The social location of Horace's poems: Landscape, literary talks, friendship, and lyric monuments

In this dissertation I explore the relation between Horace's poems and the social and cultural contexts of their production. Horace composed his poems during the turbulent transition from the Republic to Principate, a period of rapid imperial conquest and economic expansion which yielded spectacular wealth for the beneficiaries of empire and shifted Roman social and political identities. In the ensuing contests over moral values and changing social boundaries, poetry played a vital role as a medium for elite self-positioning and distinction. Chapter 1 outlines the contexts and methods. Chapter 2 on Rome and the Sabine 'farm' looks at how landscape, both as a poetic construct and material reality underwritten by empire, configures elite self-identity in the ways the elite perceived themselves and their place in the social hierarchy and in the image they sought to project to society. Landscape representation thus refracts a nexus of values and benefits associated with the experience of otium, villa economy, and the relation between city and country. Chapter 2 examines the literary epistles to Augustus and the young aristocratic Florus, in which Horace presents the poet as the cultural spokesman for the elite and instructor of the young. In negotiating a privileged place for poets, Horace implicates written poetry in the work of empire by framing his poems in the context of Roman military conquest and Augustus' political achievements as commemorated in the Res Gestae . Chapter 3 analyzes the role of poetry in acculturating the young elite into a system of shared values and practices via amicitia. In the competition for status and social advancement, Horace's poems help to define the contours of amicitia, serving to maintain social cohesion within the established elite and contest the ambition of rival claimants to power. Poetry thus intervenes in sustaining an exclusive network of support and obligations, circulating economic and social goods among amid. Chapter 4 explores how Horace assimilates the construction of his lyric monumentum to monumental architecture and ritual practices through which the elite assert their dominance and mediate their relation to society as a whole, as well as preserve the communal memory of Rome.