Horace's first 3 books of Odes, released jointly in 23 B.C., are a masterpiece of Augustan literature and the fruits of classical lyric. Matthew Santirocco presents the 1st new serious method of them in English in additional than decades.

Drawing on contemporary works on old and sleek poetry books and utilizing numerous modern serious methodologies, Santirocco unearths the Odes either as person poems and as parts in a bigger poetic layout. His interpreting of Horace demonstrates that the ensemble is itself an incredible context for figuring out and appreciating the poetry.

Reconstructing the historical past of the traditional poetry booklet, either Greek and Roman, Santirocco demanding situations definite universal assumptions approximately its foundation and improvement. He argues that real parallels for the Odes should not to be present in the opposite Augustan books, that are quite homogeneous in content material and shape, yet within the heterogeneous collections of Hellenistic writers.

Odes I-III include eighty-eight poems in twelve varied meters, and in tone and subject they range greatly. warding off the 2 extremes of prior scholarship, which both has hunted for a unmarried underlying cohesion in any other case has denied any significant layout, Santirocco uncovers quite a few either static and dynamic constructions and indicates their relevance to the literary interpretation of the poems in any respect degrees. finally, the composition of a poem and the disposition of the crowd are proven to be analogous actions. Odes I-III don't represent a medley of discrete poems yet, as an alternative, approximate the team spirit of a unmarried ode.