Apologia sroki albo August i dziedzictwo optymatów [Rec. The Alternative Augustan Age, eds. Kit Morrell, Josiah Osgood, Kathryn Welch, New York 2019]

Przedmiotem artykułu recenzyjnego jest praca zbiorowa The Alternative Augustan Age. Jej autorzy intencjonalnie nie koncentrują narracji na samym Auguście, zwracając uwagę m.in. na republikańską metrykę części inicjatyw cesarza. Te, w których zdawał się on podążać śladami wytyczonymi przez Sullę, Pompejusza i Katona Utyceńskiego, omówili K. Morrell i P. Hay. Choć nie wszystkie przywołane przez badaczy analogie znajdują równie solidne oparcie w źródłach, en masse rzucają interesujące światło na kwestię stosunku Augusta do tradycji republiki.

Disorienting Empire

Disorienting Empire is the first book to examine Republican Latin poetry’s recurring interest in characters who become lost. The book explains the prevalence of this theme with reference to the rapid expansion of Rome’s empire in the Middle and Late Republic. It was both a threatening and an enticing prospect, the book argues, to imagine the ever-widening spaces of Roman power as a place where one could become disoriented, both in terms of geographical wandering and in a more abstract sense connected with identity and identification, especially as it concerned gender and sexuality. Plautus, Terence, Lucretius, and Catullus, as well as the “triumviral” Horace of Satires, book 1, all reveal an interest in such experiences, particularly in relation to journeys into the Greek world from which these writers drew their source material. Fragmentary authors such as Naevius, Ennius, and Lucilius, as well as prose historians including Polybius and Livy, add depth and context to the discussion. Setting the Republican poets in dialogue with queer theory and postcolonial theory, the book brings to light both anxieties latent in the theme and the exuberance it suggests over new creative possibilities opened up by reorienting oneself toward new horizons and new identifications—by discovering with pleasure that one could be other than one thought. Further, in showing that the Republican poets had been experimenting with such techniques for generations before the Augustan Age, Disorienting Empire offers its close readings as a preface to the interpretation of Aeneas’s wandering journey in Vergil’s Aeneid.

Caesar’s Mistakes and Horace’s Errores

Although the book’s main concern is with Latin poetry of the Republic proper, Chapter 5 extends its analysis into the “Triumviral Period” (44–29 BCE) and thus closer to the Augustan Age. As Rome fell into a new round of bloody civil conflicts through which two essentially monarchic rulers—first Julius Caesar and then Octavian/Augustus—sought dominion over the whole empire, the poetic conceit of making one’s way through disorienting circumstances became freighted with new meaning. Vergil in the Aeneid was not the only poet to adopt this conceit in response to these events. But recognizing as much requires a different understanding of how the theme of becoming lost relates to the expansion of Roman power and the interplay between Greek and Roman culture. Rather than use the motif to figure travel in far-flung areas of the empire, Horace’s Satires, book 1, with its Epicurean satirist personae vulnerable to some of the same charges of queer attitudes and behaviors as Lucretius, limits its ramblings geographically to Rome and Italy. In doing so, however, it makes them into a means of suggesting the stable—and potentially universal—power of the man already dominant in the whole of the Western empire: Octavian. Horace’s presentation involves a skillful handling of Octavian’s links to the divine, particularly the divinity of his deceased adoptive father, Julius Caesar, whose worship Octavian himself had already introduced into state-sponsored cult. Satires 1 thus reveals awareness of the empire-wide projection of power on which Octavian’s position of leadership was coming to depend.

Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire

This book argues that the subject in Latin elegy, beginning with Catullus, constitutes itself in relation to the dynamically expanding space of empire from the late Republic to the end of the Augustan age. The lack of fixity in the elegiac subject and space of empire go hand in hand. Questions of geographical space become questions about the de-centered, dislocated subject; in imagining geographical space our very nature as subjects comes to the fore. Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid each offers his own unique expression of the gendered subject, and their poetry runs the gamut of responses to the expanding geographical empire. First comes the dream of Roman imperium sine fine, an empire that capaciously stretches to the ends of the inhabited world. And yet, imperium sine fine requires the existence of some sort of fines, even if the fantasy demands that they be overrun. Formlessness, or worse, rapidly alternating forms, gives rise to anxieties and the desire to set down some fines, to establish where, exactly, the boundaries of empire are, what belongs “inside” and what can be relegated to “outside.” But fines, cartographically speaking, are never as stable as we want them to be, and, for a rapidly expanding empire, are always under pressure. The very constitution of the gendered elegiac subject mirrors, anticipates, runs parallel to the problems and anxieties that the map of expanding empire tries to solve, yet simultaneously reveals in its production of space.

