Hidden Voices

Another often-muted voice, here in the terrain of sexual attraction, is the topic of this chapter, which sets out to bring out the hidden voices of homoerotic in desire in Horace’s Odes. Expressions of male-male desire in these poems have traditionally been played down by their interpreters, often treated as ‘merely’ a Hellenistic literary topos or a vehicle for the poet-speaker’s nostalgia. Taking its cue from re-assessments of homoerotic material in Latin literature in more recent scholarship, the discussion zooms in on a range of passages in the Odes where the poet-narrator implicitly or explicitly alludes to homoerotic desires, arguing that closer attention to focalization and perspective show that they convey conformations of desire far less unambiguously ‘heterosexual’ than is often assumed.

Art · Intertextuality · Literature · Perspective (graphical) · Scholarship · Topos theory · Visual arts · Classical Antiquity Studies · History

• A cruel and pointless trick? False non-closure in Horace’s Odes

  Open Access•Robert Cowan•Dictynna•2023

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