B. Fundamentals

In the last half-century the study of the first three books of Odes has been much advanced by the emergence of a series of important modern commentaries. Fraenkel's Horace (1957) appeared at much the same time as the last edition of the classic German Kiessling–Heinze commentary (1960), which had held the field for mid-scale scholarly exegesis since 1884. Both works in some sense presented the culmination of the humane and learned German scholarship which had dominated Europe since the middle of the nineteenth century, and are still necessary reading for today's Horatian scholars. The new era of modern commentary opened with the publication of Nisbet and Hubbard's commentary on the first book of Odes (1970). Its unparalleled depth of material on Roman cultural background, Greek and Latin literary models, and (sometimes) elements of later reception makes it still a treasure trove for scholars and interpreters; even if some of its literary judgements have not stood the test of time, it was an important step to make them and to question from time to time the perfection of a canonical writer. Their second volume, on Book 2, appeared in 1978; for the third volume, on Book 3 (2004), Niall Rudd replaced Margaret Hubbard as Robin Nisbet's collaborator, yielding a more compact texture. The current generation should be most grateful for this wave of work, which transforms the environment of a half-century ago.

These commentaries will not be quickly replaced, but their very depth and inclusivity has meant that there has been a need for shorter works for more practical use. Perhaps most significant here is Syndikus' running commentary on all the Odes (1972–3, third edition 2001), which (as already noted in Chapter I) consists of essays covering the key points in each poem, providing a clear and balanced interpretation of the crucial details and allusions. Important too are the personal and illuminating commentaries on the first three books of the Odes by David West (1995, 1998, 2002), which carry forward the lively and penetrating approach to the poet seen in his Reading Horace (West 1967): these present the text with parallel translation and running-commentary essays which focus on the key points of interpretation, always with stimulating ideas. The format of these volumes was owed to the similar commentary on Book 3 by Gordon Williams (1969), which was pioneering in this direction and is still worth consultation. Another work much used by students is the commentary on all the Odes by Kenneth Quinn (1980), embodying the principles of practical literary criticism for which he was an important standard-bearer in the 1960s and 1970s (best seen in his Latin Explorations [1963] which contains some interesting pieces on Horace); it provides some interesting reactions to the commentaries of Nisbet and Hubbard. Useful too are the Italian commentaries on individual odes by Ghiselli (1974, second edition 1983, on 1.1) and Mondin (1997, on 1.4), and on selected odes from the first two books by Baldo (2009).

C. Topics

On poetic technique, Collinge 1961 is an interesting formal analysis of the design of the Odes, stressing word order and sequence of thought as the two central and complementary techniques, with a considerable interest in imagery. His emphasis on patterning derives at least partly from linguistic theory, and can sometimes seem overdone; but it does rightly point to the importance of internal dynamics in the Odes and the complex formal principles of their construction. Commager's influential book (1962), perhaps the first major work on Horace fully to embody the impact of the New Criticism with its focus on the poetic artefact, presents the significance of the poems as lying primarily in their imagery and emotional colouring. Like Collinge, Commager is interested in structural principles on both small and large scale, especially elements of contrast and tension in both word and thought; he also argues for the presence of parody and allegory, and provides salutary arguments against the biographical approach which had been so powerful up to and including Fraenkel's work. Both these volumes, along with West 1967 and 1973, are also antidotes to the austere judgement of Nisbet and Hubbard that Horace's metaphors are ‘sparse and trite’,Footnote ² though their more literary articles allow more than this.Footnote ³ Another notable contribution in this general domain is the collection of articles by Pöschl (1970), providing a useful series of analyses of particular odes, stressing their symbolic and linguistic richness, and giving good models of dense and critical reading. Wit and humour have sometimes been underemphasized in the Odes: West 1967 and especially Connor 1987 provide good evidence for the contrary view.

