Horace lived in turbulent times. He was born in 65 BC and died in 8 BC, a period that saw Rome’s frightening transition from republic to empire. As Peter Stothard makes clear in this wonderful biography of the poet, this was a time of assassinations, suicides, civil war and confiscations. This was also the golden age of Latin poetry, unrivalled in Roman history. Catullus, Virgil, Propertius and Ovid were among Horace’s contemporaries. 

Horace was born in Venusia, 150 miles southeast of Rome. His father had been a slave but had obtained his freedom and become a successful businessman. The boy received a good education in Rome and was sent to Greece, still the cultural capital of the Mediterranean, for further schooling. There he studied the ancient Greek poets and was introduced to Marcus Brutus, the most famous of Caesar’s assassins, who became his first patron. He attached himself to Brutus and served in his army, fighting without distinction at Philippi, where Caesar’s heir, his nephew Octavian Caesar, and Mark Antony confronted Brutus and the other assassins. Returning to Rome following Brutus’s defeat, he found himself poor, his father dead and the family farm in Venusia confiscated. While working as a clerk, he began to write his first poems. These were satires, and include one rather nasty work about an older woman with whom he had conducted an affair.

In Rome, where Octavian was master, Horace’s poems caught the attention of Maecenas, who would become, in effect, minister for culture. Maecenas had been a student with Octavian and Marcus Agrippa when Caesar was murdered. After the assassination, the three young men, all aged about twenty, had travelled from Illyria