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The Praise Singer: Horace Censorinus and Odes 4. 8*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2012

S. J. Harrison
Affiliation:
Corpus Christi College, Oxford

Extract

The criticism of the eighth ode of Horace's fourth book has been bedevilled by three major uncertainties: probable interpolation in its text, confusion about the identity of its addressee, and doubt as to its literary quality.1 These issues will form the central concerns of this discussion. Earlier critics have been consistently scathing in their view of Odes. 4. 8: some editors have even gone so far as to deny Horatian authorship,2 many have made dismissive judgements, following the verdict of Wilamowitz (‘really very bad’), and a recent commentator has classed 4. 8 as ‘the least lyrical of the Odes … much of it, indeed, reads like prose—limpid, logical, but pedestrian’.3 I shall not claim that the poem is a previously unacknowledged masterpiece of inspiration, but that it has been underestimated as a poetic artefact: as a careful analysis will show, it is a well-conceived, well-finished and allusive piece, relevant to its addressee and cohering well both with the following ode to Lollius and with the purposes of Book 4 as a whole.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © S. J. Harrison 1990. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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