IF I TOLD YOU THAT A COLLECTION OF POEMS written 2,000 years ago was sent by his wife to a man serving in the trenches of the First World War, and he replied to her that he was devoting five minutes a day amid the fighting to reading them, you might wonder what kind of poetry could possibly speak to the circumstances which that soldier, Raymond Asquith, was facing. The answer is the work of that most humane of ancient poets, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, better known as Horace.
The Thames at Twickenham in the early eighteenth century could hardly be a more different environment from the Somme in the Great War, but they have Horace in common. It was in Twickenham, at a safe remove in those days from London, that the poet Alexander Pope built a villa for himself with extensive gardens and a celebrated grotto in the basement where he used to sit and write.
