An extraordinary literary efflorescence coincides with the rise of Augustus and the establishment of his regime. Augustus’ program of national recovery and renewal dominates Augustan poetry as it both responds to and seeks to define these new political circumstances. In the years which witnessed Augustus’ unrelenting rise to unchallenged control (44-31 bce) the Roman Empire saw civil war, widespread disruptions in property, and confused allegiances. After his victory at Actium in 31 BCE ended any political challenges, Augustus embarked on an ambitious program which involved the definition of his new political power and the formulation of a national identity. Augustus widely mobilized symbolic associations to promote his image and authority. This concerted cultural policy brought about sweeping alterations in the style, content, and form of architecture, art, and literature. All the dominant poets of the period have relations with Augustus and his circle, especially through his friend Maecenas, a wealthy supporter of literature (Vergil, Horace, Propertius). The mode of the dissemination of this new program is of course central to current debates about the relationship of Latin literature to power, patronage, and the princeps. We should not envision a systematic agenda overseen by Augustus. Current scholarship has rightly resisted viewing Augustan texts as either simply ‘‘oppositional’’ or simply ‘‘orthodox’’ and opposes reading poetry as a prefab ideology. In seeking to move away from the terms of pro - or anti-Augustanism, scholarship has advocated a consideration of the discursive power of texts to actively participate in the articulation and construction of cultural and social values (Kennedy 1992). When the point of reception is stressed, rather than authorial or textual intent, we must acknowledge that any statement is open to appropriation for either a pro - or antiimperial reading.
Of all the poets of the Augustan age, Vergil (70-19 bce) is most closely associated with Augustus, although this is in no small measure due to the efforts of the princeps himself to appropriate both his epic and his version of the national myth. Vergil recited parts of both the Georgies and Aeneid to Augustus, and Augustus is said to have been instrumental in the posthumous publication of the Aeneid in 19 bce, after Vergil’s death, and it is not long before imagery from the Aeneas myth appears on public monuments such as the Ara Pacis (13-9 bce), and in the Forum Augustum, completed in 2 bce. The epic was hailed as an instant classic, and became part of the elite system of education, a fact which cemented Vergil’s reputation as a poet of Augustus and made interpretation of his poetry even more difficult. Later poets faced with his monumental achievement also tend to construct Vergil as an Augustan, for the purposes of competition and comparison (especially Ovid and Lucan). The reality of Vergil’s relationship to Augustus is doubtless much more complex than this biographical tradition suggests. Born outside the ruling class, Vergil, like his fellow poet Horace, was a small Italian landholder. Vergil may indeed have owed much to the support of Maecenas or Augustus, but all of his poetry reveals a complex, multivocal, and wholly individual interpretation of his world and times. His first work, the Bucolics (‘‘Herdsmen’s songs,’’ now usually called the Eclogues or ‘‘Extracts’’), a collection of ten poems, were written largely during the turbulent triumviral period of the late forties and early thirties BCE. The work took as its main literary model the refined pastoral poetry (Idylls) of the Greek poet Theocritus, who had composed at the court of the Ptolemys during the height of the scholarly and literary activity at the Alexandrian library in the third century bce. Vergil’s poems, sophisticated and refined in form and composition, present a pastoral world of shepherd-poets, but also admit elements of the political world. Recent events, such as the land confiscations in 42-41 BCE (Ecl. 1.9) and the assassination of Caesar (Ecl. 5), are acknowledged obliquely, but they are assimilated into the pastoral world and poetics of the collection. Vergil followed this with another recherche genre, the Georgics, a didactic treatise on farming (published in 29 bce) which took him ten years to write. The Georgics are both a learned combination of a number of Greek and Roman models (Hesiod, Homer, Greek Hellenistic poetry, Lucretius, Varro, etc., see Farrell 1991; R. F. Thomas 1988) and a profound meditation on nature and the nature of the world. In the poem agriculture serves as a metaphor for man’s struggles with nature, civilization, and an understanding of his universe. Many scholars have felt that Vergil’s stress on the violence, violation, and struggle required in the conquering of the natural world ultimately calls into question the results of man’s labors and presents a dark view of Rome’s (and Octavian’s) achievements (R. F. Thomas 1988, 2001; Ross 1987). In Georgics 1 Vergil prays for future salvation from a leader (clearly Octavian), while comparing the current situation to a charioteer being pulled along with no control over his horses (1.500-14). In the Eclogues Vergil had only obliquely referred to Octavian in the first poem, as the shepherd Tityrus relates how his confiscated land was restored to him through the intervention of a god-like youth; the failure to name Octavian here is perhaps a reflection of the insecurities of the time (for the argument that the eighth Eclogue also refers to Octavian, see Bowersock 1971). In the Georgics he had portrayed Octavian as a potential savior (1.500ff.) and as a divine figure (1.40ff.), and at the beginning of Book 3 he seems to promise a future work in honor of the emperor, claiming that he will build a marble temple and ‘‘place Caesar in the middle.’’ The Aeneid seems to fulfil this promise, but the poem is no Augus-teid. By choosing the legend of Aeneas Vergil liberated himself from the panegyrical tradition of national epic (Naevius, Ennius, etc.) and was able to problematize the issues of Roman history and of the principate (P. Hardie 1997a: 319). The theme is mythical, in the tradition of the Homeric epics, but at the same time historical and national, tracing the struggles of the surviving Trojan hero Aeneas to travel to Italy and found the dynasty which will lead to the foundation of Rome and directly to the family of Augustus (related to Aeneas through his son Iulus, the eponymous founder of the Julian line). Contemporary events and Augustus are mentioned in several prophecies and ecphrases; Aeneas in the Underworld is shown the future emperor: ‘‘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 an Age of Gold’’ (Aen. 6.791-3, trans. R. Fitzgerald). The first words of the poem, ‘‘arms and a man I sing,’’ proclaim Vergil’s intent to follow and challenge Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and create a Roman epic classic. He succeeded - indeed the poet Propertius hailed the Aeneid as a masterpiece greater than the Iliad as it was being written (2.34.66). The epic is an intertextual tour de force and his treatment of Latin hexameter verse is highly innovative and varied. Vergil’s Aeneid seeks nothing less than to define its new age in both politico-historical and cosmological terms (P. Hardie 1986). The poem aims to explain the rise of the Roman (Augustan) state to universal dominion by tracing its origins in the past and in the process to explain the nature of Roman-ness. Aeneas’ primary characteristic is a sense of duty (pietas), but he suffers from a lack of understanding of his mission and hence an unwillingness to pursue it (‘I sail for Italy not of my own free will,’ Aen. 4.361). In the course of the poem Aeneas suffers great personal loss, losing his father, his wife, and his lover Dido, the latter two through his own inadvertent actions. As in Vergil’s other works, the voice of suffering and loss of the victims is ultimately louder than that of triumph, and he reveals again his ‘‘marked openness to the problematic elements of life and its unresolved tensions’’ (Conte 1994: 284). The war in Italy between the Trojans and Italians in the second half of the poem is represented as a painful civil war, causing the death of many innocent youths, calling to mind the many anxieties caused by the more recent civil wars that brought Caesar and Augustus to power. While Rome’s fated destiny as world leader is guaranteed by Jupiter’s concern, and at the cosmic level Rome is seen as bringing order and balance, the human cost of this victory is repeatedly called into question. In the Aeneid the Fury of warfare always threatens to break loose again; in Augustus’ age of peace ‘‘the Gates of War will then be shut: inside, unholy Furor, squatting on cruel weapons, hands enchained behind him by a hundred links of bronze, will grind his teeth and howl with bloodied mouth’’ (Aen. 1.293-6). Already in antiquity the reception of the Aeneid reflects its multi-vocal nature, as poets beginning with Ovid grapple with its unresolved tensions.
In 17 BCE Vergil’s contemporary Horace (65-8 bce) was commissioned by Augustus to write a Hymn, a poem to be sung by a choir of boys and girls, in celebration of the Secular Games, a festival announcing a new age (Putnam 2000; Barchiesi 2002). This was a remarkable moment in Horace’s poetic career, which had been largely devoted to more private genres, such as satire, verse letters, and, most famously, lyric odes. In his Odes, Horace took as his models the early Greek lyric poets (Sappho, Alcaeus) and created the first lyric poetry book in Latin (so he proudly claims at Odes 3.30, ‘‘I was the first to bring Aeolian song to Italian measures’’), with poems on personal (erotic, sympotic, philosophical) as well as public themes. After publishing Odes 1-3 in 23 bce, Horace produced a fourth book ten years later in which praise of the imperial family is prominent, but mixed with personal erotic poems. The earlier Epodes, poems defined by their meters and invective tone, are also profoundly engaged with both their literary antecedents (at Epistle 1.19.23-5 Horace claims to be the first to reveal iambi, Archilochean poetry, to the Romans) and the turbulent political climate of the late thirties (Oliensis 1998; Mankin 1995: 10-12). One of Horace’s abiding themes in all of his work is the relationship between the poet and his great patron, whether Maecenas, with whom, like Vergil, he was closely associated, or with the emperor (Oliensis 1998). We see Horace developing strategies for preserving aesthetic and personal independence within the new social and political structure, in which there were new demands on the poet’s voice. These strategies for dealing with the ever-changing conditions of speech in the empire will prove useful also for later imperial authors. His Epistles 2.1, a poem addressed to Augustus, articulates both a ‘‘didactics and a poetics for the Principate’’ (Barchiesi 2001b: 82), which reveals the central place of the emperor in the construction of imperial poetics (see Feeney 2002).
