Horace

3 units

This course examines Roman poetry that illuminates ancient and still-influential ideas about the functions of literature. Horace's monumental Ars Poetica and his other literary-critical works will be the major texts. These works convey the complexity of contemporary debates about literature's role in society and history and about the merits of various genres (epic, tragedy, comedy, satire, epigram). Readings in secondary sources will help to fill out the picture of Horace's career and of the climate of literary production in early Imperial Rome.