When, with Brutus and Cassius slaughtered, there was no longer an army of the state; when Sextus Pompey was put down in Sicily; and Lepidus had been swept aside and Antony had been killed, so that not even on the Julian side was there any leader left but Caesar; then, casting off the title of triumvir, Augustus carried himself about as consul, claiming he was content with tribunician power for protecting the people. Meanwhile, he seduced the army with gifts, the common people with grain, and everyone with the sweetness of peace; and little by little he increased his strength and absorbed the offices of the senate, officials, and laws into his own person, with no opposition.
1.1 Authorizing Augustus
Few figures have been credited with more control over the course of political events than Rome’s first emperor, Augustus. From Tacitus to the twenty-first century, Augustus’ success in transforming the res publica into an enduring dynastic monarchy has been ascribed to his artful manipulation of Roman institutions and perceptions. But Augustus’ deathbed scene, in Suetonius’ account (Aug. 99.1), both illustrates and circumscribes his power over public image.
supremo die identidem exquirens, an iam de se tumultus foris esset, petito speculo capillum sibi comi ac malas labantes corrigi praecepit et admissos amicos percontatus, ecquid iis videretur mimum vitae commode transegisse, adiecit et clausulam:
On his final day he asked repeatedly whether there was any disturbance outside on his account; then, calling for a mirror, he ordered for his hair to be combed and his sagging cheeks set straight. After that, bringing in his friends, he asked whether it seemed to them that he had played the mime of life fitly and added this closing verse:
On the one hand, Augustus’ dying attempt to “set straight” (corrigi) his sagging jowls exemplifies the concern for public appearance he had shown during life.Footnote 2 So, too, does his staging of this scene: his attendants had little choice but to answer his question in the affirmative, as indeed the Menandrian tag presumes.Footnote 3 At the same time, though, this comic quotation places Augustus in the low-status position of an actor and solicits his witnesses’ approval, even their permission to leave. The princeps’ dying scene thus reveals two opposing impulses: the emperor’s attempt to control his public persona to the last, and his simultaneous admission that his audience enjoyed final rights of judgment over his performance.
This anecdote encapsulates the interdependence of author and audience, emperor and subjects, that, in the argument of this book, also preoccupied the poets of Augustus’ day and lent them a dynamic model for discussing Rome’s new order. The immense auctoritas (authority) that underpinned Augustus’ rule (RG 34), even his honorific name, existed within and because of his subjects’ perceptions: autocracy thus found a paradoxical basis in mutual consent.Footnote 4 But the same holds true for literary authority. And the Latin authors – to use another derivative of the aug- root – keenly explore the resultant similarities between themselves and the emperor, particularly in their dependence on the validating judgment of an audience.
This analogy takes striking form in the poets’ representation of themselves as triumphing generals in advancing their claims for artistic greatness.Footnote 5 In Georgics 3, Vergil describes his quest for poetic glory (8–9) in terms that evoked or anticipated Octavian’s triumph after Actium.Footnote 6 The poet envisions himself returning home from Greece (10–11) to lead the Muses in procession, clothed in the victor’s purple (17); presiding over sacrifices and victory games (19–25); and founding a marble temple to Caesar often read as an emblem of the Aeneid (16; 26–39). Horace declares he has built a monument “more lasting than bronze” (exegi monumentum aere perennius, Odes 3.30.1) and crowns himself with a triumphal laurel (16) in anointing himself a princeps of poetry (13).Footnote 7 Propertius depicts himself as a triumphing general leading a band of imitators (3.1), while Ovid, once part of that band, imagines himself first triumphed over by Love in Amores 1.2, triumphant himself at Amores 2.12, and finally surpassing even kings (cedant carminibus reges regumque triumphi, “let kings and royal triumphs yield to songs,” Am. 1.15.33). Metamorphoses 15 develops this rivalry between poetic and temporal power, ultimately envisioning the poet’s apotheosis in terms that trump the deifications of Caesar (745–851) and Augustus (861–70):
From one perspective, these poetic triumphs flatter by way of imitating a ritual whose associations with imperial glory form the subject of Chapter 5. At the same time, in forcibly appropriating Augustus’ symbolic property for their own purposes, these poets illustrate the separability of representation from reality, symbol from signifier, that is the mutual liability of all ‘authors,’ imperial or literary. Moreover, in metamorphosing the triumph from a real-world celebration to an imaginative event, these poems underscore the basis of all auctoritas in an audience’s subjective judgment. Ovid underscores this point when he stakes his literary immortality on his continued readership by people across the Roman world (ore legar populi, “I will be read in the mouths of the people,” Met. 15.878).Footnote 8 An author’s glory, like a triumphing general’s, ultimately derives from the active consent of Roman subjects as mediated by a text.
The poets’ authority, of course, existed only in the limited sphere of literary recognition, among the narrow Roman demographic with the education, leisure, and inclination to consume such poems.Footnote 9 The emperor’s, by contrast, influenced lives at all levels through taxes, troops, government, law, culture, the economy, civic life, religious institutions, and patronage networks. While Rome had long had a geographical empire, moreover, its internal power structures, based during the Republic on the principles of collegiality and limited tenure, were evolving during the principate into new, “imperial” forms, not always disaligned with subjects’ interests, but exerting an increasingly hegemonic force over their ways of understanding, fashioning, and conducting themselves within society.Footnote 10
It is precisely in response to these shifting political winds that the Augustan poets offer their own power as a model and metaphor for the princeps’. Given the geographical extent of Rome’s empire and the impossibility of mass surveillance, policing, and communication as in modern totalitarian regimes, the emperor’s power rested in a very real way on symbols: the texts, inscriptions, coins, portraits, and other vehicles that conveyed his image across the Roman world. In this sense, the poets recognized, the emperor was analogous to them and subject to the same interpretive judgment as were their own poems. The passive modern term “reception” is inadequate to the mental, aural, phonic, and social activity that Romans associated with the act of reading, not to mention the ancient belief that a viewer’s eyes emitted rather than received light from the thing seen.Footnote 11 Augustus’ gratification when subjects shielded their faces from his luminous gaze (Suet. Aug. 79.2) finds a mirror in the penetrating vision that Roman eyes exerted upon him, his symbols, and the poets’ texts, confirming their agency at a time when other spheres of civic participation were narrowing. In framing meaning and authority as the products of active collaboration, the poets and their readers thereby explored new forms of libertas by which to grapple with their relative loss of dominance within Rome’s social hierarchy.
