J. Kevin Newman Livres

Catullus is one of the most popular of Classical Latin authors because he offers poems easily presented to a beginners’ class: not weighty and serious but short and humorous. But this is not the whole truth. He is also deeply committed to the Roman Republic, its traditions, the disaster of Pompey’s defeat and Caesar’s triumph, the decay of public morality. This is what Newman already emphasised in his Roman Catullus and the Modification of the Alexandrian Sensibility (Weidman, Hildesheim 1990, Pp. 483) and tries again to emphasise for the more general reader here. John Kevin Newman, born in 1928, made his first acquaintance with Classical scholarship at Oxford in 1946-52, where Eduard Fraenkel and Rudolf Pfeiffer were still lecturing. After teaching for the Benedictines at Downside Abbey for some years, in 1969 he accepted a professorship at the University of Illinois, from which he has now retired. He has published eight books and over a hundred articles on Classical themes.

Horace, a beloved poet, has been reshaped to fit the tastes of his admirers. What was it truly like for the talented son of a former slave striving for a career in a conservative Rome? He lost one patron at Philippi and, to gain favor with another, wrote verses he deemed trivial and even absurd. The death of the venerated Virgil left him heartbroken, as he felt he had lost half of his soul. In his later works, he established a foundation for a propaganda of enlightened despotism that would negatively impact Europe in the future. Two appendices explore the long-ago suggestion that Horace’s father may have been an Alexandrian Jew and examine Horace's reception by the outsider prince of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin, who was also a subject of another Caesar—Tsar. The text delves into the complexities of Horace’s life and legacy, revealing the struggles of a poet caught between personal ambition and the expectations of a rigid society. Through this exploration, the annotation highlights the often-overlooked realities behind Horace's celebrated status and the implications of his work on subsequent generations.