Power and Impotence in Horace's Epodes

Abstract

Horace's Epodes are seldom considered as a whole. On the face of it, there would seem to be good reason for this fact. It is generally agreed that the poems were written over a period of ten years (from after Philippi to after Actium), during which time there was a great deal of change in the Roman world and in Horace's circumstances. Furthermore, the collection contains a considerable diversity of themes, genres and what, for lack of a better expression, one must call levels of reality. The Archilochean persona maintained in several of the poems is a unifying factor, of course, but it has not seemed pervasive enough to have allowed a systematic interpretation of the whole collection, and even within the Archilochean group scholars have tended to separate the political poems from the invective poems.3 Attempts to find some principle of arrangement for the collection have not been very enlightening, since they have rarely amounted to more than classifying each of the poems by type or theme (usually a completely unsystematic mixture of both), and then putting them into groups, which reveals structural patterns that have a no more than decorative function, or else simply displays Horace's penchant for variatio.