Horace and Virgil, poets of love

Abstract

In the first century b.C., Horace and Virgil, Roman contemporary poets, produced their works through emulation of texts before them. The present work presents an analysis of how the love theme is approached in Horace’s Odes 1,8 and 1,13 and in the fourth book of Virgil’s Aeneid. In this process, it was identified that the fragment 31 of Sappho of Lesbos is among the texts used for the emulation in the analyzed Horace’s odes.  In the ode 1, 8, this is evident only in the metrics, while in the ode 1, 13 the emulation is evident also in the subject. However, the poetic persona in Horace does not identify himself with the love-illness of Sappho. The love, conversely, appears as something not naturally destined to the male figure and that, when happens to a man, takes him away from his destiny. Analyzing the forth book in Aeneid, we note that the emulation process was similar to Horace’s one: the love-illness assaults Dido, the female figure, and, in Aeneias, the love takes him away from his destiny, but he does not suffer it like a disease. The conclusion is that the coincidences in Horace and Virgil are because they both are great emulators and have used, as an object of emulation for the love subject, the fragments of Sappho, here exemplified by fragment 31.