Some ‘Central’ Thoughts on Horace's Odes

Abstract

As we read these lines we are inevitably reminded of the old adage ab love principium, . Horace here conforms to the ancient precept, as many other poets, at least since Pindar, had done before him. But in his works as a whole, and in the first collection of Odes as a whole, he begins not with Jupiter but with his patron Maecenas.3 Perhaps, therefore, Horace's own practice may help to justify the division of this Horatian article into two separate but interdependent parts of which the first takes Maecenas as its starting-point while the second is concerned with Jupiter and with Augustus, his vicegerent on earth.