Another area where there has been considerable debate is that of the ordering of the poems in the poetic books of the Odes. Nisbet and Hubbard had here provided some cautious remarks, pointing to the importance of opening and closing poems and sequences, central positioning, thematic groupings, and metrical arrangements, but adding that it was easy to be fanciful in this area.Footnote ⁴ Metrical sequences at least provide hard data: the fact that the so-called ‘parade odes’ 1.1–9 deploy nine different Greek lyric metres, using tighter rules than Horace's Greek predecessors,Footnote ⁵ is clearly a statement of technical mastery, just as the use of a wide range of lyric predecessors in the following 1.12–18 shows the poet's command of his inherited thematic material.Footnote ⁶ Dettmer 1983 posited a series of complex structural relationships between poems across Odes 1–3, many of which can be questioned, while both Santirocco 1986 and D. Porter 1987 argue that the poet has designed Odes 1–3 with the close attention to structure of a modern poet, with each poem having a detailed and particular relationship to the poems either side of it. Santirocco's scheme is more flexible than Porter's and perhaps more attractive, but there is always a danger of forced interpretation in the construction of such schemes and especially in claiming them for the poet's own intentions. Minarini 1989 provides an interesting survey of the various further schemes of arrangement.

There has also been much discussion of intra-poem structure, moving on from the work of Collinge. Quinn's 1980 commentary commendably suggests an architectural structure for each ode, and Nisbet and Hubbard themselves had been clear in their introduction that the odes were carefully planned with impressive symmetry and unity,Footnote ⁷ though this was not generally pursued in their detailed commentary. Syndikus 1995 looked at different modes of movement within Horace's odes, from personal endings through inversions, through reflections moving away from concrete situations, to ring composition; the last idea was also taken up by Tarrant 1995, who explored Horace's tendency to return to an idea in the final section of a poem.

The 1990s saw an explosion of interest in poetic closure in ancient literature.Footnote ⁸ In Horatian studies this had partly been anticipated in the work of Schrijvers (1973) on how to end an ode and in Esser's monograph (1976) on the ends of all the odes, but Horace was a key point of reference in the more subtly theorized work on poetic closure of Don Fowler.Footnote ⁹ Meanwhile, the opening poems of all Horace's books are touched on by Gold (1992) in the standard volume on classical poetic openings, and the middle points of Horatian poems also receive treatment in Harrison 2004, in the standard collection on poetic middles in antiquity, following the pioneering work of Moritz (1968).

A major work of Horatian criticism is Davis 1991, which put the idea of metapoetry (poetry symbolically talking about poetry) firmly on the map of scholarship on the Odes. Davis, a pupil of E. L. Bundy who had famously applied structured rhetorical criticism to the lyrics of Pindar, argues that ‘the composer of the Odes is primarily engaged in conveying ideas and philosophical insights in a manner that is rhetorically persuasive’.Footnote ¹⁰ Perhaps surprisingly, he avoids reference to the individuals who are in fact addressed and in theory urged to action in the poems, and I would still agree with Nisbet and Hubbard, whose interpretations of odes try to assign importance to the addressee where possible. Davis looks at many of Horace's odes in a metaphorical way as defining their own form of lyric: talk of the symposium is also talk of symposiastic poetry and of the poet's values and approach to life.Footnote ¹¹ Particularly attractive and convincing here is the interpretation of Odes 1.38, which for Nisbet and Hubbard is a rather unemphatic end to the first book; in Davis' hands the modest garland, symposium, and lifestyle become a symbol for the unambitious poetry of Horace, the restrained discourse of symposiastic lyric. Another important element stressed by Davis is what he calls ‘intergeneric badinage’ and ‘generic disavowal’ – witty contact between Horatian lyric and other genres, which are confronted and then rejected (epic, elegy, tragedy). Another advocate of metapoetry is Krasser (1995), who argues that the divine scenes narrated in the Odes often function as a symbol of the poet's own concerns, which can be both literary and political (and indeed both simultaneously), and that the odes related to Bacchus in particular (2.19 and 3.25) serve to express the poet's elevated status and interests. Edmunds 1992 has provided a paradigmatic reading of Odes 1.9 from the perspective of reception theory.

