Horace by Peter Stothard: Plump, playboy poet who was in love with wine and the sunshine

In the autumn of 44 BC, after Julius Caesar’s brutal assassination, the ringleader, Brutus, was in Athens raising support for a full-scale conquest of Italy that would restore the values of the old Roman Republic.

The world waited to see what would happen. And, then, on to this stage stepped a short, plump 21-year-old poet called Horace, a man who hated war and politics, loved wine and sunshine and girls, and believed that life was for living and enjoying. In Athens, Horace met with Brutus.

How was an ambitious young poet to negotiate his way through this splintered and barbed contemporary landscape and not fall foul of the powerful? And what should he write about?

Horace is the anglicised version of his Latin name, Quintus Horatius Flaccus. It sounds imposing, yet Flaccus actually means flaccid. Roman names were often faintly mocking. (Cicero bore a name meaning chickpea. Likeably, he refused to change it to something more dignified.) Thus opens this wonderful new biography of the most accessible of all Latin poets.

Horace has even been likened to John Betjeman. And while we know little about Homer, who gave us the immortal Iliad and Odyssey, and not much about Virgil, who wrote that sublime, ambiguous epic of Rome, The Aeneid, we know plenty about Horace from his verse. It is from his own lines that we know for instance that he was ‘short and plump.’

Though sometimes savage and satirical, it’s his love of life that shines in his writing.

Born in 65 BC, in his youth Horace moved to Rome, living as the archetypal starving young poet in the teeming slum quarter.

Here he scraped a miserable living copying legal documents, burning for recognition and success. An angry young man, it seems he had a affair with a wealthy older woman which turned sour. She had mocked him for being flaccid. Maybe, he wrote laceratingly, that was due to her blackened teeth, her ploughed-field face, her flabby stomach... Though on the upside, there were her fat pearls and silk cushions. It was incendiary stuff, designed to make an impact in gossip-loving Rome.

In time Horace’s startlingly original work was noticed by the wealthy patron of the arts, Maecenas, and he escaped the slums and entered his charmed circle. He still wrote cheeky verses about how chasing married women wasn’t worth it. If you were caught in flagrante you’d only have to flee in undignified undress, or even be ‘buggered by the stable boys’ as punishment. No one gives us such a startlingly vivid and uncensored feel for Roman life.

He spent much time at Maecenas’ palatial villa in Herculaneum. Here he came to the attention of the Emperor Augustus, who called him a purissimum penem, freely but fairly translated by Stothard as ‘an amusing little f***er’.

In middle age, Horace wrote less about love affairs, more about the countryside, as well as complex, brilliant poetry about the twin curses of politics and war. He died in Rome in 8 BC, aged 56. He never married but cherished old friends, sought the quiet life, praised a philosophy of enjoyment and gratitude. Dona praesentis cape, he wrote: Seize the gift of the present.