The emperor Augustus had always been a controversial figure. Vergil and Horace had honored him for bringing the civil wars to an end, even if it was at the cost of Roman liberty. Tacitus had depicted him as a ruthless politician who had removed all his enemies through war or proscription and then ruled the state as a tyrant. Poets like Juvenal and Martial, distressed at the lack of literary patronage during their own age, looked back to the reign of Augustus as a time when men of wit and taste both governed Rome and supported writers of genius. Augustus, then, could be either enlightened monarch or pitiless tyrant, depending on the use a poet or historian wished to make of him.
In seventeenth-century France, the court of Augustus was to be emulated. Indeed, the comparison of modern France with Augustan Rome had patriotic implications: Louis XIV was now the incomparable monarch, a modern rival to Augustus. In England, though, the political situation was more complicated, and Augustus served several different political purposes. For some Oliver Cromwell was a modern Augustus who had destroyed the state and set himself up as tyrant. Conversely, in Astraea Redux (Justice restored, 1660), a poem celebrating the Restoration of Charles II, Dryden could proclaim the advent of a new Augustan age that promised to rejuvenate English ‘‘arms and arts’’ (line 322). In the end Dryden and his contemporaries would be disappointed by Charles’s rule, but the myth of the Augustan court, with its men of taste dispensing enlightened patronage to writers of genius, remained an ideal for literary men, one that poets of all political parties could exploit. The writer in search of patronage, for example, could employ the Augustan myth in his approach to those in power and, if disappointed, bewail the times in which no Maecenas was to be found.
During the 1730s, with George II on the throne, Alexander Pope made imaginative use of the idea of the Augustan age in his satiric imitation of Horace’s epistle to Augustus (Epistles 2.1). Pope was one of the literary men who opposed the policies of the king and his chief minister, Sir Robert Walpole. English freedom, these authors argued, was being undermined by a corrupt administration, and true merit went unrecognized at court. In this heated political context, Pope addressed the king (who had been christened George Augustus) as Horace had addressed the emperor, praising him for his victories, his reformation of the nation’s morals, and his support of the arts - none of which, as far as Pope was concerned, could be said truly of King George. Pope’s poem, though, is neither a naive evocation of the Augustan myth, nor a simple attack on the monarch he despised. It is a serious engagement with Horace’s thoughts on the place of poetry in the modern world. It remains a political poem, but its deepest concerns are social; and the figure at the center is neither George nor Augustus, but Horace.
World History
