ABSTRACT
This allegory of ‘the ship of state’ was not an invention by Horace. He models this ode, like many others, on the poems of Alcaeus, a Greek lyric poet from Lesbos writing in the sixth century BCE. We know that Alcaeus’ poems were read allegorically in antiquity and we can be confident that Horace and his well-educated readership were familiar with this interpretation and able to read the deeper political ‘message’. And by the way, the image at the heart of this allegory persists in the English language to this day: the Latin word gubernator, from which we derive ‘governor’, literally denotes the ‘helmsman’ of a ship.