Scholars had long been aware of what Kroll 1924 had called Kreuzung der Gattungen, ‘the interbreeding of genres’, the ways in which Horace's odes and other Augustan poems combine and exploit elements of different literary kinds,Footnote ¹² but the work of Nisbet and Hubbard in carefully identifying in their introduction the various literary genres at play in the Odes constituted a stimulus to further work.Footnote ¹³ Conte 1980 and 1986 had shown how Virgil in particular had exploited this element, and its impact on the Odes was shown by a number of scholars including Lowrie 1997, who in an important volume showed how many of Horace's more extensive lyric pieces conducted a complex dialogue with narrative forms such as epic and epyllion. Harrison 2007b followed this by arguing that these contacts with other genres resulted in ‘generic enrichment’, the lyric texture of the odes being permanently expanded through incorporation of non-lyric ‘guest’ elements. Some of this thinking was certainly influenced by the approach to poetic genre in Cairns 1972, which, though it focused on ‘genres of content’ derived from rhetorical treatises, pursued the same kind of intergeneric analysis of Horatian odes among its many examples.

The relationship of Horace to Greek lyric has always been a key element in Horatian scholarship. Our knowledge and understanding of Greek lyric has increased considerably in recent decades, and with it a greater sense of Horace's interaction with its texts. Useful analyses are found in the handbooks to Horace: Hutchinson 2007 gives a good survey for the Cambridge Companion, but the articles in the Blackwell Companion are especially useful: Davis (2010b) himself argues with excellent illustrations that the non-iambic poetry of Archilochus is much more important for the odes than previously thought; Strauss Clay 2010 on Lesbian lyric models rightly suggests that Horace aimed to include all Greek lyric in his collection, and stresses the value of Alcaeus for the allegorical interpretation of 1.14 (well known) and the importance of Sappho for the erotics of 4.1 (less well known and very interesting); Race 2010 on Pindar contains excellent detailed analyses of a number of Pindarically coloured odes, stressing the encomiastic elements common to the two poets and containing a number of excellent links.

Important from the 1990s are Feeney 1993, which shows convincingly how Horace fulfils the ambition of Odes 1.1 in incorporating himself into the Greek lyric canon and uses all its variety in his own varied output, and Lowrie 1995, which persuasively argues how a sequence of poems in Book 1 symbolically uses material from a range of Greek poets to show the variety of their Horatian remodelling. Barchiesi 2000 has shown that the ordering of Greek lyric collections had important consequences for their reception by Horace, while Woodman 2002 has suggested that Sappho deserves more prominence as a model for Horace than she has traditionally been given and that Catullus' Sapphic imitations and their ambivalent approach to gender were a crucial element here. The discovery of new material by Simonides has similarly led to the reassessment of his impact on Horace's odes,Footnote ¹⁴ while a significant conference volume presents some important perspectives on a range of issues in the area of Horace and Greek lyric poetry.Footnote ¹⁵ There has also been some discussion of the so-called ‘motto’ technique, by which the opening of a Greek poem is alluded to at the opening of a Horatian poem;Footnote ¹⁶ older views used to suggest that the Latin poem then tended to go its own way, but we always need to remember that often the first line is all that survives for the Greek poem, and that its lost parts may also be echoed: Odes 1.37 is a case in point, where further elements such as the rare Homericizing simile of lines 17–20, as well as the famous opening (cf. Alcaeus PMG 332), may come from the Alcaean model.

