What to do when you only have modest wine on hand for a decorous guest
So, I’ve have been rooting around in Horace’s Epistles, which are full of amusing things. They really are not “epistles” in the conventional sense, since they were make-believe letters, artfully wrought jebux d’esprit that employ the convention of addressing a friend in order to entertain not (or not only) that friend (who may or may not exist) but one’s readers. Horace wrote two books of Epistles, one circa 21 BC when he was in his early forties, one a decade later, a few years before his death in 8 BC at the (it seems now) tender age of fifty-six. One that caught my eye when sitting down to write this column was Epistle 1.
