Horace’s Mercury and Mercurial Horace

Abstract

In this piece I have surveyed the various guises under which the god Mercury is presented in the poetry of Horace. Mercury is an important figure in the Odes as inventor of the lyre, a key patron of lyric poetry and divine protector of the poet; though he can be paralleled with the young Caesar at one moment, he is not to be taken as symbolizing him at others, especially in Horace’s account of Philippi in Odes 2.7. References to his epic role as psychopompos serve to generate some particularly elevated moments, while allusions to his role as erotic enabler look to lowlier connections with Roman comedy and the elegiac world of amatory intrigue; this combination of high and low reference suits the middling literary level of the Odes in general. We have also seen how the Satires’ narrative of Horace’s origins and their presentation of Damasippus present a different kind of vir Mercurialis (a man of business) he might have been had he not become a lyric poet. By becoming the poet of the Odes, Horace moves upwards from the world of his birth and upbringing, associated with the lower money-making role of Mercury, to the realm of literature and lyric, associated with the god’s higher divine functions, a key step in his poetic and social career.