The opportunity to act as patron of the arts was too good to miss for a politician as astute as Augustus. He was especially lucky with his writers. Two of the greatest poets of the age, in fact of any age, Horace and Virgil, were already well established in Rome before Actium. By then they were also members of the cultivated circle enjoying the patronage of Maecenas, an Etruscan aristocrat, who was in his turn an intimate of Octavian. After Actium a complex relationship developed between these two independent and sensitive poets, their patron, and their ruler, who must have hoped they could be persuaded by his achievements to enhance his personal glory.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Horace, was born in 65 bc. His father had been a slave, freed before Horace’s birth, who had made enough money to give his talented son the best education possible, first in Rome and later in Greece. Horace’s debut in public life, however, was inauspicious. He had sided with Brutus against Mark Antony and Octavian at Philippi and he was lucky, after Octavian had granted an amnesty to Brutus’ supporters, to be able to return to Rome and find a post as secretary to the quaestors. It was from this that Maecenas, recognizing his genius, plucked him and gave him the support needed to become a full-time poet. The support included a farm in the Sabine Hills that Horace was to immortalize as a retreat of rural bliss. (A lively biography is by Peter Levi, Horace: A Life, reissued London, 2012. Fuller essays are to be found in Stephen Harrison (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Horace, Cambridge and New York, 2007.)
Like all Roman poets Horace was immersed in Greek poetry. Its influences run through his verse at such deep and complex levels that they are often impossible to disentangle. He is a poet’s poet, fascinated by the actual art of making poems, and this becomes more obvious as he matures. Among his earliest work, the Satires, written in the 30s, are conversation pieces. Already the central themes of his later poems are there, above all the joys and agonies of friendship and sexual relationships, and the problem of finding balance, between peace in the countryside and stimulation in the town, between independence as an individual and support by a patron. In the Epodes, published 29 bc, many of the same themes are developed, but in a denser and more complex way. They lead on to Horace’s supreme achievement, the Odes (published together probably in 23 bc), short lyrical poems, using Greek metres, in which each word is placed to provide alliteration or to play off against another. The composition is often so sophisticated and polished that many have continued to resist satisfying translation.
The translator’s greatest challenge has often been seen as the fifth ode in Book I. Horace describes his ‘shipwreck’ at the hands of an unscrupulous lover, Pyrrha, and wonders now who struggles to enjoy her favours. This is the translation of the English poet John Milton.
What slender youth bedewed with liquid odours Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave,
Pyrrha; for whom bind’st thou In wreaths thy golden hair,
Plain in thy neatness; O how oft shall he On faith and changed gods complain: and seas Rough with black winds and storms Unwonted shall admire:
Who now enjoys thee credulous, all gold,
Who, always vacant, always amiable,
Hopes thee; of flattering gales Unmindful? Hapless they
To whom thou untried seem’st fair. Me in my vowed Picture the sacred wall declares t’have hung My dank and dripping weeds To the stern god of sea.
The Odes cover many subjects, from the very personal, the fear of death, the satisfaction, even glory, of being a poet, the intricacies of relationships, to grand public themes such as the celebration of Augustus’ achievements. At one level Horace’s life as expressed in his poetry seems calm and unhurried. He loves the contrast between the peace of the countryside, with its simple rustic virtues, and the sophisticated bustle of town life, but within a very limited range of venues he explores every nuance of personal feeling. He comes across as a sensuous man, enjoying sex, good wine, the warmth of the sun, and the fertility of the land, but underlying his work is an anxiety about being accepted socially, about his relationship with his patrons, the perennial dilemma of a man of intellectual brilliance who is dependent on support from men more wealthy than himself. He never married.
Horace’s relationship with Augustus was particularly complex. Augustus, who had few intimate friends, warmed to him and even asked him to become his secretary. (The relationship provides a good example of how Augustus, despite his new grandeur, continued to be approachable.) Horace refused. He was acutely aware of the need to preserve his integrity as a poet although at the same time he knew that his way of life depended on the stability that Augustus had brought. It is only in Book III of the Odes that he allows himself to give unashamed support to the regime, but even here he still hints at the precariousness of power, a theme that is never far from his thoughts. Finally, in 17 Bc Horace agreed to compose the Centennial Hymn for the Ludi Saeculares and appeared in public to conduct it. The poem was an exultation of Rome’s refound greatness:
By land and sea and Mede [Parthian] now fears Rome’s mighty hands and the Alban axes,
Proud Scythians and Indians have just now come To crave audience.
There is Trust now, and Peace, Honour and Chastity;
Ancient Virtue, long neglected
Dares to return, and rich Abundance is amongst us
With full horn.
(Translation: David West)
When he died, in 8 bc, Horace left everything he had to Augustus.
