Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic

445 Pages·2013·1.767 MB·English

by  Joseph Farrell, Damien P. Nelis

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Oxford Scholarship Online
Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic
Joseph Farrell and Damien P. Nelis
Print publication date: 2013
Print ISBN-13: 9780199587223
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2013
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199587223.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic
(p.ii) (p.iii) Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic
(p.iv)
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Preface - Oxford Scholarship
Oxford Scholarship Online
Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic
Joseph Farrell and Damien P. Nelis
Print publication date: 2013
Print ISBN-13: 9780199587223
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2013
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199587223.001.0001
(p.v) Preface
This volume has its distant origin in a conference held at the Fondation Hardt, in
Vandoeuvres, Geneva on 22–4 March 2007. Two papers delivered on that occasion are not
included here, A. Barchiesi’s contribution, ‘La Guerre sociale dans l’Enéide de Virgile:
naissance d’un peuple’, will appear as part of the published version of his 2011 Sather
Lectures. M. Leigh’s paper, ‘Troy, Sicily and Rome: Vergil’s Boxing Match and the Problem of
Eryx’, has appeared in HSCPh 105 (2010), 117–55 under the title, ‘Boxing and Sacrifice in the
Epic: Apollonius, Vergil, and Valerius’. The conference, which was generously sponsored by
the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Société Académique de Genève, and the Faculty
of Arts and the Department of Classics of the University of Geneva, was organized as one of
the regular meetings of the ‘Réseau international de recherche et de formation à la recherche
dans le domaine de la poésie augustéenne’, a research network which includes the following
universities: Cambridge; Dublin (Trinity College) Florence; Geneva; Heidelberg; Lille;
London (King’s College); Oxford; Rome (La Sapienza); and Udine. The idea for the
conference arose from discussions among the members which took place in the gardens of
Corpus Christi College in Oxford, during an earlier meeting of the network held on 22–4
September 2005. Some of the papers read at that conference have now been published in a
volume entitled Paradox and the Marvellous in Augustan Literature and Culture (Oxford,
2009), edited by P. Hardie. The papers of the previous meeting of the network, held in
Heidelberg on 15–17 April 2004, were edited by J. P. Schwindt and published as La
Représentation du temps dans la poésie augustéenne (Heidelberg, 2005). The topic chosen
for the Geneva meeting arose directly from discussions concerning A. Gowing’s Empire and
Memory: The Representation of the Roman Republic in Imperial Culture (Cambridge,
2005). This book may be considered as a tribute to the richness of Gowing’s work and as an
attempt to follow through on one of the many ideas for further research arising from it. The
editors would like to thank all those who did so much to make the Geneva conference such a
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Preface - Oxford Scholarship
pleasant and memorable occasion, especially colleagues at the University of Geneva and the
staff at the Fondation Hardt, particularly Monica Brunner and Pierre Ducrey. Special thanks
are of course due to the contributors to this volume and (p.vi) to all those involved in the
research network which gave rise to the conference in Geneva; without their expertise, their
good will, and their patience, this collection of papers would never have been published. We
would also like to thank all the staff at OUP for their constant help and endless patience,
especially Hilary O’Shea, Taryn Das Neves, Kizzy Taylor-Richelieu and the anonymous
readers. And so finally, with Propertius, we can say to all concerned (3.4.10):
ite et Romanae consulite historiae!
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List of Contributors - Oxford Scholarship
Oxford Scholarship Online
Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic
Joseph Farrell and Damien P. Nelis
Print publication date: 2013
Print ISBN-13: 9780199587223
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2013
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199587223.001.0001
(p.ix) List of Contributors
Joseph Farrell
is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Damien P. Nelis
is Professor of Latin at the University of Geneva.
Mario Citroni
is Professor of Latin Literature at the ‘Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane’
(Florence). He is the author of an edition and commentary on Martial Book I
(1975), of studies on the author–public relationship in Latin poetry, including
Poesia e lettori in Roma antica (1995) and on various aspects of the relation
between literature and society in the Roman world. He is currently working on
literary canons in ancient literature.
Maria Luisa Delvigo
is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Udine. She is the author of
Testo virgiliano e tradizione indiretta: Le varianti probiane (Pisa, 1987) and
Servio e la poesia della scienza (Pisa, 2011). She works mainly on the text of
Virgil, on philology and literary criticism in antiquity, and on scientific poetry,
particularly Lucretius.
Alain Deremetz
is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Lille. He is a specialist in
Latin poetry and in the ancient novel. He is the author of studies devoted to the
history of interpretation and to literary pragmatics and of Le Miroir des Muses:
Poétiques de la réflexivité à Rome (Lille, 1995).
Jacqueline Fabre-Serris
is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Lille. She is the author of
Mythe et poésie dans les Métamorphoses d’Ovide: Fonctions et significations de
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la mythologie dans la Rome augustéenne (1995), Mythologie et littérature à
Rome: La réécriture des mythes aux 1ers siècles avant et après J.-C. (1998), and
Rome, l’Arcadie et la mer des Argonautes: Essai sur la naissance d’une
mythologie des origines en Occident (2008), and has published many articles on
the Latin literature, on the mythology and mythography, on Gender Studies, and
on the reception of antiquity. She is co-director of the electronic reviews
Dictynna and Eugesta, of a series on ‘Mythography’ published by Presses du
Septentrion, and editor of two websites: Polymnia
(〈http://polymnia.recherche.univ-lille3.fr/〉) and EuGeStA
(〈http://eugesta.recherche. univ-lille3.fr/〉).
