Politics And Divinization In Augustan Poetry

This book offers a new interpretation of one of 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.

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.

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.

This volume brings together eleven chapters on the genre of Latin elegy by leading scholars in the field. Latin elegy is typically thought to have flourished for a brief period at Rome between c. 40 BC and the early decades of the first century AD; it was the pre-eminent vehicle for writing about amatory matters in this period and among its principal exponents were Propertius and Ovid, whose works constitute the focus of this volume. Their poems and poetic collections were, however, by no means restricted to the themes of love, even if amatory concerns often surface at unexpected moments in texts that are not ostensibly concerned with love. Both poets were alive to their precursors' writings in elegiacs, and so aetiological themes and reflection on contemporary political circumstances form an integral part of their poetry. Such concerns are explored in some of the chapters on Propertius, on Ovid's Fasti and exile poetry, and also in a Renaissance elegy that looks closely to its literary heritage as it comments on the concerns of its day. Some contributions to this volume also shed new light on the typically elegiac conceit of separation, notably in amatory and exilic texts, while others look to conceptions of Roman identity and the relationship between the natural world and the cultural, political and literary spheres. All of the chapters share an interest in the close-reading of texts as the basis for drawing broader conclusions about these fascinating authors, their poetry, and their worlds.

Presenting a range of Neo-Latin poems written by distinguished classical scholars across Europe from c. 1490 to c. 1900, this anthology includes a selection of celebrated names in the history of scholarship. Individual chapters present the Neo-Latin poems alongside new English translations (usually the first) and accompanying introductions and commentaries that annotate these verses for a modern readership, and contextualise them within the careers of their authors and the history of classical scholarship in the Renaissance and early modern period. An appealing feature of Renaissance and early modern Latinity is the composition of fine Neo-Latin poetry by major classical scholars, and the interface between this creative work and their scholarly research. In some cases, the two are actually combined in the same work. In others, the creative composition and scholarship accompany each other along parallel tracks, when scholars are moved to write their own verse in the style of the subjects of their academic endeavours. In still further cases, early modern scholars produced fine Latin verse as a result of the act of translation, as they attempted to render ancient Greek poetry in a fitting poetic form for their contemporary readers of Latin.

Ovid's Fasti comments on Augustan religion by means of ambivalent aetiologies, elegiac jokes and subtle allusions to the religious self-fashioning of the imperial family. Darja Sterbenc Erker carefully reconstructs Ovid's subtle unmasking of religious fundaments of Augustus' principate.

Explores the dynamic interactions among Latin poets, artists, and audiences in constructing and critiquing imperial power in Augustan Rome.