Horace’s Myrtle Crown and the Poet’s Bloodless Triumphs

What you will hear today is a small part of a book that I am writing on The Ritual Forms of Narrative in the Age of Virgil. A section of this book aims to show how Rome’s ritual calendar helped structure a great deal of Latin poetry—naturally, we think of such structures when considering Ovid’s Fasti, an obviously calendrical poem. One of the things I demonstrate is that such structures were far more important, and ubiquitous, than ever suspected, and that the divide between the study of literature and religion, and certain inherited ideologies of historical interpretation, not least confessional battles in post-Reformation Europe, are largely responsible for this fact. Today, I will be discussing Horace’s war against the Canicule, the hottest season of the year, thus named because it is when the Canis, the dog-star, Sirius, rises, in antiquity around what we would call 17 July. To do so, we will do a close reading of the short and unassuming final poem of his first book of Odes; we will then use this as a way to open up new interpretations of Horace’s life’s work, as well as to expose a part of what I call, in my book, Horace’s Fasti.