'Who knows if Jove who counts our Score will toss us in a morning more?'

 It's not often that I have occasion to mark an anniversary from the era we traditionalists still call 'BC' –but today is the birthday, in 65BC, of Horace, the Latin poet who was more widely read, 'imitated' and translated in England than any other (with the possible exception of Virgil). In the seventeenth and, especially, eighteenth century, he virtually became one of the English poets, and in the 19th century Gladstone was one of many who habitually read and translated him, in his case while also serving as Prime Minister – those days are long gone, that's for sure... Pope wrote a fine set of eleven Imitations of Horace, and one of Marvell's greatest poems was Horace-inspired – the endlessly subtle, touching and ironic 'An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland'. 
  As for Samuel Johnson, he read and translated Horace – especially the Odes – all his life, from his schooldays to near the end. It was in his final months that he wrote this translation of Ode 7 from Book 4, with its strong theme of mortality and the transience of things – 

The snow dissolv'd no more is seen,
The fields, and woods, behold, are green,
The changing year renews the plain,
The rivers know their banks again,

The sprightly Nymph and naked Grace
The mazy dance together trace.
The changing year's successive plan,
Proclaims mortality to Man.

Rough Winter's blasts to Spring give way,
Spring yields to Summer's sovereign ray,
Then Summer sinks in Autumn's reign,
And Winter chills the world again.

Her losses soon the Moon supplies,
But wretched Man, when once he lies
Where Priam and his sons are laid,
Is nought but Ashes and a Shade.

Who knows if Jove who counts our Score
Will toss us in a morning more?
What with your friend you nobly share
At least you rescue from your heir.

Not you, Torquatus, boast of Rome,
When Minos once has fix'd your doom,
Or Eloquence, or splendid birth,
Or Virtue shall replace on earth.

Hippolytus unjustly slain
Diana calls to life in vain,
Nor can the might of Theseus rend
The chains of hell that hold his friend.

A.E. Housman regarded this ode of Horace's as 'the most beautiful poem in ancient literature', and he produced a beautiful translation of it himself –

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
And grasses in the mead renew their birth,
The river to the river-bed withdraws,
And altered is the fashion of the earth.

The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear
And unapparelled in the woodland play.
The swift hour and the brief prime of the year
Say to the soul, Thou wast not born for aye.

Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring
Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers
Comes autumn with his apples scattering;
Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.

But oh, whate'er the sky-led seasons mar,
Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams;
Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are
And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.

Torquatus, if the gods in heaven shall add
The morrow to the day, what tongue has told?
Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has had
The fingers of no heir will ever hold.

When thou descendest once the shades among,
The stern assize and equal judgment o'er,
Not thy long lineage nor thy golden tongue,
No, nor thy righteousness, shall friend thee more.

Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,
Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;
And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain
The love of comrades cannot take away.

In the 20th century, Patrick Leigh Fermor was a devoted reader of Horace – in the original Latin, of course – and his knowledge of the Odes formed an extraordinary and wholly unexpected bond with General Kreipe, the German officer Paddy and his partisan comrades had just kidnapped on Crete in 1944. They took him to an overnight hideout in a cave on Mount Ida, and when in the morning Kreipe saw the landscape around, he muttered the opening lines of Horace's Ode XI.I: 

'Vides ut alta stet nive candidum,
Soracte nec iam sustineant onus…'

Leigh Fermor finished the stanza for him:

'Silvae laborantes geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto.'

Being Paddy, he also knew by heart all five of the following stanzas, and recited them to the astonished Kreipe. As Leigh Fermor notes in his memoir:

'For five minutes the war had evaporated without a trace.'