Niall rudd biography

Whether it is appropriate to a fashionable courtesan is perhaps debatable; I think it is. I am also taken to task for referring to Maecenas and Horace as patron and client. In English terms that is what they were. Granted, they did not refer to one another as patronus and cliens. They were amiciand the evolution of their relationship, which came to transcend their positions in society, is a remarkable story.

In fact I did not choose my time: I was invited to do the translation. But no doubt some of the slime of the insinuation will stick. Find out more about the London Review of Books app. For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions. Newsletter Preferences. Ach so, Herr Major Nicholas Horsfall.

Accept Close. Close Search. More search Options Search by contributor Browse our cover archive. Horace: Odes and Epodes edited by Niall Rudd. Harvard, pp. Letters Vol. Download the LRB app. James I saw himself as a potential Augustus; he encouraged Shakespeare, Jonson and Donne, and took a serious interest in religion; but he failed to assert British power abroad.

The comparison was developed by Higgons in but opposed by Warton and Hume, who argued that in taste and morals the age was far from Augustan. In the midth century the debate became more complicated.

Niall rudd biography

But whether revered or reviled he remained a central point of reference. In his immensely impressive book Dr Erskine-Hill shows how the example of Augustus was used as an inspiration, or as a warning, at every period from the Church Fathers to the end of the 18th Professor Rudd worked on a wide range of different texts. He was particularly noted for his work on Horace, including The Satires of Horace: a study Cambridge, and the Cambridge green and yellow edition of Epistles II Cambridge,as well as studies of Roman poetry and satire more generally, and translations of Cicero and Juvenal.

He also wrote a memoir of his early upbringing, Pale Green. Light Orange: a portrait of bourgeois Ireland Dublin,which revealed important aspects of his complexity and border-crossing mind. Meanwhile it may be observed that the poems in question seem to contain no reference to such an approach; also, although Juvenal may well have annoyed some of his contemporaries, he did not employ the name of anyone who was both alive and important.

Some texts continually invoked in discussion are not Augustan at all. The Epistles paid so little attention to Augustus that he wrote to inquire whether Horace was afraid his reputation would suffer if he were seen to be on friendly terms with the Princeps. Several major works are about Augustus, but also have a much wider and more general field of reference.

Even the opening verses form part of the literary argument: if the public admires a living ruler more than his predecessors on account of his civilising achievements, it ought to do the same for living poets. So as well as being flattered, and encouraged, and educated his tastes were rather old-fashionedAugustus is also being used.

As for the Aeneidwhen Aeneas is identified with Augustus a process which had become familiar by the beginning of the 18th centurythe epic can then be seen as a work of sustained sycophancy. This, of course, is absurd. Except in a very few niall rudds biography, Aeneas is not a prototype of Augustus. Moreover, what Virgil says and implies about Augustus is part of what he says and implies about Rome, which in turn falls within what he says and implies about the course of human history.

That is what makes the work a classic. That is an enormous and complex theme, for it shows educated people trying to understand and assess and influence what was happening to them. As we follow the story, we are reminded in abundant detail how this, like other Roman threads, is inextricably woven into two hundred years of British history. At the end of 64, Catullus contrasted modern i.

In f. The young wife, of course, belongs to the son. They are quite wrong. Many of the changes are very slight; they are drawn from five hundred years of Catullan scholarship; and in my view almost every one is an improvement. For example, in 51 Catullus describes the shattering effect which Lesbia has upon him:. But Catullus had not read the Thesaurus Linguae Latinaeand the hypallage is not so unusual.

The instructions about reading verse aloud are open to question. They tell us to stress the ictus i. A hard task. Where ictus and accent do not coincide there must indeed be a compromise: but most scholars would prefer to reach it from the other direction by stressing the word accent i. Here and there we could do with more bibliographical information.

The complex question of fact and fiction is passed over rather quickly.