Carpe Diem Does Not Mean What You Think It Means

On Uses and Misuses of a Piece of Roman Life Advice in Popular Culture

Quintus Horatius Flaccus (8 Dec. 65 BCE - 27 November 8 CE), better known to English speakers as Horace, grew up in Venusia; he and his family were manumitted from slavery at some point in his early life, meaning that they were liberti, or “freedmen.” After an educational stint in Athens and an ill-fated enlistment in the army of Brutus (of Ides of March fame) during the Liberators’ Civil War (43-42 BCE), Horace fled back to Rome where he took up the life of a part-time treasury scribe and a poet. The latter stuck more permanently as a career choice, as he befriended none other than Publius Vergilius Maro and, through him, came into the literary circle of Maecenas. Horace wrote a long list of works whose exact dates have been disputed in the history of biographical scholarship on his life but which are generally acknowledged as Satires I-II, the Epodes, Odes I-III, Epistles I, the Carmen Saeculare, Epistles II, a fourth book of Odes, and the Ars Poetica (this is Nisbet’s listing). Horace was a lover of Greek meter, many varieties of which he employed in his texts, and he seems to have been an avowed Epicurean, judging from multiple carmina (including the one under discussion here).