Late Horatian Lyric and the Virgilian Golden Age

Recent scholarship has focused on the way in which Horace avoids speaking of a returning golden age in his later lyric poetry, despite the fact that Virgil had done precisely this in the sixth book of his epic. I argue that Horace realized that the concept was a problematic one. Many of the golden ages constructed by earlier poets were marked with characteristics that could never be achieved in reality. Horace therefore avoids the terminology, instead defining the new age on his own terms.