VI Horatian style and literary texture

Abstract

In this section I will briefly survey the literature on Horatian poetic style, and then offer some detailed translations and analyses of particular poems from different genres to try to show how Horatian expression works on the page, especially in terms of intertextuality, structural arrangement, and word order. Horace's exceptionally dense and refined poetic texture has been recognized as such since antiquity: Ovid (Tristia 4.10.50) refers to Horace's carmina culta (‘cultured poems’), and Petronius (118.5) to his curiosa felicitas (‘painstaking felicity of style’), while Quintilian (10.1.96) sees him as uerbis felicissime audax (‘most felicitously bold in expression’). All these comments are likely to refer primarily to the Odes, but can be applied in general to Horace's style through different genres. For the basic facts of Horatian diction and syntax, Bo 1960 remains unrivalled in its sheer level of detail; for more recent overviews and useful scholarly bibliography on Horatian poetic style see the excellent Muecke 1997 and the rest of the major section on style of which it forms the chief part in the Enciclopedia oraziana (Mariotti 1996–8), the list of publications in the area up to 2006 by Holzberg, and the helpful survey of the development of Horace's style and metrical practice in Knox 2013. On the metres of the Odes, the introductory section in Nisbet and Hubbard 1970 remains a reliable guide; for some more adventurous attempts to relate metre to literary content in Horace see Morgan 2010. The elaborate and expressive word order of the Odes is the topic of Nisbet 1999. But the best resources for the analysis of Horatian style and metre are the recent detailed commentaries on Horace's works (listed in Chapter I, section 3), which are closely used in what follows.