Horace: Poet on a Volcano by Peter Stothard

Horace: Poet on a Volcano

By Peter Stothard

Yale University Press 2025

The Ancient Lives series from Yale University Press continues with Horace: Poet on a Volcano by classicist and former Times Literary Supplement editor Peter Stothard. Some of the subjects taken up by the series have been more obscure than others (Demetrius, Phocion, etc.), but Stothard’s subject, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, was for 2000 years the exact opposite: not just known but beloved, not just familiar but family. Even before his death in AD 8, Horace was a godsend to teachers of literature and Latin, a great writer who could be enjoyed by even the stupidest students, a master of the language who was also fun.

That pedagogical tradition continues virtually uninterrupted for two millennia, which is why writers and translators separated by centuries all tend to sound exactly the same when dealing with Horace. Clerics in Hadrian’s Rome struck the same notes as, for instance, translator and literature professor Charles Passage writing about Horace 40 years ago: “Advance only a short distance into his works, and you begin to perceive him as a living personage at your side: immediately likeable, trustworthy, level-headed, compatible with almost any society, and congenial with almost any mood.” Here, Passage noted with apparent approval, readers will find “no inaccessible ecstasies, no dark profundities.”

It's perhaps a sign that Horace is no longer taught in schools (except to Classics majors and other hopeless cases) that this communal hail-and-well-met tone fallen out of fashion when writing about this poet. Stothard is comfortable calling him “a poetic genius for all time,” (and grants that, as he wonderfully puts it, Horace was “not a man for a thesis”) but he consistently reverts to the poet’s less sunny aspects. “Horrors were buried under sweetness,” Stothard writes. “Fake familiarity masked the truth of how alien was his work in so many ways.”

This is largely a biographical study, and Stothard essentially accepts the Vita Horatii of Suetonius, which was written 125 years after Horace’s death and reaches us only in a digest copied and re-copied a thousand times after that. If a biographer combines the Vita Horatii with the plentiful autobiographical details in the poems themselves, ignoring the scattershot nature of the former and the high likelihood of, let’s just call it poetic license in the latter, the result is the old familiar story of the son of a freed slave being given an expensive education but watching his life fall apart when civil war ripped apart the Roman world.

The young man, now landless and penniless, moves to Rome and takes a day job working as a clerk while turning out poems so notably good that they attract the attention of far more established poets and also the great patron Maecenas, who eventually grants the poet financial independence in the form of a farm in the countryside. Prominent now, having outlived most of those more established poets, Horace becomes something of a state figure, his talents coveted even by the emperor Augustus, who used his typical blend of Mafioso coercion and loutish humor when addressing the poet (Purissimum penem, etc.). The state occasions, the lavish funeral, all the trappings that seem so ironic when matched against the sharp-tongued young poet of the Satires (which, pace Passage, don’t always come across as “likeable, trustworthy, level-headed”).

As noted, this is all extremely familiar ground. In fact, one of the main interests of any new biography of Horace is curiosity over just how derivative a life any new author ends up telling.

There’s less anxiety on this front with Stothard, because his books are so intensely enjoyable, so invigoratingly smart. His The Last Assassin: The Hunt for the Killers of Julius Caesar, for example, immediately began to do more than its hackneyed premise suggests, and his 2023 book Palatine: An Alternative History of the Caesars was a marvel of historical investigation and informed speculation.

So it is with this new book. Horace: Poet on a Volcano is remarkably energetic work, with two standout bits of excellence. The first of these is Stothard’s running commentary on the poems themselves, which tends to make Horace’s artistic development as gripping as if readers were watching it happen in real time. Writing about the famous Odes of 23 BC (and their even more famous bit about “Carpe diem”), for instance, there’s this:

His Odes were different. The words carpe diem had never been used in that way before. Plucking fruit was a common enough idea. Plucking time, seizing the day, was not. Other novelties were even more demanding on his readers. It was the essence of the Latin language that the words of a sentence could run in almost whatever order the writer wished: each individual word contained a marker that connected it to another and to the whole. But Horace’s art of molding the sounds of the Greeks to the language of the Romans stretched what was possible toward what for many was beyond the possible.

Again, it’s not new; after 2000 years of constant attention, it doubtful anything new could be written about this author. But it’s all done with so much clear, assessing affection that it mostly makes the old story feel fresh again.

And the second bit of excellence: 30 pages of close-typed Source Notes that veritably sing with erudition and zest, taking up and working over hundreds of points of interest or contention in the poems, referencing dozens of earlier translators and commentators, reminding even the casual reader that in addition to being a source of joy for 2000 years, Horace’s work has also been a playground for scholarly annotation. It could almost be said that these Source Notes alone sell the whole book, except that most readers would quite rightly view such a sentiment as lunacy. The hopeless cases will understand.

 Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News