Horace: Poet on a Volcano
By Peter Stothard.
Yale University Press, 2025.
Hardcover. 288 pages. $28.
Reviewed by Nadya Williams.
Once upon a time, a middle-aged poet climbed up to the top of the Sicilian volcano Mount Etna. He gazed a while with longing and rising determination upon the raging flames within. Then he jumped.
Empedocles, the pre-Socratic philosopher and poet, is probably best known for his dramatic and likely mythical death. And yet, myths hold sway, and the haunting of Empedocles’s death offers the connecting thread for classicist Peter Stothard’s new biography of the Augustan poet, Horace. A poet on a volcano is living a life filled with dangerous beauty—and the hope of immortality through his words alone. Stothard is not writing specifically for Christians or conservatives, and unless you studied Roman history and Latin at some length, you may never have heard of Horace. And yet, a close-up of Horace’s life offers us the opportunity to get to know a brilliant man and artist who lived and wrote wholly apart from God.
Poets, whatever their religion, are not like us, normal people. Their life stories only confirm this further, the closer you look. The real Horace, no less than the mythologized Empedocles, is a case in point. A main staple of students’ Latin reading lists at all levels since his death, Horace would have been appalled at his popularity among these least discerning of readers, Stothard is convinced. Besides, this use of his poetry generally requires editing out the more salacious bits (of which there is an overabundance, which in turn offered much work to Victorian school-book editors). His legacy, as a result, ends up sanitized and simplified, leading to misunderstanding. Intermediate Latin students for generations could claim to have read Horace. But they never truly knew him.
For instance, the first poem of Horace I was assigned to memorize in tenth grade was none other than the famous ode from which we get the quotable “carpe diem” injunction: “Seize the day!” Except, the implications in the poem are decidedly not as inspirational as what we normally think of when saying the phrase. When Horace is trying to cajole his lover into seizing the day here, his intentions are decidedly not honorable.
So why have generations of students been reading this poet who requires much sanitizing and excerpting for impressionable readers, and is likely to shock and offend less impressionable readers with some of his content? Because, when it comes to the poetic art, Horace is a master—albeit a remarkably complicated one: “Horace was a wild poet as well as a wise and mellow one. He left behind a unique legacy of dark insecurity, bright pleasure, love, anger, and gratitude for life. He left a monument, as he put it, but even more a voice. He boasted that his poems would last into perpetuity and, unusually for the subjects of such boasts, they did last.”
But to understand Horace’s poetry, we must get to know him better. And that is Stothard’s goal in this new biography, his second for the Ancient Lives series of biographies published by Yale University Press. His first for the series was, appropriately enough, a biography of Crassus, whose influence on Roman politics shaped Horace’s early life.
Born in the Southern Italian town of Venusia in 65 BC to a freedman father, Horace did not have a socially privileged background. Yet his family was well-to-do enough to send the brilliant youth first to Rome (accompanied by dad), then to Athens for study (unchaperoned). In the meanwhile, however, the Roman Republic, shaky for the previous half-century or more, was disintegrating into civil war. In 60 BC, Crassus joined Caesar and Pompey to form the Triumvirate—the three-headed monster, as Stothard dubs it. By 44 BC, only Caesar was still alive—but that, of course, changed on the Ides of March.
After Caesar’s assassination, Brutus and the rest of the assassins fled to Greece, and Horace’s path intersected with them in Athens, where he was a student at the time. He was not the only impressionable youth to join their effort. In 42 BC, however, the so-called Liberators lost the Battle of Philippi to the army of Marc Antony and Octavian, future Augustus. Horace managed to safely flee from the battlefield and make it back to Rome. There were advantages to obscurity, it turned out.
Over the next few years, living in relative poverty and working a secretarial job, Horace began writing poetry—perhaps, as the extreme anger and acerbic wit he pours out in these early poems suggest, it was cheaper than therapy. He did come much too close, after all, to losing his life at Philippi. It was unclear, furthermore, in the world of continued proscriptions and political turmoil of the late 40s and early 30s BC, what the status of once-enemies of Octavian really was. Horace lived for decades in the shadow of Philippi, wondering what he had lost there and what he could still lose.
