While the satiric representation of city life and particularly Horace’s Satires have been already acknowledged as relevant contexts for Pliny’s Ep. 1.9, its Horatian ‘numerological parallel’, Sat. 1.9, has been left out of consideration so far. This chapter aims at filling in that gap and reading Pliny’s letter 1.9 against the background of Horace’s Sat. 1.9. As it shows, Pliny’s urban interactions go hand in hand with the generic interactions performed by his epistle: while the city forces Pliny to interact with various anonymous interlocutors (ille, ille, and ille) and thus disturbs his otium and undermines his personal autonomy, the Horatian intertext makes the epistle interact with the genre of satire which restricts its literary or generic autonomy. Due to the sinistri sermones (‘unkind insinuations’, and also ‘ominous satire’?, 1.9.5) so typical for the urbs, Pliny’s position gets dangerously close to the roles of both ‘Horace’ and the ‘Bore’ in Sat. 1.9, and his epistle starts to change into a kind of satiric representation of his life in Rome, where everybody is everybody’s ‘bore’. Pliny’s letter 1.9 is thus not only a laudatio of countryside otium, but also an intertextual tour de force that shows us the satirizing effects of urban interactions.

In letter 1.3 Pliny urges his friend Caninius Rufus to take advantage of the tranquillity of his villa to cultivate literary activity, for which (especially when it comes to poetry) Caninius shows aptitude. This exhortation is reinforced by and embellished with intertextual allusions: in particular Pliny evokes Hor. carm. 3.30. By alluding to this and other texts by Horace, Pliny builds an argument where the subject of posthumous memory is combined with that of the right to property. Unlike material goods – among them the villa – literary works are not passed on to heirs but forever remain the (intellectual) property of their authors.

On the Ides of March 44 BC, a momentous occasion took place in the history of Rome: Julius Caesar was assassinated in a crowded meeting of the senate.1 Almost immediately the scramble to define, legitimize, and record the act was set in motion. Marcus Junius Brutus, we are told, raised his dagger in the air and called on Cicero, presumably hoping he would be the ideal advocate for their deed; after all, Cicero had spoken out vigorously against tyranny in his published works, and this is the line they wanted to take now: that Caesar was a tyrant justly slain. For the same reason, the assassins took control over their image by rebranding themselves as ‘Liberators’ – that is, as the men who had freed Rome from Caesar’s rule. On the afternoon of the Ides, Brutus and Cassius attempted to address the people of Rome in a contio – a public meeting hastily convened in the forum. But there was little public support either then or in the meetings that followed.

In the last two centuries BC, with the Republic limping towards its end, the cultivated ruling elite began to lose its moral and political authority.1 Its members not only held themselves responsible for the so-called crisis of tradition, but at the same time also conveyed the impression of a loss of memory, as if all Romans were suffering from some kind of amnesia or identity crisis.2 In particular, institutional figures such as pontiffs and augurs, who had preserved Rome’s memory throughout its history, were accused of neglecting their duties and, by extension, of allowing ancient practices and values to slowly disappear.3 Accordingly, Cicero and Varro, both perfect representatives of this elite, employed recurrent terms such as neglect (neglegentia/neglegere), involuntary abandon (amittere), oblivion (oblivio), vanishing of institutions (evanescere), and ignorance (ignoratio/ignorare) to describe this critical loss of information; they depicted the citizenry of Rome (civitas) as disoriented and estranged, incapable of sharing any common knowledge or values.

In 36 BC, after the battle of Naulochus, Octavian decided to dedicate a temple to Apollo in memory of his victory over Sextus Pompeius and to have it built on the Palatine, on the spot where lightning had struck, which was taken to be a sign.1 The temple, however, would not be erected until 28 BC, after the battle of Actium, and would both commemorate Naulochus and Actium. Apollo was effectively linked to the battle of Actium: after his victory, Octavian restored the temple of Apollo at the entrance of the Ambracian Gulf; he also consecrated a sanctuary to Apollo on the site of his camp at Actium.

