The Augustan Space: The Poetics of Geography, Topography and Monumentality

Augustus famously boasted that, having inherited a city of brick, he bequeathed a city of marble; but the transformation of the City's physical fabric is only one aspect of a pervasive concern with geography, topography and monumentality that dominates Augustan culture and – in particular – Augustan poetry and poetics. Contributors to the present volume bring a range of approaches to bear on the works of Horace, Virgil, Propertius and Ovid, and explore their construction and representation of Greek, Roman and imperial space; centre and periphery; relations between written monuments and the physical City; movement within, beyond and away from Rome; gendered and heterotopic spaces; and Rome itself, as caput mundi, as cosmopolis and as 'heavenly city'. The introduction considers the wider cultural importance of space and monumentality in first-century Rome, and situates the volume's key themes within the context of the spatial turn in Classical Studies.

About the Author

MONICA R. GALE is a Professor in Classics at Trinity College Dublin. She is the author of Myth and Poetry in Lucretius (Cambridge, 1994), Virgil on the Nature of Things: The Georgics, Lucretius and the Didactic Tradition (Cambridge, 2000), Lucretius: De Rerum Natura V (2009) and other books and articles on late Republican and Augustan Poetry. She is editor of Classics journal Hermathena.

ANNA CHAHOUD is Professor of Latin at Trinity College Dublin. She is the author of C. Lucili Reliquiarum concordantiae (1998) and of articles on Republican Latin and the Latin language. She also contributed to and edited, with E. Dickey, Colloquial and Literary Latin (Cambridge, 2010) and, with J. N. Adams and G. Pezzini, Early Latin: Constructs, Diversity, Reception (Cambridge, 2023).