SOURCE: “Experiment—The Epodes” in Horace: A New Interpretation, Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1924, pp. 128-46.

In the following excerpt, Campbell examines the works of Horace while he was a novice poet, and explores his use of invective in the Epodes.

That the infant Horace was covered by doves with bay and myrtle leaves we need not necessarily believe, but his self-chosen apprenticeship to the Muses must have begun when he was very young. Even his earliest extant compositions—Sat., I. vii., and Epodes, vii. and xvi. and perhaps ii.—though the first is poor in humour and some of the others are even (a strange thing in Horace) diffuse in execution—even they are pretty surely not the work of an absolute beginner. He had probably learned something from those early exercises in the writing of Greek verse, of which he tells us in Sat., I. x. 31; but we...