The question before us at the turn of both century and millennium is how one determines whether Horace is a dangerous love-poet (unrecognised because we read badly). Or a panderer, playing to our delight in the comedy of manners. Or a serious analyst of communication between the sexes—even a prophet for our time. The choice varies from villain to vates, the extremes reminding us how certainly the past exists, as Robert Frost laments in ‘Directive’: ‘Back in a time made simple by the loss/Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off,/Like a graveyard marble sculpture in the weather.’Recently, a Classical scholar, writing about what she termed ‘Horace's detachment as a love poet’, asserted that his readers ‘remain trapped, perhaps by necessity, in male assumptions about desire that they are unable to question.’ She believes that there is a ‘disturbing picture of love and desire’ which critics have missed because we read, almost all of us, with half-closed eyes, ignoring ‘erotic subterfuge’ in the love-odes. We overlook, she insists, ‘the overpowering desire’ of the male ‘poet/lover’ because, in ‘unacknowledged identification’ with Horace, we put on Horatian eyes. This charge raises disquieting questions about distinctions between speaker and poet, persona and historical figure, art and life.