A Translation and Interpretation of Horace’s Sermones, Book I
Horace’s book of Sermones (also called Satires) was his first published work. Rather than a collection of satirical sideswipes, as the genre might have dictated, the book is a wiry, tight, muscular, interlaced hexameter artwork of enormous originality and as far removed from the legacy of satirical writing he inherited as one can imagine. It is the work of a 29-year-old grappling with issues of personal and poetic identity during one of the most important and pivotal times in European history. Geographically, socially and genetically an outsider, Horace earned himself a seat at Rome’s top creative table, close to the heart of the political engine that was to change Rome forever. His book details a transformational journey from ‘nobody’ to ‘somebody’, and is a simultaneous invention of poet and reinvention of poetic genre.
Horace’s Sermones have floated in and out of fashion ever since they first appeared, regularly eclipsed by his Odes. Today, rehabilitated, they find space in the higher levels of the school curriculum. This book provides unique insights and will be of interest to all classicists, as well as students studying core influences on European literature.
During his forty-year career as communications advisor to global companies, Andy Law was named an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year, was profiled by the Harvard Business Review, chaired plenary sessions at Davos, advised in Downing Street, and shared a podium with world leaders. He has written a number of highly acclaimed business books. His first, Open Minds, was a Daily Telegraph Business Book of the Year, and was described by Theodore Zeldin as “a 20th-century equivalent of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563), a business book which is literature.” After retirement, he renergised his love for the Classics.
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