In 62 BCE, a young and politically ambitious Roman aristocrat, Publius Clodius, is said to have disguised himself as a women in order to infiltrate the rites of the Bona Dea, which it was sacrilege for men to observe. His purpose, according to his detractors, was to seduce the wife of Julius Caesar, the Pontifex Maximus, in whose house the ceremony was taking place. A man dressed as a woman, the profanation of religious rites, adultery with the wife of one of the leading men in Rome and the adulterer already notorious for his pernicious and disruptive political dealings – this incident, related or alluded to by numerous Roman authors, summed up the disorder of the final years of the republic. For Roman writers, adultery among the elite was a telling symptom of disease in the body politic.

The emerging tribes of LPRIA in southern and eastern Britain had a long history of contact with the Roman world and were heavily influenced by Roman attitudes and actions because Rome saw all her neighbours as within her sphere of influence. Whether or not the British tribes still paid tribute, some of them had been subject to Roman control following the invasion of Julius Caesar in 55 and 54 BC (DBG V.22). This precedent meant, for the Roman emperors, that the island lay within their legitimate sphere of interest. This interest had already been shown by both Caligula (Suetonius, Caligula 44, 46) and Augustus (Dio 49.28, 2; 53.22, 5; 53.25, 2), who had contemplated and prepared for invasion. Such direct intervention following a long period of indirect contact had precedents, for the general pattern of Rome’s expansion saw her first taking an indirect interest, then a successively more active role before assuming absolute control. In the case of Britain this process was slow, since annexation had been delayed first by the civil wars, next by Augustus’ interests in Germany and elsewhere, then by Tiberius’ static frontier policy and finally by the troubles of Caligula. Notwithstanding this, the question should not be why Claudius invaded Britain, but why it had not happened earlier.

The ecological thinking of the Georgics leads to intricate problems of scale, which Chapter 4 traces. The poem seeks to conceptualize humans’ place in their local environments – epitomized by the bounded space of the farm – while also imagining life at larger scales and attempting to think the world as a coherent whole. The chapter connects these issues to political, geographical, agricultural, philosophical, and poetical questions. This chapter finds in the Georgics a searching exploration of what it means to be local, and whether such a thing is even possible in the age of Jupiter and the time of Caesar. Ultimately, the poem rethinks a more nuanced concept of locality that is intertwined with the global, and is of shifting, unpredictable scale: a concept of fractal locality. At the center of the poem, Vergil places a fitting emblem for a fractally local poetry, the temple he vows in his native Mantua. This temple models Vergil’s achievement as anchored in particular place, and yet in a place that has become local, Roman, Italian, and global all at once.

In contrast to anthropocentric readings of the Georgics, chapter 3 argues that Vergil is interested in farming as a way of considering the entangled lives of humans and nonhumans. The chapter contextualizes Vergil’s ecological thinking – highlighting influences from ancient philosophy, ethnography, Hesiod, and Roman agricultural treatises – and differentiates this reading from interpretations that shoehorn the relations of humans and nonhumans into a nature–culture binary. The chapter examines how the poem discloses agriculture as a practice of managing ecological relations. The second half of the chapter then queries the status of the human within its ecologies. While much of the poem denies human exceptionality, it does recognize ways in which humans stand out from the rest of the world, above all in their unparalleled ability to transform their environments – epitomized by the world-altering activities of Rome and Caesar. Ultimately, the chapter connects the peculiar status of the human to the didactic aims of the poem. By relaying and explaining the signa of the world, the Georgics offers the fantasy of an expertise that can better embed humans in their environments.

The eighth chapter begins with the question of why monumental epic came to be written again after a period of neglect; it suggests that the epyllion provided a way forward. After a history of republican epics after Ennius, Vergil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses form the primary subjects of this chapter. Coverage focuses on what was innovative about them, language, plot, historical contexts, and style, and compares them to one another.

The ninth chapter finishes what was started in the fourth, covering personal poetry of the Augustan period. It begins with Vergil’s Eclogues, first explaining why.The majority of the chapter focuses on the varied works of Horace, his long career, and his relationship with power. It ends with Ovid’s exile poetry, which is the last literature of the republic.

The seventh chapter focuses on Latin love elegy, tracing its history from several Greek roots and in Roman comedy, and concentrating on the genre as a whole. It also looks at other poetic treatments of love, Catullan, Lucretian, and Horatian, in order to show what was so distinctive about elegy. At the end, it observes that the genre lasted only a short while, and explores some of the reasons why. Treatments of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, with brief exploration of Gallus

The provincial coinage was transformed during the new regime of Augustus and the adoption of his portrait. Roman interventions, however, were rare and localised, except for Nero.

This chapter challenges the supposed transformation “from Baal Hammon to Saturn” in North Africa one of the chief grounds upon which narratives of cultural continuity are predicated. It argues that instead of simple syncretism or the persistence of a god, the material signs used to construct and identify the deity to whom stelae were dedicated underwent important transformations in the second and third centuries CE, changes closely tied to the experiences and practices of empire. Stelae of the third and second centuries BCE made a god present indexically; stelae of the imperial period embraced iconicity in ways that were entangled with empire, including new divine epithets tied to imperial authority and new road systems in the province. And by the end of the second century CE, this iconic system could even work to perpetuate clear social hierarchies.

