Byron toyed with several epigraphs for his immense and unfinished poem Don Juan. Two were drawn from Horace's Epistle to the Pisones, better known as the Ars poetica, of which Byron had written an adaptation in 1811, Hints from Horace, seven years before starting work on Don Juan. One option was the phrase domestica facta, referring in the Horatian context to heroic deeds and actions which were Roman, and thus domestica, rather than Greek (hence sanctioned by Homeric tradition). He abandoned this option, accepting that the words would be understood, not so much as a program for a poetic treatment of English life, but rather in relation to the alarming events in his own “domestic” life which had led him to abandon England, in 1816, for Europe and, during the writing of Don Juan between 1818 and 1823, for Italy—where his relationship with Countess Teresa Guiccioli rendered unwelcome the revival, by such an epigraph, of old charges and insinuations. The other Horatian epigraph, however, although not published at the head of Don Juan during Byron's lifetime, he retained; and it is with a consideration of this choice, the phrase difficile est proprie communia dicere, that the main body of this paper shall begin. From it, discussion will move to several aspects of Don Juan, reaching beyond its epigraph, which can plausibly be considered in some sense Horatian; the poem's citations of Horace, its setting and narrative action, its guiding thoughts and ideas, and the relations it implies between poem and poet.

Two preliminary issues should be raised; the range and nature of Horace's writing, and Byron's awareness of that range. Quintus Horatius Flaccus lived from 65 BC to 8 BC. The son of a freed slave, he fought under Brutus at the battle of Philippi in 42 BC; defeated there, he took up a routine civil service post until his early writings, the Epodes and the first book of Sermones or Satires, attracted favorable attention from the rich and independent-minded Maecenas. Maecenas's lasting financial and material support gave him leisure and confidence to compose, over the years up to 20 BC, a second book of Satires, three books of Carmina (Odes), and a book of poetic letters (Epistulae).