Caesar’s Mistakes and Horace’s Errores

Abstract

Although the book’s main concern is with Latin poetry of the Republic proper, Chapter 5 extends its analysis into the “Triumviral Period” (44–29 BCE) and thus closer to the Augustan Age. As Rome fell into a new round of bloody civil conflicts through which two essentially monarchic rulers—first Julius Caesar and then Octavian/Augustus—sought dominion over the whole empire, the poetic conceit of making one’s way through disorienting circumstances became freighted with new meaning. Vergil in the Aeneid was not the only poet to adopt this conceit in response to these events. But recognizing as much requires a different understanding of how the theme of becoming lost relates to the expansion of Roman power and the interplay between Greek and Roman culture. Rather than use the motif to figure travel in far-flung areas of the empire, Horace’s Satires, book 1, with its Epicurean satirist personae vulnerable to some of the same charges of queer attitudes and behaviors as Lucretius, limits its ramblings geographically to Rome and Italy. In doing so, however, it makes them into a means of suggesting the stable—and potentially universal—power of the man already dominant in the whole of the Western empire: Octavian. Horace’s presentation involves a skillful handling of Octavian’s links to the divine, particularly the divinity of his deceased adoptive father, Julius Caesar, whose worship Octavian himself had already introduced into state-sponsored cult. Satires 1 thus reveals awareness of the empire-wide projection of power on which Octavian’s position of leadership was coming to depend.