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Drawing on scholarship in cultural anthropology on gift economies, I interrogate in several Horatian poems the rhetoric that suggests the following related concepts. First, the public service (or munus) that the poet performs by writing his political poems constitutes a form of sacrificial expenditure, and ultimately a sacrifice of self, that the philosophically oriented first book of Epistles reclaims: as a priest of the Muses, or sacerdos Musarum, Horace's political poems provide the "gift" of purification for a people corrupted by the civil wars. Second, though many of the poems serve to reinforce a certain ideology of voluntarism in Augustan literary patronage, they also expose its contradictions. Just as gift-exchange societies conceal economic interests behind the concept of the disinterested gift, so the rhetorical language concerned with benefaction similarly occludes but may also reveal calculation in regard to the return gift of verse. Horace deploys different registers of imagery to expose the conflict between the "philosophy" of voluntary benefaction and the often-distorted reciprocity ethic by which the practice in fact operated in the upper echelons of Roman society. And third, Horatian poetic rhetoric often draws on larger cultural practices of expenditure in a way that produces an ideological effect sympathetic to his patrons even as it simultaneously provides the ground for the poet's gestures of autonomy. At the risk of simplification, my inquiry may be summed up by this question: if the gifts of patronage symbolically expropriate the poet's self, obligating him to make the return gift of poetry as the embodied or "reified" form of his labor, then ― 4 ― in what ways and to what degree does the figurative language concerned with this exchange permit resistance to that same patronal discourse? During the 20s B.C.E. the Augustan regime solidified its power by transforming political structures and by communicating a coherent-if ne

The government that led Rome's rise to world power in the middle and late Republic was founded on aristocratic competition. What drew men to the struggle was the prospect of personal honor and political authority.[1] Entry into the highest stratum of Roman society came with victory at the polls: for most of the history of the Republic those who won a curule magistracy could expect enrollment in the senate at the next census, but even before that date they enjoyed a senator's prerogatives. They perhaps also earned a place among the nobilitas and passed this distinction on to their sons.[2] Furthermore, winning public office was inseparably bound up with the moral imperatives of aristocratic status. Virtus,gloria,dignitas, and a constellation of associated ideals represented the highest aspirations of aristocratic endeavor, and although in the abstract the qualities these words defined were capable of various manifestations, only rarely and awkwardly in fact could they be revealed apart from service to the state. Hence the vital importance of winning public office and thereby gaining the chance to display them: the moral superiority that their possession implied, quite as much as membership in the senate or noble birth, enabled individuals to

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