The boundaries between space and place remain unsettled in the founding imagination in three ways: as a space that is unbounded since there is nowhere that cannot potentially be converted into a place; as a space that is already an inhabited place; and as a place that is continually infused with new groups, thus potentially altering the familiarity of that place. This chapter explores the fate of the Samnites in the Roman imagination and the Native Americans in the American imagination as the wild Stranger who threatens place. The Samnite and the Native American are different from the corrosive Stranger, yet both play a part in the construction of its identity. The Greeks, Italians, and Gauls remained a flourishing aspect of Roman culture even as they were cast as Strangers to make room for Rome’s ownership of its past, just as the European and immigrant were cast similarly in the United States. But the Samnites and Native Americans were frozen in time, simultaneously rendered invisible and retained as an image of not just the conquest of wildness but the unifying and securing of a familiar space.

This chapter investigates how Faulkner uses the figure of eyes as inkwells in his depiction of Temple Drake in his sensationalist 1931 novel Sanctuary where she is raped with a corncob by an impotent gangster. The ink represents the various narratives men imagine themselves drawing from her – she is either too sexual or not sexual enough, the victim of a crime or its instigator. Faulkner wrote Requiem for a Nun (1951) as a sequel to Sanctuary that in many ways recapitulates this sadism, but he suggests the possibility that Temple herself could achieve a new kind of agency as a paperback writer in the manner of Faulkner penning these salacious novels and eventually profiting from them. The topic of masculinity in Faulkner’s work is also fraught terrain. In Soldiers’ Pay (1926), Margaret Powers surprises the young Robert Saunders swimming naked; his body, the narrator says, looked like the color of old paper. This marks on Robert’s body a female gaze. Throughout his career, Faulkner wrestled with the idea that writing connotes effeminacy over and against masculine action, but spiritually and physically strong women become connected with writing in ways that defy a strict gender binary.

Chapter 3 analyses the carpe diem motif in Horace from an innovative angle. It argues that we gain a better understanding of the motif if we read it against the background of Horace’s literary criticism in the Ars Poetica. In the Ars Poetica, Horace compares a language’s lexical development to leaves falling from a tree: while some words disappear, old ones return. Both the image of leaves and the understanding of time as cyclical are also part of Horace’s poetry of carpe diem. The chapter shows that the poems as well as the individual words of which they consist evoke present enjoyment. The chapter combines innovative work on Horace’s literary criticism with new interpretations of some of Horace’s most famous Odes, including the ode to Leuconoe, C. 1.11. The chapter reveals the importance of Horace’s choice of words for his poetics of presence.

Chapter 5 looks at passages of carpe diem within longer texts, such as satires of Horace and Juvenal, Petronius’ Satyrica and Vergil’s Georgics. As carpe diem poems are read and re-read, they become independent textual objects: they can be inserted just about anywhere but never lose their lyric splendour. Thus, Vergil applies the carpe diem motif to a context as humble as cattle-breeding, while both Seneca and Samuel Johnson ignore the context and treat this section as vatic wisdom. This chapter analyses how such excerpts relate to Latin satire, which bastardised other texts, to late antique anthologising, medieval florilegia, and early modern commonplace-books. The chapter also proposes a new model for understanding textual allusions and intertexts in classical literature. Finally, the chapter argues that clichés are important features of classical culture that are worthy of close study.

Chapters 2 analyses the carpe diem motif in Horace and pays particular attention to wine and calendars. In doing so, the chapter shows how Horace’s lyric is distinct from any lyric poem that was written in archaic Greece. Rich Romans possessed thousands of wine amphorae, and consular dates marked the age of each amphora. The chapter argues that this made wine storage places into huge drinkable calendars, in which the oldest wines were stored at the back, and the younger wines at the front. Every time Horace mentions vintage wines, he accesses this calendar. Time is expressed through wine: opening an old wine creates a moment of present enjoyment, which cannot be repeated. Yet, through vintage wines Horace also brings moments of the past to the present. The chapter combines close readings of some of Horace’s poems with research into epigraphical sources, and ultimately advances our understanding of Roman calendars and fasti.

