The Carmen Saeculare is unique in the surviving corpus of classical Latin: a hymn commissioned by the state and actually performed. In 17~BC Augustus revived the Ludi Saeculares, the “Secular Games” held to mark the close of one saeculum (an age of about a hundred and ten years) and the opening of the next, and he charged Horace — by then the acknowledged master of Latin lyric — with composing the choral hymn for the occasion. It was sung on the third day of the festival, on the Palatine and at the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, by a trained chorus of twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls, all with both parents living. The inscription recording the games survives and names Horace as its author.

The hymn is in nineteen Sapphic stanzas and addressed primarily to Apollo and Diana — Phoebus and his sister, the divine pair of the new Palatine cult — together with the Sun, the birth-goddess Ilithyia, the Fates, Mother Earth, Jupiter, and the cluster of personified virtues whose return Augustus’ program claimed to secure: Faith, Peace, Honor, Modesty, and Virtue, with Plenty and her horn. Its movement is a public prayer for Rome’s continuance: for fertile fields and lawful marriages and many children (a glance at Augustus’ moral and marriage legislation), for the safety and growth of the city, for the submission of the Mede, the Scythian, and the Indian abroad. Threaded through it is the Trojan foundation-legend — pious Aeneas leading the remnant of Troy to a new home, the ancestor of Augustus, “the blood of Anchises and Venus” — so that the present settlement is shown as the fulfillment of the city’s oldest destiny.

The voice is the formal, luminous register of the grandest Odes, pared to the economy of liturgy: the diction is elevated and the syntax suspended in the Sapphic manner, but the whole is shaped for choral utterance, building to the chorus’s closing declaration that it carries home the “good and certain hope” that Jupiter and all the gods have heard. Composed at the height of Horace’s public standing, the hymn belongs with the civic Odes of Book~IV, several of which look back to this commission; in this edition it closes the poet’s lyric work.