Horace and Cicero: poets with a philosophic bent, Republicans who came down on the losing side of civil war in the wake of Caesar's assassination but nevertheless admired the man who became Augustus, authors preoccupied with their own immortality and who thought hard about art's commemorative task. Augustus and Cicero: statesmen with a literary bent, whose prose was more successful than their poetry, who wrote accounts of their own accomplishments, and took especial pride in saving the state from civil disturbance, who were hailed as pater patriae and thought of themselves as new founders, but whose role in bringing peace came with the terrible price of putting Roman citizens to death without trial. My tendentious descriptions emphasise the many similarities linking Horace, Cicero, and Augustus despite all the differences: Cicero's poetry was an afterthought to his political career; the death of the Catilinarians could be defended in legal terms while the triumviral proscriptions could not; Augustus succeeded where Cicero failed.

I will argue that Cicero triangulates the relation of Horace to Augustus in Epist. 2.1. Horace cites Cicero's poetry in declining to write the princeps' res gestae:

Horace's line also shares a verbal similarity with Augustus' own Res gestae. Augustus says me principe (13) in talking about the closing of the gates of Janus, mentioned in the previous line of Horace's epistle – the pronoun is Cicero's, the noun Horace's.