Horace's first epode situates the collection on the brink of the battle of Actium, the final episode in Rome's prolonged civil wars. The poem, which is addressed to Maecenas, represents Horace in the act of resolving to accompany his beloved patron into battle: “I will gladly fight this and every war in the hope of earning your favor” (libenter hoc et omne militabitur \ bellum in tuae spem gratiae, I. 1.23–4). We do not know whether Horace actually fought at Actium; most likely he did not. But the book of epodes is itself evidence of his readiness to do battle on the home front on behalf of Maecenas and the young Caesar. The epodes that follow Horace's declaration are blows struck in an ongoing “culture war.” Horace is fighting at once to stabilize a disordered world by establishing its center and defining its periphery and to protect his own face by ruling himself in and others out. The collection is characterized, accordingly, by the divergent impulses of solidarity and division, with gestures of deference directed toward (what Horace represents as) the center and gestures of authority aimed at (what Horace represents as) the fringes.

In his Epodes as in his roughly contemporaneous collections of satires, Horace combines attacks on enemies with a defense of his friends' and his own moral integrity. But there is an urgency about the epodes that is absent from the satires. Whereas Horatian satire aspires to universality, the epodes are figuratively located within a particular historical crisis and take the form not of philosophical reflections but of socially engaged and consequential acts.