The influence of the surviving Roman poets of the previous generation on the Odes has also been a continuing object of investigation: Putnam 2006 has provided a comprehensive treatment of Catullan intertexts in Horace, showing for example how the two Sapphic poems in Catullus are both echoed in Odes 1.22 (1.22.23 = Catullus 51.5; 1.22.5–8 ~ Catullus 11.2–9), while links in the more philosophical Odes 2 with Lucretius and his recent promotion of Epicurean ethical values in poetry have also been recently emphasized (Harrison 2013b). We can only guess at the allusions to lost poetry such as those apparently present in 2.9 to the elegist Valgius.Footnote ¹⁷

The politics of the Odes has been another central topic of discussion,Footnote ¹⁸ especially the complex Roman Odes (3.1–6), which have been intriguingly argued to be one single poem.Footnote ¹⁹ Witke 1983 provides a running commentary on all six odes, which provides interesting interpretations and a full bibliography, while Lowrie 1997 gives perhaps the most stimulating recent account, emphasizing how the poet preserves his independence in the cycle through an oblique and lyric approach to Augustan encomium. Fraenkel's narrative of Horace's gradual transformation across the Odes into an encomiastic laureate figure has naturally been complicated in the post-1960s period, with the emergence of quite different approaches to the relationship between poetry and power. One influential approach has been that of La Penna (1963), who prefers the aesthetic to the political in his analysis of the Odes; the real Horace is the thoughtful and urbane individual of the private odes, not the public uates of the political poetry, where La Penna finds a lack of authenticity of sentiment. An interesting contrast with La Penna is Doblhofer (1966, 1981), who followed Pöschl 1956 in stressing the importance of the literary tradition of panegyric in Horace's political odes, but combined this with Fraenkel's belief that Horace was fully sincere in his praises of the great man Augustus.

By contrast, more recent scholarship has stressed the gaps and slippages in the Odes' relationship with the Augustan regime. Lyne 1995 argues that Horace in the political odes of Book 1–3 mixes deference to the great with assertions of his own social and political status, and sometimes shows a mildly subversive independence, while Lowrie 1997 has, in her own words, explored ‘how Horace's decisions about his genre and self-imposed formal constraints give him an excuse for not delving into the central narrative of the age: civil war and Augustus’ accession to power'.Footnote ²⁰ Don Fowler (1995) has even argued that effective Augustan panegyric is in fact impossible for Horace given his self-consciously modest and individualist ethical and critical framework: ‘the inheritance of Epicurean and Stoic moral philosophy on which Horace draws throughout his work … particularly when conjoined with Callimachean poetics to produce a Callimachean ethics, makes it impossible to produce successful panegyric’.Footnote ²¹ Seager 1993, on the other hand, argued that Horace became disillusioned with Augustan foreign policy owing to his personal commitment to imperial expansion. The issue still continues to divide scholars, much as in the study of Virgil.

Closely linked with politics is the issue of patronage. Syme 1939 had influentially suggested that the poets wrote what was convenient to their political masters in this period; Fraenkel 1957 (ignoring Syme) presents a narrative of growing affection and alignment between poet and princeps, while White (1993, 2007) shows how the relationship between poet and patron was simply one variety of the complex framework of amicitia within Rome's privileged classes, in which the poets firmly stood. More recently, frameworks from anthropology have been creatively applied to this discussion: Bowditch (2001, 2010) persuasively suggests that Horace artfully presents his patronage relationship with Maecenas and Augustus as combining proper gratitude with the putative reciprocity of a gift economy, and as allowing for the negotiation of some independence alongside moments of anxiety. The relationship between Horace and Maecenas has naturally stood at the centre of this debate, with its characteristics both of friendship between like-minded equals and of power and obligation: Horace's odes to Maecenas have been well discussed by Santirocco and Lyne, among others.Footnote ²²

