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In Les Jardins d’Horace (1875), the renowned landscape artist Camille Corot depicts the poet at work. That poet, Horace, holds a scroll or codex, shown in the act of either reading or writing. Though ostensibly the only person in the picture, Corot emphasizes Horace’s being in the world, that is, Horace’s interconnectivity with everything around him. Dark lines zigzag and intersect into stones, hills, trees, and sky, all flowing into and out of the poet at work. Indeed, where Horace ends and the atmosphere begins is indetectable. It is simultaneously a moment of reception and composition.

The implications that arise from Camille Corot’s nineteenth-century sketch of Horace and his fluctuating landscape resonate with other questions posed during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such queries include those asked by Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schiller, who—building on Immanuel Kant’s notion of Stimmung and his critique of beauty—ask how we create, and are indeed reoriented by, the endless nuances which color our being in the world. How is the artist shaped by, and shaping, their world, be they political, ecological, or literary atmospheres? 

This one-day symposium (October 3, 2025) approaches Horace and his poetry in much the same way Camille Corot did. Namely, we seek moments in Horace’s works in which the poet gestures toward the atmosphere in which he composes and performs.

SCHEDULE

8:45 – 9:15: Coffee reception and welcome in the Far East Room of Evergreen Museum and Library (4545 N Charles St, Baltimore, MD)

Panel 1

(Alvin Deutsch Seminar Room)

9:15 – 10:15: Gregson Davis, “Close Friendship and The Garden: aspects of ethical bonds among Vergil, Horace and Maecenas”

10:15 – 11:15: Jennifer Ferriss-Hill, “Horace, Satires 1.5: A Literary Journey”

11:15 – 12:00: Show-and-tell of the library’s Horace collections and other early modern imprints, Evergreen Main Library

12:00 – 1:00: Catered boxed lunches in the Far East Room

Panel 2

1:00 – 2:00: Martin W. Michalek, “Snow into Wine: Pairing Atmospheres in Horace”

2:00 – 3:00: Peter Osorio, “Horace's Personal Epistles: The Case of Hieronymus of Rhodes in Ep. 1.6”

3:00 – 3:15: Coffee break

Panel 3

3:15 – 4:15: Jeffrey Ulrich, “The Temporal and Spatial Limits of Satire: Playing with Chronotopes and Escapist Fantasies in Horace’s Satires 2.6”

4:15 – 5:15: K. Sara Myers, “Horace in and out of Place in the Satires”

5:15 – 5:45: Reception in the gardens (Far East Room si pluvit)