(p.x) Monica R. Gale
is Associate Professor of Latin at Trinity College, Dublin. She is the author of
Myth and Poetry in Lucretius (Cambridge, 1994), Virgil on the Nature of
Things: The Georgics, Lucretius and the Didactic Tradition (Cambridge, 2000),
and other books and articles on late Republican and Augustan poetry, and is
currently working on a commentary on the complete poems of Catullus for the
Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series.
Bill Gladhill
is an Assistant Professor at McGill University. He has published a number of
articles on Roman poetry and prose, and is currently completing a book entitled
Rethinking Roman Alliance, as well as an edition of Pontano’s Parthenopaeus.
Alain M. Gowing
is Professor of Classics at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he has
been on the faculty since 1988 after receiving his Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College.
His chief interests lie in the area of Roman historiography and literature,
especially of the imperial period. His most recent book is Empire and Memory:
The Representation of the Roman Republic in Imperial Culture (Cambridge,
2005), and he is currently working on a book-length study of the role of Rome
and urban space in Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus.
Philip Hardie
is a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. He has recently
published Rumour and Renown: Representations of Fama in Western
Literature (2012), and is currently completing a commentary on Ovid,
Metamorphoses 13–15 (Fondazione Valla), co-editing the volume on the
Renaissance in the ‘Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature’,
and writing a short book on the reception of the Aeneid.
Jean-Christophe Jolivet
is Professor of Latin at the University of Lille. His main research and teaching
interests are in Latin poetry, intertextuality, and especially the influence of
Homeric scholarship on Virgil and Ovid. The author of Allusion et fiction
épistolaire dans les Héroïdes d’Ovide (Rome, 2001), he is currently working on a
book entitled L’Homère romain: Recherches sur les études homériques à Rome
et leur influence sur la poésie augustéenne.
Mario Labate
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List of Contributors - Oxford Scholarship
is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Florence. His studies mainly
deal with Augustan poetry, and in this field, he has worked mainly on elegy and
epic poetry, and in particular on Ovid. He is also interested in Latin satire and
narrative and has written several articles on Horace and Petronius.
(p.xi) Fiachra Mac Góráin
is Lecturer in Classics at University College London. He studied at Trinity College
Dublin and at the University of Oxford, where he wrote his doctorate on tragedy
and the dionysiac in Virgil’s Aeneid. He is currently writing a book entitled
Virgil’s Dionysus.
Jürgen Paul Schwindt
is Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Heidelberg. He is the
author and editor of books and articles on Latin literature of the classical period
and on literary theory and aesthetics. He is the editor of the ‘Bibliothek der
klassischen Altertumswissenschaften’ and is now working on books dealing with
the theory of philology and the semiotics of Latin love elegy.
Gail Trimble
is Brown Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Trinity College, Oxford, and was
previously a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. She is writing
a commentary on Catullus 64, with newly edited text, for the series Cambridge
Classical Texts and Commentaries. She has also published articles on Ovid and
on the history of Catullan scholarship.
(p.xii)
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Introduction
Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic
Joseph Farrell and Damien P. Nelis
Print publication date: 2013
Print ISBN-13: 9780199587223
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2013
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199587223.001.0001
Introduction
Joseph Farrell
Damien P. Nelis
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199587223.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
A considerable body of recent scholarship has been devoted to investigating the
ways in which societies remember, studying not only what they construct as
memorable but also why and how they do so.1 Adopting a narrower focus, this
volume examines the ways in which different aspects and images of the Roman
Republic are created and exploited by the Augustan poets. Our subject
immediately suggests two obvious strategies: on the one hand, emphasis on a
strictly historical project; on the other, concentration on versions of literary
history. The latter has been more popular and influential in recent Latin
scholarship, but the former has not been without its adherents, as the lively
debate in recent historical research has fought over the value of ancient literary
sources for reconstructing the early history of Rome and, crucially, for the
origins of the Republic and the struggle of the orders....
