We are living, sadly, in an age of the big political lie: leaders avowing untruths so stark and incredible that their purpose is not so much to mislead as to assert control. In an emerging autocracy, the big lie serves to remind the populace that obedience is more important than truth. Among the lies promulgated by the emperor Augustus as he ushered the Roman Republic to its end, two stand out for their brazenness: that he restored the constitution of the Republic and that he conquered the kingdom of Parthia. In this talk I will examine how Horace prepared the ground for these two falsehoods in his most exquisite poems, the Odes. Neither a propagandist nor a subversive, Horace encourages the reader to accept these untruths as lies that are worth pretending to believe. The calculated ambiguity of poetry affords him the means to imply arguments in favor of the big lie that would be treasonous to articulate explicitly. In the Odes, we can see poetry not just passively reflecting political ideology, but helping to shape it.