Because editors tend to focus on words, they may fail to appreciate the power of graphics to convey information. Collaboration with designers can provide an education and enlarge your view of what is possible. In heavily illustrated publications – coffee-table books, annual reports, art catalogues and cookbooks – the pix take precedence over the text. Their production requires close liaison between the editor and the designer throughout the project.

The term ‘illustrations’ covers a wide range of material, defined in Standard D of Australian Standards for Editing Practice as including drawings, cartoons, diagrams, charts, graphs, maps, photographs, computer-generated graphics and moving images. Here we will look at the editor's tasks. For more information, see the Style Manual, Chapter 21.

Appraising pix

Pix appear on your desk in various physical manifestations ??? rough sketches, printouts of scanned photographs, computer-drawn graphs. When working with photographs and drawings, use photocopies or printouts; this saves the originals from harm and also allows you to freely mark crop lines and other instructions for the designer. The edited photocopies are known as artwork roughs. Store original artwork and photographs safely and return them, carefully packaged, with the edited manuscript.

HORACE'S LITERARY CAREER

By the year 23 bce H. had published his first three books of Odes, probably as a single, finished collection – as it was clearly intended to stand, whatever the particulars of publication. Three or four years later he put out the first book of Epistles, whose sphragis helpfully provides the age of H. – 44 years old in 21 bce (Epist. 1.20.26–8) – if not the date of publication. That was a year or two later, as is clear from references to events of 20 (Epist. 1.3.1–2; 1.12.26–7, Tiberius in Armenia; Epist. 1.12.27–8, Parthian standards recovered) and 19 bce (Epist. 1.12.26, Agrippa successful in Spain).

Around this time, it would seem, H. returned to lyric. For all we know he never stopped composing in lyric meters, though the hexameter form was reclaiming his immediate attention in the years following the appearance of C. 1–3. There is no substantial evidence for the view that Odes 1–3 had been poorly received. Fraenkel was a strong advocate of that view, referring to H's ‘annoyance at the cool reception which the three books of his carmina met with after their publication in 23 b.c.’, ‘the anger which he vented in the nineteenth epistle’ (1.19) and his resolve ‘to accept the failure of his proud venture and never to write lyrics again’, ‘as solemnly announced… in the overture of his book of Epistles (1.1.10ff.)’.

The Secular Games, celebrated in 17 bce, came to be perceived as marking the saeculum, approximating to a 100-year period, the longest possible span of a human life (Varro, Ling. 6.11, with the popular etymology from senex: seclum spatium annorum centum uocarunt dictum a sene, quod longissimum spatium senescendorum hominum id putarunt), the idea being that no one who was alive at the opening of the saeculum could still be so at its close (which presumably makes the lack of regularity in intervals ritually acceptable). The association has to do as much with ringing out the old as ringing in the new, though the Augustan reinvention would look very much to the latter. The first celebration for which there is certain evidence was in 249 bce, during the First Punic War, with the next occurring in 146 bce. There were no games in 49 or 46 bce, understandably in view of the turmoil of those years. The games assigned to 349 bce are generally considered fictional (see Pighi 4–7 and esp. 6, n. 2 for the dates; also Davis 2001: 114), in part because the gens Valeria is associated with the founding and the aetiology may be connected with M. Valerius Corvinus, cos. 348. It is also the case that the games of 17 bce were exclusively ludi scaenici, while the oldest Roman ludi were circenses, a fact that has been used to argue for a late origin (Taylor 1934: 107).

METRE

Sapphic stanza (see 4.2). In the CS there is no clausal enjambment from quatrain to quatrain, a feature that is rarer for the Sapphic than the Alcaic stanza, whose fourth line has inherently less of a closural feel to it than does the adonic. The triadic structure of the quatrains doubtless contributes to the need for stanzaic closure. There are a few instances of such enjambment in Sapphic stanzas elsewhere in the Odes (1.2.49; 2.2.21; 2.10.17; 2.16.37; 3.14.9; 3.20.13; 3.27.41, 65; 4.2.31; 4.6.9; 4.11.5). The avoidance of enjambment in the CS would have facilitated memorization for the boys and girls, and allowed a pause in the singing at the end of each verse, an obvious aid to memorization and performance.

INTRODUCTION

The ludi Latini saeculares of 17 BCE

The Acta for the games of 17 bce are at CIL VI 32323 = ILS 5050 = Pighi 1965: 107–19 = Schnegg-Köhler 2002: 24–45, hereafter ‘Acta’ (for relevant parts of the text see Appendix 2); documentation of subsequent Games will be referred to by specific designation, e.g. ‘the Severan Acta’. The inscription was discovered close to the site of the Tarentum (or Terentum) by the pons Aelius on the left bank of the Tiber in 1890.

This commentary has been some time in the making, in part thanks to recurring administrative duties. That has perhaps been for the good, in that my thinking about the poems included has evolved in what I hope will prove to be productive ways. The Carmen saeculare and book 4 of the Odes are not easy to situate in their political and aesthetic contexts. Fundamental issues of tone, purpose and meaning are still under debate, in spite of the fact that the Horace of the 30s and 20s bce has seemed perhaps the most familiar of the Augustans. The poems of C.4 have seemed at the same time, to many readers, to represent a falling away from the first collection. It has therefore been useful to spend some time, while engaged on other projects to which inclination or duty consigned me, to reflect about these poems, which have to me become more interesting as I kept their company.

It has been my fate now for the second time to be completing a commentary on the same text on which other commentaries were imminent or recently published. I received the Italian commentary of Paolo Fedeli and Irma Ciccarelli (Q. Horatii Flacci Carmina: Liber IV, Florence 2008), after I had finished a penultimate draft of my commentary.