When he first thought he had written his last ode, Horace signed off in a poem which asserted that his poetry was a monument more lasting than bronze: you can read and hear it here. Years later, this really is his final ode, and it is primarily political, rather than personal. The ancient tradition is that he wrote his fourth book of odes after a long break at the instigation of Augustus and his circle to celebrate the advantages that his régime had brought to Rome, and this certainly looks like the coda to a work of propaganda.
It would therefore be easy for a modern reader to be cynical about the sentiments expressed, but we should be cautious about that. Augustus’s ascendancy had brought peace after many decades of disastrous civil war, and the gratitude that Horace is channelling would have been genuinely felt by many. He and his audience would also have been acutely aware of Augustus’s reputation for modest living, his promotion of traditional Roman social values, his generosity in funding temple building and public works, and the respect he showed to many of the institutions of the old republican system even as he established himself as a new kind of national leader. Augustus was not the luxurious and narcissistic autocrat that some of his successors were. No doubt the kind of grateful remembrance that Horace describes at the end, of a virtuous man who served Rome well, would have had a strong appeal for him.
As much as any, this ode relies on the metre – Alcaics, which Horace used for the solemnest subjects. Its flow creates three powerful crescendos – in the list of Augustus’s achievements, culminating in his attempts at social reform, in the catalogue of enemies beyond the borders who, thanks to him, are no longer able to threaten Rome and in the idyllic scene at the end of domestic thanksgiving for him and his legendary ancestry.
The poem ends with a masterly bit of ambiguity. Augustus claimed descent from the mythical Trojan prince, Aeneas, son of Anchises and the Goddess Venus. Neither Aeneas nor Augustus is mentioned by name as the divinely-descended hero whose praises an idealised Roman family of the future will be singing, but there is not much doubt about which one we are meant primarily to have in mind.
See the illustrated blog post here.
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