An Ode to Horace, et al....

Italian Villa for sale 
- one careful owner 
- needs some restoration

I want out.  I need to move.  Am definitely (maybe) thinking of going back to resume the life I led in Italy.  I need some opus reticulatum.....

Many years ago (I dread to count) I went to Licenza, not far from Tivoli (to the east of Rome) with a young courtesan I had fallen in with.  She had a connection with an ex-Naval Captain who had drifted ashore with his good lady CPO in this necklace of the woods....

Between them they smoked Canadian Salmon - by which I don't mean like Capstan Full Strength - (they actually smoked Senior Service).  No, they had a blackened hut in their garden where frozen corpses of Canuck Salmo salar would slowly absorb the tar from smouldering oak chippings, until they attained the rich flavour you get from the tyres on a Trans Am when you floor the accelerator at a green light.....

And then they would sell them near Piazza Navona.... (the fish - not the tyres....)

[I do them an injustice - it was delicious (only slightly carcinogenic)....]

Anyway, we pitched up for Sunday lunch (as one does) and almost immediately the phone rang.  Blah, blah, blah, and his Admiralty reappeared with a very large G & T for the CPO, announcing that someone they knew had just rung to say they had died.

So we made ourselves comparatively scarce....

Which meant wandering off in search of a bar.  

Unsuccessfully, as it turned out.  Instead we happed on the Villa of one Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65 - 8 B.C.)

It wasn't in good shape.  He wasn't home, and his pet sheep had eaten all but the foundations.  

(I vowed  never to eat pecorino again.....)

It turns out that Horace (as he is sometimes known) was something of a cool dude.  My classical knowledge has in the main been gleaned from the droppings of our 'esteemed' Prime Minister, so forgive me if I err....

Son of an ex-slave from the Hellenist south of Italy, privately educated in Rome, then a graduate of the University of Athens, Horace dropped everything to follow Brutus after the assassination of Julius Caesar, but then dumped his shield at Philippi and scarpered from the battlefield, ruining his chances of a service pension.

Back in Rome he got a job copywriting for the Civil Service, buddied up with Virgil (no, not Wyatt's brother.... Aeneid's) and was patronised by Gaius Maecenas, a close pal of the Emperor Augustus.  It's not what you know....

Which somehow led to our man being gifted this lovely villa in the Sabine Hills, just down the road from the smoking salmons....  Where, perhaps inspired by the odour wafting across the fields, he took to writing Odes (ouch!)

At which, they say, he was pretty good.

I have read them, but overall, they make about as much sense as a statement by certain old Etonians, being in more Latin than I remember from my 'O' Levels.

For example:

Parcus deorum cultor et infrequens

insanientis dum sapientiae

consults erro, nunc retrorsum

vela dare atque iterare cursus

I mean!  What good is that to your average goat?  Say what you mean man!

[Which is, apparently:

I, who have never been

A generous or a keen

Friend of the gods, must now confess

Myself professor of pure foolishness.....

Book One, Ode XXXIII]

Where was I?  Ah, to return to my theme, I need out.  This lock up/down is doing my head in.  It doesn't compare with the outrage suffered by the Guildford Four or the Birmingham Six, but I begin to appreciate the waste of life that is the key to incarceration.

I would give anything to move to Horace's Villa, and to sit by an open fire, roasting a sheep with wild herbs and garlic, sipping from a jar of Falernian wine.....

Come, let's

Go to the cave of love

And look for music in a jollier key.

(Book Two, Ode I)

We don't know much about Horace, but it does seem that he was a likeable and a decent, unassuming fellow.  In Book Three, Ode 16, he says this:

The more a man denies himself, the more

God grants him.  See, I go with empty hands,

Glad to desert from the ranks of the rich to camp

With the unself-seeking bands,

Lord of the little that other men despise,

But prouder than if I were rumoured to have in store

All the corn of labouring Apulia - 

A rich man, but a poor

Fool.  My few woodland acres, my clear brook,

My crops that keep faith might - though he does not know it - 

Make fertile Africa's glittering proconsul

Envious of a poet.

I have had happy times in England. And ultimately no move is going to salve the aches in my heart, or restore that sense of immortality and the delicious taste of youth that I still remember. 

Horace wrote:

Yet be warned: each year gone round, each day-snatching hour says,

'Limit your hopes: you must die.'

(Book Four, Ode VII)

But.... Were this desirable property be on the market, despite the need for a little DIY, I would be sorely tempted to up sticks and transport myself to the Sabine Hills, where the air blends the oaky oils of salmon with the herby singe of sheep, and Bacchus is your neighbour....

I have a jar of Alban wine that musters

more than nine years; in my herb-beds

The parsley, Phyllis, clusters

To furnish for our heads

Green garlands; and luxuriant ivy spreads

To bind your hair with, make your beauty dazzle.

The house laughs bright with silver plate.

With laurel and with basil - 

Chaste boughs - we decorate

The shrine that for the lamb can hardly wait.

(Liber IV, XI)

[With many thanks to James Michie  

for his translations]

Julius Caesar - The Ides of March

You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things.....

The Ides of March is not a good day.  It was, after all, the day on which, in 2003, Thora Hird drew her last, slightly rasping, breath, perhaps causing Freddie Frinton to hiccough in his grave.

It was not a good day for Gaius Julius Caesar (100 - 44 BC), as he took no notice of the warning of the soothsayer, and succumbed to the knives of Brutus et al on the steps of Pompey's Theatre, not far from the Campo di Fiori in Rome.  

