The hymn and the hymnal in Horatian lyric

This dissertation is a study of Horace’s lyric hymns and prayers. As such, it aims to provide an up-to-date account of one of Horace’s most favored modes of lyric expression. By detailing the traditions of the Greco-Roman hymn in relation to Horace’s lyric, we will notice that these hymnic features structure the poet’s compositional methods even in certain odes not typically identified as hymns (e.g., Odes 1.16, 1.17, 3.3, 3.28). More broadly, my project explores the ways in which Horace’s employment and manipulation of the hymnic form contributes to the larger rhetorical program of his first lyric collection (Odes 1-3), and a decade later in Odes 4, where the form proliferates and still more appreciably interacts with a related poetic mode, the encomium. As for those Horatian odes that are undoubtedly or primarily hymnic, I demonstrate by means of detailed readings how the poet employs the conventions of Greco-Roman hymnody in both expected and unexpected ways.