Horace

Horace was the son of a freed slave and became the leading lyric poet of Rome. Born at Venusia in 65 BC, he wrote that his father, a former slave who worked as an auctioneer's agent, spent everything he had to take him to Rome and educate him alongside the sons of senators, and accompanied him to school himself — a debt Horace acknowledged repeatedly and without embarrassment. He studied philosophy in Athens, and when Brutus arrived there recruiting after Caesar's murder, Horace joined and was given command of a legion. He fought at Philippi in 42 BC on the losing side, and describes running away and leaving his shield behind — a literary joke borrowed from Archilochus and also, presumably, true. He was pardoned, found his father's property confiscated, and took a clerkship in the treasury. Virgil introduced him to Maecenas, Augustus's cultural minister, around 38 BC, and Maecenas gave him a farm in the Sabine hills that made him independent for life. The Satires are conversational and self-mocking rather than savage. The Odes, four books in Greek metres adapted to Latin, are his major achievement, and contain the phrases that entered every European language: carpe diem, seize the day; that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country, which Wilfred Owen called the old lie; and the golden mean. The Ars Poetica shaped literary criticism for eighteen centuries. He declined the post of Augustus's private secretary. He died in 8 BC, weeks after Maecenas, and was buried beside him.

• Lived: 65 BCE – 8 BCE
• Nationality: Roman
• Roles: poet, writer