Quintus Horatius Flaccus

Shackleton Bailey's Horatius text is a university set text used world-wide; in the US American market in particular, it became standard reading for students of Latin. From the first edition in 1985, Shackleton Bailey improved and updated his work with each new edition, especially with the 4th revised edition in 2001. Thus the editor has put his Horatius text on course to continue being used and disseminated in the coming decades.

Early in his life, and again in maturity, Horace sought to turn his poetic skills to the uses of moral and aesthetic discussion in the series of didactic works translated here. In the Satires, Horace adopts one persona after another, each of which reduces himself to absurdity in the process of trying to argue a point of view about the ethical or artistic life. The form of the Epistles permits Horace to write with particular intimacy, addressing moral issues in a persuasive yet informal way. The third epistle, The Art of Poetry, on the other hand, is a formal poem addressed to the emperor Augustus, and seeks to educate the poetic taste of the ruler of the western world. Jacob Fuchs is Associate Professor of English at California State University, Hayward. He is the editor of Virgil: The Aeneid (Pengiun Classics, 1991), and author of Reading Horace (Edinburgh UP, 1967), The Imagery and Poetry of Lucretius (Edinburgh UP, 1969, reprint Bristol CP, 1994).