Augustan Poetry

An important contribution to the growing interdisciplinary field of monster studies

Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic focuses on the works of the major Augustan poets, Vergil, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid, and explores the under-studied aspect of their poetry, namely the way in which they constructed and investigated images of the Roman Republic and the Roman past.

Traces the developing attitude of poets of the first century BC, considering why they came to write as they did.

Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic explores the liminal status of the Augustan period, with its inherent tensions between a rhetoric based on the idea of res publica restituta and the expression of the need for a radical renewal of the Roman political system. It attempts to examine some of the ways in which the Augustan poets dealt with these and other related issues by discussing the many ways in which individual texts handle the idea of the Roman Republic. Focusing on the works of the major Augustan poets, Vergil, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid, the contributions in this collection look at the under-studied aspect of their poetry, namely the way in which they constructed and investigated images of the Roman Republic and the Roman past.

"Inspiring reverence and blasphemy, combining paternal benignity with sexual violence, transcendent universality with tribal chauvinism, Jupiter represents both the best and the worst of ancient religion. Though often assimilated to Zeus, Jupiter differs from his Greek counterpart as much as Rome differs from Greece: "the god of Rome" conveys both Jupiter's sovereignty over Rome and his symbolic encapsulation of what Rome represents. Understanding this dizzyingly complex figure is crucial not only to the study of Roman religion, but to the whole of literary, intellectual, and religious history. This book examines Jupiter in Roman poetry's most formative and fruitful period, the reign of the emperor Augustus. As Roman society was transformed from a republic or oligarchy to a de facto monarchy, Jupiter came to play a unique role as the celestial counterpart of the first earthly princeps. While studies of Augustan poetry may glance at Jupiter as an Augustus figure, or Augustus as a Jupiter figure, they rarely explore the poets' richly nuanced treatment of the god as a character in his own right. This book fills that gap, demonstrating how Jupiter attracts thoughts about politics, power, sex, fatherhood, religion, poetry, and most everything else of importance to poets and other humans. It explores the god's manifestations in the five major Augustan poets (Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid), providing a fascinating window on a transformative period of history, as well as a comprehensive view of the poets' individual personalities and shifting concerns"--

From archaic Sparta to classical Athens the chorus was a pervasive feature of Greek social and cultural life. Until now, however, its reception in Roman literature and culture has been little appreciated. This book examines how the chorus is reimagined in a brief but crucial period in the history of Latin literature, the early Augustan period from 30 to 10 BCE. It argues that in the work of Horace, Virgil, and Propertius, the language and imagery of the chorus articulate some of their most pressing concerns surrounding social and literary belonging in a rapidly changing Roman world. By re-examining seminal Roman texts such as Horace's Odes and Virgil's Aeneid from this fresh perspective, the book connects the history of musical culture with Augustan poetry's interrogation of fundamental questions surrounding the relationship between individual and community, poet and audience, performance and writing, Greek and Roman, and tradition and innovation.

The establishment of the Augustan regime presents itself as the assertion of order and rationality in the political, ideological, and artistic spheres, after the disorder and madness of the civil wars of the late Republic. But the classical, Apollonian poetry of the Augustan period is fascinated by the irrational in both the public and private spheres. There is a vivid memory of the political and military furor that destroyed the Republic, and also an anxiety that furor may resurface, that the repressed may return. Epic and elegy are both obsessed with erotic madness: Dido experiences in her very public role the disabling effects of love that are both lamented and celebrated by the love elegists. Didactic (especially the Georgics) and the related Horatian exercises in satire and epistle, offer programmes for constructing rational order in the natural, political, and psychological worlds, but at best contain uneasily an ever-present threat of confusion and backsliding, and for the most part fall short of the austere standards of rational exposition set by Lucretius. Dionysus and the Dionysiac enjoy a prominence in Augustan poetry and art that goes well beyond the merely ornamental. The person of the emperor Augustus himself tests the limits of rational categorization. Augustan Poetry and the Irrational contains contributions by some of the leading experts of the Augustan period as well as a number of younger scholars. An introduction which surveys the field as a whole is followed by chapters that examine the manifestations of the irrational in a range of Augustan poets, including Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and the love elegists, and also explore elements of post-classical reception.

The age of Augustus, commonly dated to 30 BC – AD 14, was a pivotal period in world history. A time of tremendous change in Rome, Italy, and throughout the Mediterranean world, many developments were underway when Augustus took charge and a recurring theme is the role that he played in shaping their direction. The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Augustus captures the dynamics and richness of this era by examining important aspects of political and social history, religion, literature, and art and architecture. The sixteen essays, written by distinguished specialists from the United States and Europe, explore the multi-faceted character of the period and the interconnections between social, religious, political, literary, and artistic developments. Introducing the reader to many of the central issues of the Age of Augustus, the essays also break new ground and will stimulate further research and discussion.

In this book seventeen leading scholars examine the interaction between historiography and poetry in the Augustan age: how poets drew on — or reacted against — historians’ presentation of the world, and how, conversely, historians transformed poetic themes for their own ends.

Politics and Divinization in Augustan Poetry offers a new interpretation of one of the most prominent themes in Latin poetry, the divinization of Augustus, and argues that this theme functioned as a language of political science for the early Augustan poets as they tried to come to terms with Rome's transformation from Republic to Principate. Examining an extensive body of texts ranging from Virgil's Eclogues to Horace's final book of the Odes (covering a period roughly from 43 BC to 13 BC), this study highlights the multifaceted metaphorical force of divinizing language, as well as the cultural complications of divinization. Through a series of close readings, this book challenges the view that poetic images of Augustus' divinization merely reflect the poets' attitude towards Augustus or their recognition of his power, and puts forward a new understanding of this motif as an evolving discourse through which the first generation of Augustan poets articulated, interrogated, and negotiated Rome's shift towards authoritarianism.