Chapter 11 - Powerful Presences: Horace’s Carmen Saeculare and Hellenistic Choral Traditions

Summary

In this paper D’Alessio explores the reception of the ideology of choral performance in Horace’s Carmen Saeculare arguing that, contrary to current scholarly consensus, it is profoundly indebted to Hellenistic choral theory and practice, and, more particularly, to its crucial, but often overlooked configuration in Callimachus. D’Alessio’s interpretation starts from an analysis of the relationship between divine ‘presence’, political power, and the ‘present’ of poetry in the Epistle to Augustus, moving to the centrality of choral performance as the site for recognizing and legitimizing divine presence and staging political power relations in Hellenistic choral poetry and in Callimachus’ Hymns, where, as he argues in detail, this theme finds one of its most fully articulated formulations. In the following section the author shows how important features of the Carmen Saeculare should be read against the lively tradition of post-classical, Hellenistic and later Greek public cultic poetry, as well as through intertextual Callimachean links, and finally draws attention to Horace’s peculiar re-configuration of the ideological background provided by his models.