A key feature of the Odes is that they normally have an addressee. One of the signal services of the Nisbet–Hubbard and Nisbet–Rudd commentaries is that they take the status of the addressee seriously, and use the resources of the prosopographical approach to Roman history to track down detail on identifiable addressees, not always to universal assent. They crucially show that the addressee is not (as some have thought) window-dressing for universal lyric thoughts left over from an archaic context of performance, but a real determinant for the poem's content; West 1973 importantly pushes in the same direction. As Citroni argues in the most important modern account of the Odes' use of the addressee, this particularity need not exclude ethical generalizing, and indeed makes it more effective and accessible to the reader by pinning a moral precept to the vivid context of an individual.Footnote ²³ It is still important to remember that, ‘perhaps oftener than we know, Horace's choice of imagery and vocabulary is determined by the personality and interests of a poem's recipient’,Footnote ²⁴ especially as many modern treatments of the Odes tend to stress their poetic autonomy as lyric poems rather than their situatedness as artefacts produced in a certain cultural environment. This emphasis on the reader – both the original implied reader and his/her successors – follows the turn to the reconstructible reader rather than the less reconstructible author in the interpretation of literature generally. This is a less theorized version of reader-response theory, with which classical literary studies meshes nicely.Footnote ²⁵

Another major issue is that of performance. Until recently, most followed the view of Heinze 1923 that the references to lyres and singing in the Odes were simply fictional allusions to the tradition of archaic Greek lyric performance rather than indications of musical performance of the Odes.Footnote ²⁶ More recently, with increased interest in the element of performance and song in Greek and Roman literature,Footnote ²⁷ the issue of actual performance of the Odes has again been raised.Footnote ²⁸ Perhaps the most plausible approach is that of Lowrie 2009b, which suggests that too much is made of the contrast between the function of an original performance in a real historical context and that of a purely textual reading of a poem. In some poems at least, as she sees it, the idea of repeated performance is invoked as a symbol of repeated reading and social continuity, just like repeated textual copying on paper.

The erotic odes and their approach to gender have been more closely scrutinized in an age when feminist scholarship has come to bear on Latin literature.Footnote ²⁹ Lyne 1980 showed that in general Horace's erotic odes regard love as a playful activity for the youthful and leisured, and as a temporary and varied pastime, rather than as the obsession with a single lover seen in Roman elegy, though he did not allow for odes such as 3.9, which seem to cede something (however ironically) to the idea of lifelong commitment. An independent and stimulating, if sometimes eccentric, treatment of the love odes is offered by Nadeau 2008; Minadeo 1982 takes a more Freudian approach in analysing their sexual symbolism, opening up an important area, if occasionally too enthusiastically.

It is hard to deny that Horace ‘is a poet more for men than for women’:Footnote ³⁰ even considering the unliberated standards of the period, Horace gives less dignity and air-time to the female characters of the Odes than do the love elegists, though here he is perhaps following the literary traditions of archaic Greek lyric and Hellenistic epigram: too often they are types (Pyrrha [1.5] as femme fatale, Chloe [1.23] as timid adolescent, Lydia [1.25] as too old for the game of love). The degree of fictionality with which erotic objects are presented, a problem in Roman poetry since Catullus, has a particular prominence in Horace's Odes, where the love objects are many and their names are often punning or symbolic: Pyrrha's name reflects her attractive hair colour and ‘fiery’ (Greek pyrrhos) temperament, Chloe's her youth (Greek chloe, ‘green shoot’), Lydia's both her ethnic/servile origins and her role as ‘play-girl’ (ludere). There is clearly a balance here between literary function and realism.Footnote ³¹ A more nuanced and sophisticated approach is offered by Ancona 1994, which shows how the themes of time and desire identified by Lyne give us a world where, in the end, the male lover cannot control things and love remains an elusive target; more recently, in Ancona 2010, she has given us a useful sketch of Horace's female characters from this perspective.

