The Augustan Space

The Poetics of Geography, Topography and Monumentality

Monica R. Gale, Anna Chahoud

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2024
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009187527
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Augustus famously boasted that, having inherited a city of brick, he bequeathed a city of marble; but the transformation of the City's physical fabric is only one aspect of a pervasive concern with geography, topography and monumentality that dominates Augustan culture and – in particular – Augustan poetry and poetics. Contributors to the present volume bring a range of approaches to bear on the works of Horace, Virgil, Propertius and Ovid, and explore their construction and representation of Greek, Roman and imperial space; centre and periphery; relations between written monuments and the physical City; movement within, beyond and away from Rome; gendered and heterotopic spaces; and Rome itself, as caput mundi, as cosmopolis and as 'heavenly city'. The introduction considers the wider cultural importance of space and monumentality in first-century Rome, and situates the volume's key themes within the context of the spatial turn in Classical Studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Spaces of Augustan Poetry
• Chapter 1 The City in Horace’s sermo: Physical Spaces and Political Spaces
• Chapter 2 excucurristi a Neapoli: Virgil, Augustus and the Art of Disappearing
• Chapter 3 Poetic and Imperial Spaces in Propertius, Books 1–3
• Chapter 4 Horace on Sacred Space: The Odes and Augustan Temples
• Chapter 5 Roman Topography, Politics and Gender: The Cult of Bona Dea in Propertius 4.9 – An Answer to Aeneid 8?
• Chapter 6 aurea nunc, olim siluestribus horrida dumis: The luci Molorci and the Augustan Space in Virgil’s Georgics and Aeneid 8
• Chapter 7 Hippolytus and Egeria in the Woods of Aricia (Virgil, Aen. 7.761–82 and Ovid, Met. 15.479–551): Where Greek Myth and Italic Myth Come Together
• Chapter 8 locum tua tempora poscunt: Topography in Ovid’s Fasti
• Chapter 9 imperii Roma deumque locus: Rome as Celestial City
• Chapter 10 The Rise and Fall of Virgil’s Sublime Carthage
• Chapter 11 Eccentric Poetry: Ovid, Exile and the Prototype of a ‘Periphery’ Literature
• Chapter 12 Virgilian Heterotopias: Multiple Entrances to the Underworld
• Chapter 13 loci desperati: Possibilities and Boundaries of Augustan Conceptions of Space
• Works Cited
• Index Locorum
• General Index