The Odes of Horace – Bilingual Edition

Carpe diem! Sieze the day! Thus cried Horace two thousand years ago, before the birth of Christ, before the apogee and eventual demise of the empire that he saw crawl from its egg, blind and hungry, and blossom into an eagle of gold!

The power and prescience of Horace’s words made his name recognizable even to those that have never read him, and made his verses quotations to those who don’t even know his name. As he sings in the last ode of this collection: “Exegi monumentum aere perennius” (“more durable than brass my monument shall be”).

This Bilingual Anthology (English and Latin), translated by John Conington, former Corpus Professor of Latin at the University of Oxford, contains Books One and Three in their entirety, recognized as the height of his work, leading Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to refer to them as: “jewels five-words long, that on the stretched forefinger of all time sparkle forever.”