There had already developed in Rome other more personal forms of poetry, such as epigram and elegy. Catullus and the ‘‘new poets’’ of the early and mid-first century had written on varied personal themes, especially the erotic, and perfected a learned refinement of style and content which greatly influenced Vergil and later poets. Erotic elegy (so called because it was love poetry composed in the meter known as the elegiac couplet) was practiced in the Augustan period by the poets Propertius (c.50-16/2? bce), Tibullus (55?-19), and Ovid (43 bce-19 ce). In these collections the poet writes in the persona of a lover ‘‘autobiographical’’ poems about his erotic experiences, which follow a set of predictable rules and literary conventions. As with Catullus’ Lesbia, significant poetic pseudonyms are used for the mistresses (Tibullus’ Delia and Propertius’ Cynthia both refer to Apolline inspiration; Ovid’s Corinna, like Lesbia, is the name of a Greek poetess), about whose social status the poets are deliberately vague. These mistresses often serve as ciphers for the poet’s own compositions (Wyke 1989; Keith 1994). Ovid, typically, makes this most overt in poem Amores 3.1 where Tragedy and Elegy appear to him as female figures.
One of the most characteristic features of elegy is its tendency to communicate at two levels; love and poetry-writing are united in the figure of the lover-poet and the two activities are made parallel. So when Propertius claims, ‘‘I was born unfit for weapons, love is the warfare the fates wish me to undergo’’ (1.6), he equates his life of love with the composition of elegy (defined as not about warfare [armis], that is, epic). The elegists create in their works poetic identities and a poetic code which is formulated in terms directly opposed to the prevailing moral and social ideology (Kennedy 1993). They advocate a life of love and poetry, rather than political duty and military pursuits. This oppositional strategy by which elegy defines itself also involves gender and social reversals. The poets construct their mistresses as their masters (dominae) and play the part of slave; so Tibullus declares, ‘‘Slave to a mistress! Yes, in recognition of my fate bidding now farewell to the freedom of my birthright I accept the harshest slavery’’ (2.4.1-3, trans. G. Lee). The implications of this poetic code have proven difficult to interpret. The elegiac poets seem to express dissent from and even resistance to prevailing ideals, yet opposition may be read as validation of the ideal by contrast (Conte 1989; Wallace-Hadrill 1985).
The poetics of this self-professed ‘‘lesser’’ genre also requires a consistent rejection of the national and celebratory themes of epic. In ‘‘apologies’’ or ‘‘refusals’’ ( recusa-tiones) the elegiac poets express their unwillingness or profess inability to write a grander kind of poetry (usually laudatory epic). So Propertius explains that if fate had made him capable of writing about heroes he would sing about Caesar’s wars, but he has not the powers (2.1). Yet Tibullus and Propertius also include in their collections poems of praise of public figures, Tibullus of his patron Messala (1.7, 2.5), while Propertius, like Horace, eventually published a fourth book of poetry which dealt with Augustan themes in a series of poems dealing with the origins of a number of
Roman monuments. Like Horace’s fourth book of odes, erotic subjects are still juxtaposed and combined with the national, such as in the tale of Tarpeia (4.4), a woman punished for love and forever associated with a Roman landmark. In this way, private concerns and space never wholly yield to the national. Finally, it is also in love elegy that we have our only example of a female poet at Rome, in the six short poems of Sulpicia, a poetess associated with Tibullus and preserved with his collection. Her first elegy reveals a distinctively female perspective in the expressed hesitation at publishing her loves: ‘‘Finally a love has come which would cause me more shame were Rumor to conceal it rather than lay it bare for all’’ ([Tibullus] 3.13, trans. J. Snyder).
