A Commentary on Horace's Epodes

Horace's Epodes reflect as no other work of Latin poetry does the crisis afflicting Rome in the Forties and Thirties BC, as it passed from a republican to a monarchical system. In its seventeen poems various bogeys which were perceived as instrumental to societal breakdown are outspokenly attacked: the brutal carnage of the civil wars, widespread agricultural disruption, perversion of traditional Roman ethical values, dissolution of social hierarchies, the rampant and highly noxious weed of black magic, and female sexual self-assertion.