Conquest and Immortality in Horace’s Odes

Abstract This chapter focuses on Horace’s discussions of Augustus’ divinization in the first three books of the Odes. It interprets them within the broader context of Roman imperialism and the Augustan regime’s attempt to control the political narrative of post-civil war Rome. This chapter offers a two-pronged argument. Firstly, it argues that Horace’s presentation of Augustus’ divinization draws attention to the extent to which the discourse of Rome’s remarkable transformation—from being mired in civil strife to pacifying the world again—has contributed to Augustan power. While the Odes on the whole present Augustus’ divine mission as mirroring the expansion of Roman imperial authority, the ways in which Horace renders ambiguous the distinctions between triumph and defeat, Roman and foreign, and self and other in many of his poems obliquely contest the regime’s ideological drive, especially its reinvention of civil war as foreign conflict. The second prong of the argument is that the issue of Augustus’ divinization is used by Horace as a proxy to discuss the incompatibility between Horatian lyric and Augustan panegyric—between creative authority and political allegiance. In the ‘Bacchic Odes’ (2.7, 2.19, 3.25) and the ‘Roman Odes’ (3.1–6) especially, Horace presents the topic of Augustus’ divinization as something that tests both the limits of his lyric poetry and his credentials as a nationalistic vates. In this way, Horace conveys that even his most panegyrical poems are underpinned by a tension between accepting regime’s self-mythologizing discourse and holding onto his artistic and ideological autonomy.