Horace Quotes
God has joined the innocent with the guilty.
Horace. Odes and Epodes. Translated by Niall Rudd, Harvard University Press, 2004, Odes, bk. 3, ode 2, line 29, p. 151.
In 1856 Kansas was at war over slavery. Kansas was to enter the Union with the resident men voting to determine whether it would be a slavery state or a free state. At first pro-slavery forces sent men into Kansas to increase the pre-slavery vote. The abolitionist anti-slavery forces outside of Kansas did the same, and had more money to finance anti-slavery settlers. Soon the pro-slavery forces, realizing that they would be outnumbered turned to violence and began to intimidate abolitionist settlers to return from whence they came. Soon abolitionists were killed and the anti-slavery men retaliated. Soon real war broke out but terrorism was the modality on most attacks as the purpose of the pro-slavery men was to frighten the abolitionists—many of whom were religious pacifists—into leaving the state. Brown and some other abolitionists retaliated with terror of their own, but Brown was rabid. He and his sons, attacked 5 pro-slavery fighters at Pottawatomie Creek, but Brown personally hacked off their limbs with a broadsword and left the bodies to intimidate and terrorize many of the pro slavery people. Brown was such a fanatic that he, in this infamous quote, claimed that his killing and butchery was “justified under the circumstances.” The phrase “Bleeding Kansas” came from the violence and terrorism in this period.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known in the English-speaking world as Horace (/ˈhɒrɪs/), was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his Odes as just about the only Latin lyrics worth reading: "He can be lofty sometimes, yet he is also full of charm and grace, versatile in his figures, and felicitously daring in his choice of words."
