ABSTRACT
The opening lines of Horace’s Odes I.9 make for a convenient introduction to the literary heritage of the mountain in Latin because in many ways Soracte represents a typical mountain image in Classical literature in this passage. Soracte, known today as Soratte, stands in the province of Rome, Italy. Despite its relatively small stature in comparison with the neighbouring Apennines and the Alps to the north, the 691-metre-high ridge is certainly prominent in its surroundings. For the Romans then, Soracte was a mons.2 Although frequently and correctly translated as ‘mountain’ in English, the two words are not exactly equivalent. Mons can refer to any heaped-up mass, from argenti mons, ‘a mountain of silver’, to a heap of stones on the back of a wagon.3 In this figurative sense, the use of mons does not differ much from the way that the word mountain is used in English. In one important aspect, however, the use of mons in Latin does diverge from the English mountain: It does not necessarily single out a particular peak. For this reason the Jura mountain range located to the north of the western Alps and which spreads over the borders between France, Switzerland and Germany, could be called mons Jura.4 Olympus, similarly, refers to a range of 52 peaks of which the highest, Μύτικας, ‘the nose’, reaches 2918 metres of altitude. Soracte itself is a case in point since the mons is in fact a ridge with several peaks.
