Truditur dies die: Reading Horace as a Political Attitude in 19th‐ and 20th‐Century Hungary

What is it about?

This chapter, through the analysis of several Horatian 'reading scenes', outlines the political significance of reading Horace in the Hungarian culture. In early modern Hungary, 'Horatianism,' being an amalgam of highly different cultural discourses, was a useful device for the Hungarian gentry both to shape and hide its inarticulate political position. After the defeat of the revolution of 1848–1849, reading Horace as a cultural practice changed into a symbol of 'passive resistance,' while Horatian poetry as well as its early modern Hungarian interpretations began to lose their 'original innocence.' In the 1930s, a group of intellectuals around the distinguished classical scholar Carl Kerényi tried to use Horace’s traditional role in Hungarian culture in order to make him a symbol of an 'inner emigration' toward a symbolic 'island' where different intellectual attitudes could meet. As my interpretations show, Horace’s self‐contradictory, polysemic, ironical poetic world—as we today perceive it—enabled him to be a 'Hungarian' poet too.

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Photo by Gabor Koszegi on Unsplash

Photo by Gabor Koszegi on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Horace's poetry played an important role in 19th- and 20th-century Hungarian culture. This chapter investigates a few 'reading scenes' where the significance of Horatian lyric for Hungarian literature and culture can be analysed in its richness and complexity.

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