![]() Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 bce), was born the son of a freed slave in southern rural Italy and rose to become one of the most celebrated poets in Rome and a confidante of the most powerful figures of the age, including Augustus Caesar. Translating a poet of such variety and vitality as Horace calls on all his literary abilities. Alexander is an accomplished poet, novelist, biographer, and translator who has lived in Italy for more than thirty years. ![]() The voice we hear in this graceful and carefully annotated translation is thus one that emerges with clarity and dignity from the heart of an unchanging Latin culture. ![]() Horace shares with Italians of today a distinctive delight in the senses, a fundamental irony, a passion for seizing the moment, and a view of religion as aesthetic experience rather than mystical exaltation-in many ways, as Alexander puts it, Horace is the quintessential Italian. In his perceptive introduction to this translation of Horace's Odes and Satires, Sidney Alexander engagingly spells out how the poet expresses values and traditions that remain unchanged in the deepest strata of Italian character two thousand years later. Horace has long been revered as the supreme lyric poet of the Augustan Age. ![]()
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