Cult and Personality in Horace

Abstract

It was the main contention of a book published a few years ago that the material and the attitudes which we find in the works of the Augustan poets are intimately connected with the realities of Roman life. The poems are not to be amputated, as too often happens, from the society in which they were produced and enjoyed. Literature is not a balloon floating in the air, but a plant with its roots firmly fixed in the earth. It was argued there that ‘the same material can be observed at different levels of stylisation in different poetical contexts’, and that we can learn a great deal about the poems and their authors by following the ways in which they employ and vary the same subject matter. That was illustrated in connection with such elements of the life of pleasure as drinking and singing, bathing and nakedness; and also with the topic of death. Those ideas are carried further in this paper, which extends that approach to another area: that of religious cult. It concentrates on the poet Horace and aims to show how he uses and varies the theme of religious festivals and ceremonies, and what contrasts are offered by the work of Propertius and Ovid.