Horace: A Life - Tapa dura

..."for anyone who has caught even a glimpse of the genius of Horace, or who has developed a keen amateur interest in the Rome of the late Republic and early Empire, there is a lot to be learned from this book, and a great deal of enjoyment to be found in it." -Allan Massie, "The Daily Telegraph ..."a charming and learned work." -"New England Classical Journal, March 1999 ..."[Levi] stitches a sympathetic commentary on Horace's work, mixing revelation with reevaluation." -Nigel Spivey, "Financial Times "This delightful, well-written, and informative book is a wonderful remedy to a real gap and will be of interest to both the general reader and the classicist." -"Library Journal "Levi's book is, as far as possible, comprehensive, for he examines individually every one of Horace's poems.... [P]erhaps the most attractive quality of ["Horace: A Life] is that Levi reveals his subject not simply as a great poet, but also as a good man." -"Boston Book Review

Of all the Roman poets, Horatius Flaccus (65 BC to 8 BC) is undoubtedly the greatest. His vast corpus of work (the Epodes, Satires, Odes, Epistles and the Ars Poetica) spanned all aspects of Roman life: politics, the arts, religion, and the authority of the emperor, while his poems about friendship, philosophy, love and sex still have considerable universal appeal. For two thousand years he has been kept alive by scholars who have felt a great affinity with the benign personality that emerges. But not since Fraenkel's life of Horace in 1957 has a substantial biography of the poet been undertaken. This book makes a real attempt to present a complete picture of the life of Horace and the world in which he lived. It considers the details of Horace's romantic liaisons and why he never married, what the status of his father - a freedman - meant to the poet, and his distinctive brand of philosophy.