Boris Johnson

How to live for ever

Boris Johnson on the relationship between Horace the poet and Augustus the emperor, and why the poet identified with Mercury

I found myself in disgrace a while ago when I contrived to fly my family to a Greek airport called Preveza, only to discover on arrival that they didn’t have a hire car big enough for our purposes. It was about 11 p.m. and I was standing pathetically thinking about buses and looking at a map of the area when I saw that Preveza was really called Preveza Aktio.

‘Hey!’ I said to my wife. ‘It’s fantastic!’

‘What is fantastic?’ she asked in the tones of someone still faintly hoping that her husband would produce a people carrier. ‘It’s Actium,’ I cried. ‘All my life I have wanted to see Actium!’

‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘and I’m still waiting to see some action from you.’

‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘It’s the great battle of 31 bc, the naval engagement that changed the history of the world. It was the one where Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra. The Roman poets built it up as a clash of civilisations, east meets west, Roman virtues against the nard-dripping hordes of Egypt….’ For the rest of the week I am afraid I raved about the importance of this site, and on the last day I persuaded everyone to cram into the Korean saloon and to go in search of Actium, and above all of Nikopolis, the victory city built by Octavian as a lasting memorial to his triumph.

As I sat there looking at the scattered grey drums of the columns, I had a flash of complacent Gibbonian melancholy, and it occurred to me that I could not find a single inscription, or statue, or monument recording the connection between these lumps of masonry and the epoch-making ruler who founded Nikopolis or the victory he was commemorating; and so I took out my edition of Horace, and, ‘Horace, old man,’ I said to the book (rather in the manner of Horace himself, who believed in addressing his own volume), ‘Horace,’ I said, ‘you were right.

‘That monument you erected in 23 bc, in your first three books of Odes, has indeed turned out to be a good deal more perennial than bronze.

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