My erstwhile beauty and my skill I sing,
   When I once soldier’d on Love’s battlefield,
But Arms made obsolete by War I bring,
   My sword, my lyre, my spear, fife, drum and shield.
Now I consign them to their rightful place:
   Rest, rest, ye arms, on pegs by Venus’ side!
And near the Goddess, born of foam, a space
   For torches, threat’ning War where they abide.
O Goddess who in Cyprus blest doth dwell,
   And Memphis, far from Thracian mountains snowy,
Queen, take thy Whip against her to rebel,
   And with one humb’ling blow, I pray, strike Chloe.

—Horace, Ode 3.26

I rendered this poem into alternate rhyming lines of iambic pentameter so as to keep the line numbers the same, thereby imitating the styles of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century translators. It’s even better if you imagine it written out with elongated s and fl and ct ligatures, and the proper names in small caps. This poem would make a great sonnet, I think—there’s a pretty good volta right where the third quatrain would begin. Unfortunately, there are only twelve lines in the original, so if you wanted to stick your own ‘zinger’ couplet at the end, it’d have to be of your own devising.

CAESAR. The Ides of March are come.
SOOTHSAYER. Ay, Caesar, but not gone.

His famous last words are, naturally, legend. As the inimitable folks of I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again once put it:

Bill Oddie: Well, I know his famous last words!
David Hatch: And what were they?
Bill: Err…quod erat demonstrandum.
David: That means ‘which was to be proved’.
Bill: What was to be proved?
David: Which was to be proved!
Bill: Well, no wonder they were his last words.

Caesar’s last words were reported by Plutarch to be καὶ σὺ τέκνον; (’You too, my son?’) and literally translated by Suetonius as tu quoque, fili mi? (’You too, my son?’). However, the translation given in Shakespeare of et tu, Brute? is undoubtedly more popular and famous. Also, it flows better, despite the fact that Caesar, like other educated, upper-class Romans, would have probably spoken Greek in day-to-day use, unlike the vulgar Latin of the vulgar masses. In fact, there’s a terrific bit of dialogue from the beginning of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that picks up on this quite nicely:

CASSIUS. Did Cicero say anything?
CASCA. Ay, he spoke Greek.
CASSIUS. To what effect?
CASCA. Nay, an I tell you that, I’ll ne’er look you i’ the face again: but those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me.

But let turn back to ISIRTA for the last word:

David Hatch: Eventually, Caesar was stabbed in the Appian Way.
Bill Oddie: And that’s a very nasty way to be stabbed!
David: I’m sorry, did I say he was stabbed in the Appian Way? I meant he was stabbed in the Senate.
Bill: That’s even nastier.

My students asked me what they could do to commemorate the Ides of March, and I told them to stab their best friends before their friends could stab them. A good bit of advice, that, especially if you’re an ancient Roman, but I wonder how much utility it has today. I do hope they didn’t take me seriously. Ave atque vale, Caesar.

If Virgil is your thing, however, you will probably have something to say about Ahl’s new translation. It is written in something approximating English dactylic hexameter, which gives him a lot of room to play with per line (the line count is the same as in the Latin original). Also, Ahl’s hexameters are a damn sight better and more natural-sounding than Longfellow’s awful

This is the forest primeval: the murmuring pines and the hemlock

But Ahl’s hexameters—especially in terms of versification—are not perfect, and he has to deal with the problem of sustaining the hexameter through thousands of lines in English, which can start to sound quite tiresome even after only a few verses. Additionally, there is a lot of unnecessarily technical vocabulary retained, significantly in some of the crazier battle scenes. Much of this is explained via endnotes linked to asterisks in the text, which seems clunky and inelegant poetry to me. But then again, what is a translator to do?

For example, let me quote twelve lines from Book IX, during one of the interminable ‘fight scenes’ (9.503–514):

Far off, the resonant bronze of a bugle has crackled staccato
Terror. There follows a thunderous cheer bellowed back by the heavens.
Quickly the Volscians approach in an interlocked tortoise formation,
Ready to fill in the trenches, to ram through and rip apart ramparts.
Some look for ways to get in and to scale outer walls upon ladders:
Points undermanned, where the crown of defence admits flickers of daylight
Through less dense crenellations of troops. In response, though, the Teucrians
Blast them with all kinds of weapon, prise ladders away with strong levers.
Holding a wall under siege was a skill they’d acquired in prolonged war.
Further, they tried hurling boulders of murderous heaviness, hoping
Somehow to break through this covered attack. But whatever they threw down,
Troops underneath that dense-packed tortoise easily handled.

In the text, ‘Volscians’ has an asterisk and endnote, referring the reader to a different endnote, in which these people are identified, and a cross-reference to yet a third endnote to explain the ‘interlocked tortoise formation’. Yet I would be doing a disservice to Ahl to carp too much upon this: certainly there are many other features about this translation that are redeemable. The line ‘Ready to fill in the trenches, to ram through and rip apart ramparts’ has some terrific alliteration, nicely rendering the Latin alliterative vellere vallum in the same line, for example. Ahl is also a master of making the metre ‘paint’ his text, parallelling this feature in Virgil: the original ferre iuvet subter densa testudine casus, heavily spondaic as it is, is reflected as such in Ahl’s translation: ‘Troops underneath that dense-packed tortoise easily handled’—a very heavily accentual and spondaic line to reflect the tightness of the soldiers’ formation.

What is more, the reader is drawn in to the action of the text, not left standing as an observer outside the text (this, I feel, is the downside of many modern translations, including Mandelbaum’s celebrated version and possibly even Fagles’ recent effort; a step backwards, in a way, from his masterful Iliad and Odyssey). But I can’t help feeling that this is compromised in some ways by awkwardnesses in the text—’all kinds of weapon’, for instance, does not strike me as particularly elegant English, and the two lines beginning with ‘Points undermanned’ does not read like natural language, and is complicated by needlessly obscure vocabulary (’crenellations‘, for example, are those square bits cut out of the tops of towers at castles; I don’t see how the word is really being applied here to this situation). Finally, there are some nice and some not-so-nice features about the versification—the enjambment of ’staccato / Terror’ is well done, but ‘In response, though, the Teucrians’ smacks of metrical filler, and ‘they’d acquired in prolonged war’ scans badly with respect to the line’s accentuation.

So take the new Ahl translation for what it’s worth (mine cost £16.99 plus postage and packing, though it seems now to be available in North America via the usual outlets)—hopefully it will be able to take its rightful place among the excellent efforts of the modern translators.

(Seneca, Thyestes 1096–1112, my own translation. The text is R. J. Tarrant’s 1985/1998 edition (APA).)