Horace

As a boy, Horace fell asleep beneath the trees of Venusia—and woke covered with leaves by wood-pigeons. The countryside took it as a sign that the gods had marked him out.

Writing in the early twentieth century, William Tuckwell follows Horace from rural Italy into the upheavals of the late Roman Republic. His father, once enslaved, spends what he has to give his son an education in Rome; at nineteen, Horace is studying philosophy in Athens when Brutus draws him into a cause that will cost him dearly. Defeat leaves him back in Rome, his property gone and his prospects narrowed to a clerk’s desk. Can the son of a freedman rebuild his life—and find a poetic voice amid the ruins of his first ambitions?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

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