Working Papers by Author

A. T. Zanker - Classics Department, Princeton University

090905 On the Dual Nature of the "Carmen Saeculare"
A. T. Zanker, Princeton University
Download PDF Abstract - Horace's Carmen Saeculare serves as a prayer to the gods, but also documents the felicity of Augustan Rome in the here and now. While the verbs of the first two-thirds of the poem are in the subjunctive, the final section is couched in indicatives. After a series of indicative statements concerning Rome's felicity of extraordinary boldness, however, Horace resumes the language of prayer, a fact that led a long succession of copyists and critics to interpret his statements as imprecations. This, I argue, is precisely Horace's point -- to mitigate the jarring insertion of positive statements into what had started off as a prayer.
010904 Horatian Lyric and the Vergilian Golden Age
A. T. Zanker, Princeton University
Abstract - Recent scholarship has focused on the way in which Horace avoids speaking of a returning golden age in his later poetry, even though Vergil had done precisely this in the sixth book of his epic. I argue that Horace realized that the concept was a problematic one; the golden ages constructed by the earlier tradition had been marked by characteristics that could never be achieved in reality. Horace therefore avoids the problematic terminology, instead defining the Augustan new age on his own terms.
This paper is now forthcoming in American Journal of Philology December 2010.
060702 A Dove and a Nightingale: Mahābhārata 3.130.18-3.131.32 and Hesiod, Works and Days 202-13
A. T. Zanker, Princeton University
Abstract - The Hesiodic Fable of The Hawk and the Nightingale remains a scholarly problem, but perhaps light can be shed on it by stepping outside the Greek tradition and comparing it with a story from the Indic Mahābhārata that involves not merely a hawk and a dove, but also a king who protects the latter.
This paper has now been published in Philologus 1531 (2009), pp. 10-25.