LATIN LITERATURE: AUGUSTAN PERIOD

An overview of the development of Latin literature throughout the Golden Age of Augustus and the contributions of some of its more important authors

Virgil

Life of Virgil:

• Born in 70 BC, near Mantua, to a family of small landholders and most likely educated either in Rome, or in Naples

• Lacking in external events and centred instead on his literary work, which he cultivated in the circle of Maecenas, his greatest friend and patron, around whom the brightest literati of Rome were gathered

• Dies in 19 BC, on a return voyage from Greece and is thereafter buried in Naples, with his final work, the Aeneid, published posthumously

Works of Virgil:

1. Bucolics, ten brief poems in hexameters, also called the Eclogues

2. Georgics, a didactic poem in four books of hexameter

3. The Aeneid, an epic poem in twelve books, written in hexameter and left unfinished

4. Spurious texts of the Appendix Vergiliana

Virgil’s Bucolics:

• Modelled after Theocritus’ bucolic poetry, which painted the picture of the traditional pastoral world from a distinctly metropolitan perspective and taste, focusing on the countryside setting and the shepherd protagonists in order to treat larger themes

  • Virgil’s emulation transcended the usual limits of Roman ‘‘imitate’’ to become instead a complete immersion into this world and genre that Theocritus constructed

• Title means ‘‘cowherds’ songs’’, thus precisely containing the basic feature of the genre by evoking the pastoral setting in which the herdsmen are both creators and actors for poetry

  • Alternatively, called the ‘‘Book of Eclogues’’ to indicate the ten poems, as ‘‘eclogue’’ means a short, selected poem

• Careful, architectural composition of the ten poems, with the number ten going back to a collection of ten idylls by Theocritus and there existing many parallelisms between individuals poems, which are sorted according to this symmetry

• Miscellaneous themes, that extended beyond the pastoral world and instead extended into a variety of settings, such as the world of the city, exotic destinations of Magna Graecia, the mythical and ideal landscape of Arcadia, as well as genres, such as the existence of celebratory poems dedicated to royal patrons

• Free use of autobiographical material, such as:

  1. The drama of the exiled shepherds in eclogues 1 and 9 referring to the land confiscations Virgil himself may have experienced

  2. The implicit presence of Octavian in the first eclogue

  3. Homage paid to Cornelius Gallus in eclogues 6 and 10

  4. Concrete historical references in the fourth eclogue, which contains a prophetic song for the birth of a child who will witness the coming of a new and happy cosmic age

     • This eclogue in particular belongs to the genre of expectations of renewal, common in the age of crisis between Philippi and Actium yet the identity of this foretold saviour is in itself a dilemma, most likely referring to the child expected to come out of the marriage of Antony and Octavia

  5. The meditative function that the bucolic setting plays, both in soothing Virgil’s woes and in reconciling the agonies and contrasts of models from other genres

Virgil’s Georgics:

• Ten-year long period of composition, prompted by Virgil’s new patron Maecenas and his inclusion in the circle of amici that surrounded the latter

• Conceived as a reconciliation of the didactic genre as developed by:

  1. The Hellenistic scholars, renowned for their focus on descriptive imagery

  2. Lucretius, who promoted material, intellectual and spiritual independence in the reader

• Series of four books, whose themes are concerned with the fundamental activities of the farmer, from the working of fields to beekeeping

  • The order of themes demonstrates an evolution throughout which human toil becomes less marked and nature is the more active agent, one that is likened and related to human activity

  • Introduced through a proem that serves as digression in the narrative, one which is long and excessive in books 1 and 3, and brief and strictly introductory in books 2 and 4

  • Highlights the symmetry of the work’s structure as well as its use of thesis and antithesis to move thought along through the use of contrasting tonalities, between themes of life and death

• Georgic space is defined by the context of the Augustan era, especially in:

  1. Its portrayals of the figure of Octavian, first as saviour then as triumphant bringer of peace

  2. The correspondence of Augustan ideological propaganda to the glorification of the Italic peasants and warriors

  3. The consideration of the Georgics as the first true document of Latin literature in the age of the principate

Virgil’s Aeneid:

• Shaped by the strong cultural expectation for a continuation and revival of the epic genre in the Augustan period, yet still innovative and subversive

• Conceived as a replacement for Ennius’ own epic, with twelve books written as a response to the forty-eight books of the two Homeric poems, both contaminating them with a reversal and continuing them

  • Homeric influence is therefore especially evident in the structural partition the Aeneid, which represents the two epic-fables in reverse sequence:

    1. Books 1 to 6: Odyssean half of the Aeneid, so-called for its portrayal of Aeneas’ difficult voyage from Carthage to the shores of Latium

       • Inverted as a journey towards the unknown

    2. Books 7 to 12: Iliadic half of the Aeneid, so-called for the narrative of war that begins with the arrival of the Trojans at the mouth of the Tiber and ends with the death of Turnus

       • Inverted as a war meant to construct a new city, not destroy it

• Cultural context to the Aeneid:

1. Propagandistic and historical-celebratory function in relation to the creation of the Roman Empire and especially the reign of Augustus, which allows the reader to perceive through a number of narrative techniques employed previously by Homer

   • Among these techniques are: the use of a prophecy of Juno that links the destinies of Aeneas and Augustus and mirrors a similar prophecy of Zeus on the destruction of Troy; Aeneas learning from the kingdom of the dead the great events of Rome’s future, just as Odysseus obtained visions of his own destiny; the description of Aeneas’ shield which is crowned with images of critical moments in Rome’s history, similar to the description of Achilles’ shield

2. Representation of the popularity of foundation legends in Italic cultures, which linked the founding of their cities to heroes of Trojan fame, with the legend of Aeneas gaining particular importance, especially as Roman expansion mandated for the Romans to construct their own genealogy and anthropology, equal to that of the Greeks

   • Through the figure of Aeneas’ son Iulus, the genes Iulia claimed very ancient and privileged origins, that Virgil was free to exploit for his narrative

• Epic style is characterised by the use of the Virgilian hexameter, a vehicle for long and continuous narration that creates rhythmic structure due to its limited number of principal caesuras

• Elevated language, characterised by the richness of archaisms as homage to Ennius and early tragedy as well as poeticisms, mainly calques and neologisms, which are used in combination of ordinary words of prose and everyday usage

• Increase in subjectivity, allowing the reader to confront the stimuli of the story, namely the differing perspectives of its characters

  • Complexity is evident in the demonstration of the psychology and individual motives of the defeated, which the narrative takes care to contemplate in the typical fashion of the Greek tragedians and invites the reader to appreciate:

    1. When it comes to the motives of Dido, Virgil represents the war from Cartage as a result of tragic and excessive love between two different parties

    2. When it comes to the portrayal of Turnus, Aeneas faces difficulty in ending the life of his enemy-turned-subjectus

Horace

Life of Horace:

• Born in 65 BC, in Venus, a Roman military colony, to a family of modest means, with a freedman father who became a small land-owner

• Given the best of educations, first in Rome then in Greece, where his career of student was interrupted by the outbreak of civil war that followed Caesar’s murder

  • Horace enrolled in Brutus’ republican army yet his impending military career as commander of a legion as interrupted by the defeat at Philippi

• Return to Rome thanks to an amnesty, where land confiscations force him to turn to writing to make a living, in the process making contact with other poets and writers, eventually joining the circle of Maecenas

• Lives his life away from Rome and in a farm in the Sabine country, with the remaining of his days articulated by the publication of his works under the patronage of Maecenas, and later on, Augustus, who would become a friend to Horace

Horace’s works:

1. Epodes, or seventeen short poems

2. Satires, or two books with ten poems and eight satires respectively

3. Odes, a collection of two books

4. Epistles, two books, with the last published posthumously

Horace’s Epodes:

• Name refers to the metrical form, as the epode is the shorter verse that follows a longer verse in a couplet, called iambi by Horace

• Characterised by a variety of subjects, with the prefatory poem dedicated to Maecenas, followed by poems of invective, erotic epodes, civil epodes and even a gnomic epode and an ambiguous epode

• Composition is linked to the youthful phase of Horace’s poetic activity and the conditions of life that marked the period immediately after Philippi, with the situation of hardship leading to the harsh polemic, loaded tones and violent poetic language

  • Still, the poem remain a conscious product and its distinctive features are an intentional imitation and subversion of models, specifically Archilochus, which utilises the spirit of the former to express the sensibilities of an entire generation that had experienced great upheaval

• Horace explicitly acknowledges modelling his work after Archilochus, yet at the same time, he claims originality, as Archilochus’ fierce polemic and animi cannot find full expression in Horace due to a difference in circumstance:

  1. Archilochus expressed the hatred and rancorous, civic passion and disappointment of the seventh century’s Greek aristocrat

  2. Horace is the son of a freedman, barely escaped from a difficult and highly dangerous political experience, writing n the triumvir-dominated Rome and soon to join Octavian’s own entourage, thus his aggression can only be directed at smaller targets, those who are unimportant, anonymous or even fictitious

• The existence of epodes with iambs that accommodate softer and more careful diction, with motifs that emulate those of Callimachean and Alexandrian poetics

Horace’s Satires:

• Varied subjects and themes, among which are literary-programmatic satires that explicitly mention Lucilius as inventor of the genre and therefore, a natural model to emulate, especially in regards to specifically fundamental elements, such as:

  1. The choice of hexameter as the metrical form of satire and the aggressiveness it conveyed

  2. The autobiographical aspect, which the narrative accommodated through facts, persons and coversation connected to the personal life of the poet

• Marked originality from Lucilius' set precedent, that Horace himself emphasises, pointing out differences in:

  1. Style, as he criticises Lucilius’ careless facility

  2. Content, as he distinguishes between diatribe and aggressiveness and connects them

  3. Target, as Lucilius attacked eminent citizens but this inherited aggressiveness Horace instead directs to a small world of irregular types

• Horatian morality seeks to discover a path for the author and his similarly enlightened group of friends, and is therefore rooted in education, traditional good sense of a rustic and Italian character as well as Hellenistic philosophies

  • Basic objectives to this moral inquiry are Autarkeia, namely inner self-sufficiency as well as Metriotes, meaning moderation

• Philosophical tradition to which he gives the greatest weight is that of Epicureanism, as Epicurean theories influence especially the value of Philia

• Transition in moral stance is evident by the Second Book, as satire loses its ability to be the locus of moral inquiry that can empirically identify a satisfying code of behaviour, thus losing the balance between Autarkeia and Metriotes

  • The mechanism of the First Book, wherein there is a comparison between a positive model as objective of the moral inquiry of the poet and his friends and a plethora of negative models found in Roman society is lost to Horace, who is no longer able to live amongst people without losing his own moral identity

• Style is considered by Horace to be closer to prose than to poetry, with a disciplined and simple language that can garner the greatest effect with the greatest economy of expression to contrast the exuberant and raw style of Lucilius

Horace’s Odes:

• Collection of two books of poems, divided so as to be four and published after a seven-year long period of composition

  • Arranged according to the Alexandrian editions of the Greek lyric poets, with the opening and closing odes addressed to persons of note and dealing with questions of poetics and all other poems organised with the principle of ‘‘variatio’’ kept in mind

• Characterised by the experimentation with various metres, from the Alcaic strophe to the minor Sapphic strophe and then the Asclepiadic strophe

  • Exemplification of a relationship of ‘‘imitation’’ that signifies an obedience to the rules of the literary genre and creation in the recipient of a consistent set of expectations

Tibullus and Propertius

Ovid

Livy

Seneca