Following this analogy between poets and princeps as fellow subjects of the public gaze, this book offers readership as a new model for understanding Augustan poetry in its dynamic engagement with Roman politics. Over the long history of the field, the poets have alternately been treated as eulogizers, skeptics, and subverters of the principate. But nobody has yet attempted a comprehensive study of the poets’ public responses to imperial iconography as a tool for dissecting, debating, even disrupting imperial power. This study therefore shows how the poets read and respond to Augustus’ public image as represented in well-known signs, monuments, and rituals: the sidus Iulium, the Palatine complex, the Forum Augustum, and the triumph.Footnote 12 In training their literary gaze on such symbols, I argue, the poets explore the degree to which imperial signs and power rely on audience interpretation. They also model ways of responding to Augustus that join the public discourse surrounding the emperor, shed light on how he was perceived in his own day, and continue to affect our own understanding of the age. In short, this study tunes in to the lively, independent dialogue that took place beneath the surface of images historically understood as vehicles for imperial control. It recasts these instead as instruments by which the poets and their readers reasserted their own critical authority over empire. In my view, the poets ultimately suggest that the emperor’s authority, no less than their own, depends on a mutually constitutive relationship with a judging audience – as Augustus himself recognized with his deathbed mime. In response to burgeoning autocracy, then, the poets reclaim for themselves and their audiences intellectual authority over the symbols and ideas that underpinned the principate, imaginatively transforming Rome’s empire into a res publica of readers.Footnote 13
1.2 The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus?
The idea that Augustus “organized” public opinion to disguise his autocratic power, championed by Ronald Syme and prevalent for much of the past century, is at least as old as Tacitus (Ann. 1.2, above) and continues to shape textbooks and syllabi.Footnote 14 In recent years, though, this notion has slowly yielded to a model that makes for a less succinct narrative, but better accommodates the historical realities and political complexities of the Augustan age. Historians now suggest that imperial power depended as much on horizontal patronage networks as brute force.Footnote 15 Increasing attention has surrounded “soft” means of creating cohesion across Rome’s far-flung and heterogeneous empire: the active participation of subjects, notably provincial elites, and a shared system of ideas, objects, civic institutions, and social, political, economic, and religious practices. Among these, visual representations of the emperor have received particular attention since the publication of Paul Zanker’s Augustus und die Macht der Bilder (Reference Zanker1987), a work of sweeping scope and influence that the present volume revisits and revises from a literary perspective.Footnote 16 Scholars of architecture and urban design have analyzed the physical city of Rome as a structured and meaningful “text” that created for its viewers a narrative about imperial power.Footnote 17 Others, in turn, have doubted whether Roman monumental art bore transparent messages to its various audiences.Footnote 18
On the literary side, the view that the Augustan poets were mouthpieces of empire has come under question since the so-called Harvard School detected voices of resistance in Vergil more than half a century ago.Footnote 19 More recently, philologists have reenvisioned Augustan literature as a cultural discourse around the princeps, which Alessandro Barchiesi characterizes as an “unprecedented campaign of persuasion and revision” enacting “universal diffusion at all levels.”Footnote 20 Scholarship by Philip Hardie, Stephen Hinds, Jim O’Hara, and Barchiesi himself, among others, has shown the critical riches that this more intertextual, decentralized approach can yield, particularly when attuned to the ambivalences within Augustan poetry. Charles Martindale adds important consideration for the contingent nature of all readings. Others, including Shadi Bartsch and Michèle Lowrie, have analyzed performative aspects of textual and political authority during the early empire. They and many others have broken ground for further inquiry into the Augustan poets’ complex relationship with visual and oral culture, religion, memory, ritual, and law.Footnote 21
But the Harvard School is a closer heir than it likes to acknowledge to Syme’s dictatorial Augustus.Footnote 22 We still struggle to clarify the poets’ relationships with political power, often sidestepping the issue altogether or falling into the reductive “pro-” or “anti-Augustan” binary critiqued by Duncan Kennedy.Footnote 23 Alison Sharrock’s corollary, that “in the end a text of itself cannot be either ‘pro-’ or ‘anti-Augustan’; only readings can be,” usefully points to the importance of audience interpretation even as it threatens to fall into the same binary.Footnote 24 It also downplays the fact that not all texts lend themselves as readily to one type of interpretation as to another, and that readers within a given interpretive community show consistent patterns albeit not homogeneity in the messages they take away from a text. All this leaves unresolved questions that the present analysis pursues in new depth and detail. What relative roles did Augustus and the poets play in shaping his public image within Roman culture, and how did the resultant dialogue shape Roman readers’ perceptions of the principate?
1.2.1 The Palatine as Case Study
In pursuing such questions, this study opens a new perspective on the reciprocal interactions among Augustus and his various constituencies. It also traces the evolution of perceptions of the princeps over the long course of his reign, before hindsight permitted teleological rationalization. It would, of course, be wrong to underestimate Augustus’ resources or resourcefulness in cultivating public relations and planning for the future. But even Augustus could not control everything. Events and artistic expressions long understood as serving a preconceived master plan on Augustus’ part often appear, on closer examination of the sources, as ad hoc responses to contemporary exigencies or products of mutual negotiation among princeps, senate, and people. One goal of this study is to dismantle the impression of finality and conscious design that still attaches to many Augustan symbols, even in much of the scholarship discussed above.
An instructive case in point is the Palatine complex in Rome, dedicated on 9 October 28 BCE and considered a “veritable ex voto” to Octavian’s victory at Actium. According to Zanker, this was one of the young princeps’ “clearest statements of self-glorification” and left “no doubt as to who would determine Rome’s fate from now on.”Footnote 25 Yet Octavian originally vowed the temple to Apollo in 36 BCE during his campaign against Sextus Pompey and began building it shortly thereafter.Footnote 26 It may be historical accident that it came to be associated more closely with Actium than with Naulochos or Egypt.Footnote 27 For that matter, the story of the temple’s foundation involves considerable give and take that belies the autocratic intentions imputed to Octavian at this time. Historians report that Octavian had bought a prominent piece of land on the Palatine for his own residence, but Apollo showed his desire for part of the house by striking it with lightning (Cass. Dio 49.15.5; Suet. Aug. 29.3).Footnote 28 Octavian accordingly made the area public property, and in return, the people voted him a house funded by the public treasury (Cass. Dio 49.15.5). The resultant structure combined a modest private residence built at public expense with a splendid public temple built at private expense, in meaningful counterpoint that highlighted Octavian’s piety and public-mindedness while foreshadowing the reciprocity that would come to characterize Augustan culture.Footnote 29 This was underscored when, in return for Octavian’s much-debated “restoration of the res publica” to the senate and people in January 27 BCE, they granted him his honorific name along with laurels and a corona civica to adorn his doors (RG 34; see Figure 3.3).Footnote 30 The history of the Palatine complex thus shows that the public face Augustus presented to Rome – much like his auctoritas – was not simply preconceived and imposed from above. Rather, like any text, it was “a mosaic of quotations” that absorbed and transformed other texts,Footnote 31 in a process of continual negotiation and response in which the senate, people, and other less visible groups took an active part.
As the following chapters demonstrate, moreover, monuments like the Palatine continued to serve as sites for interactive self-fashioning by ruler and subject even after they were built. An unprecedented number of buildings, portraits, coin types, and inscriptions represented Augustus to the urbs, Italy, and the provinces. They also, in their very diversity, attest to the impossibility (even undesirability) of presenting a single unified image to the geographically, socioeconomically, and culturally heterogeneous Roman world. Some, like the Res Gestae and Augustus’ lost Commentarii, clearly evince the emperor’s authorial hand. But even in the case of Augustan building initiatives, many details were left up to architects and craftsmen, and many others were added later or recycled from elsewhere. (The Palatine complex, for instance, included statues imported from Greece and the laurel and oak wreath appended by the senate and people.) For that matter, the clupeus virtutis, the Ara Pacis, the Pantheon, and many other prime examples of so-called Augustan propaganda were not commissioned or coerced by the emperor himself. Rather, these objects were communicative acts of diplomacy that allowed various constituencies to co-construct Augustus’ image and articulate expectations for his behavior in public view.Footnote 32 Even coins and portraits, those crucial tools of modern propaganda, lacked stringent central supervision in Roman antiquity and often reflected local or personal motivations: of the tresviri monetales in charge of the mint and their provincial counterparts, for example, or private patrons like the commissioners of the Boscoreale Cups (Figures 5.1 and 5.2).Footnote 33 Many of the everyday objects through which average Romans encountered Augustus, such as decorations on gaming pieces, were manufactured and distributed among lower rungs of the social ladder rather than handed down from on high.Footnote 34 And these might ignore, respond to, or actively mock more official representations, as in the case of the Pompeiian caricature depicting the famous Aeneas-Anchises-Iulus triad with simian bodies, long phalluses, and the heads of dogs, carrying game pieces rather than penates from the flames of Troy.Footnote 35 In sum, one might regard Augustus’ public image not as a carefully crafted tool of manipulation but rather as a bottom-up, largely unregulated process of distributed content creation by individuals from all rungs of society.
