Pro patria mori.
At a stroke Horace became the smug representative of imperialism, the éminence grise who sent millions of young men to ghastly deaths. For postwar iconoclasts such as Ezra Pound and the members of the Bloomsbury group, Horace was the problem, not the solution. Much more attractive than Horace's measured, ambivalent support of Augustus's Pax Romana were romantic young rebels such as Catullus, who said he did not care whether Caesar was pale or swarthy, or Propertius, who daringly looked forward to much later poets such as John Donne by making his mistress, not his emperor, the centre of everything.
from Financial Times: Horace saved my life
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