In the Library
Ode 1.11 (Carpe Diem)
Horace, 23 BCE
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by John Conington (1863)
- Original
- Original la
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 0k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in tomorrow.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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Siduri the alewife tells Gilgamesh to fill his belly, dance and hold his child's hand, since the gods kept life for themselves: carpe diem two thousand years before Horace.
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About the book
Two people talk while winter wears the Tyrrhenian sea against the rocks, and one of them, a girl named Leuconoe, wants to know how long she has. Don't ask, Horace tells her, it is forbidden to know; put down the Babylonian star-charts, strain the wine, and prune your long hopes down to this short room of time. In eight lines he gives the world the two words it has never stopped saying: carpe diem, seize the day. Yet the phrase everyone quotes as a party slogan is really an act of tenderness, spoken by someone who can feel the hour slipping even as he speaks it: while we talk, he says, envious time has already fled. The Latin is impossibly compact, each word packed against the next like the pumice against that shore. Read it once and the day around you changes weight.