ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates on Beethoven’s engagement with three important writers from Roman times - Plutarch, Horace and Tacitus. Abundant records show that he was seized and transported by Plutarch, the major allround analyst and commentator of the Greco-Roman world. References in the primary sources suggest that this commitment was strong and abiding and that he regulalry read Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (very probably not the Morals) and took the attitudes of these 48 famous Romans and Greeks as models for his own choices in life. It was through the 18th-century literary figure Karl Wilhelm Ramler that he also became familiar with poems by Horace. The translation of the Odes was contained in the second volume of his Poetische Werke, an edition from 1801 that Beethoven had on his shelf. The initial plan to study Tacitus dated from 1807, possibly as a sequel to Plutarch. Regrettably, it is not known whether he received the translation he specifically asked for, the one by Bahrdt.