But as all writers and artists know, it is challenging to balance one’s art with other responsibilities, especially with a demanding full-time job. The Age of Augustus turned out to be a veritable golden age for poets, writers, and artists. Yet Horace was not one of the favored ones at first—he could not compete with someone like Virgil, for instance. Even after Horace secured the patronage of Maecenas, the wealthy patron of the best writers of the age, his status as poet of the regime was still in question. What did Augustus think of him? Apparently, not much, at least as far as Horace’s poetic skills went. Instead, Augustus invited the poet to become his personal secretary—someone who might ghost-write the interminable thank-you notes and nice congrats for friends and relatives. All those birthday greetings wouldn’t just write themselves, you know, and the First Citizen of a mighty empire was a busy guy.
Cautiously saying no (pleading his ill health by way of excuse), Horace evaded that particular honor and kept marching to his own drumbeat. Indeed, that is the mode we see in all of his poetry, throughout his entire career. Horace didn’t seem to care about readers’ preferences. Instead, he wrote technically difficult—and difficult to fully grasp—verses in intricate poetic meters not used before by Latin poets—like the Archaic Greek poets Alcaeus and Sappho, who “wrote songs in complex metrical patterns whose power was hard to unlock in Latin. That was Horace’s aim. To be the first to bring these masterpieces into Latin was the art that he recognized as wholly his own.”
Horace’s genius lay, though, no less in the remarkable adaptations of Greek meters into Latin poetry, but also in his use of words that also pushed the creative envelope in unprecedented ways that beginning readers, ancient or modern, fail to wholly appreciate. Take the “carpe diem” poem, in fact, as an example of the demands that Horace habitually inflicted on his readers. Stothard explains:
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 in the essence of the Latin language that the words of a sentence could run in almost whatever order the writer wishes: 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.
In other words, instead of appealing to his readers’ possible tastes and interests, Horace wrote what he wanted and how he wanted—and expected his readers to get on with it. Dare, double-dare—read it if you want, and begone from sight if you don’t. We would be remiss to think, however, in reading the regular taunts in his words, that he had no insecurities. He had, in fact, plenty of those, Stothard reflects. Like any poet, Horace was afraid of failure—of anyone not liking his work. These brilliant brainchildren, after all, were the only children that Horace, a lifelong bachelor, had produced. He loved them to madness, as he jokingly reflects at times. Indeed, both the fear of failure and a lifelong anger at the cards dealt him underlie most of Horace’s works, whether they be humorous self-portraits, descriptions of amorous encounters gone wrong or right, or reflections on the great beauty and even greater mania of writing poetry.
Writing is always personal. We can read Horace’s soul—his deepest longings, fears, and dreams—within his poetry over the course of decades. Indeed, perhaps the greatest strength of this biography is Stothard’s close reading of Horace’s work, including both the Latin (for the nerdier connoisseurs) and his translations (for the benefit of all readers). Words matter, and for a poet who took much time choosing each one carefully, words matter even more than for most. I have a greater appreciation for Horace as both a poet and a thinker after reading this biography.
And yet, I feel much pity too. Yes, Horace’s work has stood the test of time—Latin students still read him today. Still, it is a shallow fame for a man whose misery never quite departed from his company. Artists create—this is simply who they are, to the deepest marrow of their bones. But no art can compete with flesh and bone, the joy of human relationships. Horace, it seems, lived a life of shallow connections, never fully finding love, even as he wrote encouragements for others to seize the day.
Maybe it is not our job to judge the lives of others—but maybe it is. As a writer, I love the creative process of writing. But I love the people in my life more. Truly, the greatest joys in this mortal coil of ours come from relationships. And in their own way, the most beautiful of Horace’s poems remind us of this truth.
Nadya Williams is books editor at Mere Orthodoxy and the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023), Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic (IVP Academic, 2024), and the forthcoming Christians Reading Classics (Zondervan Academic, November 2025).
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