This mosaic of images, in turn, elicited heterogeneous reactions that fed back into political discourse over the course of the principate and form the subject of this study. Chapter 3, for instance, shows how the Augustan poets appropriated the Palatine as a locus for debate about freedom, obedience, and mercy through eulogistic responses to the building that also highlight its contradictions and omissions. Topographically, the splendor of the temple of Apollo was hard to square with the pointed humility of Augustus’ own neighboring home.Footnote 36 Over time, the Palatine’s overtones of discipline and hierarchy would grate against the more harmonious polity envisioned on monuments like the Ara Pacis, dedicated by the senate in 9 BCE.Footnote 37 This points to the fact that buildings, coins, and poems had long life spans within Roman culture and lent themselves to divergent interpretations within different reception contexts: as Augustus toned down his expressions of power, for instance, or as military defeats questioned the laurels’ assertion of perennial triumph.Footnote 38
For that matter, Hinds’ rightful warning that “we should not fall into the trap of regarding the Augustan reading public as a monolith”Footnote 39 applies to audiences of Augustus’ representations across all media. The Palatine surely evoked different reactions from an aristocrat whose family had lost property during the triumviral proscriptions than from a newly prosperous freedman eager to escape the bustling city in the elegant environs of the Danaid portico. We have little direct evidence, of course, for the thoughts of an average Roman (as if such a person could exist) as she gazed upon the princeps’ magnificent building projects or handled a newly minted coin – if she looked at them at all.Footnote 40 What we do have is the poets’ responses to Augustan buildings and iconography, responses that put under a microscope the process of viewing, interpreting, and judging imperial imagery in which every Roman subject engaged.
These poems make no pretense of objective reportage, though, ironically, they have been used over the centuries to reconstruct monuments like the Palatine, creating a feedback loop that continues to affect modern perceptions of the emperor. The very lack of objectivity that makes them slippery as archaeological evidence, however, makes these poems uniquely valuable as echoes of ancient debates that surrounded Augustus. This is not to say that we should take these works as sincere and unmediated transcriptions of the poets’ responses to Augustan imagery, or attempts to dictate how others should respond to imperial art. Rather, these poems are designed to put the very act of viewing under public scrutiny. They perform responses to imperial iconography, some highly idiosyncratic or tendentious, that readers might choose to imitate or (more likely) weigh and critique. In doing so, they drive home the extent to which readers’ interpretive processes, rather than Augustus’ intentions as imperial auctor, shape these buildings’ significations within Roman culture. As such, these poems provide some of our most valuable, if indirect, insight into the process by which Romans interpreted images of empire – shedding a band of light on the shadowy question of how Rome perceived Augustus and his rise.
1.3 The Augustan Poets and Reader Response
Augustus’ deathbed mime represented a last attempt to govern perceptions of his life and rule, but also marked his final loss of control: the transference of his reputation into the hands of historians and the judgment of posterity, well illustrated by the Quattrocento “Triumph of Fame” on this book’s cover.Footnote 41 But of course, the emperor had never fully controlled his contemporaries’ interpretations. His final act merely symbolizes the condition of audience dependency that all authors confront as they attempt to create meaning through their works. In the view of this study, the poets, too, were keenly conscious of this process. Their self-representations in triumph express the flip side of Augustus’ mime: recurring fantasies of authorial power that balance the reality of readerly dependence. But many of their poems betray a deep concern with the power that readers wield over texts, and that Romans, in turn, exerted over imperial semiotics.
In this era of Facebook, fan fiction, and focus groups, when audiences actively participate in the creation of media content, we need little proof of the once-controversial idea that audiences shape the meaning of texts. Even in its own day, Roland Barthes’ grand proclamation of the “mort de l’auteur”Footnote 42 was not entirely revolutionary: in many ways, the separation of a reader’s response from an author’s intention is a logical extension of the New Critical rejection of the “intentional fallacy.”Footnote 43 The basic concept has undergone some useful refinements and modifications over the years: for instance, Hans Robert Jauss’ conception of a “horizon of expectation” shaping readers’ responses to texts, Wolfgang Iser’s distinction between implied and real readers, Stanley Fish’s interest in the interpretive communities that shape readers’ norms of judgment, and Michel Foucault’s idea of the author as a function of discourse.Footnote 44 Semiotic theory, particularly Ferdinand de Saussure’s focus on the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, further highlights readers’ role in bringing meaning to a text. At the same time, the complicity between power structures and interpretive practices has come under increasing scrutiny, for instance, with Louis Althusser’s attention to the contradictions of political rhetoric and the ways that “ideological state apparatuses” (such as media, religion, family, and education) function to inculcate belief.
This interest in reception, semiotics, and the social practices of reading, however, is not an exclusively modern phenomenon. As writing emerged from the oral cultures of antiquity, it became a locus of anxiety in that it allowed, even entailed, a separation between an author and his words. In conversation, an author was able to explain his thoughts, answer objections, and clarify misconceptions from his interlocutor. Translated into mute signs on a papyrus roll or tablet, however, an author’s words not only depended on readers in order to be seen and voiced, but also were subject to their manipulation or abuse. In the Phaedrus (275d4-e6), for instance, Socrates points out that texts’ separation from their creators leaves them uniquely vulnerable to interpretive violence:
Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself.Footnote 45
Augustan poets’ deep concern with this issue, and with its implications for imperial representation, is no historical accident. Around this time, literacy rates were increasing, and literary culture was increasingly focused on the circulation of texts in addition to oral recitations by the author.Footnote 46 This translated a writer’s authorial “I” into the voice of his reader – or, in many households, that reader’s literate slave or freedman – within private performance contexts that underlined the author’s real dependency on others’ minds and bodies. With the expansion of professional book production and the broadening geographical circulation of texts within the Roman empire, an author might no longer personally know or participate in the same social networks as his audience, who in turn might take un(fore)seen liberties with his text. The same anxieties that surrounded slaves, as “speaking tools” with independent agency (Varro Rust. 1.17),Footnote 47 thus came to attach to books. It is also tempting to imagine, in this loosening of authorial control, an analogy for the relative loss of political privilege that some Roman elites experienced along with the redistribution of power through a broader spectrum of society that was one hallmark of the Augustan revolution. The widening circulation of texts throughout empire also mirrored the social and geographic dissemination of the image of the emperor and the idea of Rome, not to mention the imperial administration’s pragmatic reliance on writing to connect Rome’s center and peripheries.Footnote 48 As such, the Augustan poets found in the princeps a mirror for their own aspirations and anxieties – and scrutinized imperial representations, analogously with their own poems, as interpretive arenas for contestation and negotiation between author and audience.