While the poems of Horace present an absorbing picture of the sensitivities of a gregarious and highly talented man living off his wits, his contemporary, Virgil, comes across as shy and less socially adept. (Technically Vergil is the correct spelling, derived from the Latin original Vergilius, Virgil had crept in by the Middle Ages. Both are acceptable.) Virgil was born in 70 bc to what appears a well-off family near Mantua, an area that was to suffer badly in the civil wars. (His family estates appear to have been confiscated to provide land for veterans after the Battle of Philippi.) The experience of disruption helps explain the intensity that Virgil brings to his poetry, the conviction with which he writes of the importance of stability and the sacrifices that are needed to bring order.
Like many talented provincials, Virgil was attracted by the cultural beacon of Rome and finished his education there. With his first poems, the Eclogues, published about 38 bc, he followed most Roman poets in taking a Greek model, in this case the Hellenistic poet Theocritus, the father of pastoral poetry (see p. 347). The Eclogues are pastoral poems in which peace on the land is contrasted with the threat of the disruption of war. It is this theme that is developed in Virgil’s first great work, the Georgies, written after he had become a member of Maecenas’ circle.
In contrast to the fashion of the time, the Georgies form a long poem, in four books, with a total of over 2,000 lines. They masquerade as a practical handbook in verse for farmers but their main purpose is very different. Virgil was writing just as the civil wars were coming to an end (the Georgies were completed in 29 bc). He was preoccupied, like so many Italians, with the need for peace, and the work is suffused with the hopes raised by the emergence of Octavian. (‘Surely a time will come when. . . the farmer heaving the soil with his curved plough will come on spears all eaten up with rust or strike with his heavy hoe on hollow helmets, and gape at the huge bones in the upturned graves.’ Translation: L. P. Wilkinson.) In the Georgies, the measured toil of farming life, its steady cultivation of crops, its frugality in the midst of fertility, which peace makes possible, echo back to the mythical past of Rome when the state was made up largely of farmers. Farming, suggests Virgil, may be an unceasing struggle against the inexorable forces of nature but it creates morally good men, those who form the backbone of a stable society. To argue his point Virgil has to romanticize. The farmer as Virgil sees him is not worn down by back-breaking toil, as must have been the case of the typical peasant farmer: he seems to be perpetually active, sensitive to the fruitfulness of the earth and even invigorated by the routine of labour in the fields.
The Georgies broke new ground by their length and the intensity with which their theme is presented but Virgil’s masterpiece was still to come. The Aeneid, written between 29 and 19 bc, comes at a culmination of his life, a rare instance when an artist happens to end on the highest note possible, without a decline into old age.
(In fact the work was unfinished and only saved on the direct orders of Augustus, but then it became an instant classic, a fixture in the Roman schoolroom.) Virgil had the same problem as Horace. He was deeply grateful for the order that Augustus had brought (and fearful that it would end) but unwilling to surrender his independence as an artist simply to glorify the new regime. After the Georgies his ambition was to write an epic. An obvious theme was the rise and triumph of Octa-vian but Virgil knew that in doing so he would have to gloss over the brutal realities involved in the struggle for power. It was much better to look further back into Roman history and eventually Virgil chose the legend of the Trojan Aeneas. The legend, as Virgil adapted it for his purposes, told how Aeneas, fleeing from the capture of Troy, voyaged across the Mediterranean and eventually arrived in Italy after a celebrated love affair with Dido, queen of Carthage. After bloody struggles for supremacy, he founded the family that was itself to found Rome. The attraction of the story was that Augustus’ adoptive family, the Julians, claimed their own descent from Aeneas and so indirectly Virgil was glorifying his emperor.
The Aeneid is consciously modelled on Homer. The wanderings of Aeneas in the first part echo the Odyssey and the battles of the second the Iliad. It was an audacious undertaking, particularly from a man who, in famous lines from Book VI of the Aeneid (see below, p. 418), acknowledged the supremacy of the Greeks in all the arts, but it was a subject which allowed Virgil to use his powers to the full. The greatness of the Aeneid lies not just in the majesty and beauty of its language but in its courage in tackling the agonies involved in power and destiny. Rome has been given its tasks by the gods and must not flinch from achieving its empire. Virgil captures the emotional force of Aeneas’ separation from his homeland, his loneliness, and what seems to be a refuge in the arms of Dido, before duty and the will of the gods drive him on to the hostile shores of Italy. Here the battles he wages to establish himself are ruthless and destructive. Virgil is free, as he would never have been if he had written directly about Augustus, to dwell on the pity and waste of war and to write sympathetically of the victor’s opponents. Yet there is an end, order established and the rise of Rome foretold. Taken into the underworld, Aeneas sees the future Octavian: ‘This is the man, this one, of whom so often you have heard the promise, Caesar Augustus, son of the deified, who shall bring once again the Age of Gold to Latium. . .’ A past prophecy has been fulfilled in the present. Virgil’s respects have been paid and his hopes for the future expressed without any compromise to his independence. (An acclaimed recent translation is by Sarah Ruden, The Aeneid, New Haven and London, 2008. Wider perspectives are provided by Charles Martindale (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, Cambridge and New York, 1997.)
