Powerful presences. Horace’s Carmen Saeculare and hellenistic choral traditions

Giovan Battista D’Alessio offers an analysis of Horace’s Carmen Saeculare in terms of choral poetics. Chorality can claim to be the central issue in all discussions of the religious significance of Greek literary reception. When do choruses become, and when do they cease to be, authentic voices for the community? When do they become, and when do they cease to be, fictions constructed in the service of elite aesthetics? The dominant narrative in classical scholarship has always been a Romantic-inspired one of progressive dilution. D’Alessio’s analysis reverses the direction of travel: he argues that while Callimachus’ ‘choral theology’ is implicit, Horace, having ingested it, brings it out in a double sense: as open performance in an identifiable time-space in Augustan Rome, and as the fullest expression of a latent cosmic vision of universal power.