Like modern literary critics, the Augustan poets expound no unitary or homogeneous theory of reader response. Rather, they offer a kaleidoscopic array of attitudes and approaches toward the text. In keeping with its origins in the Latin verb texere, “to weave, intertwine, construct,” I use this term to refer to any verbal or visual fabric capable of bearing meaning. Weaving, poetry, and the visual arts have been interconnected since the ancient Greek rhapsodes (literally, “sewers together” of songs): Helen’s weaving of the Trojan War in Iliad 3.125–28, which becomes indistinguishable from Homer’s own spinning of the story into words, is an apt symbol.Footnote 49 The closest Latin equivalent is, surely, the shield of Aeneas forged by Vulcan in Aeneid 8: a visual artifact, described as a non enarrabile textum (“not fully describable artistic surface,” 8.625), that is paradoxically inextricable from Vergil’s own poetic fiction.Footnote 50 The relationship between Roman art and text has attracted considerable attention as of late, notably by Jaś Elsner (Reference Elsner and Masters1996, Reference Elsner and Masters2007) and Michael Squire (Reference Squire2009), with the ekphrasis commanding particular interest as a “speaking picture” with transportive powers.Footnote 51 Others, like Diane Favro (Reference Favro1996) and Paul Rehak (Reference Rehak2006), frame the Augustan cityscape itself as an eloquent urban narrative. There are, of course, some obvious differences between the ways a poetic scroll, a visual surface, and a built environment can tell a story, appeal to the imagination, and structure a viewer’s mental movement through time and space.Footnote 52 These are compounded when we remember the many other sensory dimensions at play, including the performance of many literary compositions within a social context and the sights, sounds, and smells that accompanied a Roman’s progress through the urbs.Footnote 53 But though these artistic texts are different in kind, they share an important quality. All rely for their meaning on an audience’s active interpretation. Vergil underscores the parallels by using the verb legere, which normally denotes the act of reading, for Aeneas’ visual consumption of the artwork on Daedalus’ temple at Aeneid 6.34 and the parade of future Romans at 6.755.Footnote 54 The verb’s root in the idea of conscious gathering or selection further recalls the audience’s critical independence in responding to visual and verbal objects that, unlike an interlocutor, cannot speak back – or defend an author’s intended meaning. The first and last of the great Augustan poets, Vergil and Ovid, make this point in a series of paradigmatic scenes that depict viewers (mis)interpreting fictional works of art. Brief analysis of a few will reveal some general interpretive strategies that ancient readers applied to texts, and that the poets themselves reapply to imperial iconography.Footnote 55
1.3.1 Readership in Vergil
The temple that caps Vergil’s vision of poetic triumph at Georgics 3.26–39 vividly symbolizes his projected epic and its own frequent collapsing of verbal and visual surfaces. The Aeneid’s many ekphrases have attracted rich analysis as hermeneutic keys to the epic, most comprehensively by Michael Putnam (Reference Putnam1998). Others, like Alden Smith (Reference Smith2005), have pointed to the importance of vision and the gaze within the epic, linking it with a shift from republican oral culture to a more visually oriented imperial one.Footnote 56 But the epic itself thwarts any easy separation between verbal and visual rhetoric. Indeed, Vergil frequently arrests his narrative to depict viewers observing and responding to fictional art in ways that comment more generally on the modes of interpretation that audiences apply to real texts, from the verbal one of the Aeneid to the visual ones of Augustan Rome. These scenes, moreover, drive home the point that even the most confident authorial self-representations, like Vergil’s at Georgics 3, ultimately rely on audiences for their communicative and emotional content.
A programmatic case in point is Aeneas’ encounter, early in Vergil’s epic, with another monumental façade: a depiction of the Trojan War on the temple to Juno at Carthage (Aen. 1.450–93). To the storm-tossed protagonist, this testifies to his fallen city’s fame and presages a sympathetic reception from the locals (459–63):
Vergil’s subsequent ekphrasis of the mural or frieze, it has been observed, reflects on the artistry of the Aeneid itself in its sympathetic portrayal of the casualties of Roman destiny.Footnote 57 But it also speaks to ancient practices of consuming monumental art. Notably, the description evinces little if any concern with the intentions of the work’s creators: with Dido’s purpose in founding the temple or commissioning the mural, for instance, or the designs of the various craftsmen who add their hands to the work (455). Instead, we see this temple only through the eyes of Aeneas, its internal audience, with frequent reminders of his mediating (“focalizing”) perspective and subjective response to the events depicted.Footnote 58 The meaning a viewer takes away from a work of art, this passage suggests, may have little relation with its author’s original intentions, and everything to do with the viewer’s own experiences and emotions.
The narrative follows Aeneas’ gaze first as he takes in the brazen grandeur of the temple (448–49), then as he sees the pictures, recognizes their subject (453–58), and interprets the images as though they are unfolding before him in present time (464–93). Verbs of perception highlight his increasing imaginative participation as he literally sees himself in this scene.Footnote 59 He is equally part of the scene insofar as his Trojan sympathies color his perspective. He views Athena as “unfair” (non aequae, 479), averting her eyes from her wretched Trojan suppliants (479–82). A similarly heartless Achilles drags Hector three times around the walls of Troy (483) and “sells his lifeless body for gold” (484), causing Aeneas to groan as he sees the ransom, his friend’s body, and the unarmed Priam supplicating Achilles (485–87).Footnote 60 This description, as focalized through Aeneas, revisits the events of Iliad 24 but strips them of the mutual respect and sympathy that Achilles and Priam ultimately attain. Aeneas has eyes only for Achilles’ rage and Priam’s vulnerability. Aeneas’ perspective also determines which details attract his attention. His gaze dwells in particular on the horses of Rhesus (469–73), the death of Troilus (474–78), and the loss of the Palladium, hinted at in 479–82. These scenes all refer to omens concerning the fall of Troy,Footnote 61 suggesting Aeneas recognizes and revisits these signs of Troy’s doom from hindsight.
The strong emphasis on Aeneas’ response elides the intentions of the architects and artisans. Since the temple honors Juno, the Trojans’ divine adversary, Aeneas’ sympathetic reading has been characterized as hopelessly naïve: in actuality, this is a triumphalist monument to the goddess’ persecution of his people.Footnote 62 Yet there are problems with this view. Most immediately, Aeneas is proven correct in his hope for a friendly reception: Dido confirms that the Trojans’ sufferings are known the world over and welcomes them to Carthage (561–78). More generally, much Greco-Roman art alluding to conflict, from monumental friezes like the Pergamon Altar to the statues of Laocoon, the Dying Gaul, and Marsyas in Rome, centers less on the victor than on victims’ pathos in suffering.Footnote 63 Aeneas’ ease in deciphering the mural’s visual grammar and Dido’s rapt attention to his story of Troy’s fall suggest that the Trojans and Carthaginians share this aesthetic code among other cultural similarities.Footnote 64 Thus, though the mural’s Carthaginian setting enables a pro-Junonian interpretation, Aeneas’ pro-Trojan response cannot be characterized as a misreading. Rather, it is one of the many interpretations permitted, even invited, by this imagined visual text. The verbal matrix in which it exists, moreover, both privileges and vindicates Aeneas’ subjective interpretation over any authorial intent.
