Our recent book chat on Horace' Satires really spurred my interest in Horace. I finally got hold of The Cambridge Companion to Horace (Cambridge Companions to Literature), of which Google Books has a limited preview.
The essays are excellent and do invite deeper study of the poet. Here is a Bryn Mawr Review:
Reviewed by Niall Rudd, University of Liverpool
Word count: 2475 words
This is a wide-ranging and successful collection, aimed at the
scholarly non-specialist. The contents are as follows: Introduction
(Harrison), Horace: Life and Chronology (Nisbet), Horatian
self-representations (Harrison), Horace and archaic Greek poetry
(Hutchinson), Horace and Hellenistic poetry (Thomas), Horace and Roman
literary history (Tarrant), Horace and Augustus (Lowrie), The Epodes:
Horace's Archilochus? (Watson), The Satires (Muecke), The Epistles
(Ferri), The Ars Poetica (Laird), Carmina: Odes and Carmen Saeculare
(Barchiesi), Philosophy and ethics (Moles), Gods and religion
(Griffin), Friendship, patronage and Horatian sociopoetics (White),
Wine and symposium (Davis), Erotics and gender (Oliensis), Town and
country (Harrison), Poetics and literary criticism (Rutherford), Style
and poetic texture (Harrison), Ancient receptions of Horace (Tarrant),
The reception of Horace in the Middle Ages (Friis-Jensen), in the
Renaissance (McGann), in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
(Money), and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Harrison).
This arrangement provides full coverage with a certain amount of
overlap. I offer comment on two general themes and then make some
passing observations, in all of which there will be some friendly
dissent; but a large measure of agreement may be taken for granted.
read on … and don't miss this response … and the response to the response
Niall Rudd himself is the translator of:
Horace, I, Odes and Epodes (Loeb Classical Library)
The Satires of Horace and Persius (Penguin Classics)
