Horace - Horace

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Résumé :
Horace's Odes remain among the most widely read works of classical literature. This volume constitutes the first substantial commentary for a generation on this book, and presents Horace's poems for a new cohort of modern students and scholars. The introduction focusses on the particular features of this poetic book and its place in Horace's poetic career and in the literary environment of its particular time in the 20s BCE. The text and commentary both look back to the long and distinguished tradition of Horatian scholarship and incorporate the many advances of recent research and thinking about Latin literature. The volume proposes some new solutions to established problems of text and interpretation, and in general improves modern understanding of a widely read ancient text which has a firm place in college and university courses as well as in classical research....

Biographie:
Quintus Horatius Flaccus (8 December 65 BC - 27 November 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus. His career coincided with Rome's momentous change from a republic to an empire. An officer in the republican army defeated at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC, he was befriended by Octavian's right-hand man in civil affairs, Maecenas, and became a spokesman for the new regime. Horace is often regarded as the world's first autobiographer. His writings tell far more about himself, his character, his development, and his way of life, than any other great poet of antiquity. Horace left Rome, possibly after his father's death, and continued his formal education in Athens, a great centre of learning in the ancient world, where he arrived at nineteen years of age, enrolling in The Academy. Founded by Plato, The Academy was now dominated by Epicureans and Stoics, whose theories and practises made a deep impression on the young man from Venusia. Meanwhile, he mixed and lounged about with the elite of Roman youth, such as Marcus, the idle son of Cicero, and the Pompeius to whom he later addressed a poem. It was in Athens too that he probably acquired deep familiarity with the ancient tradition of Greek lyric poetry, at that time largely the preserve of grammarians and academic specialists (access to such material was easier in Athens than in Rome, where the public libraries had yet to be built by Asinius Pollio and Augustus).

Sommaire:
Preface; Introduction; 1. Date of Odes II; 2. Horace's literary career; 3. Characteristics of Odes II; 4. Literary intertexts; 5. Internal architecture of poems; 6. Style; 7. Metre; 8. Text; 9. Abbreviations; Q. Horati Flacci Carminvm Liber Secvndvs; Commentary; Bibliography; Index.