Painted Worlds and Porous Walls

Propertius’ fourth and final book of elegies also dramatizes the anxieties that emerge when one draws a map. The false promise of order and control, of being able to determine what is “in” and differentiate it from what is “out,” what is “Roman” as opposed to what is “non-Roman” returns in the guise of an Augustan-era map that the young wife, Arethusa, consults in elegy 4.3 and of the walls around early Rome in Tarpeia’s story of transgression from elegy 4.4. Propertius intertwines cartographic fines with the fortified boundaries of the new city, until he retrospectively reconstructs the problem of porous limits as an originary one for Rome, one that does not solely spring up with the imperial expansion of the Augustan age but always already existed at the very beginnings of the city.

Introduction

The introduction provides an overarching view of the book’s questions, texts, and theoretical concerns. It moves from a concrete detailing of the physical extent of geographical space the Roman empire added in the late Republic and in the Augustan age to a consideration of the effects that such an expansive increase in territory might have on a people’s worldview, relying on theories of cartography and the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan in conjunction with questions about how Romans conceptualized their world and what light the (no-longer-extant) late first-century BCE or early first-century CE map of Agrippa can shed on it. The emphasis of the inquiry is on the subject in Latin elegy (including Catullus) in poems that turn out to be chock full of geographical references. The book traces the different ways in which, and the varying consequences with which, the elegiac subject encounters the space of empire depending on gender in the works of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid.

Dichtung der augusteischen Epoche und der frühen Kaiserzeit

Niklas Holzberg, who until his retirement in 2011 was a professor of Classics at the University of Munich, of-fers a collection of twenty-three papers on Roman poetry of the Augustan age and the early imperial era. Published between 1997 and 2019 in periodicals and anthologies, fifteen of them were originally written in English or Italian and are published here in German for the first time. They discuss works by Virgil, Horace, Ovid, the elegists, Martial, Ps.-Virgil, Ps.-Tibullus and Ps.-Seneca. The interpretations of the texts focus on self-reflection as expressed by intertextuality and implicit metapoetics, sequential reading of poetry books and the recognition of pseudepigraphs as literary games played by anonymous authors impersonating classical poets.

The Roman Virtue of Pietas and the Glorification of the Deceased Wife (CIL VI, 1527 “Laudatio Turiae”)

The subject of this paper is the multiplicity of meaning of the word pietas as it is used in the famous inscription CIL VI, 1527 called Laudatio Turiae. In revealing traditional and innovative aspects of this notion, the author tries to see the ideology of relations in the Roman family of the laudator and the laudata behind it, and to set it into the context of the changing world in the times of the Late Republic and the Principate within the Roman history.The inscription reveals that, in the eyes of laudator, pietas is the most important virtue of his defunct wife, laudata. In the course of the research, three features of pietas are marked out: 1) the virtue of pietas is operative exclusively in the sphere of family relations; 2) pietas relations always presuppose the hierarchical ones (e.g. children to the father / mother, wife to husband, younger brother / sister to the elder one); 3) the virtue of pietas always implies a strong action. Some new aspects of the functioning of the virtue of pietas can be observed when exploring the usage of the word in the inscription. For the first time in the Latin literature, the word pietas signifies the transfer of the virtue of pietas into the female domain, using it to describe the relation of the younger sister to the elder. But the most striking innovation is an inversion of the hierarchical order of children to the parents. For the first time, pietas means the duty of the parents to bring up their children in the best manner possible – an obligation which will find its place in the Roman law codes.The large usage of the notion of pietas and experimentation with its meaning, which finds parallels in the poetry of the Augustan age (Virgil, Ovid) signifies the susceptibility of the laudator to the ideas of the Augustan policies and his ideological stances.The article is preceded by a Lithuanian translation of the inscription with a short introduction.

The River Araxes in the Roman Poetry

The River Araxes In the Roman Poetry The Araxes flowing through the Armenian Highlands was one of the rivers mentioned quite often in Roman poetry from the Augustan Age up to the 5th century. In line with the traditional tendency of classical literature, the Araxes was usually shown as a pars pro toto of a country, in this case Armenia, which was one of the aims of the Roman eastern policy and the object of rivalry between the Empire and Parthia/Persia. The great majority of references to the Araxes was connected with the theme of Roman expansion in the East (especially with the campaign of Tiberius in 20 BC and later with the Roman-Parthian war 58–63 AD), which can be observed best in the recurrent motif of a bridge across this river, a clear-cut symbol of Roman domination over Armenia and – more generally – over all of the East.

Constructing Authors and Readers in the Appendices Vergiliana, Tibulliana, and Ouidiana

This volume juxtaposes, for the first time, the set of appendical works associated with three of the most well-known poets of the Augustan age, the Appendices Vergiliana, Tibulliana, and Ouidiana. Scholars who work on these texts tend to treat them in isolation or in comparative contexts to the authentic texts of those authors. This book instead treats them in the light of one another, and asks of them a different set of literary-critical and reader-reception questions from those typically posed. Whereas much previous scholarship has been interested in who wrote these texts, our chapters ask questions such as: why and when did authors want to insert themselves and their works into the canon?; what are the effects of our preconceived notions of quality on our interpretations of these texts? The chapters of the volume focus, for the most part, on individual texts, but the questions they ask and answer have significant implications for the corpus of appendical texts as a whole.