The ancient life of Horace, probably by the historian Suetonius, tells us that Horace had not intended to make a further collection of his Odes – lyric poetry written drawing on Greek models and metres but in a new and distinctive Roman style – after issuing his first three books of them in 23 BCE, but was required to do so by the Emperor Augustus to glorify the imperial regime. Horace obliged, and threw the kitchen sink at the task in the penultimate ode of the book. The abjectness of the flattery jars and the poem is aesthetically and technically far from Horace’s best, but support for Augustus and the peace and stability that he brought following a grim period of civil wars is an important element in Horace’s works and in the wider story of how the rule of the Roman emperors came to be established. See his Latin and follow in English here.
The last tribute to Augustus
