Triumviral Literature

In this paper I identify and analyze a series of ‘iambic’ features within Horace’s first epode, i.e., stylistic contrasts and lexical responses that imitate the lilting, short-long sequence of the iamb. I argue that these features serve as a programmatic gesture for our understanding of the collection as a whole by placing broader thematic concerns and stylistic choices in dialogue with the formal constraints of the iambic genre and its meters, especially its signature metrical unit, the iamb.

I argue that in Eclogue 4, Virgil raises the possibility of a prestigious pastoral genre as a peaceful equivalent to glorious but martial epic. In arguing this, I make the case that Eclogue 4 is truly generically pastoral and that the praise it bestows on its unnamed honorand contends with the praise possible through laudatory epic.

Latin poetry books often manifest architectural schemes on both a large and small scale. Scholars have argued for architectural patterns in Vergil’s Eclogues (Van Sickle), Horace’s Odes (Santirocco, Lowrie) and Epodes (Cucchiarelli), and Propertius’s four books (Hutchinson). It has also long been recognized that Horace’s first three satires form a grouping, the diatribe satires (e.g. Rudd).

The continuity and development in Horace’s attitudes towards the civil war from the Epodes to the Odes have received some scholarly attention (Grimal 1975, Wallace-Hadrill 1982, Nasta 2001). One aspect of this development has remained underappreciated, however, namely the poet’s expressions of anxiety about the pollution incurred from the civil war and the possibility of its expiation.