This opening scene thus emblematizes the power that all audiences wield over art, from Vergil’s poem to the monuments of Augustan Rome. In this case, the narrator’s decision to render the Troy mural entirely through Aeneas’ perspective illustrates the inseparability of artistic meaning from audience response. It is ironic that this ekphrasis, itself a consummate work of poetic artistry, depicts an artist’s recession from his text, surrendering it to the intellectual and emotional ownership of its interpreter.Footnote 65 But as subsequent chapters will show, it is only one of many ekphrastic passages that tacitly weigh the relative power of authors and audiences, and tip the scales in favor of the latter – at least within the immediate context of the narrative. In the case of Daedalus’ temple to Apollo at Cumae (6.14–41), Aeneas’ vision of future Romans in the Underworld (6.752–892), and the shield that Vulcan forges for Aeneas (8.608–731), Vergil’s external readers are invited to step into the text, correct for Aeneas’ ignorant or uninformed readings, and recognize authorial intentions or meanings that he cannot perceive. Yet even though we occupy a superior interpretive position, we are ultimately not so different from nescius Aeneas, similarly imposing our own historically conditioned readings upon Vergil’s defenseless text.
The publication history of the Aeneid offers the ultimate example of readers’ violation of authorial desire: Vergil reputedly wanted the Aeneid burned on his death, but Augustus had it published in defiance of the poet’s wishes.Footnote 66 In this story, which equates the poem’s textual birth with the literal death of the author, the Aeneid exists for us today only because of an originary act of violence against Vergil’s authorial intentions by its most powerful reader, Augustus himself. This story also provides an apt etiology for the epic’s polarized appropriation in modern times by “pro-” and “anti-Augustan” camps. It suggests that Augustus and Vergil each recognized the poem’s potential to serve pro-Augustan readings and purposes, that the dying Vergil attempted to resist such a use, but that Augustus ultimately overrode the author’s intentions.Footnote 67 This story also implicates all readers in a subtextual tug-of-war between poet and princeps. While our sympathies often lie with the artist, we implicitly side with Augustus just by virtue of having, and having read, Vergil’s reluctant text.
Thus even the reception history of the Aeneid, like the ekphrasis of the Trojan mural at Carthage, shows that the meanings of texts are not dictated by their makers; rather, they arise at the moment of reception, in the imaginations of an audience. This study will, accordingly, not concern itself overmuch with Augustus’ largely irrecoverable designs with his building program and self-representations within visual culture, though it certainly acknowledges his active participation. Rather, it will focus, as Vergil does, on the different interpretive strategies, levels of understanding, and affective impulses his subjects brought to imperial art – as well as the sometimes willful misprisions and creative violence they worked upon Augustan texts.
1.3.2 Power, Art, and Representation in Ovid
If Vergil meditates on potential divergences between audience interpretation and artistic intent from an indirect, third-person point of view, then Ovid puts the process of communication and interpretation under closer scrutiny, often from a first-person perspective whose subjective fallacies and wishful thinking highlight readers’ arbitrary power to impose meanings on indifferent or resistant texts. Thus, at Amores 1.13.47, the narrator believes that the dawn “blushes” in answer to his pleas; at Tristia 1.2.107–10, that a storm abates in response to his prayers. And at Metamorphoses 1.553–67, in what I read as a parable for the very act of reading, Apollo continues his attempted rape of Daphne on a semantic plane by forcing his own desired meaning (557–65) on her still-resistant body (refugit tamen oscula lignum, 556). As her voice and intentions recede forever behind her book-like bark (mollia cinguntur tenui praecordia libro, 549), she is unable to consent to or correct Apollo’s self-serving perception that she nods in assent (caput visa est agitasse cacumen, “she seemed to nod her tree-top like a head,” 567).Footnote 68
In Ovid’s early works, the gap between authorial intention and reader response often operates, with humorous effect, to confirm the poet’s self-perceived power. In Amores 3.12, for instance, Ovid complains that his poems have turned his beloved Corinna into common property, enjoyed by many (ingenio prostitit illa meo, 8). The author chides his readers for their over-credulity in poems, which are responsible for fictions like Jupiter’s metamorphoses into animal form (21–40):Footnote 69 they should have assumed that Corinna, too, was invented rather than real. But Ovid’s purported motive for insisting on Corinna’s fictionality is to keep her in obscurity and avoid sharing her with others (credulitas nunc mihi vestra nocet, 44). Thus, in the winking, Möbius-strip logic of this poem, Ovid continues to maintain the illusion that Corinna is a real girl even after he berates his readers for their gullibility in thinking so. Whether or not we construe “Corinna” as Ovid’s love poetry and prostitutio as the act of publication, this punch line makes a metaliterary point that later acquires political heft. Readers, writers, even emperors can collude to make false things seem true, but the illusion is shattered when audiences decide to disbelieve.
Metamorphoses
The relations among author, reader, and text grow tenser in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (c. 8 CE), which purports to recount the history of the world from its creation to modern times (1.1–4). Early on, though, Ovid subjects his universal mythological epic to double vision as political allegory when he writes, “if boldness were granted to my words, I would not at all fear to have called [Olympus] the Palatine of high heaven” (si verbis audacia detur, / haud timeam magni dixisse Palatia caeli, 1.175–76). As I discuss in Section 3.5.2, the poet’s performative self-policing here comments on discursive constraints under Augustus, a “god in his own city” (Caesar in urbe sua deus est, 15.746) who nonetheless disliked references to his dominance (Suet. Aug. 53.1).Footnote 70 This passage is one of several textual linchpins that crack open into diametrically opposed hermeneutic possibilities. On its surface, the epic weaves old myths into brilliant new forms. But underneath this “hermeneutic alibi,”Footnote 71 some readers may understand the Ovidian gods’ arbitrary exertions of power as veiled reflections on Augustus’, in tacit resistance to his self-representation on monuments like the Palatine. Ovid thus invites readers to exercise a libertas in interpreting the poem that he lacked in writing it.Footnote 72
The weaving contest between Arachne and Minerva in Metamorphoses 6 presents for audience arbitration a programmatic conflict between artists and autocrats, cynical and propagandistic views of power.Footnote 73 Here, each woman’s tapestry becomes an argumentum (69). Minerva’s shows the gods as they wish to be seen. The goddess depicts her victory at Athens and divine support (70–82), with an emphasis on her personal appearance and iconography (78–81; 101–2), along with visual vignettes illustrating the consequences of defying the gods (ut tamen exemplis intellegat aemula laudis, 83).Footnote 74 Arachne’s tapestry, however, shows greater verisimilitude by depicting the gods as they are – at least within Ovid’s epic, as they seduce mortal women in various false guises.Footnote 75 Arachne’s tapestry thus becomes a visual emblem for Ovid’s own epic, in its amatory and metamorphic content, its aesthetics of continuity (6.61–69; cf. Ovid’s carmen perpetuum, 1.4), and its hint of defiance. This aesthetic contest, however, is ultimately decided by force. Though even Minerva cannot find fault with Arachne’s artistry (129–30), the jealous goddess rends Arachne’s tapestry (131), beats her with the shuttle (132–33), and transforms her into a spider doomed to keep spinning in diminished form (134–45). Readers, on the other hand, are invited to correct Minerva’s divine crime (caelestia crimina, 131) within their own judgment, awarding Arachne the victory along with their sympathy.
