Horace's Body, Horace's Books

This chapter attempts to engage in a specific modification of a well-known and widely subscribed-to theory about the representation of the human body in literature and the visual arts. And the Latin text with which the chapter will do these things is that of Horace. It compares two generically distinct and self-contained ‘publications’, namely the first book of Sermones and the first three books of Odes. It addresses the question: What sorts of bodies does Horace represent in these two collections?