Augustan Poetry And The Irrational

Most of the chapters in this volume originated as papers in a colloquium entitled "Augustan Poetry and the Irrational," held at the University of Cambridge from 30 August to 1 September 2012.

The establishment of the Augustan regime presents itself as the assertion of order and rationality in the political, ideological, and artistic spheres, after the disorder and madness of the civil wars of the late Republic. But the classical, Apollonian poetry of the Augustan period is fascinated by the irrational in both the public and private spheres. There is a vivid memory of the political and military furor that destroyed the Republic, and also an anxiety that furor may resurface, that the repressed may return. Epic and elegy are both obsessed with erotic madness: Dido experiences in her very public role the disabling effects of love that are both lamented and celebrated by the love elegists. Didactic (especially the Georgics) and the related Horatian exercises in satire and epistle, offer programmes for constructing rational order in the natural, political, and psychological worlds, but at best contain uneasily an ever-present threat of confusion and backsliding, and for the most part fall short of the austere standards of rational exposition set by Lucretius. Dionysus and the Dionysiac enjoy a prominence in Augustan poetry and art that goes well beyond the merely ornamental. The person of the emperor Augustus himself tests the limits of rational categorization. Augustan Poetry and the Irrational contains contributions by some of the leading experts of the Augustan period as well as a number of younger scholars. An introduction which surveys the field as a whole is followed by chapters that examine the manifestations of the irrational in a range of Augustan poets, including Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and the love elegists, and also explore elements of post-classical reception.

Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic focuses on the works of the major Augustan poets, Vergil, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid, and explores the under-studied aspect of their poetry, namely the way in which they constructed and investigated images of the Roman Republic and the Roman past.

Politics and Divinization in Augustan Poetry offers a new interpretation of one of the most prominent themes in Latin poetry, the divinization of Augustus, and argues that this theme functioned as a language of political science for the early Augustan poets as they tried to come to terms with Rome's transformation from Republic to Principate. Examining an extensive body of texts ranging from Virgil's Eclogues to Horace's final book of the Odes (covering a period roughly from 43 BC to 13 BC), this study highlights the multifaceted metaphorical force of divinizing language, as well as the cultural complications of divinization. Through a series of close readings, this book challenges the view that poetic images of Augustus' divinization merely reflect the poets' attitude towards Augustus or their recognition of his power, and puts forward a new understanding of this motif as an evolving discourse through which the first generation of Augustan poets articulated, interrogated, and negotiated Rome's shift towards authoritarianism.

This volume gathers together about two thirds of the articles and essays published between 1983 and 2021 by Philip Hardie, whose work on ancient literature has been of seminal importance in the field. The centre of gravity lies in late Republican and Augustan poetry, in particular Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid, with important contributions on wider Augustan culture; on Neronian and Flavian epic; on the Latin poetry of late antiquity; and on the reception of Latin poetry.

Inspired by Theodore Papanghelis’ Propertius: A Hellenistic Poet on Love and Death (1987), this collective volume brings together seventeen contributions, written by an international team of experts, exploring the different ways in which Latin authors and some of their modern readers created narratives of life, love and death. Taken together the papers offer stimulating readings of Latin texts over many centuries, examined in a variety of genres and from various perspectives: poetics and authorial self-fashioning; intertextuality; fiction and ‘reality’; gender and queer studies; narratological readings; temporality and aesthetics; genre and meta-genre; structures of the narrative and transgression of boundaries on the ideological and the formalistic level; reception; meta-dramatic and feminist accounts-the female voice. Overall, the articles offer rich insights into the handling and development of these narratives from Classical Greece through Rome up to modern English poetry.

This volume of essays is intended to commemorate the eminent Latin scholar David West, best known for his work on Lucretius, Horace, Virgil and Shakespeare. The contributors – Francis Cairns, Ian Du Quesnay, Bruce Gibson, Alex Hardie, Stephen Harrison, John Moles and Tony Woodman – have aimed to produce close readings of classical texts, paying due attention to historical context and literary tradition in the manner adopted by David West himself. The authors covered are Empedocles, Antisthenes, Callimachus, Lutatius Catulus, Catullus, Horace (Epodes and Odes), Propertius, Virgil (Aeneid), Dio Chrysostom and Hildebert of Lavardin.

While most work on Dionysus is based on Greek sources, this collection of essays examines the god’s Roman and Italian manifestations. Nine contributions address Bacchus’ appearance at the crossroads of Greek and Roman cultures, tracing continuities and differences between literary and archaeological sources for the god. The essays offer coverage of Dionysus in Roman art, Italian epigraphy; Latin poetry including epic, drama and elegy; and prose, including historiography, rhetorical and Christian discourse. The introduction offers an overview of the presence of Dionysus in Italy from the archaic to the imperial periods, identifying the main scholarly trends, with treatment of key Dionysian episodes in Roman history and literature. Individual chapters address the reception of Euripides’ Bacchae across Greek and Roman literature from Athens to Byzantium; Dionysus in Roman art of the archaic and Augustan periods; the god’s relationship with Fufluns and Liber in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE; Dionysian associations; Bacchus in Cicero; Ovid’s Tristia 5.3; Bacchus in the writings of Christian Latin writers. The collection sheds light on a relatively understudied aspect of Dionysus, and will stimulate further research in this area.