Horace and his Legacy

Horace has had a long and varied afterlife. In the Victorian era, for example, he became a model for learned gentlemen among the English upper classes (Harrison 2017). But Horace’s role was not restricted to the complacent elite. This paper argues that the Augustan poet plays a quite different part in Karl Marx’s Capital. For Marx,Horace represents not a traditional and conventional gentleman, but a satirist and a potent voice for ethical change.

This paper aims to put the bear back in Horace, and in the classical tradition he imitates and instantiates. Although Horace’s Ars Poetica (AP) opens by attacking hybrid images and, by ut pictura poesis inference, hybrid poems, it then delivers a poem jarring in its transitions, concluding with the shocking metamorphosis of a Mad Poet into a violent bear-leech.

This paper explores the role of repetition and prophecy in Horace's Odes 1.7. While this poem has attracted much and varied comment on its structure and unity, as well as the ode's connection to Munatius Plancus (Ascione 2001, Bliss 1960, Elder 1953, Funaioli 1990, Lohmann 1994, Moles 2002, to name a few), the mythological exemplum in the third part of the poem has too often been subsumed into discussions of how the whole of the poem fits together and/or how the exemplum fits in with what we know of Munatius Plancus.

Vergil’s Eclogues (39-38 BCE) and Horace’s Satires I (36-35 BCE) were both written and published “during the uncertain period of the second triumvirate” (Gowers 2012: 4). In their earliest works, both Vergil and Horace delve into the political in the way they depict the future under Octavian, specifically by focusing on the concept of otium.