The spatial turn in the humanities, dating back to the 1980s, driven by the work of Edward Soja, Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, warns us against dismissing space as simply a neutral backdrop. On the contrary, space is central, ubiquitous, always bound up in what we think, say and do; it is both a participant in, and a product of, an all-encompassing range of social and cognitive processes — political and social relations, temporal understandings, constructions of identities and bodies, as well as places. The thirteen essays in The Augustan Space: The Poetics of Geography, Topography and Monumentality enter the conversation from a literary perspective. Over the course of his reign, Augustus ushered in tremendous change — political, religious, social, cultural and spatial — all of which he highlights in the autobiographical record of his achievements, the Res Gestae. And yet, as Monica Gale points out in the introduction to the volume (2), the princeps devotes one-third of that document to the spatial transformations he causes and presides over. Under Augustus the Roman empire experiences, on several frontiers, the greatest territorial expansion since the Mediterranean conquest of the third and second centuries b.c.e., creating an intoxicating sense that only the borders of the inhabitable world can provide limits to Roman expansion. The city of Rome itself, now capital city and hub of empire, to which goods and peoples from all areas are attracted centripetally, morphs into a visual embodiment of its new status through an extensive, monumental building programme. The poets of the period can hardly be expected to sit on the sidelines while such exciting change takes place. The space of empire and the space of the city feature prominently in Augustan literature, and not merely as passive reflections of the physical world. Poets engage variously with ‘real’ Augustan space, entering into complex conversations about how space is, and should be, apprehended and why.
After Gale’s introduction, chs 1 and 2 centre a dichotomy between political and non-political spaces. Sandra Citroni Marchetti’s reading of Horace offers Rome and its environs as a construction of the (disengaged) individual. The poet prefers to avoid politics and therefore occupies spaces designated for private, everyday activities or inhabits public spaces differently than a more politically inclined individual would. He thereby re-defines the physical world as he moves through it (and simultaneously provides an alternative to how Augustus defines the same spaces). Melanie Möller sees a similar push to poetic disengagement from the Augustan context in Virgil’s penchant for disappearing, or refusing to occupy physical space, both in the biographical tradition and in his own works. If chs 1 and 2 suggest that poets subtly avoid Augustus through their spatial representation, in ch. 4 Stephen Harrison proposes the opposite. Through allusions in the Odes to religious buildings in Rome constructed or restored by Augustus, Horace attempts to draw parallels between his poetic creations and Augustus’ architectural ones. In contrast, Monica Gale (ch. 3) argues that Propertius Books 1–3 construct an alternative Rome to the city of the princeps.
For many contributors, questions of Virgil and textual authority intersect with issues of space and political power. Jacqueline Fabre-Serris (ch. 5) reads Propertius 4.9, Hercules’ invasion of the sanctuary of the Bona Dea, as a meditation on Augustus’ new strict conceptions of gender and female morality, but also on Virgil’s representation of the episode in Aeneid 8. Florence Klein (ch. 6) considers the phrase lucos Molorci at Georgics 3.19 in an intertextual context that encompasses both Callimachus’ chronologically prior Victoria Berenices and Virgil’s own later Hercules episode in Aeneid 8. The reading suggests that the poet celebrates Octavian/Augustus as a Hercules-like bringer of peace and civilisation, while simultaneously drawing parallels between the poet’s recasting of Callimachus and Octavian’s victories in the East that bring peace and prosperity to Italy. In ch. 7, Laura Aresi suggests that Ovid contributes to the redefinition of Augustan spaces and places through the myth of Virbius who meets the nymph Egeria in the grove of Aricia in Metamorphoses 15. The place holds strong cultural significance; it is where Hippolytus becomes Virbius (again with a dash of Virgilian intertextuality) and Italic Egeria takes centre stage as Roman literature absorbs its predecessors and Italy becomes the new homeland of poetry.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Virgil and Ovid feature most frequently in this volume. Chs 10 and 12 explore Virgilian heterotopias. Siobhan Chomse focuses on the architectural and historical sublimity of Carthage; the city emerges as a palimpsestic space, simultaneously old and new, rising and collapsing, somehow at once Carthage, Troy and Rome. Giovanna Laterza examines three different Virgilian descriptions of the entrance to the Underworld. These multiple entrances show, through their use of geography, their connections to different religious traditions and allow the reader to trace the poet’s progressive submission to Rome and to Augustus. Ovid plays a central role in chs 8, 9 and 11. Steven Heyworth reads the Fasti as a poem of space as well as time, a poem that highlights movement towards Rome, a model the poet himself then inverts as he writes about his relegation to Tomis. Focusing on the periphery rather than the centre, Marco Fucecchi traces the development in Ovid’s thought about his exile; the poet goes from lamenting his placement among barbarians at the margins of the known world to embracing his role as bringer of imperial culture to empire’s periphery. Gianpiero Rosati explores the creation, primarily through Ovid, of Rome as a celestial city, home to the gods, with Augustus as Jupiter on earth conferring benefits to the space around him and the people who occupy it. Jürgen Paul Schwindt closes the volume with a meditation on Suetonius’ account of Augustus’ final days. Within the text, he draws our attention to the princeps’ use of a theatrical metaphor to interpret Augustan space. In addition, Schwindt offers the intriguing suggestion that the progressive narrowing of space in Suetonius’ description as Augustus reaches the final death-bed scene echoes an Augustan poetic propensity for keeping things small.
Intertextuality, metapoetics, a consideration of whether the particular text under discussion replicates Augustus’ own approach to space or instead provides an alternative perspective. Such readings are not novel in 2026, and in fact the volume emerged from a 2014 conference marking the bimillennium of Augustus’ death. This is not meant to imply that the individual chapters do not offer valuable contributions to the discussion of the ways in which Augustan poets represent contemporary geography, topography and monuments. And yet, what strikes me most about this collection is how lacking in surprises it turns out to be. While the introductory chapter summarises various approaches to spatiality in Greek and Latin literature as a backdrop against which to understand the chapters in the present collection, the volume itself almost exclusively explores one line of inquiry: the relation between written/poetic space and ‘real’ space. Missing for me at least are more adventurous considerations of space as a capacious cognitive category that provoke broader, theoretical questions such as: how and why does space play a role in the construction of Roman identity, and how does the poetry of the moment reflect and further produce such examinations into, and/or anxieties over, self-definition?
