This volume collects the entirety of Horace's lyric poetry, comprising all 103 odes, the "Carmen Saeculare" and the earlier epodes.

In 23 B.C.E., when he published the first three books of his lyrics, Horace was 42 years old, secure in the favor of the emperor Augustus, and living in ease and comfort as a country gentleman on his Sabine farm. Serenity is reflected in these lyrics, but so are other experiences, for Horace had lived through three major political crises in a society that was the center of the world: sophisticated, refined-and beginning to decay.
The "Odes and Epodes" collect the entirety of Horace's lyric poetry, with Joseph P. Clancy achieving a mirroring of the originals that is worthy in its own right as English verse. Together with the University of Chicago Press's edition of the "Satires and Epistles," this volume offers the reader a complete and modern Horace.