Unity and Design in Horace's Odes

Horace’s first three books of <i>Odes</i> published together in 23 B.C. are a masterpiece of Augustan literature and the culmination of classical lyric. Matthew Santirocco provides the first new critical approach to them in English in more than two decades.<br/><br/>Drawing on recent works on ancient and modern poetry books and using several contemporary critical methodologies Santirocco reveals the <i>Odes</i> both as individual poems and as components in a larger poetic design. His reading of Horace demonstrates that the ensemble is itself an important context for understanding and appreciating the poetry.<br/><br/>Reconstructing the history of the ancient poetry book both Greek and Roman Santirocco challenges certain common assumptions about its origin and development. He argues that true parallels for the <i>Odes</i> are not to be found in the other Augustan books which are relatively homogeneous in content and form but in the heterogeneous collections of Hellenistic writers.<br/><br/><i>Odes I–III</i> comprise eighty–eight poems in twelve different meters and in tone and topic they vary widely. Avoiding the two extremes of past scholarship which either has searched for a single underlying unity or else has denied any meaningful design Santirocco uncovers a variety of both static and dynamic structures and shows their relevance to the literary interpretation of the poems at all levels. Ultimately the composition of a poem and the disposition of the group are shown to be analogous activities. <i>Odes I–III</i> do not constitute a medley of discrete poems but instead approximate the unity of a single ode.