SOURCE: “Augustus and Horace” in Horace and His Art of Enjoyment, E. P. Dutton & Company, 1925, pp. 64-82.

In the following essay, Haight explores the impact of Augustus's rule and policies on Horace, who became the “quasi-official laureate of the Empire.”

The Shaping of an Empire

The epoch in which Horace was to pass the remaining years of his life stands out like the Age of Pericles, the Florence of the Medici, the time of Louis Fourteenth, the Elizabethan Age, as a period of creative production that merited the name “Golden.” Unlike the last century of the Republic and the times of Cicero, it was not a period of tremendous political struggles, for after Actium, that third great duel between rival politicians for the leadership of the Roman world, Octavian was able gradually to establish a beneficent rule which, though it shared the labor of the state, assumed its...