Paradox and the Marvellous in Augustan Literature and Culture

by Hardie, Philip

• ISBN13: 9780199231249
• ISBN10: 0199231249
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-08-03
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The literature and art of Augustan Rome are often characterized as classicizing in tendency, aiming at a harmony, sobriety, and seriousness that are in keeping with an Augustan ideology of a revival of traditional Roman morality and common sense. The 'Augustan' is often contrasted with a proclivity to the bizarre and emotional in the neoteric poetry that preceded it, and with the supposed psychological and rhetorical excesses of the culture of post-Augustan imperial Rome. But Augustan culture and poetry are in fact marked by a far-reaching interest in the paradoxical, the marvellous, and the unexpected. In poetry Horace and Ovid are key figures in the development of ideas of poetic licence; Augustan wall-painting and sculpture frequently stray into the fantastic. Augustan authors respond to the amazing growth of Roman empire, and to the paradoxical novelty of Augustus' 'Roman Revolution'. There is a continuing interest in Hellenistic traditions of paradoxography and ethnographic marvels. Ovid's Metamorphoses, the late Augustan poem which takes as its subject-matter the fantastic and marvellous, can be read as a summa of important aspects of Augustan culture and literature. This volume, including contributions by some of the leading students of the Augustan period as well as a number of younger scholars, is the first to survey a broad range of the manifestations of paradox and the marvellous in Augustan poetry, historiography, rhetoric, and art. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Philip Hardie is Senior Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
List of Contributors	p. xi
Introduction: Paradox and the Marvellous in Augustan Literature and Culture	p. 1
Horace's Ars Poetica and the Marvellous	p. 19
Where the Wild Things Are: Locating the Marvellous in Augustan Wall Painting	p. 41
Against Nature? Some Augustan Responses to Man-made Marvels	p. 75
Virgil: A Paradoxical Poet?	p. 95
The Question of the Marvellous in the Georgics of Virgil	p. 113
In Search of the Lost Hercules: Strategies of the Fantastic in the Aeneid	p. 126
Thaumatographia, or 'What is a Theme?'	p. 145
Phaethon and the Monsters	p. 163
Prodigiosa mendacia uatum: Responses to the Marvellous in Ovid's Narrative of Perseus (Metamorphoses 4-5)	p. 189
Encountering the Fantastic: Expectations, Forms of Communication, Reactions	p. 213
Constructing a Narrative of mira deum: The Story of Philemon and Baucis (Ovid, Metamorphoses 8)	p. 231
Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.416-51: noua monstra and the foedera naturae	p. 248
Latrator Anubis: Alien Divinities in Augustan Rome, and how to Tame Monsters through Aetiology	p. 268
Ordering Wonderland: Ovid's Pythagoras and the Augustan Vision	p. 288
Delusions of Grandeur: Lucretian 'Passages' in Livy	p. 310
The Strange Art of the Sententious Declaimer	p. 330
References	p. 350
Indexes	p. 381
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