From Latin 'Horatius,' an ancient Roman clan name, famously borne by the poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus.
Horace is the English form of the ancient Roman family name Horatius, belonging to the patrician gens Horatia whose legendary members shaped the earliest chapters of Roman history. Most famous among them was the poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus — known to the world simply as Horace — whose Odes, Satires, and Epistles became cornerstones of Western literature. It was Horace who gave us the phrase *carpe diem* and the ideal of *aurea mediocritas*, the golden mean, philosophies that have lost none of their resonance in two millennia.
The name passed robustly into English usage through the Renaissance, when classical learning made Roman names fashionable for educated families. By the nineteenth century, Horace had become a thoroughly respectable Anglo-American name borne by statesmen and reformers: Horace Greeley founded the New-York Tribune and popularized the exhortation 'Go West, young man'; Horace Mann pioneered public education in America; and Lord Horatio Nelson, sharing the same root, became Britain's greatest naval hero. G.
Wodehouse gave us the hapless Horace in several Jeeves stories, and the name became shorthand for a certain bumbling but good-natured English gentleman. Horace reached its American popularity peak in the late Victorian era, when classical names signaled cultivation and civic virtue. It receded through the twentieth century as modernist parents turned away from Latinate gravitas, but it has never fully disappeared — it retains a kind of dry wit and scholarly dignity that makes it feel freshly eccentric rather than simply old-fashioned today.