167 English Translations of Horace’s Eheu Fugaces.

But one morning the old man, standing before the blackboard, his hands clutching his coat, — picture him with a mild and venerable and kindly face, spectacled, his big domed head scholastically bald above a fringe of close gray curls; clerically dressed in black, low-collared, white-tied; his eyes rather dim and vague behind his glasses, gazing peacefully: there he is! — one morning he stood in front of us at the beginning of the lesson, and instead of putting somebody on to construe he waited, he stared over our heads; and then he broke out in a gentle mournful chant upon the opening words of our ode. He seemed to be saying them to himself — he knew them by heart. Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume — he had a tuneful and flexible voice, and he threw into it a pensive lament as he dwelt upon the repeated name. Postume — Postume — oh, how time flies, how helplessly we see it vanish, how soon we are faced by the assault of age! He chanted the words very musically and appealingly — yet not quite seriously either, not sentimentally, but rather as if he liked to join company with an old friend, old popular Horace, in a plaintive strain that he did n’t mean very seriously; for these regrets and laments, they belong to the smooth philosophy of an honest poet, comfortable enough in his worldly wisdom — and a companionable old poet, so life-seasoned, so familiar to a scholar who has known him by heart for fifty years. There is a touch of humor in their relation; Horace does n’t pretend to be perfectly solemn, and the scholar drops easily into his mood; though after all it is true, sadly true, that time is fleeting and death is tameless — quite true enough to set an old man agreeably musing and mooning as he chants the words. He had forgotten our presence; he repeated the whole ode through to the end. (Percy Lubbock, “A Lesson of Horace,” Atlantic Montly, Dec. 1924)