Writing Down Epic: Another Homeric Allusion in Horace Odes 1.6

Abstract

This note sheds new light on Horace’s translation of the opening of the Iliad at Odes 1.6. It is frequently noted that Horace’s parodic translation turns Achilles’ epic wrath into a bathetic “feeling of annoyance” (stomachus). Yet this note argues that Horace is indebted here also to Odyssey Book 17, which already included a similarly bathetic take on the opening of the Iliad. As Horace refuses to write epic poetry in Odes 1.6, he writes anti-epic poetry that is paradoxically at least as Homeric as any epic poem.