Religiosidade e tradição: uma análise semântico cultural do Carmen Saeculare Horaciano

Abstract

In different historical and cultural contexts, moral values and inherited tradition have always been manifested through social practices, rituals, and symbolic narratives. In this regard, considering that the Carmen Saeculare was composed by Horace at the request of Emperor Augustus to serve as the public hymn of the Ludi Saeculares in 17 B.C., this dissertation aims to analyze how the values of the mos maiorum are articulated in the poem, recalling the figure of the mythical founding hero of Rome, Aeneas, and highlighting the paradigmatic relationship between the emperor and the Trojan hero. To achieve this goal, the research draws on Cultural Semantics (CS), which makes it possible to understand how the cultural memory and symbolic dimension of the text were manifested during the festivities, revealing the meanings socioculturally constructed, underlying the celebration and the reinforcement of Roman moral and political order. Furthermore, the work engages with the perspective of the Bakhtin’s Circle, which postulates that the meanings of literary texts emerge from the interaction among social and historical voices, thus allowing the poem to be interpreted as a place of negotiation of meanings and legitimation of cultural values. By the end of the study, it is evident that the Carmen Saeculare, by uniting myth, ritual, cultural memory, and literary culture, perpetuates ancestral virtues, reinforces imperial authority, and demonstrates how Roman literature articulated tradition, politics, and culture.