‘Horace: Poet on a Volcano’
By Peter Stothard
Yale University Press, 328 Pages

Horace hardly seemed a candidate for survival in the harrowing history of the Roman republic turning into an empire. He was short and tubby (to use Peter Stothard’s word), son of a slave, and not much of a soldier while fighting on Brutus’s losing side in the civil war incited by the assassination of Julius Caesar that culminated in the triumph of Augustus. 

So, how Horace prevailed occupies much of this masterful biography.  That Horace was a brilliant poet, and the first Roman to transform the intricate metrics of Greek poetry as practiced by Alcaeus and Sappho into exquisite Latin verse, certainly recommended him to the literati and the well read, including some Roman rulers. Yet his writing alone, as Mr. Stothard shows, was not enough to save him or make him the prosperous figure he eventually became.

Horace avoided the pitfalls of Roman politics by never becoming one of its players. He affected an aloof, if mild, superiority that did not offend officialdom. He could be read by anyone enjoying satires and the lubricious scenes of private life. Horace never lied about being on the losing side in the famous battle at Philippi, and in fact wrote beautiful poetry about losers.

Mr. Stothard deftly shows that Horace’s studied avoidance of political intrigue was a winning strategy. Horace certainly offered to be of service to Augustus, yet he insisted that his genius was allied to poets like Sappho.  Like her, he reveled in the immediacy of life fully enjoyed in the present, which is to say he had no agenda, no long-term goal that might have excited suspicion or envy. 

Mr. Stothard includes three poems that convey Horace’s striking evocation of personal experience, no matter whose side you are on:

Who has finally brought you home, old comrade,
oldest of all of my friends from that time
when Brutus led us out and down?

Horace loved parties and to read him is to be invited to the party:

Fill full the cups with the red wine of oblivion.
Pour perfume from the shells.
Who is hurrying along the garlands
from the celery and the myrtle?

Is that the party host making sure your cup is never empty? And why, anyway, do you always have to read the news? You know better, you know how it is all likely to turn out:

Forget for a while your cares for the city.
The army of Cotiso the Dacian is done for,
The Medes are doing for themselves by
their usual civil wars.

He says later in the same poem: “No shouting here./No anger please.” Don’t be tiresome: “You are a private man. Give yourself a break.” The words are spoken to a partyer, a friend of Horace’s, but Horace, who said he cared nothing about posterity except for the survival of his verse, arrests our attention, as though he is speaking to us.

Avoid asking what will come tomorrow
and see as gain each day that Fortune gives.
While you are young neither set aside sweet love
nor say no to parties.

Few male poets in the history of poetry have so taken Sappho to their hearts. It is not too much to say — although Mr. Stothard doesn’t say it — that she liberated Horace from the kind of male competitiveness and saturation in public events that did in many of his contemporaries. 

Of course, a day comes, Horace acknowledges, when “miserable old age” will mark the end of such parties, yet that sly poet never grows old in his invocation of lovers whose: 

whispers grow louder in the dark
where the laugh of a hiding girl betrays her place
in a shadowy corner, just as some token
is snatched from a finger or a wrist,
hardly resisting.

Ah, Horace, you leave us dangling not quite in a state of consummation, like those lovers aboard the Grecian urn.

Mr. Stothard finishes up showing how Horace fared in the ages to come, how his more erotic and downright dirty verses were quickly passed over, and how Romantics like Byron could not get enough of him. 

Congratulations, Mr. Stothard, for showing how Horace, always saying he did not care about the future, was in fact thinking about us.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of the forthcoming “Sappho’s Fire: Kindling the Modern World.”