Horace’s Myrtle Crowns

Kachuck, Aaron
(2025) Festschrift for Philip Hardie — ISBN: [9780187765589], submitted

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This article argues that Horace’s struggle with the Dog Days of summer animates his work from his Satires and Epodes through his Odes. Following tours of the canicule from Homer to Claudian, and in Horace’s Satires and Epodes, it addresses the mystery of the ‘late rose’ in Horace’s Persicos odi (Odes 1.38) to present what we might call Horace’s Fasti, the calendrical rhythms that stimulate his poetic imagination, frame his cosmic politics, and structure his oeuvre. Bridging the gap between Roman ritual and Latin literature, it shows how Rome’s ‘ritual archive’, to use Renaud Gagné’s term, was, for Horace, a thesaurus of the imagination, and a further source of intertexts that enrich, and complicate, his works. Multiple temporal rhythms—seasonal, climactic, vegetal, cultic, astrological—form this treasure-house, and help Horace, fortune’s child, Fortuna’s, triumph over Jupiter, bedecked in peaceful myrtle and vaunting laurel.
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Kachuck, A. (2025). Horace’s Myrtle Crowns. In Collectif d’auteurs (ed.), Festschrift for Philip Hardie. De Gruyter.