Q. Horatius Flaccus
Satires 1.5 — the journey to Brundisium
Sermones I.5 · c. 37 BCE; published with the first book of Satires c. 35 BCE.
A fortnight on the road from Rome to Brundisium: bad water, gnats, sore eyes, a boatman who ties up the mule and falls asleep. What the poem never mentions is that Horace is travelling with the delegation negotiating peace between Octavian and Antony.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
Christopher Smart's prose translation, as revised by Theodore Alois Buckley (Harper, 1862). Two things about it shape everything the reader sees. First, it is prose, and the poem is hexameter verse — so every joke that lives in the metre is gone, including the one about the town whose name will not fit in a line. What survives is the anecdote; what is lost is the timing. Second, it is a crib. Smart made it for schoolboys construing the Latin, so it follows the word order of the original more closely than English wants, and Buckley's square brackets mark words supplied to make it parse — '[at night]', '[by law]', '[from Epicurus]'. Those brackets are the edition's, not this site's, and they are a useful signal: they mark places where the Latin says less than the English needs to. Smart himself is worth knowing about. He was a considerable poet, confined for madness, who wrote Jubilate Agno in an asylum; the Horace was hack work done for money. The register is accordingly flat and dutiful where Horace is quick, and it reaches for eighteenth-century politeness — 'obliged to use the black ointment' — where the Latin is blunt.