I’ve tried to write more consistently in the Shield this year—can’t ask the Guys to do something I wouldn’t do myself—but this is a slightly different beast.
You see, this issue was originally scheduled to come out before February break, to coincide with Valentine’s Day. That would’ve made Messrs. Davis‘ and Steele‘s articles look a lot more sensical.
Then it was supposed to come out after February break, and still retain that theme of love, affection, and romance, which remained a more metaphorical theme through Messrs. Jurasinski‘s, Monile‘s, and Thomas‘ articles.
In the end, due to the vicissitudes of human life, it didn’t come out until now, which especially made Mr. Hay’s article a mess, since he had to play catch-up with the strange trainwreck that is current Australian politics.
Consider this, as the person responsible for every word that gets put into this great publication, an apology on my part. Adelante.
When it comes to Roman poets, Horace plays for me a distant third wheel to the Argonath of Latin poetry: Vergil, whose stately hexameters could pack more meaning into five dactyls and a spondee than you or I could in a book, and Catullus, who was just as precise in his diction, but so outrageously, omnidirectionally messy that you can’t help but laugh at his outrage, even though its target is usually completely lost to us.
I admit I have no logical reason for this, given that Horace was just as consummate and learned a poet as his predecessors, and it’s not like he doesn’t have bangers. Plenty of people who have never set foot in a Latin class learn the famous phrase carpe diem. When you get to read “O Captain! My Captain!” in English class, try reading it in company with Horace’s Ode 1.14, a poem about a ship in disrepair that wears its weightier meaning on its sleeve—or would, if the Romans wore them.
The poem I want to mention today, though, is actually between those two. I’m looking at Ode 1.13, whose last stanza I memorized, pacing and pacing in a cold and nervous sweat downtown as I waited to take my comps (translation exams) for the second time, a month before I got married.
Felices ter et amplius
quos inrupta tenet copula nec malis
divolsus querimoniis
suprema citius solvet amor die.
What’s that, you say? Still can’t read Latin? Okay, fine:
Thrice-blessed, and yet more,
those whom an unbroken bond holds, nor,
dissolved by wicked quarrels,
will their love end sooner than their last day.
You can probably see why, given that I was a month away from becoming a husband, I felt it worth memorizing that—and that was before I walked to my proctor’s house to take my comps, and gasped in surprised delight the moment he handed the exam papers to me, because he’d just handed me this very poem. I dashed it off in seven minutes, moved on to the prose section, aced my comps (don’t be too proud of me; it was my second attempt), and a few weeks later, packed up my Roman history textbooks and headed halfway around the world to begin my own life held by an unbroken bond.
As a rule, I consider myself the unluckiest man on the face of the Earth . . . but only in the small things. In what matters, I have been blessed a whole lot more than just thrice.
By the way, these same verses are inscribed on the Wadsworth Gate at Harvard University. You’ve seen it, even if you (like me) have never set foot on the campus, because it’s in the photograph at the top of this article. The Harvard class of 1857 was the first to sponsor a campus gate; for them, who had fought on both sides of the Civil War and whose 25-year reunion had been much more sparsely attended as a result, the gate was a chance to commemorate in brick and mortar the bonds of camaraderie they had forged as younger, happier men. The Horatian inscription was added in 1910, and though it recontextualizes the verses as an encouragement to lifelong friendship rather than romantic love, I can’t say they got it wrong, either.
When we think of the Romans, we think of disciplined soldiery and tactical genius; feats of engineering that seem like miracles to the modern eye, even when we know how they were done; principled political thundering; weird foods; attention to legal minutiae that would make the modern United States Code seem almost vague in comparison; sheer imperial dominance. We do not tend to think of them in their tender moments, caring for their children and their pets, building community with each other, loving their families and friends as intensely as we love ours now, in 2026.
That isn’t a failure on our part. If anything, it is a measure of the success the Romans (and their imitators, who litter modern history) have had in marketing themselves as invincible machines of principled, controlled violence. But the Romans weren’t Spartans, beholden to a hypermasculine ethos that resisted any kind of personal attachment other than the mess-hall and the state. (Really, even the Spartans weren’t Spartans.) If anything, we are taking the Romans too much at their own word, and that has kept us from assembling a fuller portrait.