Ovid’s Exile
The end of the Metamorphoses reenacts this victory of artist over god. While the narrator pays lip service to contemporary political discourse in predicting Augustus’ apotheosis (15.852–70, with discussion in Section 2.7.3), he concludes by triumphantly imagining his own more lasting immortality on the lips of his readers (15.871–79). Yet this victorious arc took a rapid downward turn, and swept representational conflict off the page and into real life,Footnote 76 with Ovid’s relegatio by Augustus in 8 CE. The ‘fact’ of exile becomes an important paratextual influence on readers’ interpretations of Ovid, prompting interpretive revision and politicization of his earlier works.Footnote 77 Like Arachne, the exiled Ovid keeps weaving his verses in debased form, with a heightened awareness of his audience’s capacity to inflict hermeneutic, even physical, violence. At the same time, Ovid’s exile poems elicit readers’ arbitration in the implicit representational battle he stages with the princeps.
In Tristia 2.207, Ovid attributes his punishment to two charges: a poem and a mistake (carmen et error).Footnote 78 He refuses to discuss the latter, veiling his exile in mystery and confirming the sense of fear and circumspection about Augustus that he had hinted at in Metamorphoses 1.175–76 (si verbis audacia detur, / haud timeam magni dixisse Palatia caeli).Footnote 79 He does, however, state that the poem in question was the Ars Amatoria, used to accuse Ovid of teaching adultery in defiance of Augustus’ moral program (2.207–8, 211–13):
Ovid’s cautious suggestion here that the “error” was in fact Augustus’ becomes part of his subsequent self-defense (2.353–56):
As Ovid presents it, the fault lies with reader rather than author: the emperor has misunderstood his poem as a reflection on Ovid’s true character, though the two are perfectly separable (“my life is chaste; my muse is playful”). In doing so, Augustus has committed the same error as the woman in Amores 2.17 who pretended to be Corinna: he has mistaken Ovid’s fictions for fact. This audience credulity, amusing in the Amores, now has tragic consequences for Ovid. On one level, Augustus’ interpretation prevails and results in Ovid’s banishment because the emperor is an exceptionally powerful reader.Footnote 80 (Even history itself, in Livy’s account of Cossus’ spolia, bent groaning under Augustus’ weight.Footnote 81) However, this also forms the culminating example of Ovid’s recurring suggestion that readers can usurp a text’s authorially intended meaning. Thus, while Tristia 2 depicts Ovid as an author struggling to define and defend his poems’ meaning, the very exile that motivates the poem simultaneously testifies to the primacy of audience interpretation, however erroneous.Footnote 82 Thus Ovid’s exile poems widen the fissures between authorial intent, text, and reader response while also demonstrating the high political stakes of representation.
The exile poems also widen the division between “pro-” and “anti-Augustan” interpretive possibilities already implicit in the Metamorphoses. These poems have sometimes earned Ovid the over-simple label of proto-imperialist or panegyricist because many foreground their consciousness of a powerful imperial “overreader.”Footnote 83 In an apparent recantation of his claims for poetic immortality and freedom from temporal constraint in Metamorphoses 15, the chastened poet now fully acknowledges the supremacy of the emperor, who had the power to punish him and retains the power to save. Among his many rhetorical arguments for recall, Ovid advertises his own usefulness to the project of constructing Roman authority abroad. This argument underscores similarities between imperial representations and Ovid’s own poetry that fall under discussion throughout this study.Footnote 84 For instance, the poet proclaims in Ex Ponto 4.8 that even the gods “are made” by verse; Caesar owes his divinity in part to the talent of poets; and Ovid would be glad to render similar service to Germanicus himself (55–66). However, this apparently patriotic claim draws a cynical parallel between political reputation and poetry: both are constructed, potentially fictitious, and reliant for their power on audience belief.
The flip side of poetry’s prospective complicity with imperial power is, of course, its potential for censorship or cooptation, and this specter looms darkly over the exile poems. Ovid’s sentence, and his conspicuous caution in discussing it, appear to confirm his earlier fear of parrhesia (si verbis audacia detur, Met. 1.175) while clarifying that it is the divine wrath of Augustus, not Jupiter, that Romans should most fear. Despite a lack of evidence for censorship in this period, Ovid frames himself as attempting and having failed to exercise free speech.Footnote 85 On a local scale, this suggests an opposition between his own writing and the princeps’ desired public image. On a larger one, it suggests that Augustus was consciously controlling public discourse and punishing those who spoke out of line. This manufactures a “hermeneutics of suspicion” or, put more bluntly, paranoia on the part of readers.Footnote 86 It marks positive portrayals of the princeps as potentially coerced, and it encourages readers to search them for veiled meanings. Ovid, to borrow a phrase from Sergio Casali (Reference Casali1996), thus prompts his audience to “read more” into his text, searching for moments of ambivalence and charging them with subversive meaning.
Ovid proceeds to turn his power as a reader back on Augustus by reapplying the same principles of interpretation that condemned his poems to the emperor’s own building projects, public entertainments, and sponsored arts. It is unfair, Ovid argues in Tristia 2, for his poems alone to incur punishment for depicting adulterous love (361–62). Meaning ultimately lies not with authors but with readers, who can turn any work to immoral ends if so inclined (263–78) – even the Augustan cityscape:
For that matter, Augustus himself funded and enjoyed mimes featuring scandalous love affairs for general audiences including unmarried girls (497–516). No part of “your Aeneid” (tuae … Aeneidos, 533), Ovid adds, is better read than Aeneas’ affair with Dido. The possessive adjective signals Augustus’ physical and cultural appropriation of the Aeneid after the death of its author, while the sentiment underscores the impossibility of absolute control.Footnote 87 Ovid’s authorial self-defense thus doubles as an interpretive act of aggression. It frames Augustus as the author of the Roman cityscape, and a validating factor behind the Roman literary canon, but also shows the ease with which his interpreting subjects can subvert his representational and moral intentions.
1.4 Reading Augustan Monuments
Tristia 2, in its critical rereading of Augustus’ public image as inscribed in the civic and cultural landscape of Rome, renders explicit a broader preoccupation of the era. The Augustan poets, in my analysis, look intently at looking itself, highlighting interpreters’ role in creating meaning as they respond to art. They also apply their powers of critical viewership to representations of the principate. Augustan poetry is full of moments in which the narrator, or his proxy, gazes intently at an Augustan building or symbol and performs a response – be it admiring, ambivalent, or quizzical. These passages thus present accounts of reception, along the lines of Aeneas’ viewing of the Carthaginian murals in Aeneid 1. On this level, these poems vindicate audiences’ power to invest Augustan symbols with meaning and illustrate their susceptibility to private interpretation and contestation. At the same time, these poems are carefully composed rhetorical works with larger designs on their reading public. They transfer to their own authors some of the cultural and interpretive authority the princeps claimed over Roman audiences. By modeling hermeneutic strategies that audiences could reapply to the new regime, these poets acknowledge the mental libertas of their readers and offer their own interpretive leadership as a pleasurable, edifying, and empowering alternative to the princeps’. The following chapters unpack the range of critical, competitive, even revisionary stances the poets strike toward Augustus and his image, shedding light on the evolving interpretive dialogue that vitally affected the meaning of Augustan symbols within society.
