When in Rome ...

HORACE: A Life by Peter Levi, Duckworth pounds 25

Until now "passing" would have been too strong a word for my acquaintance with the works of Horace. In the fifth form, I think, we struggled through a translation of one of the duller Letters, and in the sixth we were made to write an essay on the line "They change their skies but not their souls who run across the sea."

What did I know about it, who had never been anywhere at all, much less run across the sea? In any case, the word "run" irritated me so much that I argued against the proposition. I was marked severely for my cheek and ever since have given the poet a wide berth - a nasty character he seemed, cold, enamelled, obvious, sententious.

There was little to challenge this prejudice. Horace, far more than the other poets of the Latin golden age, that "summer which had no autumn", has fallen from public favour. Professor Levi even puts a date on the fall. He retells the tale of Patrick Leigh Fermor who in 1943 with a bunch of desperadoes captured a Nazi general in Crete and whisked him off to a cave in the mountains. The next morning, captors and captives alike gazed in awe at the view from the cave mouth - snowy peaks ablaze with sunlight and eagles floating in the blue. Leigh Fermor murmured to himself the first stanza of Horace's Soracte Ode. The general (an ugly customer himself, who had no compunctions about his country's brutal occupation of Crete) overheard him and continued the poem in Latin to the end. "There is something about this story," writes Levi, "some resonance of the past ... that suggests that was the last moment of the old Europe." Certainly it is hard to imagine that scene in any wars that have taken place since.

Levi himself, however, has loved the poetry of Horace for 40 years and transmits his enthusiasm in this biography, the first in English since 1947. He promises that the book is meant for those with "little or no Latin or Greek ... and with some interest in poetry and curiosity about history" and he sets off at a gallop, but like most academic experts in a field he soon forgets his promise and we are up to our ears in epodes and Latin tags and Pompeys of various stripes. Levi's rapid, conversational prose has a disconcerting quality. It is like quicksilver - it rolls here, it rolls there, it scatters in several directions at once, but we forgive him for this, for every so often it coheres, as quicksilver does, and reflects some vivid moment from two millennia ago - a song heard across a marsh late at night, the laughter of two friends travelling together, a "dirty dream that stained my night gown", the whispering of lovers in a shadowy piazza.

Horace's life sounds remarkable to modern ears. The son of an ex-slave, he was born in 65BC in the mountains that rise darkly behind Paestum. Horace first went to school with "the huge sons of huge centurions" but his father was wealthy enough to take him to Rome for a decent education. He fought in the civil wars and went on to become a friend of Virgil, of the richest man in the world, Maecenas, and of the Emperor Augustus himself, and was given a country estate in the Sabine Hills. In middle age we see a short, fat, irritable man, elitist, fussy about his wine, playing at being a country gentleman. The figure of Evelyn Waugh comes involuntarily to mind - wrongly, probably: Horace "adored" his slaves and liked nothing better than sharing ham-and-pea soup and philosophy with them around the fire on a winter night. He also had a bedroom lined with mirrors for erotic purposes, which sounds un-Waughlike.

As usual with a book by Peter Levi, the pages scintillate with rare details: the poetic image of a herdsman pausing among ruins was already popular in 40BC; the right hind leg of a boar is tougher than the left "since the animal raises the right rear leg to piss"; in 1944 the Pope appealed to the Americans not to unleash hoards of black men on the city of Rome; a tough old hen should be killed by drowning it in wine; Virgil had a blind spot about olives; in the reign of Tiberius, the entire upper class of Rome suffered from skin rashes, contracted from the emperor, who used to greet senators with a kiss.

This is all good fun, but there is heavy weather ahead. Like Wordsworth, who had two voices ("one is of the deep / and one is of an old half-witted sheep", as a critic rudely put it ), there seemed to be two Horaces. One is convivial, personal, pungent, earthy or delicate, melancholy or glad in turn, and he is also one of the founders of the great myth of the immortality of poetry, which will outlive its maker and everything else - a theme which has resounded through western literature ever since, not least in Shakespeare's sonnets.

The other Horace, the public laureate, the moralising philosopher, the Roman nationalist, presents us with problems. Levi manfully defends him, but the music must be in the Latin - it does not reach us in translation, and on occasion even Levi gets fed up, dismissing some poems as "twaddle", "a boring tirade", "deplorable", "nationalism of he lowest sort". This Horace can't wait to see the "untouched British" paraded in Roman chains. He jumps for joy when the castles of some harmless Alpine tribes, whom Virgil admired, are pulled down. He praises Augustus:

Good leader, give light back to your country

It will be spring when your good face will

seem

To shine on the people, days will go cheerfully

And suns will gleam.

Levi attacks an unnamed Oxford don who said that this poem was close to "straight fascism". But the point is made - it is poetry which could easily be hijacked by fascists. In German grammar schools up until 1914, when a pupil died, the whole school would sing Horace's 22nd Ode with its quivers and spears and wolves prowling in the greenwood. The Nazi general in Crete was of that generation, and there was enough in Horace which could have been grafted onto the Kultur he and his kind visited on Europe. At the end of a century of unprecedented totalitarianism, the voice of this second Horace falls on deaf ears.