This volume sets out to replace the Horace New Survey by Gordon Williams of 1972, now more than forty years old. The preface to that book states that ‘so much has been written about Horace even in the last decade that the mind wearies and sickens’;Footnote 1 the last four decades have only increased the rate of production, and it is no longer possible to read even all the emerging scholarship on this most perennially popular of authors, let alone all the historic material. The splendid bibliography on Horace by Niklas Holzberg (2007, in print and online) contains over 2,500 items, mostly published since 1960; I have tried to map the broader tendencies in scholarship, largely listing books rather than articles, and I have concentrated on material published in the half-century since Eduard Fraenkel's Horace (1957). I have made liberal use of my own previous work on Horace.
The advent of the internet in the last generation has revolutionized classical scholarship, above all in bibliographical research, and in its first chapter this volume tries to direct the reader to the most relevant online resources. The same period has also seen a much increased interest in classical reception, which I have pursued for Horace in the last chapter. The shape of the book overall is largely chronological, both for convenience and also to reflect the interest of modern scholarship in the self-constructed careers of ancient poets (see Harrison 2010).
I am most grateful to John Taylor for his kind invitation to write this volume, for his considerable patience in waiting for it amid the many pressures of my other obligations, and for his editorial care. Warm thanks also go to Tony Woodman for some timely and helpful comments, to Joanna Snelling for kind assistance in sourcing the cover illustration, and to Hester Higton for her excellent copy-editing.
I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of two friends and colleagues, great Horatians both, who died within a week of each other in May 2013: Robin Nisbet and David West.
