Horace

Horace was a freedman’s son from Venusia, educated in Rome and Athens, who fought on the losing side at Philippi, was pardoned, and was taken up by Maecenas, who gave him the Sabine farm where he wrote the Odes. They are short poems on wine, friendship, the passing of time, the Roman virtues and the emperor, in Greek metres he made Latin, and they are the source of carpe diem and of the claim that he had built a monument more lasting than bronze. The Epodes are earlier and rougher. Every schoolboy in Europe learned Latin from him for fifteen centuries, and Wilfred Owen took his bitterest title from him.