John Beveridge, the Neo-Latin Horatian Ode and the Narrative of British Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century North America

Abstract

The composition of Neo-Latin poetry was integral to the bilingual literary culture of eighteenth-century Britain, and the practice was taken by the British colonists to America. Yet the role of this Neo-Latin verse in the new political, religious and social setting of early North America has remained largely unexplored. This article examines the Latin Horatian odes published by the colonial poet John Beveridge in his Epistolae familiares (Philadelphia, 1765), a collection of Latin verse epistles. Beveridge used his Latin poetry to not only describe but justify British colonisation of North America. His appropriation of Horatian models for the colonial experience was influenced by the later reception of Horace’s poems which attributed religious and political significance to them – in order to reflect the moral, religious and cultural superiority of Christian Europeans in America. By exploring the cultural symbolism of Latin poetry, this article enables a greater understanding of the place of Neo-Latin literature in the colonial endeavour to Anglicize, Europeanize and Christianize America.