SOURCE: Santirocco, Matthew S. “Horace's Odes and the Ancient Poetry Book.” In Unity and Design in Horace's “Odes,” pp. 3-13. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1986.

In the following essay, Santirocco considers the arrangement of the poetry in the Odes, Books I through III.

One

One of the most important achievements of recent Horatian criticism has been the rediscovery of structure—not the mechanical dissection of poems into component parts, but an awareness of how form is inseparable from content and how unity proceeds from design.¹ Although the individual ode has by now received sufficient critical attention, the structure of the first lyric collection, the three books of Odes published together in 23 b.c., remains problematic. This is not to say that it has been neglected. The initial observations of von Christ and Kiessling a century ago inspired continental scholars to search for the one principle according to...