The Odes' depiction of the symposium has been a renewed topic of interest following recent research into symposiastic culture generally.Footnote ³² In the field of Horatian studies this has given further support to the fresh interest in whether or not the odes were performed in such contexts,Footnote ³³ as well as in whether the kinds of symposium that the Odes depict were realistic for Augustan Rome.Footnote ³⁴ Most successful perhaps here are approaches which take a more symbolic view: the symposium can express not just moderate Epicurean hedonism but also a moderate style of poetry suitable for lyric, set in the middle ground between the heights of epic and tragedy and the lower forms of elegy and comedy.Footnote ³⁵ The details of the symposium can thus take on a metapoetical tinge, especially in Odes 1.38, where the presentation of a moderate symposium in the final brief poem of a long book surely reflects the author's Callimachean poetics of brevity.Footnote ³⁶ Wine itself can be symbolic of poetry through their shared patron Bacchus,Footnote ³⁷ who can push lyric to heights of inspiration;Footnote ³⁸ particular vintages can also recall small facts about the addressee.Footnote ³⁹

The philosophical perspective of the Odes has often been a subject of discussion. We are still without a major modern monograph on philosophy in Horace, partly because it is such a ubiquitous presence in all his work. Some see Horace as strongly concerned with philosophical didacticism, especially in ethics, while others view philosophy as simply part of the intellectual material of the time: Moles 2007 presents the best brief survey of the issue and discussion of other work, and full references are provided by Mariotti.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Odes in general present something of an eclectic world: the Epicurean elements of the erotic and symposiastic odes, with their emphasis on moderate pleasure, the undesirability of anxiety, and the brevity of life, clearly point towards an Epicurean perspective; in contrast, the more elevated world of the Roman Odes (3.1–6) takes on the Stoic ideas of virtue, duty, activism, and patriotism which spoke naturally to Roman culture, and holds up enduring national heroes such as Regulus as models for imitation. It is also clear that some odes (such as those to Maecenas) reflect the likely philosophical views of their addressee.

B. Fundamentals

As with the Odes, the study of the first book of Epistles has been much eased by the appearance of a modern English commentary, that of Mayer (1994), which is especially helpful on the work's Latinity and linguistic level; also useful is the extensive Italian running commentary by Fedeli (1997), and the fine book-length commentaries on individual poems by Horsfall (1993) and Citti (1994). We also now have a reliable general guide, Kilpatrick 1986, which provides a sympathetic and approachable reading of all the poems of the book, as well as being well aware of previous scholarship; this is now the first point of call for an extended treatment. For shorter accounts there are useful expert pieces in all three Horace Companions: Ferri 2007, Cucchiarelli 2010, W. Johnson 2010, and Fantham 2013a. W. Johnson 1993 provides a dense and wide-ranging personal reading of Epistles 1 as a search for different kinds of freedom, whether social, philosophical, or literary.

C. Topics

As noted above, the relationship of Epistles 1 to real letters has been a matter of scholarly discussion. Most would now agree that what we have here are highly artistic poems which make literary capital out of exploiting their resemblance to actual letters, just like Ovid's later Heroides and Tristia. Many of the topics of the letters match those of a real correspondence (1.2, 1.4, 1.10: letter to a friend from vacation or the country; 1.3, 1.8, 1.11, 1.15: letter to a friend on campaign or travels abroad; 1.5: letter of invitation; 1.6, 1.17, 1.18: letter of advice; 1.7: letter of excuse; 1.9, 1.12: letter of recommendation; 1.13: covering letter for gift of books; 1.14: letter to a member of staff), but the programmatic opening referring to Horace's past writing career (1.1), the reply to critics of his previous poetry (1.19), and the witty address to the book as a slave going abroad (1.20), alluding to the final poems of Odes 2.20 and 3.30,Footnote ⁴⁴ all show that this is a hexameter sermo poetry book in the same general tradition as the Satires. Recent work on epistolary frameworks in the English novelFootnote ⁴⁵ has been applied with fruitful results to Epistles 1 by De Pretis (2002), who nicely shows how these poems interact with many features of ancient letter-writing,Footnote ⁴⁶ to some extent deconstructing the dichotomy between ‘real’ and ‘literary’ letters. It is even possible to suggest that Horace's book obeys some of the precepts of ancient epistolographical theory.Footnote ⁴⁷

