Roman Odes Elegies & Epigrams

The great Roman poets of Antiquity wrote some of the most compelling lyrical poetry of all time to be read privately but also on occasion to be performed publicly on the field of victory at a banquet or at a public festival. With a freshness that belie the nearly two thousand years that separate us Virgil Ovid Horace Propertius and Catullus write movingly of the pleasures of love of wine of nature and the joys of pastoral life a city and its contrasts of friendship and of death. This edition brings together an exceptional selection with translations by Christpoher Marlowe Ben Jonson Abraham Cowley Robert Herrick John Dryden Alexander Pope Samuel Johnson Alfred Tennyson A. E. Houseman and Rudyard Kipling. This edition is illustrated with the magnificent classical engravings of Johannes Pine's great edition of Horace of 1737. Happy the man and happy he alone He who can call today his own; He who secure within can say Tomorrow do thy worst for I have lived today. Horace's ode iii tr. by John Dryen