Through the analysis of individual love poems and groups of poems as well as through the representation of thematic and compositional connections of the love theme with other cardinal themes, this work opens up a new perspective on Horace?s’ first collection of odes. Love becomes identifiable as the center of poetry, its poetic functionalization leads to a reassessment of the relationship between Horace and Augustus. Manifold evidence of relationships between individual poems allows new insight into the homogeneous structure of the collection as a whole.