Poetic Discourse, Rhetoric, and Augustus in Horace's Regulus Ode (Hor. Carm. 3.5)

Abstract

Horace's fifth Roman Ode has often been taken as a push for war with Parthia and thus interpreted as an uncomfortable insertion of Horace's voice into politics. This article argues for a profoundly different take on the ode's rhetoric and thus on its political relevance. The analysis brings to bear a theoretical perspective recoverable from ancient rhetorical handbooks, which saw analogy, exemplarity, and some form of visual comparison as three aspects of a single argumentative or stylistic figure: comparison. The ode—structured as a movement through these forms of comparison—aims at nothing less than the articulation of a vision of Rome's, and Augustus’, place in the establishment of a new cosmic order along with a return to the old Roman virtues. Within the ode, oratorical figures of style and thought work together with a poetic strategy—Horace's deployment of an intricate and previously undetected ring composition—to produce meaning on many levels, embracing aesthetic and literary practices, rhetorical and ancient theoretical approaches, and political, religious and cosmological, and philosophical concerns.