Horace and Politics

Abstract

It seems to me that reading Horace’s poetry with Housman’s double irony in mind helps us to understand the way in which he combines public and private elements. The private does not “sap” the public, as some recent commentators have suggested:¹ rather, each element retains its own integrity and seriousness. The private voice might sometimes look as though it were intended to undermine the public, but in fact we have to do with a double irony, and the relation between the public and private is one of juxtaposition and contextualization. Neither voice is meant to drown the other; the voices—at least in Horace’s best political poetry—are held in balance. Nisbet and Hubbard tell us that Horace is “an unpolitical poet” ([1], p. xii): given that he did write a number of political poems, they presumably mean that his political poetry is unsuccessful.² That is undeniably a reasonable judgment to make about some of Horace’s political poetry. But it does not apply to all, not, for example, to the ode that Horace wrote (III, 14) to celebrate Augustus’s return to Rome in 24 BCE from his Spanish campaign.