Epilogue

Abstract The Epilogue summarizes the core arguments of the book and explores how the main points of this study could be extended by offering a succinct reading of Horace’s Odes 4. Horace’s final book of lyric poetry is underpinned by tensions between the unstoppable passage of time and the desire for timelessness, between absence and presence, finality and perpetuity. It will be argued that the poet’s depiction of Augustus’ divinity in Odes 4.5 encapsulates these tensions, through which Horace subtly raises the issue that the aetas of Augustus—both his biological age and the political concept of ‘the age of Augustus’ (tua, Caesar, aetas, 4.15.4)—will have to come to an end at some point. As Horace frames the divinization of Augustus as the symbolic culmination of a glorious historical process on the one hand, and the transitional point to a future without Augustus on the other, Odes 4 renders apparent the problem of identifying the peace and stability of Rome with the life of Augustus—the problem of putting the hopes and fears of the state in one mortal man.