A comprehensive treatment of the reflections by Augustan poets on Apollo as an imperial icon.

In the Odes, Horace writes of his own work, “I have built a monument more enduring than bronze,”—a striking metaphor that hints at how the poetry and built environment of ancient Rome are inextricably linked. This fascinating work of original scholarship makes the precise and detailed argument that painted illustrations of the Trojan War, both public and private, were a collective visual resource for selected works of Virgil, Horace, and Propertius. Carefully researched and skillfully reasoned, the author’s claims are bold and innovative, offering a strong interpretation of the relationship between Roman visual culture and literature that will deepen modern readings of Augustan poets. The Museum of Augustus first provides a comprehensive reconstruction of paintings from the remaining fragments of the cycle of Trojan frescoes that once decorated the Temple of Apollo in Pompeii. It then finds the echoes of these paintings in the Augustan-dated Portico of Philippus, now destroyed, which was itself a renovation of Rome’s de facto temple of the Muses—in other words, a museum, both in displaying art and offering a meeting place for poets. It next examines the responses of the Augustan poets to the decorative program of this monument that was intimately connected with their own literary aspirations. The book concludes by looking at the way Horace in the Odes and Virgil in the Georgics both conceptualized their poetic projects as temples to rival the museum of Augustus.

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

These ardent, even obsessed, poems about erotic passion are among the brightest jewels in the crown of Latin literature. Written by Propertius, Rome's greatest poet of love, who was born around 50 b.c., a contemporary of Ovid, these elegies tell of Propertius' tormented relationship with a woman he calls "Cynthia." Their connection was sometimes blissful, more often agonizing, but as the poet came to recognize, it went beyond pride or shame to become the defining event of his life. Whether or not it was Propertius' explicit intention, these elegies extend our ideas of desire, and of the human condition itself.

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.

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.