In this lecture at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, Dr Armand D’Angour invites us into the lyric poetry of Horace, as it is placed within the Greek musical and poetic inheritance. Beginning with the musical and metrical innovations of early Greek lyric poets like Sappho and Pindar, he unveils how this genealogy finds fruition in a Latin world, maintaining rhythmic structure in an adaptation to a new cultural context.
With close readings of key odes, he shows us how Horace uses Greek lyric meters to achieve something both rhythmic and aural. Constructed around the themes of love, time, and political life, these poems can be seen as carefully constructed personae, rather than autobiographical confession. Operating on multiple levels, these lines are not abstractions or disembodied analysis, but vivid, situational moments that draw the listener into a shared scene. This lyric poetry is, then, a discipline that carries inherited Greek forms into something unmistakably Roman, without disturbing the musical intelligence beneath them.
This lecture highlights something lost to modern ears: these poems were not written to be read silently, but were deeply connected to music, rhythm, and memory. By recovering this dimension, Professor D’Angour illuminates Horace not just as a literary figure, but as a poet working within a living tradition of song in which meaning is brought about through the interplay of sound, structure, and voice.
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