un augustan activities

8/9/2019 Un Augustan Activities

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Un-Augustan Activities


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Approved patterns of behavior and life of educated Romans

o Period of military service as cavalry or infantry officer.

Career tracks: career soldier/membership of the Senate

through magistracies

o Public life: Advocates at Rome/magistrates in communitieswhere family estates were

o Partners in companies operating government contracts or in

private enterprise

Expectation: To marry within an approved circle, so as to increase

inherited alliances and produce heirs to perpetuate the family


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[Illustration: Costumes of Roman men, women, and children inthe procession of a peace festival. These reliefs formed part of

the outer frieze of the right wall of the Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace),

erected by Augustus and dedicated 9 B.C. This and another well-

preserved section are in the Uffizi Palace, Florence. One of two

other fragments in the Villa Medici contains the head and bust of

Augustus, and with the section here shown completes what is

supposed to be a group of the family of Augustus.]


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The Age of Catullus (ca. 84 BC ca. 54 BC)

Changes in society destabilize traditional expectations

Catullus treated with hostility military careerism

expressed the idealization of a love affair

insulting epigrams against Julius Caesar and his

military associates

abuse of the provincial governors Memmius and

Piso

no prudery about sex itself; sexuality becomes a

weapon to be used to enhance ones own image or diminish

that of another


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Statue of Catullus


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Love Elegy of the Augustan Age

Catullus set the style that would dominate the love elegy of the

Augustan Age

Writing in a new way: the glamorizing of love affairs with boys or

women expresses dissent and resistance to societys demands

Poetry about Clodia, an older woman in experience if not in

years (Lesbia is the poetic name he used for Clodia)

Catullus created personal love elegy: he treats Lesbia as a

dominant mistress to whom he is subordinated like a slave


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Love and Roman Elegy

From the time of Catullus on love poets write non just for the

immediate occasion, to offer their poems to their women, or to

read it to friends, but with the expectation that others would want

to buy and read the poems

Appropriation of the language of military service:

The love elegist presents himself as conquered by his beloved

in the war of love.

Ovid constructs one of his elegies on the paradox that every

lover is a soldier in his mistresss service


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Elegiac Counter-Culture

Propertius tells I was not born for glory or for warfare; He

supports his refusal to marry by the claim that no child of my

blood will be a soldier

Tibullus opens his first book of elegies with a negative picture of

the soldiers life, and the last poem of the book curses the inventor

of swords as an iron savage

Admission of being the slave of love: the poets mistress took on th

status of a commander or of a master


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The women featured in Roman Elegy (Catullus, Tibullus,

Propertius, and Ovid)

Manage to attain a singularly exalted stature

To be appreciated as people in their own rightThey are even casted in the active, masterful role customarily

played by men


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Augustus moral programme

Reaffirm the old Roman morality

Financial rewards for child production (purpose: replenishing

Romes depleted ruling elite, the senatorial and equestrian ranks)

Laws requiring intra-class marriage of upper class males andforbidding adultery

The Elegists could reject the idea of a supportive wife who bears

useful offspring in favor of an exciting, attractive and spiritually

inspiring female companion.

Youthful self-assurance, connection, high degree of intellectual

attainment, financial security enabled them to do so, and to displaycynicism about politics.

patria#puellae


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The feeling of the love elegists that they were not vitally needed in

the Roman governing and expanding process; the celebration of

the pleasures derived from their mistresses in the place of

celebration of the traditional Roman careers and awards.

Otium (free time), love and elegy are activities which in

importance rival accepted pursuits: the law, and politics, financial

acquisition, the military.

They use the language of established practices to speak of their

love affairs: they aim for comprehensibility; for the conversion of

others to their behavior: Ovid


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Roman puella


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Girl with perfume


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The Sorrows of Augustus

Daughter Julia (born to his first wife Scribonia in 39 B.C.)

Julias first marriage to Agrippa: two sons Gaius and Lucius,

two daughters, and a son Agrippa Postumus.

Augusts makes Gaius and Lucius his own sons by adoption in 17B.C.

Julias second marriage to Tiberius (Augustus stepson); they

separate

In 2 B.C. Augustus learns that Julia is involved in adultery; expels

her to a barren island (first domestic scandal); Julias two sons die

Tiberius returns to Rome and is adopted as Augustus heir

In A.D. 8 second domestic scandal: Julias daughter, the youngerJulia, is alleged to have been adulterously involved with five

noblemen

Ovid is exiled in Tomis

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