There were other important poets of this generation, Propertius and Tibullus, for instance, who both saw poetry as the best way to express the struggle of the lover against the agonies imposed by desire and dominant women, but the third major star of the reign was a much younger man, Publius Ovidius Naso. Ovid came from a peaceful and fruitful part of central Italy that had been left relatively untouched by the civil wars. He was still only a boy of 12 when the wars ended
And, as a member of a well-off provincial family, he was free to make his way in a society much more settled than that known by Horace and Virgil. When he came to Rome to study rhetoric, he seemed set on a conventional career. His father’s hopes were that he would progress to the senate. (A good survey is provided by the essays in Philip Hardie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, Cambridge and New York, 2002.)
However, Ovid’s greatest love was the use of language and he engineered his life so that it became one of full-time writing. He never committed himself to the imperial establishment to the same degree as Horace and Virgil and he emerges as a freer and less inhibited poet as a result. His first published work, the Amores (around 20 Bc), explores the life of young lovers let loose in a large metropolitan city. Trips are made to the races and theatre against a background of all the frustrations, delights, joys, and sufferings of young love. The Amores are elegies (elegies took their name from the metre in which they were written and were used, in classical times, to express a wide range of subjects, not only the ‘songs of lamentation’ with which the word is now associated), and they set a standard of the genre for later generations.
In The Art of Love (possibly around 1 Bc), a much more cynical and world-weary poet writes of the stratagems to be used by both men and women to seduce those they desire. ‘The first thing to get in your head’, writes Ovid, ‘is that every single girl can be caught and that you’ll catch her if you set your toils right. Birds will sooner fall dumb in springtime, cicadas in summer, or a hunting dog turn his back on a hare, than a lover’s bland inducements can fail with a woman.’ (Translation: Peter Green.) As it follows its decadent theme, the Art of Love is filled with the detail of everyday life in Roman society, the devices with which women make themselves look beautiful, the skills of hair-dressing, and the appropriate lover’s gift.
Ovid’s hunger for new forms of expression was also to find a rich source in Greek mythology. In his Metamorphoses (about ad 2) he constructs a rich tapestry of stories from the time of creation to his own day. The common theme is the transformation of the characters into new shapes, from human to animal or plant as history moves on towards contemporary events. So finally the human Julius Caesar is transformed into a god and, by implication, so will Augustus become divine. Yet underlying the entire poem is the volatility of the natural world in which little is stable. This remains a world of anxiety. The Metamorphoses are a highly inventive work that remained Ovid’s most popular throughout the Middle Ages (and provided the inspiration for Roberto Calasso’s modern reinterpretation of classical myth The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, London and New York, 1993, as well as the acclaimed free translation of the English poet Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid, London and New York, 1997).
Ovid was sensitive and cynical by turns, but always brilliant and ready to break new ground. He was right to express an increasing sense of unease among the writers of the period as the regime consolidated itself. Finally he fell foul of Augustus. His ‘crime’ is not known. Augustus certainly disliked Ovid’s celebration of sexual freedom for women at a time when he was trying to uphold more austere moral codes (it did not help that some of Augustus’ new public monuments were recommended as pick-up points) but there was some other more serious offence, possibly association with political opposition. Augustus summoned him personally in ad 8 and sent him into remote exile to the Black Sea. He was separated from everything he loved, the bustling demi-monde of Rome, even his third wife. He was never allowed to return, and died about ad 17, after composing a final set of poems bemoaning his exile (in an excellent translation by Peter Green for Penguin Classics).
The Res Gestae Divi Augusti
Towards the end of his life Augustus compiled a list of his achievements, the Res Gestae, ‘what has been achieved’. It is an inspired piece of political propaganda that has not only defined Augustus’ reign but provided a model for ‘good’ emperors to follow. A bronze copy was placed in front of Augustus’ mausoleum and other copies distributed to temples dedicated to the imperial cult. The best surviving example, in both Greek and Latin versions, was inscribed on the walls of the temple to Rome and Augustus at Ancyra in central Anatolia, possibly by the provincial governor after Augustus’ death. Very recently a fragment of the text has been discovered at Sardis. (The text of the Res Gestae is now translated with a full commentary by Alison Cooley, Cambridge and New York, 2009.)
Although inscriptions on stone were commonplace in both Greek and Roman cities, there is no exact equivalent of this text. It appears to have been an initiative of Augustus. He was adept at combining a record of his military achievements with one of the munificence with which he spent the plunder on embellishing the city of Rome, restoring temples, throwing games and gladiator displays, and improving the water supply. He presented himself as a world conqueror, on a par with Alexander, but he emphasized that, unlike Alexander, his conquests extend west as well as east. So perhaps he has even surpassed him. Then Augustus stresses how he had willingly surrendered his power in 28-27 to the Senate so that this could also be seen as a restored republic. Yet there is also the underlying theme, so fully proclaimed in the imperial art of the period, that this is indeed a new era. The question was whether stability could be sustained.
World History
