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Abstract.
Horace Ode 4.15 names the Augustan Age, defining a bounded period of history by reference to Augustus' mortal lifespan (aetas). By contrast, poetry's command of immortality gives the poet, not the princeps, ultimate control of the meaning of aetas Augusta. But Horace undermines the suggestion that his own poetry will forever define and represent the Augustan Age. Ode 4.15 in fact projects the Aeneid, or a sanitized version of it, as the Roman people's everlasting hymn in praise of Augustus and his age. This gesture of demurral is anticipated in the poem's opening recusatio of a Virgilian-style epic.
CLOSURE IS HARDLY AN UNEXPECTED THEME in the final poem of Horace's lyric oeuvre, and Ode 4.15 certainly recapitulates significant aspects of the fourth book and of the earlier collection of Odes. A further, complementary way in which the poem aspires to closure is through reference to politics and contemporary history. Ode 4.15 has been said to comprise Horace's "poetic summa of the Augustan age," and "his richest meditation on Augustan Rome and the intimacy his poetry possesses with it," to quote Galinsky and Putnam, respectively.1 In this poetic attempt to sum up the successes of the day, the poet refers specifically to tua, Caesar, aetas (4.15.4), "your age, Caesar."2 The phrase marks the first direct attestation of the concept of the Augustan Age through the definition of the boundaries of a historical period by reference to the lifespan of the princeps.3 This paper argues that in a context of retrospection and summing up, this use of aetas hints at a different sort of closure, namely, the finite power of the mortal princeps to define the age on his terms. But simultaneously the poem gestures toward poetic continuity: its last stanza, and particularly its last word, canemus, "we will sing," look to the Aeneid and the role it played in creating, and transmitting, the concept of the aetas Augusta.
As Putnam has fully explicated, all of Ode 4A5's meditations on the Augustan age, and on poetry's place in it, are intimately tied up with its meditations on the Aeneid.4 With an eye to the Aeneid, the phrase tua, Caesar, aetas upsets the distinctive balance between the communal and the individual that Virgil had achieved when...