Author: HORACE
Biography:
HORACE (65-8 BCE: OCD)
Horace—Quintus Horatius Flaccus—is such a renowned figure that only a bare outline of his life is provided here, leaving space for his more obscure British translators. He was born on 8 Dec. 65 BCE in Venusia in south Italy, was well educated in Rome and Athens, but saw the family fortune forfeited on account of his service as a tribune in the army of Brutus. He turned to poetry to make a living and thereby won the friendship of Virgil (q.v.) and the patronage of Maecenas, who gave him a country retreat, the Sabine farm which is celebrated in his poetry. He wrote odes, epodes, epistles, and satires. He did not marry, and died on 27 Nov. 8 BCE, shortly after Maecenas. Of the twenty translators whose work is represented here, all but three have headnotes as original poets. One, Philip Francis, is a “prior” author whose translations appeared in the 1740s. William Green (fl 1777-84) was a physician in Liverpool, Lancashire, who undertook the translation of several classical authors—Anacreon, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, and Pindar—on a new plan, to make those authors appear livelier and more accessible, especially to women. His first attempt (Horace, 1777) was dedicated to Henry Blundell, Esq., a wealthy Catholic collector of classical sculpture and old master paintings. It is possible that he is the William Green buried at St. Nicholas’s, Liverpool, on 29 Nov. 1785, but the name is so common that his identity cannot be confirmed. The Oxford 1824 collection is attributed to James Macfadyen as “one of the translators” on the basis of a ms note in the BL copy. It is likely that he is the botanist of that name (1799-1850) who was the son of the Glasgow bookseller John Macfadyen and his wife Elizabeth. If so, he was trained in medicine at Glasgow University 1818-21 and in 1825 left for Jamaica to establish a botanical garden there. The garden did not materialise, but he practised as a physician, served as a magistrate, and published several studies of Jamaican flora. From two marriages in 1832 and 1843 he had four children, and never returned to Britain. In 1835 he received compensation for six previously enslaved persons. He died of cholera in 1850. (OCD 6 Mar. 2025; Harvey; findmypast.com 4 Mar. 2025; LBS 6 Mar. 2025)