The Cultural History Of Augustan Rome

This volume explores the interrelationship of the literature, monuments, and urban landscape of Augustan Rome. Targeting scholars of both literature and material culture, its interdisciplinary studies range from canonical authors (such as Cicero, Livy, and Ovid) to iconic monuments (such as the Rostra, Pantheon, and Meridian of Augustus).

Written by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, one of the world's foremost scholars on Roman social and cultural history, this well-established introduction to Rome in the Age of Augustus provides a fascinating insight into the social and physical contexts of Augustan politics and poetry, exploring in detail the impact of the new regime of government on society. Taking an interpretative approach, the ideas and environment manipulated by Augustus are explored, along with reactions to that manipulation. Emphasising the role and impact of art and architecture of the time, and on Roman attitudes and values, Augustan Rome explains how the victory of Octavian at Actium transformed Rome and Roman life. This thought-provoking yet concise volume sets political changes in the context of their impact on Roman values, on the imaginative world of poetry, on the visual world of art, and on the fabric of the city of Rome.

Weaving analysis and narrative throughout an illustrated text, the author provides an account of the major ideas of the Augustan age, and offers an interpretation of the creative tensions and contradictions that made for its vitality and influence.

Centring on the reign of the emperor Augustus, volume four is pivotal to the series, tracing of the changing shape of the entity that was ancient Rome through its political, cultural and economic history. Within this period the Roman world was reconfigured. On a political and constitutional level the patterns of the republic, which sustained an oligarchic regime and a popularist structure, were transformed into a monarchical dictatorship in which the earlier elements continued to function. On an imperial level, the growth in Roman power reached what was virtually its apogee. In literature and the visual arts, new forms of expression, based on those of the previous generations but closely linked to the new regime, showed great achievements. In society and the economy, the effectiveness and dominance of Rome as the centre of world power became increasingly obvious.

Explores how cultural memory theory intersects with the literature, politics, history, and archaeology of Republican and Augustan Rome.

This book examines the impact of the Roman cultural revolution under Augustus on the Roman province of Greece. It argues that the transformation of Roman Greece into a classicizing 'museum' was a specific response of the provincial Greek elites to the cultural politics of the Roman imperial monarchy. Against a background of Roman debates about Greek culture and Roman decadence, Augustus promoted the ideal of a Roman debt to a 'classical' Greece rooted in Europe and morally opposed to a stereotyped Asia. In Greece the regime signalled its admiration for Athens, Sparta, Olympia and Plataea as symbols of these past Greek glories. Cued by the Augustan monarchy, provincial Greek notables expressed their Roman orientation by competitive cultural work (revival of ritual; restoration of buildings) aimed at further emphasising Greece's 'classical' legacy. Reprised by Hadrian, the Augustan construction of 'classical' Greece helped to promote the archaism typifying Greek culture under the principate.

Offers a new interpretation of the man and his life and emphasises the place and importance of Strabo's Geography and of geography itself within these intellectual circles.

This book places culture centre-stage in the investigation of the transformation of Rome from Republic to Empire. It is the first book to attempt to understand the so-called Roman Revolution as a cultural phenomenon. Instead of regarding cultural changes as dependent on political developments, the essays consider literary, artistic, and political changes as manifestations of a basic transformation of Roman culture. In Part I the international group of contributors discusses the changes in the cultural systems under the topics of authority, gender and sexuality, status and space in the city of Rome, and in Part II through specific texts and artifacts as they refract social, political, and economic changes. The essays draw on the latest methods in literary and cultural work to present a holistic approach to the Augustan Cultural Revolution.