Ovid is often viewed as a transitional poet, bridging the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius. His poetry exerted a huge influence on the development of the Latin literary language and style, even if Vergil remained the primary literary model to whom later authors respond. His exile by Augustus in 8 ce forever changed, both for Ovid and for us, how we read his earlier productions and also marks the beginning of a decline in imperial tolerance. Ovid, exiled, as he tells us, because of a poem (he is probably referring to the Art of Love, a how-to manual for lovers) and an ‘‘error’’ (Tr. 2.207), was never recalled by Augustus or by Tiberius. The Art of Love provocatively advocates adultery (against which Augustus had enacted new legislation) and suggests a number of Augustus’ new public monuments as good places to pick up dates. In Book 1 Romulus is held up as a model for rape, yet in the same book appears praise of Gaius, Augustus’ grandson, and this work evidently was tolerated for at least eight years or so after its publication (see B. Gibson 2003: 37-43 for a recent discussion of the dating issues of the poem). Although once regarded as politically detached, Ovid is increasingly viewed as an author very much engaged in the discourses of his times. Faced with the Augustan revolution as a fait accompli, Ovid responds by unmasking and revealing the underpinnings and constructions of both political and literary forms (Feeney 1991: 210-32, 247-9; Myers 1994; P. Hardie 1997b). Ovidian poetry is known for its irony or meta-literary self-consciousness and its seeming awareness of the postmodern issues of fictionality and textuality. Ovid had begun as a love poet, producing a variety of amatory elegiac works. In these he systematically exposed the generic codes of elegiac love. He began his Amores not, as traditionally, with a declaration of love for a mistress (see Propertius 2.1.4, ‘‘my only inspiration is a girl’’), but with the choice of a genre and a lack of topic. This poem also marks the beginning of a lifelong engagement with Vergil’s work; instead of telling us what the Amores are about, we learn first what they will not be about, arma, the first word of the Aeneid. In the Heroides, a series of verse letters written by heroines, Dido herself delivers a deadly critique of Aeneas’ actions in the Aeneid (Her. 4), claiming that Aeneas was the cause of her death and that she should have learned from the fate of his wife creusa. Typically, Ovid likes to explore different perspectives, frequently female.
Ovid’s two longest works, the Fasti and the Metamorphoses, are masterpieces of great originality, and in many ways as a pair represent his response to Vergil (P. Hardie 1991: 47). The epic Metamorphoses, a 15-book compendium of Greek and Roman myth, challenges Vergil both in its cosmological scope and its intertextual nature. Ovid tells us in the proem that his poem will be a universal history, proceeding ‘‘from the creation of the world to his own time.’’ The many tales of metamorphosis throughout the poem account for the origins of the natural world and the poem ends with the ‘‘metamorphosis’’ of Julius Caesar into a god (and looks forward to the apotheosis of Augustus). Within the scope of this epic, Ovid modulates between many genres (hymn, pastoral, didactic, elegy, tragedy, etc.) and engages with a vast range of Greek and Roman literature. When the poem reaches Italy in its final books, Ovid retells the story of Aeneas, in a manner that highlights not Rome, or fate, but rather personal stories of metamorphosis, in keeping with the rest of the poem (Tissol 1997; Myers forthcoming). Thus the Sibyl does not show Aeneas his great Roman descendants, but tells the sad tale of Apollo’s love for her and his punishment of her when she refused to comply with his wishes (Met. 14.101-53). When prophecies of Rome’s greatness appear in Book 15, they are spoken by the philosopher Pythagoras, whose main goal is to stress the mutability of all things, even eternal Rome! Ovid’s depiction of this profoundly unstable world of the Metamorphoses, governed by arbitrary divine powers, has implications for his understanding of life under the empire.
Ovid’s Fasti, a versification in elegiac couplets of the Roman religious calendar (of which we have only the first six months and are unsure whether he ever composed the other half [see Barchiesi 1997b]), parallels Augustus’ own manipulations of the Roman religious year and challenges his appropriation of the discourses of religion and antiquarianism in the service of the dissemination of his new values. Like the Metamorphoses, the poem is aetiological, providing explanations and historical causes for various Roman religious rituals and festivals. In the poem praise of the imperial family alternates with erotic and fanciful myth in often contradictory and uncomfortable juxtapositions. There is the peculiarly un-balanced treatment of the Ides of March in Fasti 3, where Ovid devotes the greater part of his lengthy narrative to the festival celebrated on that day in honor of the minor deity Anna Perenna, whereas the apotheosis of Julius Caesar is dealt with in a mere 14 lines (697-710, see New-lands 1995). The two-faced figure of Janus which opens the poem has been suggested as a symbol of the possible dual readings of the poem, as both encomiastic and oppositional (Barchiesi 1997a: 230-7).
World History
