This polished collection of thirteen essays, published in 2024 following a conference one decade earlier at the bimillennium of Augustus’ death, explores space and place in Augustan poetry. The conference took its impulse from Aeneid 8’s famous phrase imperium sine fine, ‘limitless empire’, and Virgil is near the volume’s centre of gravity: he gets roughly one quarter of the index locorum, as does Ovid. The strongly connecting theme is the topographies of the city and the Italian peninsula in the time of Augustus, with excursions to Tomis, Carthage and Taenaron. There are no maps or figures, as this is a philological book, and indeed one that demonstrates that these places were imaginary, even for authors who inhabited them. The contributors explore the symbolic and ideological meanings of locations and their relations in the age of Augustus, as expressed through its texts (and to some extent their reception). In terms of the main author under discussion, there are four chapters apiece on Virgil (M. Möller, F. Klein, S. Chomse, G. Laterza) and Ovid (L. Aresi, S.J. Heyworth, G. Rosati, M. Fucecchi), two apiece on Horace (S. Citroni Marchetti, S. Harrison) and Propertius (Gale, J. Fabre-Serris), and a concluding chapter on Suetonius’ Augustus (J.P. Schwindt). The book is thematically cohesive, with Augustus and Virgil both regular presences. There is also a cumulative argument that Augustan authors collaborate in a refashioning of Roman letters that is broadly in parallel with Augustus’ refashioning of Roman life, not least in his many physical changes to the urban landscape. The general bibliography, footnotes rather than endnotes, and extremely good copy-editing add to the usefulness of a well-conceived book.
In terms of method, the book reflects the variety of approaches current in Roman literary studies, from the historicist to the metaliterary. Some chapters profit from the circumspect -alities and -arities (intertextuality, exemplarity, epistolarity) with which French post-structuralism has furnished classical studies: in this case, spatiality and the titular monumentality. Other chapters can fairly be called critical readings of motifs of geography and topography. Gale’s superbly written introduction sets the agenda by reflecting on the arrival of the ‘Spatial Turn’ in classical studies, spurred by H. Lefebvre (and M. Foucault) and heralded by C. Edwards’ Writing Rome (1996). Gale also cites M. De Certau’s 1984 essay ‘Walking in the City’ for the way that portraying space can reinforce power relations and that navigating it can conjure subjective realities. The two chapters with overt theoretical frameworks are those by Chomse on I. Kant and E. Burke’s ‘sublime’ and Laterza on M. Foucault’s ‘heterotopia’, though there are passing appeals to other seminal works in spatial studies, such as P. Nora’s lieu de mémoire, and in classical studies, such as H. Fränkel’s Ovid: A Poet Between Two Worlds (1956) in Fucecchi’s chapter on Ovid’s exile poetry. In general, the contributors engage closely with the relevant scholarship and advance our knowledge of some of the most canonical Latin poets and their age. There are more than two decades’ worth of scholarship on Rome’s urban or rural landscape in classical culture, including several book-length studies of the Augustan period. In that sense, Augustan Rome is well-trodden territory, but these eloquent essays all add new ideas and nuances.
One recurrent theme in the book is the presence of political commentary in spatial references, especially the geography of empire and specific urban monuments. In fact, there is nothing spatial that does not also prove to be, in some sense, sociopolitical. Harrison argues that Horace’s references to sacred buildings in the Odes evoke Augustus’ temple restorations or new projects, and follows P. Hardie (1993) in comparing the programmatic 3.30 (exegi monumentum) with the Mausoleum Augusti. He observes that the Temple of Divus Iulius is never mentioned, suggesting that Caesar was avoided as controversial until late in Augustus’ lifetime. Fabre-Serris interprets Propertius 4.9 as handling gender identity with elegiac playfulness, while commemorating the Bona Dea cult in a manner compatible with its temple’s restoration by Livia. Heyworth explores the Fasti’s thematic use of geography to position Rome centrally, receiving migrants and sending forth armies, and also sending forth Ovid, compelling him to change the focus from centre to periphery. Rosati shows that Ovid portrays Rome as an analogue of heaven, with special connections with the gods and Augustus, the Jupiter of the Palatine; for Augustine the city’s sacredness is configured differently.
Another recurrent theme is the self-reflexive use of geography and topography as a means of defining one’s own role and identity. Citroni Marchetti, drawing comparisons with Xenophon’s Hiero and Iamblichus’ Pythagorean neophytes, argues that Horace’s retreat from free urban movement in the Satires to countryside living in the Epistles reflects increasingly constrained political conditions. Aresi sees Ovid’s narrative of the Greek Hippolytus becoming the Italian Virbius as, in part, a symbol of epic being absorbed into elegy as a characteristically Roman genre. It thus informs Ovid’s identity, both as a Roman and as a poet. Outside poetry, Schwindt interprets Suetonius’ narrative of the end of Augustus’ life (including his dying mention of the ‘mime of life’, Suet. Aug. 99.1) as spatially choreographed, reflecting a theatrical control of space by Augustus in his own person as well as across the Rome of his lifetime.
Several contributions involve Virgil in intertextual relationships concerning places, sometimes in surprising ways. Möller, starting from the words ‘you dashed out of Naples’, connects Virgil’s biographical shyness and elusiveness with two other escapes, from Rome to Naples and the countryside, and from his own work: while these are Augustus’ words, this effectively draws attention to Virgil’s biographical tradition as responding to, or supplementing, his poetry. Klein argues that Virgil’s phrase lucos Molorci (Georgics 3.9) evokes Hercules’ visit to the untended land of Nemea in Callimachus’ Victoria Berenices, which encourages us to see the same legend evoked when Aeneas follows in Hercules’ footsteps in Aeneid 8, to visit an equally untended proto-Rome. Chomse sees in Virgil’s Carthage the ‘architectural sublime’ in its grand construction and the ‘historical sublime’ in the contemplation of its projected ruins. Carthage is a cipher for the city of Rome, anticipating the Romantic fascination with ruins, but Aeneas’ tears on seeing Troy destroyed on its temple doors also evoke those of Polybius’ Scipio on seeing Carthage destroyed (p. 183). Laterza identifies Virgil’s Cumae, Ampsanctus and (in the Georgics) Taenaron as Foucauldian heterotopias, connecting the last of these (with D. Nelis 2005) back to the Orphic Argonautica, while also connecting them all forward to another ‘re-semanticised’ underworld entrance at Nicaragua’s Masaya volcano.
Although the individual chapters are led by their writers’ expertise, many of the key spatial coordinates in Augustan literature make an appearance at some point: Aeneas on the future site of Rome (pp. 110–13), Augustus’ house on the Palatine (pp. 153–4) and Ovid among the barbarians of the icy North (pp. 191–2). As a suite of expert studies, this book is essential reading for scholars of canonical Augustan authors or of Rome and Italy in the ancient imagination.
