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SELECTIONS FROM THE Odes OF HORACE 'franslated by the Sargent Prize 'franslators, Paul Shorey, and Goldwin Smith INTRODUCTION WITH SOME exceptions, the poems of Horace printed be· low are translations done by students at Harvard during the past twenty·five years. The selection, then, is of those poems most interesting to students, and the style of translation follows the traditional English verse forms of the nineteenth century-of Tennyson and Swinburne -that we accept as a pleasant stsndard. The poetry that Horace wrote, however, was of another kind. Ah child, no Persian·perfect art! Crowns composite and braided bast They tease me. Never know the part Where roses linger last. Bring natural myrtle, and have done: Myrtle will suit your place and mine: And set the glasses from the sun Beneath the tackled vine. Perhaps this attempt by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a most untraditional nineteenth·century English poet, re·creates more nearly the fine, close·textured, seemingly illogical nature of the originals. The subject of this Ode (I, 38) is that of all Horace's poems: the preservation of one's integrity and decency in a chaotic society. The statement that the poet wants no oriental luxury but only a wreath of native myrtle and a glass of domestic wine is made in the form of intricate, perfect verse, whose language is so far from that of everyday speech that it must be studied to be understood logically. As poetry it is im. mediately understsndable and not to be surpassed, but as a rational statement, not. The six "Roman Odes" (III, 1-6), which are the cen· ter of Horace's poetry, present most clearly the constant theme of all that he wrote. The cycle begins: "I hate and avoid the unwashed mob. Keep pious silence, for I, the priest of the Muses, sing for the edification of the youth songs never before heard." Here is the same formula that is used by a priest before a sacrifice; the poet, in Horace's view, is a priest of the Muses who has a religious duty to improve the character of the youths for whom his poetry is written. This duty is not to be fulfilled by direct preaching; rather, the perfect, ordered beauty of poetry is to instill in the reader a sense of personal order and decency. The theme of the individual who is self·sufficient amidst disorder around him is varied as is the musical theme of a symphony: kings rule their peoples, Jupiter rules kings; indifferently, Necessity assigns high and low degree; black Care sits behind the horseman; a dis· ciplined youth will find it sweet and fitting to die for his fatherland. The great "Roman Odes" close with the same despair that appears in some of Horace's most youthful poetry: "We must pay for our fathers' sins; our women have become impure, our men weak; our wicked genera· tion will breed children even worse." This is no praise of the great rule of Augustus-here, Horace sees disorder and ruin without: it is only within oneself and in art that order and reason may be had. Horace had been brought up by a father who was a freed slave. In the Satires that he wrote while young and in the Epistles of his last years, he describes how his father had devoted himself to Horace's education: at first at home in Venusia, then at the fashionable school of Orbilius in Rome; and finally how he sent him to study philosophy in Athens. In 44 B.C. when Brutus, the assas· sin of Caesar, came to Athens, Horace joined his forces and was made a military tribune. After Brutus' defeat, Horace, bankrupt, his father dead, returned to Rome to work for a living. His first poems, the Epodes, that he wrote while he was an underpaid clerk in the treasury department, reBect with frightful reality the chaotic last stage of the "Roman Revolution" into which Horace-after his comfortable and protected youth-was suddenly plunged. One (usually left out of school texts) describes a panting, stinking nymphomaniac; another, a vulgar, dishonest, newly-rich man; a third urges friends to drink and ignore the descending storm. However, beneath the bitter cynicism of these early poems, there is evident what one critic has called a certain, "sense of public decency" that attracted Maecenas, the minister of Augustus, and the patron of so many artists of the time. As the result of an interview secured by Virgil, Maecenas...

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