Empire of the Imagination: The Power of Public Fictions in Ovid’s ‘Reader Response’ to Augustan Rome [thesis]

Description

The idea of an ‘Augustan discourse’ represents a valuable step forward from the twentieth-century belief that Augustus ruled through patronage and propaganda, insofar as it better accommodates the polyvocality of the literature of his age as well as the delicacy of the princeps’ political position between republic and empire. I seek to expand on this approach by drawing literary works into more thoroughgoing dialogue with contemporary ‘texts’ in other media, including coins and architecture, and by treating all these as examples of reader responses to Augustus that both construct and reflect public interpretations of the emperor. This work focuses in particular on Ovid’s readings of the visual iconography of the principate, arguing that these influenced both ancient and modern historians’ conception of Augustus as the master architect of his own public image. My project is inspired by poets’ creation of a sense of professional rivalry between themselves and the princeps, particularly Ovid’s portrayal of Augustus as a fellow manipulator of fictions. However, individual chapters deconstruct this idea by examining how specific ‘pro- Augustan’ icons cannot be regarded as a tool of propaganda, but rather, exist only within individual representations that often embed critical, evolving, and dialogic perspectives on the emperor. The first chapter analyzes historical evidence for the appearance and interpretation of a comet over Caesar’s funeral games in 44 BCE, as well as representations of this sidus Iulium in Roman coins and the poems of Vergil, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid. I argue that the imagistic metamorphosis of the sidus from a star into a comet over the course of Augustus’ reign reflects the growth of an ahistorical sense that the young Octavian took a proactive role in deifying Caesar, and a larger tendency to retroject Augustus’ mature power onto his early career. My second chapter interweaves an analysis of the archaeological remains of Augustus’ temple complex on the Palatine with close readings of Horace, Propertius, and Ovid’s literary responses to its architectonics; I argue that these poets’ reappropriations of public space for private purposes, particularly Ovid’s critique of the Palatine iconography and urban topography, have encouraged modern scholars to overread triumphalist intentions into the Augustan building program. In my last chapter, I compare visual and verbal representations of the triumph ceremony, culminating with Ovid’s use of the subject to explore how ritual may be extended through time and space, how writing may be employed to serve empire, and how readers may intervene in a text’s creation of meaning. Building on this latter idea, a brief conclusion explores how Ovid’s exile poems treat Augustus himself as a text – that is, as a publicly circulating representation of power that was potentially unrepresentative of reality, subject to audience interpretation in defiance of authorial intention, and beholden to the imaginative participation of reader-subjects throughout the empire. Ovid also gives Augustan readers the tools by which to take interpretive control over texts and to examine their own complicity in constructing Augustan power. This parallels my broader theme that modern scholarly interpretations of the period cannot be disentangled from these subjective reader responses to Augustan Rome, and thus become part of a succession of imaginative rereadings and reinterpretations of the figure of Augustus.