Messrs Hancock and Davidson seem to have laid this one firmly to rest, many thanks to them both. I am sure Susan Treggiari agrees.
Offers the basis for one of those elegant Wilson KJ pieces culled from the Mailbase ?
Good early morning wishes to all
John R
Sent from my iPad
> On 7 Jan 2017, at 03:03, Meredith Dixon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Two different classicists on the CLASSICS-L list, which is primarily
> made up of university professors, have already come forward to say
> that none of these are real quotes and that Kipling made them all up.
>
> Ralph Hancock <[log in to unmask]> was the first to reply:
>
> I'm just going on instinct here, but I believe that every one of these
> epigrams was coined by Kipling himself. They smell of Kipling, not of any
> classical author. I think that to Kipling himself they seemed impeccably
> classical in style, but to us, later, they seem all of a kind. It's like
> van Meegeren's Vermeer fakes, completely plausible to his contemporaries;
> but to us, later, the typical van Meegeren 1930s-style simpering faces are
> glaringly obvious.
>
>
> And then Mark Davidson <[log in to unmask]> said:
>
> These epigraphs were all written by Kipling, although some of them are in a
> faux-classical style. They are not quotations, and I'm surprised that
> anyone would think they were. If they were actual quotations, Kipling would
> have credited the authors. As far as I know, they have never been
> attributed to anyone else, least of all by Kipling himself.
>
> It's also a mistake to think that the 'Horace Odes' of Kipling are genuine
> translations. They are original poems in a style reminiscent of Horace.
> This is immediately apparent, since Kipling attributes them to 'Book V' -
> and there are only four books of Odes by Horace. Any educated person of
> Kipling's time would have known that....
>
> As the Kipling Society says itself in the notes on this poem, "This is
> another of Kipling’s poems in imitation of the Roman poet Horace".
> http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_lastode1.htm
>
> They don't say, but they should, that Nov. 27, 8 BC was the date of
> Horace's death.
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