Trojan Restoration and the Aeneid in Horace, Odes 3.3

Abstract

This article argues that Juno’s speech in Horace’s Odes 3.3 includes a short series of programmatic allusions to Virgil’s Aeneid that assist Horace in promoting the distinct identity of his own lyric poetry. Juno’s speech asserts that Rome’s passage to greatness depends on not ‘rebuilding Troy’. Horace’s allusions identify the motif of Trojan restoration as a central theme in the Aeneid’s narrative, and, in a metapoetic sense, associate it pejoratively with the cultural performance of the epic itself in its canonical retelling of the Trojan story. In this way Horace uses Juno’s speech strategically to characterise the Aeneid as decadent and regressive; by contrast Juno promotes moral restraint as a virtue that characterises Horatian lyric.