Caesar, untimely ripped from his mother's womb (so the family was used to knives), may have been the greatest statesman and general the world had known, but he was a little deaf, and missed the warning about going out on March 15th.  And there were several such:

Yesterday the bird of night did sit

Even at noon-day, upon the market-place,

Hooting and shrieking....

Which surely were indications if ever there were that this was a day when calling in sick would have been a smart move?

And what is most disconcerting about the erstwhile great general, conqueror of Gaul, defeater of Asterix, amongst others, was that he repeatedly defies the auguries.  

I first noticed this when made to take a role in the famous documentary of his life by a certain Crollalanza (Sheik Speir) when I had to utter the words, You blogs, You stains, You were Stan Sends-his-things.... And within an Act or two, as sure as fate, Mr Julius went off to meet his doom.

And exactly the same thing happened only the other day, when I attended a rock concert of sorts at Nicholas Hytner's new Bridge Theatre on the South Bank.  

There was Mr Caesar, being told not to go out, and would you believe it, no less than Paddington Bear, in the guide of 'Ettu' Brutus, shambles up and shoots his Hytness in the throne, right in front of us.  Some people never learn....

All this would perhaps be the stuff of myth, however, if it weren't for the fact that on the Ides of March, 1978 another famed Roman politician had misgivings about going out, and made a point of being especially careful about packing his medications for the morrow.

Aldo Moro.  President of the Christian Democrat party.  Several times Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, Minister of the Interior, and Professor of Law.  Moro's morrow would be his downfall.

It is the bright day that brings forth the adder;

And that craves wary walking.....

He did not heed his misgivings, nor those of his faithful bodyguard Oreste Leonardi, who, with four others, escorts and drivers, was slain amongst the glass and smoke of Via Fani at nine the next morning.

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.

Aldo Moro was whisked away from that deadly ambush, kept hostage in a 'People's Prison' for fifty-five days while his family fretted and his colleagues, most notably Giulio Andreotti and Francesco Cossiga, turned their backs on him, and then his shattered corpse was returned to the world in a red Renault 4, half way between the headquarters of the Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party, the two organisations which Moro had been about to bring together in an Historic Compromise on the day he was taken.

O! what a fall was there, my countrymen;

Then I, and you, and all of us fell down,

Whilst bloody treason flourished over us.....

So.  The Ides of March is not a good day. Even if, statistically, it is just another day, if you still aren't convinced, bear this in mind: the 15th March, 2018, will be Philip Green's 66th birthday.  

It's not a good day.

Stay at home, avoid the snows and storms, the collapse of chain stores, Brexit and Trump.  And pay heed to the sayers of sooth......  

O! Julius Caesar! Thou art mighty yet!

Thy spirit walks abroad and turns our swords

In our own proper entrails.

Thank You!

Friends, Remnants, and Countrymen.....

I bought a new car the other day.  I had saved all my life and put aside a little bit here and there, and now, as I'm not so far off my three-score-years-and-ten, I wanted to treat myself.  A little bit of fun left at the bottom of the bucket list.

I took possession of the car the other day.  I thought it looked like this.....

Shiny and new.  Quiet and safe.  A car for the outdoors.

So I proudly took Amanda (my wife) for a drive into the countryside. Parked.  And went for a walk.

The countryside looked like this.....

Fresh and green, with those wonderful splashes of mischievous digitalis purpurea (common foxglove)....

Even on a slightly overcast day I thought my country - the country where I grew up, the country that my parents and grandparents fought for, the country that formed me -  was beautiful. Something to be proud of.  

We watched skylarks ascending, and swifts scissoring across the tops of the grasses.

Then, when we got back to the car park, everything had changed.....

No longer the shiny fine vehicle I had put my pension into, but a burnt out wreck, a worthless shell....

The irony is, I should have seen it coming, so, despite my shock, I am grateful to those who went to the trouble to teach me this lesson....

I know who did it.  But it wasn't the usual suspects.  No.  Not the seventeen and a half million of my compatriots who normally attract the blame.  

They weren't responsible.  No.  They have been abused for years, the victims of an under-education posing as a National Curriculum, and of shameful welfare cuts.  The lack of investment in northern cities and small towns, the poverty of austerity has reaped its own harvest.

No.  Seventeen and a half million of my compatriots cannot take the blame.  They too, after all, will find their vehicles, their prized possessions, burnt out in the countryside. They will find they have no friends.

No!

Friends, Remnants, countrymen, lend me your ears.....

I have been taught a lesson.  My eyes were blind.  I thought I was a European, but....

O masters, if I were disposed to stir 

Your hearts and minds to mutiny and rage, 

I should do Boris wrong, and Michael wrong, 

Who, you all know, are honourable men: 

I will not do them wrong; I rather choose 

To wrong the dead, to wrong myself and you, 

Than I will wrong such honourable men.

And though I remain a European, geographically, culturally, spiritually and emotionally, 

Good friends, sweet friends, let me not stir you up 

To such a sudden flood of mutiny. 

They that have done this deed are honourable: 

What private griefs they have, alas, I know not, 

That made them do it: they are wise and honourable, 

And will, no doubt, with reasons answer you. 

I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts: 

I am no orator, as Boris is; 

But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man, 

That love my country......

We must be patient now.  We have to tighten our belts, and start again. No longer will I yearn for a shiny new vehicle, I must learn to walk again.....

And so must my children.

The evil that men do lives after them....

But the larks still sing...... (for the moment....)