Breastplate Of The Statue Of Augustus From Prima Porta (early first century A.D.). The imagery of the reliefs is closely
related to that of Horace's Carmen saeculare, composed for the Secular Games of 17 B.C. At the centre is depicted the
recovery of the standards captured by the Parthians at the battle of Carrhae, and at the lower left and right are Apollo and
Diana, the deities addressed by Horace in his hymn.
Not for long, or he was not allowed to be for long. The second Augustan period is upon us. For the Secular Games of the year
17 B.C., the games to mark the New Age, Horace writes the public hymn, the Carmen saeculare. Next he is induced under the
direct patronage of Augustus to compose a fourth book of Odes containing, as I have said, courtly poems directly panegyrical
of the Emperor and his family. On the other hand-a gesture of conscious or unconscious self-assertion-the book contains
some of Horace's finest poetry of love and wine. The very first poem movingly evokes Horace in love, in love again at fifty,
in love with a boy called Ligurinus. Note that name. For once the love-object in a Horatian homosexual love poem does not
have a Greek name; so he is neither cloaked in disguise nor assigned to an acceptably lowly class. Ligurinus is a real Roman
cognomen. The poem is assertively personal-and very beautiful. Another beautiful poem of love and wine, also affectingly
personal, is poem 11; and, satisfyingly, it is built round the birthday of the once great figure of Maecenas.
I do not think that Horace took up his public pen again totally willingly in this second Augustan period; but perhaps he was
not totally unwilling. The reasons for his retirement are not, as I have said, perspicuous, and his description of poetry as
frivolity was disingenuous. Certainly he came to be proud of the Carmen saeculare. And his Epistle to Augustus (2. 1, of 12 B.
C.) asserts once more the educative function of the poet and the power of poetry to immortalize. An interesting, incidental
fact: in this epistle Horace implicitly argues for classic status to be accorded the Augustan poets: Virgil, the now lost Varius,
and presumably himself. Over the love elegists a significant veil of silence is drawn: Ovid was, for example, by now the rage,
but there is not a word on him. Finally, the Ars Poetica of the last years of his life shows him seriously occupied with poetry
as a serious business, both entertaining and educative.
Propertius