Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic

Book excerpt: Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic explores the liminal status of the Augustan period, with its inherent tensions between a rhetoric based on the idea of res publica restituta and the expression of the need for a radical renewal of the Roman political system. It attempts to examine some of the ways in which the Augustan poets dealt with these and other related issues by discussing the many ways in which individual texts handle the idea of the Roman Republic. Focusing on the works of the major Augustan poets, Vergil, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid, the contributions in this collection look at the under-studied aspect of their poetry, namely the way in which they constructed and investigated images of the Roman Republic and the Roman past.