of the leading assassins, and became a tribunus militum (senior
officer). He fought for Brutus at the battle of Philippi in 42 bc where