In his Investigation a few weeks ago, the editor turned his thoughts to the poet Horace and his ‘special relationship’ with the emperor Augustus. He pointed out that, while the emperor’s largesse obliged Horace to turn out a good deal of praise poetry, Horace himself, while genuinely grateful, nevertheless exercised a good deal of ingenuity in not laying it on too thick. The editor may not have had the space to point out the intense pressure Horace was under ‘from the emperor himself’.
In his Life of Horace, the historian Suetonius records the various attempts that Augustus made to grapple Horace to him tighter than a brother. Augustus invited Horace to be his Letters Secretary, a vital position when the emperor had such a small bureaucracy and was bombarded with petitions of every sort (the politician Seneca talks of the life of this secretary: ‘So many thousands of people have to be given audience, so many petitions to be dealt with, such a crush of matters coming together from the whole world has to be sorted out, so that it can be submitted in due order to the mind of the most eminent emperor.’). Horace declined. Suetonius goes on that Augustus continued to try to reel him in, quoting a letter as follows: ‘Enjoy any privilege at my house, as if you were making your home there. You can do this without fear or favour, because this is the relationship I have wanted to have with you.’ When Horace continued to decline, Augustus tried again: ‘If you have proudly spurned my friendship, I refuse to return your disdain.’
The reason why Augustus was so keen was, as Suetonius goes on, because ‘he rated Horace’s poetry so high and was of the view that it would be immortal’.
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