Horatian Readings

poetic and Literary Texture

Harrison, Stephen

This volume collects eighteen pieces on Horace written over the last two decades. They share a common interest in the close reading of Horace’s poems, especially of the Odes, and are intended to stand alongside the more formal analyses in my commentary on Odes 2 (2017) and the readings of Horatian poems in my monograph on generic enrichment (2007).
These pieces share a number of particular concerns linked to issues prominent in classical scholarship over the period: literary career criticism, intratextuality, intertextual interaction with other poets and genres, while a further topic is the perennial question of Horace’s negotiation of the major political issues of his time and the nature of his engagement with the Augustan regime. Like all the Augustan poets, Horace was writing for a Roman readership which had been sharply divided by the internecine wars of the 40s and 30s BCE, and his work can express the perspective of the defeated as well as that of the victors, just as Vergil’s does in the Aeneid. The volume emphasises the original cultural context (and readers) of the poems, and seeks to present Horace’s poetry with the apparatus needed for its modern literary study by scholars and advanced students.