Title page

218 Pages·2007·0.98 MB·English

EXEGI MONUMENTUM: ARCHITECTURE IN LATIN EPIC

A Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School
of Cornell University
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

by
Brent Gareth Hannah
May 2007
©2007 Brent Gareth Hannah
EXEGI MONUMENTUM: ARCHITECTURE IN LATIN
EPIC
Brent Gareth Hannah, Ph.D.
Cornell University 2007

For the poets of the early empire, architecture and architectural imagery was an
important medium through which to explore the relationship between political power
and poetic art. Virgil and Horace, and their contemporaries and successors, composed
literary monuments to stand beside the physical monuments of their patrons. No less
than the palaces and temples of the emperors, these literary monuments participated in
the formulation and evolution of imperial ideology. Within those poetic monuments,
the description of architecture afforded a space in which to explore the relationship
between poetry, monumental and pictorial art, and political power. This study is an
attempt to elucidate how Virgil and his successors explore the dynamics of this
relationship.
In the proem to Georgics 3, Virgil not only draws a programmatic parallel
between physical and poetic monuments, but he demands that we address the problem
of how the world of poetry is generated out of the phenomenological world of the
poet. These questions are explored through a series of close readings of passages from
Latin epic that engage closely with concerns raised at the beginning of Georgics 3:
Hannibal’s visit to the temple at Liternum in the sixth book of Silius’ Punica, the
description of temple of Juno in Aeneid 1, the description of Daedalus’ temple for
Apollo and the entrance to the Underworld in Aeneid 6, Aeneas’ visit to Actium and
Buthrotum in Aeneid 3, Aeneas’ tour of Pallatneum in Aeneid 8, and Caesar’s visit to
the remains of Troy in Pharsalia 9.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Brent Gareth Hannah was born in Zürich in 1974. In 1995 he graduated from the
University of Melbourne with First Class Honours in Classics. Between 1998 and
2000, having spent two years working in Italy, he earned an MA degree from the
University of Melbourne. Between 2000 and 2006 he was a doctoral candidate and a
teaching fellow at Cornell University. Since January 2007 he has been employed by
the Australian Department of Defence in Canberra.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I should like to thank Cornell University for generously providing me with the funding
necessary to undertake and complete this project. I am very grateful indeed to my
academic committee: Jay Reed, Piero Pucci, Dave Mankin, and, above all, Frederick
Ahl. I have also benefited from the advice and suggestions offered me by members of
the Cornell Classics Department and by audiences at the Hellenic Center in
Washington, the University of Virginia, the University of Nottingham. Finally, I
should like to thank my wife, Cara Yates, who edited and proofread large portions of
the manuscript. Without her assistance and support, this project would not have been
possible.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Introduction 1

Chapter one 7

Chapter two 31

Chapter three 78

Chapter four 108

Chapter five 144

Conclusions 185

Bibliography 190

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Introduction

When Octavian celebrated his triumph in 29 BC, all of his major rivals were dead.
His opponents had no significant spokesman; the senatorial class had been devastated.
In solidifying his rule, Octavian set about fashioning for his contemporaries, and for
posterity, the official image of his regime, overlaying the brick city he found with a
veneer, or façade, of marble (Suet., Aug. 28). As a direct result of Octavian’s building
program, architecture and art became the principal medium through which to
propagate and transmit the Augustan version of the Roman past and present. Virgil,
charged with the task of giving literary shape to the new Rome, was in his own way
one of the chief architects of the regime. Like the new and renovated physical
monuments of the city, the Aeneid, Virgil’s literary monumentum, was commissioned
to present, and preserve, the Augustan narrative of Roman history. Like those
physical monuments, too, the Aeneid was necessarily a selective account of the
Roman past. Yet had Virgil been concerned merely to preserve the official version of
Octavian’s Rome, his monument would have run the risk, after the passing of the
regime, of going the way of all monuments. In order that his own monumentum might
endure the passing of temporal power and its buildings, Virgil exercised a selectivity
of his own.
At the beginning of Georgics 3, Virgil proclaims the impending composition
of his new opus by describing the erection of a massive temple of marble on the river
Mincius:
et uiridi in campo templum de marmore ponam
propter aquam ingens tardis ingens ubi flexibus errat
Mincius et tenera praetexit harundine ripas.
1
(Georgics 3.13-15)
And, in a verdant field, I will erect a temple made of marble before the water,
where the massive river Mincius meanders with mazy motion and fringes the
banks with its tender reeds. I will put Caesar in the middle and he shall
dominate the temple.