It is a particular shame when it comes to this topic, because the Romans did leave us plenty of evidence of how deeply they loved. Look at this epitaph, dated to sometime between 135 and 120 BC. I have included my translation directly below.
Hospes, quod deico paullum est; asta ac pellege.
Heic est sepulcrum hau pulcrum pulcrai feminae.
Nomen parentes nominarunt Claudiam.
Suom mareitom corde deilexit souo.
Gnatos duos creavit, horunc alterum
In terra linquit, alium sub terra locat.
Sermone lepido, tum autem incessu commodo.
Domum servavit, lanam fecit. Dixi. Abei.Stranger, what I say is small; stand and read it through.
This is the not-beautiful grave of a beautiful woman.
[Her] parents named her with the name Claudia.
She loved her husband with her heart.
She bore two children, of whom one
remains on earth, the other is currently under the earth.
She was of charming speech, but also of modest manner.
She kept house, made wool. I have spoken. Go.
As a modern man, I will not sit here and tell you that Claudia’s husband, or son, or whoever put up this sepulcrum for her (by the way, note that whoever wrote this had the presence of mind to pun sepulcrum, “grave,” with pulcrum, “beautiful,” not once but twice), necessarily emphasized the right things about her. Although I am in fact a wizard at folding laundry and I am proud of that fact, I do not know whether it should make my gravestone; and note that it does not say, as graves tend to do these days, that she was herself a beloved wife and mother.
Yet I have kept this epitaph (a fancy term for “grave inscription”) in mind for a decade now, because in a few short lines, we get a complete portrait of what this woman was like, how much her family loved her, and how important it was to them that you know that, too. The services of a chiseler who would etch a long inscription on a sepulcrum did not come cheap, and I have a slight suspicion that this particular stonemason added some letters to justify an overcharge (deico, heic, mareitom, deilexit, souo, horunc, abei), but the message is clear.
I particularly like the first word here: hospes. “Stranger,” sure—but also “guest,” suggesting that while you look at Claudia’s sepulcrum, you are being hosted by her spirit and her family’s love for her. Reading this now, 2,000 years later, I hope that the men in Claudia’s life, who statistically had this inscription made, told her how much they loved her while she was alive. Perhaps in highlighting what they loved about her, Claudia’s family hoped to remind passers-by to see the wonderful parts of the people they loved.
A lot of these inscriptions, in fact, seem very concerned for the reader. The Claudia epitaph is particularly famous, or at least it was among the authors who wrote Roman history textbooks that I read for those same comps I was talking about earlier, but it’s by no means the only one. This undated one, from Sabine territory, is incomplete, but we have a pretty good idea of what it means.
Manlia L[uci] f[ilia] Sabi[na].
Parentem amavi qua mihi fuit parens;
virum parenti proxum[o colui loco].
Ita casta veitae constitit ra[tio meae].
Valebis, hospes; veive, tibi iam m[ors ve[nit]].Manlia Sabina, daughter of Lucius.
I loved my parent for being my parent;
My husband I cherished in the second place after my parent.
Thus the account of my life stands spotless.
Be well, stranger; live life, for death already comes for you.
Once again, we see that a woman’s love for her male relatives is highlighted as proof of her virtue, but we’re not told how those relatives—her father, her husband, and so on—felt about her. Once again, we are left to hope that she did not die in ignorance . . . and while my opinion of Roman men’s emotional intelligence is not exactly high, every year we find good reason to think that they were not the closed-off martinetesque moral exemplars that Cato the Elder would have liked.
Mr. Thomas said it best in his article, but Claudia, Manlia Sabina, and many other Romans also remind us across the ages: whomever it is that you love right now, romantically, amicably, filially, spiritually, or otherwise, tell them now, tell them often, and tell them everything. Do not wait until you have to settle for putting it on their gravestone.