Horace’s poetics of conspiracy: history and lyric in the odes to a Licinius ( Ode 2.10) and a Virgil ( Ode 4.12)

Abstract This article takes the cue from Horace’s ‘Ode to Licinius’ ( Ode 2.10) to theorise a mode of reading Horatian lyric that both concedes to historicism and embraces hermeneutic aporia while keeping attuned to the affective dimensions of poetry. It reads both the ‘Ode to Licinius’ and the second ‘Ode to Virgil’ ( Ode 4.12) as teasing ‘suspicious’ historicist readers into the delusion that historical accounts offer a privileged key to poetic interpretation. Ode 2.10, which invokes historical context only to refuse us the key to access it, becomes a programmatic declaration of poetics and hermeneutics, a poignant meditation on the remits of poetry and history in the Augustan period and beyond.