education

Carmen Saeculare: Purpose and Historical Importance. It is easy to misunderstand the Carmen Saeculare if we approach it as we would any other poem by Horace. Read silently on a page, it can appear formal, restrained, even distant. Yet this reaction misses the most important fact about the poem: it was never meant to live…

The Horatian work of ca. 18 B.C. belongs to a moment in Roman history when literature was being asked to do something unusual: to help a society believe in itself again. Rome had survived civil war, political betrayal, and decades of instability. By the late first century B.C., exhaustion was widespread, not only among citizens…