Jacob Sider Jost is a professor of English at Dickinson College.

Research on Shakespeare's choice of ‘Horatio’ as the name for Hamlet's fellow student and confidante has focused on two sources. In Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (mid-1580s), the character Horatio serves as the hero Hieronimo's faithful and trusted companion; J. Madison Davis and A. Daniel Frankforter suspect a more remote allusion to the Horatii, whose legendary story of Roman patriotism is told in Livy's Ab Urbe Condita. I propose another classical possibility: that Horatio, who tells Hamlet in the play's final scene that he is ‘more an antique Roman than a Dane’, is intended to recall the Roman poet Horace.

Sider Jost, Jacob. 'Hamlet's Horatio as an Allusion to Horace's Odes.' Notes and Queries 59, no. 1 (2012): 76-77. https://academic.oup.com/nq/article-abstract/59/1/76/1153802?redirectedFrom=fulltext

For more information on the published version, visit Oxford University Press's Website. https://academic.oup.com/nq/article-abstract/59/1/76/1153802?redirectedFrom=fulltext

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