The Epilogue includes a new interpretation of a late antique poem by Pentadius. The Epilogue also summarises the findings of the book.

Unlike some of the poetic forms discussed in subsequent chapters, which have a discernible ‘vogue’ and then fall out of fashion, the 'moralizing lyric' was consistently popular throughout the whole of the period covered by this book, and several are among the most widely circulated poems of early modernity. Key examples, composed between the 1530s and the early eighteenth century, from Wyatt to Watts (and indeed well beyond that, far beyond the scope of this book), recognizably belong together. But this most ostensibly English of forms has its roots in the translation and imitation of classical poetry, and emerged in the sixteenth century in both Latin and English, with influence moving in both directions. As a starting point for this book, it demonstrates what can be learnt by a serious attention to literary bilingualism: repeatedly, it is the Latin versions , including translations of the best-known English examples into Latin, which point to the classical texts (especially Horace, Seneca and Boethius) that underpin these poems, and the (broadly) Latin lyric context to which they were understood to belong by contemporary readers.

The debate about prosody in English, focused in particular upon the decorum of rhyme and the role of quantitative metrics, is a well-known feature of late Elizabethan literary criticism. But the intense interest in metrical matters at this period sits within, and emerges from, a geographically wider and chronologically precedent Latin phenomenon which has not been described. Vernacular poets engaged deeply with metrical questions because the contemporary use of Latin metre underwent very rapid change in the second half of the sixteenth century. Although it has passed almost unnoticed by scholarship, metrical creativity is one of the most astonishing features of the Latin poetry of this period. We cannot begin to appreciate the literary excitement caused by this poetry – and by its vernacular imitations, such as the remarkable metrical display of the Sidney psalter and Herbert's "Temple" – without understanding something of the music of Latin metre, and of the pace of Latin metrical innovation. This chapter offers a ‘big picture’ overview of Latin metrical innovation and experiment, as it reached and was received and taught in England, in the latter half of the sixteenth century

This chapter turns to a third influential facet of the Horatian lyric tradition: the development in English literary culture of the major political ode. Unlike moralizing lyric or psalm paraphrase, this form, of which the most famous early modern example is Andrew Marvell’s 1650 ‘Horatian Ode on Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, made a relatively late appearance in English poetry, with only scattered and marginally canonical examples (such as those by Jonson, Drayton and Fanshawe) prior to Marvell.

This chapter therefore seeks to answer two related questions. What are the defining features of the political ode in early modern England, taking into account the full panoply of the Latin (and, for these purposes, primarily neo-Latin) tradition? And how different do the landmarks of English achievement in this form – including poems by Jonson and Drayton as well as Marvell and Cowley – appear if read within the Latin literary context from which they emerged? It identifies several phases in the maturing of the formal panegyric ode as written in England in the latter sixteenth century before the form entered the vernacular.

The myth of Trojan origins of the Romans was given new life in the middle of the first century BCE, with the rise to power of Caesar and Augustus. There was more than one way to negotiate the relationship between Greece and Rome that the myth implied. One way was to continue privileging Romulus and the old foundational legend by marginalizing the myth of Trojan origins along with the antagonism between Greece and Rome that it implied (Horace). Another way was to neutralize the antagonism by claiming that the Trojans were in fact of Greek descent ( Dionysius of Halicarnassus). But it was also possible, rather than avoiding the antagonism, to bring it to the fore by presenting the Trojans and, by implication, the Romans as superior to the Greeks (Vergil). Vergil’s solution suited best the new geopolitical reality and the imperial ambitions of Rome. This transpires not only from the Aeneid but also from those imperial Greek authors who recognized that the traditional narrative of the Trojan War did not suit any longer the world in which they lived. The revised Trojan myth they promulgated brought about a thorough revision of the Trojan tradition, which survived into the early modern period.