Painted portrait of Horace in profile with short dark hair, a pale toga over his shoulder, against a terracotta ground

Portraits · Poets · IX of XIV

Horace

65–8 BC · Poet

…her poets, one and all, cannot brook the toil and tedium of the file.

si non offenderet unum / quemque poetarum limae labor et mora. vos, o / Pompilius sanguis, carmen reprehendite quod non / multa dies et multa litura coercuit atque / praesectum deciens non castigavit ad unguem.

Horace · Ars Poetica, c. 19–10 BC
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Horace wrote this in his Ars Poetica, a verse letter on the art of poetry, around 19–10 BC. Rome, he says, would lead the world in letters as it does in arms, if only its poets could bear the slow work of the file: a poem should be blotted and refined ten times over.

Ars Poetica, lines 289–294. Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, with an English translation by H. Rushton Fairclough (Loeb Classical Library; London: Heinemann / New York: Putnam, 1926), pp. 474 (Latin) and 475 (English).

The originals

A bronze contorniate medallion with a profile bust of Horace
The likenessLATE ROMAN MEDALLION · c. AD 356–425Our portrait is painted after it.Public domain (late antique object; BnF Gallica photograph; Commons tags it PD).
A medieval manuscript page of Latin verse in two columns, with small glosses written between the lines
The Odes, from Petrarch's libraryHis Odes, copied in the tenth century with notes between the lines. The book later belonged to Petrarch and is now in Florence.Horace, Odes I.12, manuscript, 10th century. Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, Plut. 34.1, fol. 9r, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.