This impulse toward interrogating visual and verbal rhetoric was a product of the education that the poets shared with their readers and indeed the princeps himself. Classical literary theory promoted critical, comparative, and engagé responses to texts across media. One expressive goal was to turn the reader or auditor into a spectator, even empathetic participant, in events on the page. Homeric scholiasts, for instance, write that the poet uses graphic (ἐναργής) description in order to elicit audiences’ critical thinking (διάνοια) and thus turn them into active cooperators in the making of meaning.Footnote 88 Poets might also engage readers’ mental faculties and enlist their skills of inference through the conscious use of paradox, inconsistency, and omission.Footnote 89 The scholiasts themselves provide numerous examples of such readings: René Nünlist documents a tendency on their part to read between the lines, (over)identify allusions to historical events, and mark deviations from traditional versions of a story as well as internal inconsistencies.Footnote 90
Such skills were not confined to professional critics, but were taught in schools and thus second nature to the Augustan poets’ audience. David Konstan has catalogued evidence that readers were expected to interrogate texts strenuously, in part because forensic and rhetorical training were inseparable from the study of literature. Audiences were tantamount to judge and jury, whether they were evaluating law cases, rhetorical displays, or literature. In a pedagogical treatise on how to listen to poems, for instance, Plutarch urges his young addressee to ask questions of poems and expose their inconsistencies. Thus, when a character in a Sophoclean play states that “profit is pleasant, even if it comes from falsehoods” (fr. 749), Plutarch encourages readers to push back: “but in fact we heard you say that ‘false statements never bear fruit’” (fr. 250; Plut. De audiendis poetis 21A).Footnote 91 In fact, Konstan suggests, ancient poets wrote with precisely this type of readership in mind, often leaving questions unanswered or inscribing false conclusions in order to engage audiences in debate.Footnote 92
This study contends that the Augustan poets encouraged their readers, already well trained in such interpretive strategies, to apply them to the imagery of the principate. They did so not because readers were incapable of doing so on their own (in fact they were likely), but because this permitted public discussion of questions that decorum, fear of reprisal, or respect for Augustan authority might otherwise preclude. Given the evidence that writers enjoyed greater freedom of speech at this time than under later emperors,Footnote 93 it seems possible that Augustus exerted what Herbert Marcuse has termed “repressive tolerance,” on the understanding that the appearance of open discourse would ultimately confirm his domination. The poets nonetheless needed to gauge political and economic consequences as they wrote, even as (and precisely because) they maintained independence of thought and vision.Footnote 94
Greek and Roman rhetoricians taught that criticism of tyrants was most safely and effectively expressed when veiled in terms that rely on reader inference – what Frederick Ahl has analyzed as “figured” speech. One technique was double-edged discourse, as in Aeschines’ treatment of Telauges, poised ambiguously between praise and mockery (Demetrius, On Style 291). Quintilian advises omitting details, appearing to hesitate, or otherwise leaving it to auditors to supply missing information, adding that judges are most likely to believe what they think we are unwilling to say (Inst. Or. 9.2.71–72). In fact, the Roman rhetorician points to omission as a peculiarly persuasive form of emphasis, defining this device as an active interpretive decision on the reader’s part (“digging out some latent meaning from something said”) rather than a mere rhetorical figure deployed by an author (Inst. Or. 9.2.64).Footnote 95 It mattered not whether an author’s criticism was plain to see; what mattered was that he evaded punishment by maintaining plausible deniability and allowing for alternate interpretations. This latter, in fact, is another prime means for eliciting sympathy on the part of one’s readers (Inst. 9.2.67):
You can speak well and make open statement against the tyrants we were discussing, provided the statement can be understood in another way. It is only danger you are trying to avoid, not giving offense. If you can slip by through ambiguity of expression (ambiguitate sententiae), there’s no one who won’t enjoy your verbal burglary (furto).Footnote 96
In this light, the Augustan poets’ treatment of Augustus via his monuments is doubly distanced, highly figured discourse. They maintain a cautious but powerful freedom of speech by training their gaze on the icons of the principate rather than on the principate itself and by conducting ambiguous readings, often on the knife’s edge between flattery and critique. In doing so, they elicit sympathy from like-minded audiences while avoiding negative political, economic, and social repercussions. This type of speech, moreover, not only relies heavily on readerly interpretation; it also creates like-minded readers by displaying and rewarding interpretive attention to ambiguities, inconsistencies, and silences not only in poetry but in Augustan iconography.
By unpacking these poetic acts of interpretation, this study offers a new perspective on Augustan power and its reception. To borrow a term from James Scott’s Reference Scott1990 analysis of the interactions between oppressed and dominant groups, this book recovers the “hidden transcript” behind overt expressions of Augustan power – the process by which the poets debated signs of the new regime, involved their own readers in critical conversation, and thereby shaped public perceptions of the principate in their own day and for years to come. Crucially, even while asserting a strong role for themselves and articulating some cogent critiques, the poets ultimately vest poetic meaning and authority in their readers. It is a paradox that mirrors that of the principate itself. In the poets’ view, imperial authority, like poetic fame and the meaning of signs, is constructed in collaboration with an audience. The poetics of power that this book describes therefore doubles as a kind of political theory, just as the poets’ readings of Augustan symbols perform an immanent critique of the contradictions behind imperial ideology. In response to the increasing concentration of power in the hands of the emperor, the Augustan poets open up an alternate empire of the mind in which they and their readers become the ultimate makers, and masters, of imperial meaning.
1.5 Chapter Outlines
Building on these general themes, each of the following chapters treats the poets’ evolving, dialogic responses to one Augustan symbol or monument: the sidus Iulium, the Palatine complex, the Forum Augustum, and the triumph. Such imperial icons were themselves, of course, a type of figured speech aimed to communicate with contemporary interpretive communities. But each chapter also focuses on one hermeneutic strategy by which the poets disrupt this normative ideological grammar for, and with, their readers: retroactive reinterpretation, for instance, or reading with attention to omissions. Together, these chapters open a new window onto questions of enduring interest to classicists, historians, and scholars of intellectual history and politics. How do literature and power engage with one another and the wider public on the plane of representation? How can we recover the contests staged beneath the surface of political imagery, and trace the ways these have shaped our own constructions of the past? It is a running theme of this study that our belated attribution of intentionality, even inevitability, to Augustus’ iconography and political career is an ironic aftereffect of texts that questioned these from every angle. Modern narratives of Augustan history, including the causality and closure we imply with that periodizing term, owe a great deal yet to be explored to the poets’ own attempts to grapple with events that were still unfolding around them.
Chapter 2 addresses the roots of such teleological thinking by tracking the iconographical development of the Julian star (sidus Iulium) and, with it, the poets’ evolving retrospective readings of Caesar’s deification. This symbol originated with a comet that appeared over Julius Caesar’s funeral games in 44 BCE and was soon hailed as a sign that he had joined the gods. Scholars since Servius have assumed that Caesar’s heir, the future Augustus, prompted this interpretation in order to advance his own power as the “son of a god.” However, historical sources closer to the time argue against the idea that Octavian ‘spun’ the comet or curated its use within Roman culture. Through close analysis of coins; poems of Horace, Propertius, and Manilius; a constellation of allusions in Vergil; and Ovid’s account of Caesar’s deification in Metamorphoses 15, I show that contemporary representations of the sidus encode heterogeneous, and frequently skeptical, responses to the principate. The idea that Augustus masterminded this symbol instead originates belatedly as viewers like Ovid retrojected the emperor’s mature power onto his earlier career. The sidus thus comes to symbolize the problem of interpreting events without the benefit of hindsight, as well as the subsequent tendency to reinterpret them in conformity with a dominant narrative.