Literary models for letters existed in philosophical and satiric predecessors: Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus all had epistles attached to their names (some extant, in prose and lengthy), while some of Lucilius' satires were clearly verse letters of a kind, which provided a model for epistolary verse in hexameter sermo (e.g. fr. 186–9 W.), and Sp. Mummius, brother and legate to L. Mummius, the conqueror of Corinth in 146 bce, had sent back humorous verse letters to his friends at Rome (Cicero Att. 13.6.4). Horace may already have known Cicero's Ad familiares, an example of a carefully arranged corpus of letters addressed to friends by a major literary figure. And, of course, Odes 1–3 already provided a precedent for a poetry book in which individual items were addressed to and tailored for different friends, a number of whom recur in Epistles 1; apart from Maecenas in 1.1, 1.7, and 1.19, we have Albius (Tibullus) in 1.5 (cf. Odes 1.33), Septimius in 1.9 (cf. Odes 2.6), Fuscus in 1.10 (cf. Odes 1.22), Iccius in 1.12 (cf. Odes 1.29), and Quinctius in 1.16 (cf. Odes 2.11). As in the links with the Satires, there are considerable continuities between the Epistles and the Odes.

The philosophical content of the book has been a major issue: how seriously are we to take the apparent ‘conversion’ of the poet raised in Epistles 1.1.10–12, and his apparently programmatic statement of tentative eclecticism in the same poem, claiming to veer between the extremes of austere Stoicism and soft Aristippean hedonism (1.1.16–18)? Macleod 1979, undoubtedly influenced by the rather positivistic analysis of conversion narratives in later antiquity by Nock 1933, argued for a genuine turn to ethics in Horace's middle age, and for a genuine commitment both to the betterment of his addressees and to self-improvement. Most recent scholarship, however, has taken the programme for a poetic one rather than a personal one, pointing out that the crucial line condo et compono quae mox depromere possim (1.1.12) can mean either ‘I put in store and lay aside things to bring out in due course’ (i.e. gather wisdom for future use) or ‘I compose and put together things to bring out in due course’ (i.e. write poetry), and that Horace's philosophical interests in the Epistles, though differently framed in didactic terms, are consistent with those in the Odes and Satires. Mayer 1986 suggests a broad Socratic approach to the subject, and the same scholar has highlighted the collection's interest in such general social virtues as tact (Mayer 1985).

Nevertheless, this has not stopped scholars from proposing particular philosophical affiliations for the first book of Epistles, following the lead of McGann 1969's suggestions of links with Panaetian Stoicism.Footnote ⁴⁸ Traina 1991 has suggested that Horace's own doctrinal profession of moving between Stoicism and Aristippean hedonism is to be taken seriously (some might say that they are simply typical polar opposites stated rhetorically). Meanwhile, Moles 2002 and 2007 demonstrate well that allusion to a wide range of philosophical doctrines is crucial to Horace's book, that the poet's eclecticism constitutes a positive freedom rather than a weak vacillation, and that philosophical doctrines on such matters as the quiet life have a real impact on his existence. Ferri 1993, a suggestive and sensitive reading of the book, suggests that Horace is a moderate Epicurean, shying away from the high didacticism of Lucretius and practising a more personal and tentative form of his philosophy in a rustic retreat, the angulus or quiet corner; Armstrong 2004 stresses the links with the Epicurean poet and philosopher Philodemus. Most recently, Morrison 2007 has suggested that there is closer engagement with Lucretius in Epistles 1, the book mirroring the ‘plot’ of the didactic poem, with the poet as progressing pupil; it is certainly clear that the poet presents himself not as an established sage but as a developing fellow-seeker for truth in company with the reader.Footnote ⁴⁹