Harry Mount

Horace and Me, by Harry Eyres – review

‘Horace reading his Satires to Maecenas’ by Fedor Andreevich Bronnikera. Getty Images | Shutterstock | iStock | Alamy

After Zorba the Greek, here comes Horace the Roman. The peasant Zorba, you’ll remember from the film, releases uptight, genteel Alan Bates from his cage of repressed Englishness. Now it’s Horace, the Augustan lyric poet, releasing another repressed Englishman: Harry Eyres, Old Etonian scholar, Cambridge graduate, poet and author of the ‘Slow Lane’ column in the Financial Times.

This charming, moving book calls itself ‘Life Lessons’, as if it were a general teaching guide for the reader. Really, though, it’s a personal guide for Eyres — who realises that the poet he first struggled to appreciate at school has valuable lessons to teach about love, wine and friendship. Now Eyres never goes anywhere without his little battered red Loeb translation of Horace in his pocket.

Non-classicists will be more familiar with Horace than they think. He’s probably the most quoted of all Latin writers. Among his famous lines are ‘Carpe diem’, ‘Nunc est bibendum’, and ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’. These one-liners were ripped from the Odes, and Eyres rightly returns them to their fully-formed contexts.

That was how Horace was learnt by Eyres and earlier generations of schoolboys and how the late Paddy Leigh Fermor learnt him; which was why he could share his knowledge with General Karl Kreipe, the German -officer he kidnapped in Crete in April 1944. As they trudged to the summit of Mount Ida, Kreipe recited the first line of a -Horace ode: ‘Vides ut alta stet nive candidum -Soracte’ — ‘See how Soracte [a mountain north of Rome] stands white with snow on high.’ Leigh Fermor continued reciting the poem to its end — as he put it, he suddenly realised that they had both ‘drunk at the same -fountains’ before the war.

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