Autumn

 vel cum decorum mitibus pomis caput
      Autumnus agris extulit,
ut gaudet insitiva decerpens pira
      certantem et uvam purpurae,
qua muneretur te, Priape, et te, pater
      Silvane, tutor finium!

when out in the fields Autumn raised his head adorned with mellow fruits, how he rejoices in plucking grafted pears and the grape which competes in hue with the purple with which he might repay you, Priapus and you, Father Sylvanus, guardian of the countryside!

Horace, Epodes, II.17-22. My translation.

Read and Question

inter cuncta leges et percontabere doctos,

through all this you must read and question the wise

Horace, Epistulae, I.18.96. My translation.

Books and Food Enough

quid sentire putas? quid credis, amice, precari?
sit mihi quod nunc est, etiam minus, et mihi vivam
quod superest aevi, si quid superesse volunt di;
sit bona librorum et provisae frugis in annum
copia, neu fluitem dubiae spe pendulus horae.

What do you think I think about? What do you think, my friend, that I pray for? That I may keep what I have or even less, and to live for myself for whatever part of life remains for me, if the gods will it to remain; may I have an ample supply of books and provisions to last through the year; and may I not waver, hanging on to the hope of the fickle hour.

Horace, Epistles, I.18.108-110. My translation.

Who is Rushing In?

From Horace's Satires (I.2.24):

dum vitant stulti vitia in contraria currunt

fools rushing to avoid one fault, rush to the opposite extreme

Alexander Pope's Imitations of Horace, Serm. I.2.27-28:

But why all this? I'll tell ye, ’tis my Theme:
‘Women and Fools are always in Extreme.’

Horace and Landor

   Neither simple nor passionate sensuous only in so far as he is a gourmet of food and of language, aere perennius, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, bald-headed, pot-bellied, underbred, sycophantic, less poetic than any other great master of literature, occupies one complete volume of the British Museum Catalogue and about half the bad poetry in English might seem to have been written under his influence, but as almost no Englishman save Landor has ever written a line of real criticism this is not perhaps very surprising. There are people called the ‘English Critics’ (sometimes the gt. E.C.) who have put down a few rules of thumb about finding rhymes, or about the religious bearing of literature, or indulged in metaphysical speculation, but Landor was almost unique in examining specific passages of verse to see whether they were well or ill written or if they could be improved.

Ezra Pound, ‘Horace’, Arion, 9.2/3 (1970), 178-187 (p. 178).

The Golden Mean

ἔστιν ἄρα ἡ ἀρετὴ ἕξις προαιρετική, ἐν μεσότητι οὖσα τῇ πρὸς ἡμᾶς, ὡρισμένῃ λόγῳ καὶ ᾧ ἂν ὁ φρόνιμος ὁρίσειεν. μεσότης δὲ δύο κακιῶν, τῆς μὲν καθ᾽ ὑπερβολὴν τῆς δὲ κατ᾽ ἔλλειψιν: καὶ ἔτι τῷ τὰς μὲν ἐλλείπειν τὰς δ᾽ ὑπερβάλλειν τοῦ δέοντος ἔν τε τοῖς πάθεσι καὶ ἐν ταῖς πράξεσι, τὴν δ᾽ ἀρετὴν τὸ μέσον καὶ εὑρίσκειν καὶ αἱρεῖσθαι.
 
Virtue then is a habit of mind concerning choice, consisting in the mean relative to us, determined with reference to reason, as a sensible man would define it. It is a middle ground between two evils: one of excess and one of deficiency; because one of these vices falls short of what is proper and the other goes beyond it, both in passions and in actions, where virtue finds and chooses the mean.

Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea, 1106b-1107a. My translation.

est modus in rebus, sunt certi denique fines
quod ultra citraque nequit consistere rectum.
 
There is a mean in things, and there are certain boundaries, beyond which and short of which, virtue is not able to find a place.

Horace, Sermones I.106-7. My translation.