Chapter 3 explores poetic responses to Augustus’ house, temple to Apollo, library, and portico on the Palatine Hill, often typologized within an early, triumphalist phase in the princeps’ self-representation. Yet the poets sidestep this complex’s political message to voice perspectives silenced by Augustus’ supposed consensus universorum (consensus of the orders), performing an individualized, interpretive libertas in the face of monolithic authority. Revising this space from an elegiac perspective, Propertius 2.31/32 defines an aesthetic and moral code beyond Augustan incursions into private life. The Danaids of the portico prompt meditation, in Horace and Vergil, on individuals’ moral autonomy in negotiating the competing claims of justice, forgiveness, and patria potestas. Much later, Ovid critically reexamines the Palatine from exile in Tristia 3.1, focusing on the many ways in which Augustus’ self-advertising falls short of reality – not least, with the exclusion of Ovid’s books from the library purportedly open to all, reifying the regime’s marginalization of dissenting voices. Together, these poets verbally reconstruct the Palatine as a counter-imperial space that celebrates readers’ freedom of mind even as their bodies, and books, were subject to increasing control.
Revision flows in the other direction in the Forum Augustum, which Chapter 4 analyzes as an ideological space that both responded to and inspired literary debate about Augustus’ place within Roman history and heuristics. Under construction when Vergil died but finished by 2 BCE, the Forum Augustum’s statue gallery of great Romans refigures Vergil’s parade of heroes in Aeneid 6 in monumental form. Both, moreover, display an impulse toward mapping and ordering information that scholars have associated with Rome’s growing empire in this period. However, Vergil’s narrative also calls attention to the deaths and disappointments that are omitted from maps and monuments, encouraging readers to navigate and interpret imperial spaces for themselves. Ovid does just the latter when, in Ars Amatoria 1, he remaps Augustan monumental spaces for private, erotic purposes. The poet’s prediction of a triumph for Gaius Caesar, in particular, parodies the Augustan “mapping impulse” and the masculine, militaristic values espoused by the Forum Augustum. Yet Gaius’ early death would come to ironize this prediction, instead aligning him with the dead Marcellus in Aeneid 6 and further undermining the expansionist rhetoric of urban architecture. In charting avenues for hermeneutic invasion and repossession of the physical city, these poems question the extent to which Augustus was able to turn Rome into a coherent urban narrative and highlight the unspoken costs of Augustan imperialism.
Chapter 5 examines poetic reversals of Augustan space on a different scale, over the vast geographical expanse of the Roman empire. Mary Beard (Reference Beard2007) has shown how triumphal processions could misrepresent their imperial authors. Taking a closer look at the literary evidence, I argue that the Augustan poets use triumphs in order to highlight imperial power’s dependence on representation, both in Rome (via the paintings, processions, and spoils that displayed faraway victories to city-dwellers) and abroad (via the statues, coins, and inscriptions by which Augustus made his authority felt in the provinces). Vergil’s shield of Aeneas casts doubt on the accuracy of triumphal representations, including the shield itself. Following Gallus’ distanced contemplation of a Caesarian triumph in the papyrus fragment found at Qaṣr Ibrîm, Propertius 3.4 suggests that triumphal signs are more important than signifieds to urban viewers, yet also subject to private appropriation. Ovid amplifies this theme in his love poetry, but it is by imagining triumphs from exile (Tristia 3.12, 4.2, Ex Ponto 2.1, 3.4) that he most powerfully interrogates imperial power’s reliance on signs that are wholly severed from reality, at least from a provincial perspective. These triumph poems thereby define an important role for poets in creating and memorializing Augustan power and illustrate the high stakes of their interventions in the public image through which the princeps ruled. In these poems, reading (broadly understood) is the process that unites empire, from urban audiences’ validating observation of triumphs to provincials’ imaginative participation in Roman symbols and ceremonies. These poems thus play a role in (re)constituting empire as an imaginative res publica, in keeping with many subjects’ experiential reality.
As a brief coda, Chapter 6 returns to Augustus’ deathbed mime and evaluates his attempts to fix his posthumous memory through his will (Suet. Aug. 101, Cass. Dio 56.32.1). The princeps left careful instructions for his funeral, a list of his accomplishments (Res Gestae), and possibly advice for the future governance of the empire (Cass. Dio 56.33.3–6). But on all these counts, audiences continued to modify the emperor’s plans and intervene in his attempted self-representation. The power they exerted after the literal death of the auctor, however, was no different in kind from the power they exerted during his life. By closely analyzing this process as it unfolds within Latin poetry, this study recovers some of the interpretive liberty that Romans exerted over the images of empire, behind and beyond the princeps’ attempts to orchestrate public opinion. As the poets depict it, Augustus’ auctoritas was much like their own literary triumphs: even as it exalted a single individual, it was ultimately founded in audience validation. From the perspective of many of his subjects, as by necessity to modern interpreters, Augustus was less a person than a creative, collective, and remarkably democratic act of the imagination.Footnote 97
Why this book, and why now? I noted above that “belatedness” is already a symptom of that political-historical-aesthetic construction known as Augustan culture. By interrogating Augustan iconography in diachronic dialogue with one another, the poets had the cumulative effect of flattening out this age and enabling teleological interpretations. In some sense, belatedness is also a necessary condition of Augustan scholarship in the current era, in the wake of the late twentieth century’s surge of innovative approaches to Vergil in particular. The present study proudly joins the third generation of that revolution: its author came of intellectual age nourished on the writings of scholars who themselves drank deeply from the Harvard School. It has benefited, moreover, from Zanker and Galinsky’s interdisciplinary approaches to the reciprocity of Augustan power within the political and visual culture of the day. It is a tribute to all these works, and in hopes of inspiring further debate across the academic spectrum, that the present volume offers a holistic theory of the poets as readers of Augustus within and against the broader backdrop of Roman culture – readers who have often imperceptibly constructed our own narratives of this pivotal moment in world history.
This study shows, for the first time and in detail, how the poets exerted their power of reader response on a range of Augustan icons, rituals, and buildings to recreate these imperial monuments as sites for (re)public(an) critique. In doing so, they reclaimed viewership as a political act, reconstituting themselves and their readers as an underground republic of letters within Rome’s burgeoning autocracy. This book offers professional classicists a synthesizing approach to Augustan poetry within its cultural matrix while advancing original readings of a variety of important texts and interrogating some standard assumptions about Augustan history. It is necessarily and deeply engaged with prior scholarship, and offers scholars-in-training an overview of themes and debates within Augustan studies that I hope will spark further inquiry. Last but not least, it strives to speak to nonspecialists through its broad concern for power and its representation, including its analysis of reading as a politically constitutive act.
In approaching these matters of perennial import, this book seeks to remain above scholarly fads, theoretical jargon, and footnote polemics. At the same time, this is a book that needed to be written, and needed to be written now. Recent popular votes in the United States and the United Kingdom have shown all too clearly how different readers may construct divergent understandings of cultural identity, current events, even the world at large onto increasingly fractured sources of information and opinion – sources that, thanks to the internet age, proliferate beyond the power of any one authority and reflect in their irreconcilability the breakdown of national interpretive communities. All of us, and not just those in minority groups or at publicly funded universities, will encounter mounting pressure to defend who we are and what we do – to explain how, why, and whether classics, and the humanities in general, can speak to the problems and concerns of modernity. This book is my reply. To the ancient Romans, as to many of us today, reading offered a borderless homeland and transcendent imagined community, even and especially when their political rights and voices came under threat. This book retraces and reanimates the conversation they conducted, beneath the surface of their texts, about preserving identity and intellectual freedom in a sometimes hostile world: a collaborative κτῆμα ἐς ἀεί, “possession for all time,” that may be of use in the years to come.
