The internet now provides many prime resources for the study of Horace which make life considerably easier for the student and scholar of the poet, such as reliable and searchable online Latin texts, bibliographies, and prose and verse translations of all kinds, as well as access to a wide range of modern and classic Horatian scholarship via digital versions of older works, Google Books, and journal databases such as JSTOR and Project MUSE (for subscribing institutions), not to mention increasing numbers of monographs available via subscription to publishers' own websites. These resources are growing continually and repay regular monitoring. But most Horatian scholarship is still to be found in printed form: here I give a brief survey of the most useful books for effective orientation in the modern study of Horace.

A brief life of Horace survives from the ancient world, attached to the name of Suetonius and probably summarizing a longer life by that writer, which is worth quoting in full here.

This first phase of Horace's poetic career has aroused extensive interest in recent scholarship, which has moved beyond the traditional teleological idea (crystallized by Fraenkel and others) that the Satires and Epodes are early experimental works in which the poet had not yet reached his highest level, to be achieved in the mature lyric glories of the Odes and the sage reflections of the Epistles. This is a crucial period in Horace's career, and some key features emerge which will be central for his poetry. In this chapter I will look at the two books of Satires and that of the Epodes, considering each collection in turn, with a focus on important issues and scholarship.

The first three books of Odes have been the most popular of Horace's works in modern scholarship, as they have consistently been his most popular poems since the Renaissance. This popularity has meant that they have played a key role as objects of modern Latin scholarship's particular concerns and developments – for example intertextuality, genre, metapoetry, the poetic book, narratology, and political colouring. This chapter will try to highlight the most important and stimulating items of scholarship from a vast range of work.

Carl Becker's 1963 book defined all these works plus the first book of Epistles as constituting Horace's late work, partly because (in the biographizing fashion of the time) he saw Epistles 1 as the decisive beginning of a final and mature period for the poet, focused on philosophical and ethical retirement and distanced contemplation of poetry and the world. In this volume I have chosen to assign the first book of Epistles not to the later period but to the middle period with the Odes (see Chapter IV), partly because I hold that it is not so different from the Odes in its concerns and techniques, even if it constitutes a move from lyric back to the hexameter sermo which Horace had last used ten years before, and partly because I take the philosophical programme of Epistles 1 as a statement about the book's particular content rather than about the poet's life in general.

In this section I will briefly survey the literature on Horatian poetic style, and then offer some detailed translations and analyses of particular poems from different genres to try to show how Horatian expression works on the page, especially in terms of intertextuality, structural arrangement, and word order. Horace's exceptionally dense and refined poetic texture has been recognized as such since antiquity: Ovid (Tristia 4.10.50) refers to Horace's carmina culta (‘cultured poems’), and Petronius (118.5) to his curiosa felicitas (‘painstaking felicity of style’), while Quintilian (10.1.96) sees him as uerbis felicissime audax (‘most felicitously bold in expression’). All these comments are likely to refer primarily to the Odes, but can be applied in general to Horace's style through different genres. For the basic facts of Horatian diction and syntax, Bo 1960 remains unrivalled in its sheer level of detail; for more recent overviews and useful scholarly bibliography on Horatian poetic style see the excellent Muecke 1997 and the rest of the major section on style of which it forms the chief part in the Enciclopedia oraziana (Mariotti 1996–8), the list of publications in the area up to 2006 by Holzberg, and the helpful survey of the development of Horace's style and metrical practice in Knox 2013. On the metres of the Odes, the introductory section in Nisbet and Hubbard 1970 remains a reliable guide; for some more adventurous attempts to relate metre to literary content in Horace see Morgan 2010. The elaborate and expressive word order of the Odes is the topic of Nisbet 1999. But the best resources for the analysis of Horatian style and metre are the recent detailed commentaries on Horace's works (listed in Chapter I, section 3), which are closely used in what follows.

The study of classical reception, the influence of classical texts and culture in later times and works, has been one of the biggest growth areas in classical scholarship in the twenty-first century. There has been considerable discussion of how classical reception is to be defined: for some orientation see Hardwick 2003, Martindale and Thomas 2006, and Hardwick and Stray 2008. Most would now view it as a kind of dialogue between classical original(s) and later work(s) which use, appropriate, or modify the original(s), and emphasize the need to understand both cultural contexts as well as remembering our own situatedness. When we look at, say, Ben Jonson's reception of Horace there are three contexts involved: ourselves in our own period and culture, Jonson in his, and Horace in his, and we are in effect reading Jonson reading Horace. In a sense, all that classical scholars do is a form of reception, as they are always inevitably receiving classical texts in the particular light of their own culture and characteristics, whether or not they articulate this explicitly. One strand of classical reception is connected with translation: a translation is never a neutral rendering of a text but is always necessarily coloured by the culture and ideology of the translator. Another is connected with literary imitation or adaptation: classical works can be very effectively recast in a new cultural context. As we shall see, Horace has been richly received in both these ways, and in others.