A considerable body of recent scholarship has been devoted to investigating the
ways in which societies remember, studying not only what they construct as
memorable but also why and how they do so.1 Adopting a narrower focus, this
volume examines the ways in which different aspects and images of the Roman
Republic are created and exploited by the Augustan poets. Our subject
immediately suggests two obvious strategies: on the one hand, emphasis on a
strictly historical project; on the other, concentration on versions of literary
history. The latter has been more popular and influential in recent Latin
scholarship, but the former has not been without its adherents, as the lively
debate in recent historical research has fought over the value of ancient literary
Page 1 of 18
Introduction
sources for reconstructing the early history of Rome and, crucially, for the
origins of the Republic and the struggle of the orders.2 Simultaneously, recent
work on Livy has provided strong support for a pre-Actian dating for the
beginning of the composition of his history, and so has vastly improved our
appreciation of the complexity and subtlety of this extraordinarily ambitious and
influential historiographical project.3 In addition, more sophisticated readings of
Roman historians in general that are themselves influenced by the application of
New Critical techniques of close reading developed by critics of poetic texts,
have begun in turn to impinge on the ways in which the Latin poetry of the
Augustan age is (p.2) interpreted.4 Just as historical writers employ the
materials of poetry and what we now call fiction—myth and metaphor, artful
structuration, and the careful activation of intertextual possibilities involving
models in both prose and verse—Augustan poets reveal their keen awareness of
and interest in different historiographical modes, such as those of universal
history, regal chronicles, and the tropes of annalistic writing. They are also
interested in some of the characteristic themes and devices of historical writing,
such as battle narrative, civil conflict, ethnography, speeches, and debates, even
as they too engage intertextually with precise historiographical models in
pointed and influential ways.5 The challenge for this volume, then, is not so
much to ask whether the Augustan poets are concerned with Roman history, but
to gain greater clarity with regard to the questions of how and to what end they
may be seen as presenting their past as a specifically Republican history. In
setting out to think about this vast topic, one which can only be treated in a
highly selective manner in a book such as this, a series of obvious questions
comes immediately to mind. Are there any particular aspects of the Republic
that Augustan poets seem to remember with particular frequency and
immediacy? Equally, are there any aspects they seem to prefer to forget? How
do they shape the past in relation to the present: do they favour narratives of
continuity, rupture, or repetition? What other forms of periodization do they
adopt? And finally, how are we to define any given poet as ‘Augustan’? Amidst
such a bewildering array of questions, it seems advisable to attempt to seek
some solid ground as a starting point.
Looking back: the search for ‘the beginning’
It is characteristic of ancient and modern historical writing to emphasize the
roots or causes of a historical process or event—in short, to identify (p.3) when
it ‘begins’. If we can identify the Augustan period with a time when one might
conceive of the Republic as a thing of the past, when does this period begin?
Alain Gowing’s Empire and Memory: The Representation of the Roman Republic
in Imperial Culture, a brilliant exploration of the ways in which memories of the
Republic function in early Imperial literature, has illustrated the potential
richness of this topic; but, crucially, Gowing begins his survey with the age of
Tiberius. In doing so, in a manner which is of course deliberately reminiscent of
the opening chapters of Tacitus’ Annals, he underlines in the clearest possible
Page 2 of 18
Introduction
fashion the liminal status of the Augustan period and the ways in which differing
interpretations of its achievements depend on how we define it. At the very heart
of any attempt to understand this period and its transitions must lie sensitivity to
the Augustan negotiation of the tension between, on the one hand, a rhetoric
based on idealizing myths of origins and the concept of restoration in a res
publica restituta and, on the other, the presentation of the past as a period of
endless civil war leading to the subsequent need for a radical renewal of the
Roman political system.6 It has long been recognized that literary texts can
provide us with insights into these questions and into the realities and ideologies
of the age. But for the literary scholar to exploit fully the potential of this line of
enquiry, it is necessary to re-examine both what we think we know about the
dating of key texts and some of the ways in which literary historians traditionally
periodize Latin poetry, particularly, but not only, the division between Republican
or Triumviral literature and Augustan. Several of the best-known and most
influential works of Augustan poetry were produced in the 20s BC, which is to
say, in the first decade after the Battle of Actium; and these reflect the
overwhelming importance of Augustus’ victories as confirming his pre-
eminence.7 In this sense, Actium would seem to serve as the essential point of
transition between the end of Triumviral disorder and the inauguration of a new
age. But representations of Actium in this period tend to forget that Augustus’
real opponent in this battle was his fellow triumvir, Marcus Antonius—i.e. that
Augustus’ glorious victory was the decisive battle in a civil war. Instead of
recalling this uncomfortable fact, monuments and poems insistently (p.4)
allude to or name Cleopatra as the defeated party, converting Actium in memory
into a victory over a foreign power.8 In this as in other ways, the poets of the 20s
seem eager to forget the recent past and to begin anew, even if the very concept
of beginning anew seems inconsistent with that of a restored Republic, which
itself makes sense only with reference to a period of civil disturbance and not to
a foreign war.9 But on the other hand, it is possible to argue that many elements
often considered as hallmarks of ‘Augustan’ literary culture were actually very
much in place in the poetry that was being produced several years before
Actium. This is true whether we think primarily of social and semi-institutional
elements, such as Maecenas’ cultivation of an elite literary sodality, or of
characteristic themes that these poets share, such as the idea of a golden age
and the tendentious construction of literary genealogy, or, certainly, of the
exacting standards of taste and refinement that these poets all exemplify. In all
of these ways, if we focus on the careers of the poets rather than that of
Augustus, we cannot ignore certain continuities between their pre- and post-
Actian selves.10 Just as a pre-Actian dating for Livy has highly important
implications both for our understanding of the nature of his whole project and
the true extent of his influence on contemporary literary production, so the
recent dating of Propertius’ first book to 33 BC has profound implications for
Page 3 of 18