Anne
ROGERSON Heroes Today: Creating a Champion with Horace
(Odes 4.4)
In
15 BC Drusus and Tiberius Nero waged war in the Alps.
Did Augustus ask for poetic celebration of his stepsons'
victories? Horace's Odes 4.4 begins with an evocation of
the awed reaction of the Alpine tribes they defeated. Is
Odes 4.4 Horace's response to such a request? And, if so,
what kind of attitude towards conquest and empire does the poem
betray? This paper proposes that Odes 4.4 is not
straightforwardly propagandist. Rather than offering eulogy (or
veiled criticism) of Drusus and Tiberius
and their recent successes in the Alps, Horace uses this
occasion to explore the making of Roman heroes. Odes 4.4, I
argue, is a poem about the education and development of Roman
champions: it reflects on the creation of a heroic image, instead
of simply delivering one on demand.
Questions
about the propagandist nature of Odes 4.4 have shaped
debate about Horace's lyric at least since Suetonius
claimed that the whole fourth book of Horatian
Odes was produced under imperial compulsion. My paper
revises previous studies of the implications of writing in
response to imperial command, revealing how Horace's poem helps us
to think about the image-making of Augustan Rome. Modern readings
of Odes 4.4 have stressed the poem's Virgilian tension,
arguing that Horace's celebratory account of imperial victory is
complicated by awareness of the suffering required to make such
success possible. I contend that this tension creates a space for
the audience to examine the foundations and formation of Roman
heroism. And I suggest further that this poem about modern Roman
heroism, about education and innate virtue, is equally interested
in the way in which heroes are viewed as it is in the way in which
they are created.
The
multiple points of view that Horace offers us on the Roman heroes
whose successes are reflected upon in Odes 4.4 provides
strong encouragement to readers to consider how their own view of Drusus and his brother has been shaped.
Evocations of the historical past and echoes of epic ñ the
twin foundations of much Augustan myth-making ñ combine in
this poem to build a picture of a modern hero. So when Horace
teaches us in Odes 4.4 how to make an Augustan hero, and shows us these heroes
from more than one perspective, he offers us lyric as a tool to
think with about the propaganda of his time. Odes
4.4 is not a propagandist exercise, as some have
argued, but a reasoned deconstruction of the complex image-making
of Augustan Rome.