Epistles, Book 1

Horace published his first book of Epistles in about 20 BC, after the three books of Odes. The twenty poems are letters in hexameters to friends, patrons and younger men, and their chief subject, announced in the first letter, is philosophy, understood as the practical question of how to live well. Horace professes to follow no single school, borrowing freely from Stoics and Epicureans.

In the first letter Horace tells Maecenas he is giving up lyric for philosophy. He goes on to describe Homer as a better teacher of ethics than the philosophers, asks Julius Florus for news of the young poets serving with Tiberius in the East, comforts Albius, and invites Torquatus to a simple dinner. The sixth letter recommends marvelling at nothing; the seventh defends his independence from Maecenas and tells the story of the auctioneer Volteius Mena, ruined by a patron's gift of a farm. There are short notes of advice and recommendation; praise of the country over the city; the warning that travel cannot cure the mind; a letter to his farm's steward, enquiries about a winter resort, a description of the Sabine farm, and two letters on how to deal with the great. The nineteenth attacks his slavish imitators, and in the twentieth he sends his book out into the world like a restless slave, ending with a short portrait of himself.

These are mature, urbane poems, full of memorable phrases. The Latin is conversational, and the apparent ease conceals much compression and irony.