Horace: A Life

by Peter Levi

The work of the great Roman poet, Horatius Flaccus (65 BC to 8 BC), spanned all aspects of Roman life—politics, the arts, religion, and the authority of the emperor—while his legendary poems ( Satires, Odes, Epistles ) about friendship, philosophy, love, and sex still have considerable appeal. This biography presents a complete picture of Horace's life and world. It considers the details of Horace's romantic liaisons and why he never married, what the status of his father—a freedman—meant to the poet, and his distinctive brand of philosophy. In this acclaimed biography, Peter Levi, a fellow poet, has produced a thrilling and eminently readable book, the definitive account of Rome's greatest poet and the times during which he lived.

Genres: Biography

288 pages, Paperback

First published March 27, 1997

About the author

Peter Chad Tigar Levi, FSA, FRSL, Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (1984–1989) was a poet, archaeologist, sometime Jesuit priest, travel writer, biographer, academic and prolific reviewer and critic.

Reviews

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Levi’s tone is personal, digressive, learned, idiosyncratic. He goes through Horace’s individual poems rather than pulling out key themes.

[Colin Fisher · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a struggle but I got there in the end. After the euphoria of the first few chapters (Peter Levi’s prose is delightful) I struggled in the middle chapters as ode after ode and then the letters were analysed. But in the final chapters I felt that Horace himself was back, as I think Levi intended, to speak for himself.

[Neale · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peter Levi’s ‘Horace’ and ‘Virgil’ (although published separately, they are almost interchangeable in style and approach) are books likely to frustrate the casual reader, or those looking for biography in the strict sense. They are more of a meditations than textbooks, a curious mix of old-fashioned and modern learning, evoking a ‘classical’ world that is part real, part scholarly dream. They are definitely late works: relaxed, personal, often digressive, sometimes to the point of non-sequitur. The author is disarmingly frank about offering personal opinions as fact, on no greater authority than his own. But if you treat the books as leisurely strolls through a classical landscape, there is much pleasure to be had from them...

(Levi was a fascinating writer: poet, classicist, translator, lapsed Jesuit, travel companion to Bruce Chatwin. He was a scholar, but his scholarly work was not academic - as a scholar he was a great poet. This haphazard approach got him into trouble on one occasion, when he attributed a poem to Shakespeare with considerable fanfare but without due academic process. He had viewed the poem only as a $0.25 photocopy, because, as he blandly explained; “Oxford Professors of Poetry do not get paid enough to travel to the US to view originals”. The story got into the popular press, which had some mild fun at his expense... )