This module surveys the poetry of Horace as key for our understanding of the relationship between poets and patrons under Augustus. By looking at the entirety of Horace’s production, we will analyse the interaction between his own poetic authorship and authority and the possibly authoritarian constraints of the Augustan regime as it evolved during the years of Horace’s life. The module will also provide a broad understanding of the main political theories of authoritarianism and totalitarianism as well as some key modes of reading Latin literary texts.
Each week, the students are expected to come to the lecture having read the ‘Recommended readings’, as well as the ‘texts to read in translation ahead of the lecture’. Each lecture will reserve the last 40 mins for a seminar in which the students, facilitated and led by the lecturer, will discuss said texts and the recommended readings. The ‘Further readings’ are meant to stimulate and encourage the students to engage with the larger scholarly debate on the themes covered each week. Further bibliography is always available upon request (Come and ask me!).
For the Latin text seminar, each week students are expected to prepare the texts listed for the language seminar with the aid of Harrison’s commentary, engaging with the formal (grammatical, stylistic and rhetorical) and thematic aspects of the poems. The seminars will aim to discuss the more prominent passages and the eventual, trickier, parts. The students are required to have attempted a translation, as this is still the best way to understand a text in its more essential components, and a gateway to thorough and aware discussions on it.