SOURCE: “Later Life and Works” in Horace, Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 117-62.

In the following excerpt, Armstrong focuses on the three poems included in the second book of Horace's Epistles.

… After the publication of Odes 4, Horace may have ceased to write. He died on November 27, 8 b.c., shortly after Maecenas's death in the same year. So his promise in Odes 2.17 to accompany Maecenas on every road, even the last, came true; whether from grief or by coincidence, there is no evidence. One thing about his death sounds strange for a Roman who figured in business and society as importantly as Horace did. Death came to him suddenly, Suetonius claims, so suddenly that he only had time to summon witnesses and dismiss his property into Augustus's hands. Augustus is known from other sources to have been a careful administrator of estates left to him, and Horace could well have...