The systematic equation of literary and physical architecture is, of course, a familiar
conceit in Augustan poetry. Horace not only equates the act of painting with the
creation of poetry (ut pictura poesis, Ars poetica 361), but he also hails the first three
books of his Odes as a monumentum that would survive the ravages of time (Exegi
monumentum, Carm. 3.30.1). But Virgil goes further: equating architectural and
poetic structures at (what would become) the precise center of his corpus, Virgil
identifies architecture as the single dominant metaphor for poetic art in Latin epic.
The correspondences that Virgil draws between the two media, moreover, are precise.
The ivory doors of Virgil’s temple will be decorated with representations of the
martial heroics of Octavian (26-32), while its accompanying statuary will stand in
honor of his Trojan ancestors (34-36). The careful correspondence between Virgil’s
temple and its decorations on the one hand and, on the other, his poetic opus and its
subject matter, demand that we afford his metaphor the fullest consideration. It
follows that descriptions of physical monuments within Latin epic are privileged sites
for meditation on the nature of poetic arts and its relationship both to physical art and
to the “real” world. This principle is the point of departure for my project.
My methodology shares similarities with previous discussions of epic
architecture, most of which fall into two broad categories. One line of approach has
been to explore the relationship between epic buildings and the material culture of
contemporary Rome. Since architecture was an important medium through which
2
Octavian and his successors articulated imperial ideology, it is unsurprising that for
the poets of the day descriptions of architecture should have been a means through
which to reflect upon political power and ideology. In this respect, the seminal studies
on the expression of imperial power through art by Zanker, Galinski, and others have
provided a point of reference for scholars treating the relationship between poetry and
power in ancient Rome.1
Descriptions of buildings in Latin epic also tend to be considered among the
broader class of descriptions commonly referred to as “ecphrasis.”2 The use of the
term is bedeviled by ambiguity: whereas modern scholars generally take ecphrasis to
refer to descriptions of man-made artifacts, in antiquity it was used to refer to
descriptions of a broader range of visual phenomena, including landscapes.3 The term
ecphrasis also suggests that such descriptions are somehow not integral to the primary
narrative, they are detachable set pieces that may be removed without doing violence
to the text. Since the currency that the term enjoys comes only at the expense of
imposing an unnatural and misleading categorization upon the text, I have decided to
avoid it in what follows. I shall also make a departure by treating descriptions of epic
monuments not as an arbitrary subcategory of ecphrasis, but rather as uniquely
privileged sites for reflecting on the nature of poetic art.
My study begins with a close reading of the proem to Georgics 3. Virgil’s
description of his marble temple, I suggest, is unique in that it describes an object that
does not exist even according to the fiction of the text itself. In this respect, it differs

1 Important examples of this approach include Rowell (1941); Wistrand (1960); Zanker (1983); Kellum
(1985); Zarker (1986); Trap (1986); Zanker (1988); Rodriguez (1989); Henry (1986); Elsner (1995);
Galinski (1996).
2 The literature on ecphrasis is enormous. Helpful discussions include Hollander (1988); Webb and
James (1991); Laird (1993); Hollander (1995); Fowler (1996), with exhaustive bibliography; Putnam
(1998).
3 On the four ancient rhetorical handbooks that deal with ekphrasis, see Webb and James (1991) esp. 4-
7.
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radically from the common run of what have been termed “notional ecphrases:”4
poetic descriptions of objects whose existence is generated by the text in which they
stand. Since Virgil insists that we envisage a monument that is insubstantial, we are
left with an important question: how do such monuments differ from those that, at
least putatively, are not insubstantial? The question is complicated by the obvious
similarities between Virgil’s song temple and the temple of Palatine Apollo, the
contemporary Augustan building upon which it is “modeled.”5 Because he appears to
construct his avowedly fantastic vision out of materials available for perusal in
contemporary Rome, the poet demands that we address the question of how the
fantasy-world of poetry is constructed from the physical reality of the
phenomenological world. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the end of book
6 of Silius’ Punica, a passage that presses the logic of its Virgilian model to its limit:
because Silius represents an artistic scheme that exists within the poem’s narrative
juxtaposed with one merely formulated in the mind of one of its protagonists, he
demands that the reader consider the substantiality of the former.
In chapter two I discuss how Aeneid 1, the first book of Virgil’s literary
monumentum, treats the question of poetic composition through architectonic, and
specifically foundational, imagery. I argue that formalist narrative considerations
precipitate deeper questions of interpretation and ideology: the problem of whose
narrative – that of Jupiter or of Juno - will prevail is ultimately connected to the
central preoccupation of the Aeneid: who will build the city destined to rule the world?
Chapter three explores related questions of narrative and visualization through a
discussion of Daedalus’ temple at Cumae (Aen. 6.14-41) and the entrance to the domus
Ditis (Aen. 6.273-94). The description of Daedalus’ temple doors unravels the

4 On the idea of “notional ecphrasis,” see esp. Laird (1993); Putnam (1988).
5 On the similarities between Virgil’s song-temple and the Palatine temple, see Miles (1980); Kraggerud
(1998).
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