Perceptions of Horace: A Roman Poet and his Readers

by L. B. T. Houghton, Maria Wyke

Overview

Throughout his work, the Roman poet Horace displays many, sometimes conflicting, faces: these include dutiful son, expert lover, gentleman farmer, man about town, outsider, poet laureate, sharp satirist and measured moraliser. This book features a wide array of essays by an international team of scholars from a number of different academic disciplines, each one shedding new light on aspects of Horace's poetry and its later reception in literature, art and scholarship from antiquity to the present day. In particular, the collection seeks to investigate the fortunes of 'Horace' both as a literary personality and as a uniquely varied textual corpus of enormous importance to western culture. The poems shape an author to suit his poetic aims; readers reshape that author to suit their own aesthetic, social and political needs. Studying these various versions of Horace and their interaction illuminates the author, his poetry and his readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521765084
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/03/2009
Pages:	380
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

L. B. T. Houghton is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Glasgow. He has contributed articles, notes and reviews to many classical journals, and contributed chapters to volumes on Ennius, the Renaissance, and memory and mourning in Ancient Rome.

Maria Wyke is Professor (and Chair) of Latin at University College London. Previous books include The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations (2002), Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema and History (1997) and Caesar: A Life in Western Culture (2007).

Table of Contents

Introduction: a Roman poet and his readers L. B. T. Houghton and Maria Wyke; 1. Becoming an authority: Horace on his own reception Denis Feeney; 2. The ends of the beginning: Horace, Satires 1 Emily Gowers; 3. Horace's Bacchic poetics Alessandro Schiesaro; 4. Horace: critics, canons and canonicity J. S. C. Eidinow; 5. Laying down the law: Horace's reflection in his sententiae Martin Dinter; 6. Social status and the authorial personae of Horace and Vitruvius Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols; 7. Writing to the emperor: Horace's presence in Ovid's Tristia 2 Jennifer Ingleheart; 8. Horace, Suetonius, and the Lives of the Greek poets Barbara Graziosi; 9. Two letters to Horace: Petrarch and Andrew Lang L. B. T. Houghton; 10. Horace and learned ladies Jane Stevenson; 11. Vivere secundum Horatium: Otto Vaenius' Emblemata Horatiana Roland Mayer; 12. The poet's voice: allusive dialogue in Ben Jonson's Horatian poetry V. A. Moul; 13. Theme and variation: Horace in Pope's correspondence Niall Rudd; 14. Appropriating Horace in eighteenth-century France Russell Goulbourne; 15. Horace and eighteenth-century commentary Penelope Wilson; 16. Horace and the Victorians Stephen Harrison; 17. A late flowering of English Alcaics John Talbot.