Horace
Horace
Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus. The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his Odes as just about the only Latin lyrics worth reading: "He can be lofty sometimes, yet he is also full of charm and grace, versatile in his figures, and felicitously daring in his choice of words."...
NationalityRoman
ProfessionPoet
house forgetful tombs
Forgetful of thy tomb thou buildest houses.
games shifting favour
Fortune, delighting in her cruel task, and playing her wanton game untiringly, is ever shifting her uncertain favours.
fly-away dregs has-beens
Friends fly away when the cask has been drained to the dregs.
frugality one-thing avarice
Frugality is one thing, avarice another.
track lame legs
Get what start the sinner may, Retribution, for all her lame leg, never quits his track.
Gloriously false. [Like Rahab.]
guilty innocent
God has joined the innocent with the guilty.
rich pleasure made
God made not pleasures for the rich alone.
powerful blow rocks
Gold delights to walk through the very midst of the guard, and to break its way through hard rocks, more powerful in its blow than lightning.
temper subjection
Govern your temper, which will rule you unless kept in subjection.
envy competition crow
Had the crow only fed without cawing she would have had more to eat, and much less of strife and envy to contend with. [To noise abroad our success is to invite envy and competition.]
men hands he-man
Happy is the man to whom nature has given a sufficiency with even a sparing hand.
team men acres
Happy the man who, removed from all cares of business, after the manner of his forefathers cultivates with his own team his paternal acres, freed from all thought of usury.
nests
Hatched in the same nest.