In a famous passage of his Metamorphoses Ovid describes the via Lactea, leading from Earth to Heaven and to the Gods of Olympus, by comparing it to the city of Rome (1.173–6). But if Heaven is like Rome, Rome too is like Heaven: in his exile poetry Ovid represents the emperor as ‘Jupiter on earth’, and it is an obvious consequence that the places inhabited by him may appear as a sort of Olympus on earth. Augustus’ house is thus described as Jupiter’s royal palace (Tr. 3.1.33–8 uideo fulgentibus armis | conspicuos postes tectaque digna deo, | et ‘Iouis haec’ dixi ‘domus est?’ quod ut esse putarem, | augurium menti querna corona dabat. | cuius ut accepi dominum, ‘non fallimur’, inquam, | ‘et magni uerum est hanc Iouis esse domum’), and this reversal of the normal spatial hierarchy becomes a standard encomiastic/panegyric trait of the Imperial age (cf. Statius’ description of Domitian’s house at Silv. 4.2.18–21, and many of Martial’s references to Domitian’s courtly world). Rome, being the seat of imperial power, thus looks like a heavenly city: a paradoxical anticipation of (or maybe a hint of?) the Christian idea that will be elaborated by Augustine.

This introductory chapter reflects on the importance of monuments, topography and symbolic space in the production of Augustan ideology, both reviewing the manifold ways in which the princeps sought to impose himself on the urban and Italian landscape, and seeking to contextualise these within wider patterns in the literary and cultural construction of space in the first century BC. After a brief review of the ‘spatial turn’ in Classical Studies, it goes on to identify six broad categories within which the construction and representation of space in ancient literary texts has typically been considered in recent scholarship: the relation between written and physical cities; the relation between space and hegemonic power; the contrasting paradigms of hodological and cartographic space; the relation between centre and periphery; space as a site of cultural memory; and the conceptualisation of poetics in spatial terms. A final section traces some key themes that emerge from the volume’s remaining chapters and relates them to these wider trends in Classical Studies.

This chapter looks at potential allusions in Horace’s Odes to the religious buildings in Rome known to have been constructed or substantially repaired by Augustus. These major construction projects in Rome in the Augustan period are naturally a topic of interest to contemporary poets; in the case of the Odes, it can be argued that there are many points of contact between poetic and architectural artefacts, and even that the Roman literary achievement of the Augustan poet as proclaimed in Odes 3.30 can be paralleled with a Roman architectural project of Augustus himself. It is also interesting to note that though Horace’s Odes contain a number of potential allusions to a range of projects in the considerable programme of temple construction and renovation later carefully recorded by Augustus in the Res gestae, there are no allusions to the Temple of Diuus Iulius, perhaps because the memory of Julius Caesar was felt to be too problematic.

In Elegy 4.9, Propertius provides an aetiology for a detail of the cult of Hercules at the Ara Maxima: the prohibition on women attending the ceremony. He presents this particularity as a retaliatory measure taken by the hero himself, who reacted to the banning of any male from the space in which the cult of Bona Dea is celebrated. Propertius describes the priestess of Bona Dea as trying to prevent Hercules from entering the sacred space by arguing that female chastity must be respected. After having argued that there is no insurmountable difference between the sexes since there may be role reversal between men and women, Hercules forces the door. Propertius uses this episode located in ancient Latium to put forward some reflections on a (modern) topic, specific to the elegiac genre: sexual identity and gender relations. He presents an alternative point of view that includes both facets of what Augustus seeks to impose in his politics of promoting ancient social practices, essentially concerned with control over morality and sexuality: a strict conception of female morality, and a crucial questioning of gender conceptions: what makes the difference between the sexes? It is dress, behaviour or the body?

The inclination to withdraw himself from the public as far as possible is regarded as one of Virgil’s most salient characteristics: this at least is the impression given by the few testimonia and numerous anecdotes of his life. The guiding principle of Virgil’s life as a poet of the res publica Romana could be described as an ‘art of disappearing’, which becomes evident in different ways. By means of this Virgil sometimes succeeds in withdrawing himself spatially even from Augustus, the mightiest designer of space, and in establishing certain limits to his ‘topotactic’ power. To present the ‘withdrawing technique’ practised by Virgil, this chapter draws on information gathered from biographical texts on Virgil as well as on relevant passages of Virgil’s work, naturally without ignoring the documentary fragility of the texts considered. Nevertheless there are conspicuous correspondences between the texts about Virgil and the poetological messages within his literary works, which give an impression at least of his effective seclusion. His reception by his contemporaries and immediate successors proves his greatest success in this respect.

This chapter presents new, annotated translations of the surviving passage of Isidoros of Charax’s Parthian Stations (written around AD 1–14), together with testimonia and fragments (mostly from Pliny the Elder) arranged as 21 extracts. The chapter introduction shows that Isidoros’ geographical work on the far east of the Roman world, commissioned by Augustus, was far more wide-ranging that the short text we have, which lists stathmoi (stations, stopping-points) within Parthia alone. Partly based upon Artemidoros, it is ‘the only surviving example in Greek of a type of record commonly found in Latin’. New maps show the western and eastern halves of this part of Isidoros’ itinerary, spanning from Mesopotamia to eastern Afghanistan.

Chapter 3 explores how the models of the healer and head of state converged around the figure of the princeps. Although each proved useful in validating the Principate, their distinctive Republican histories invested them with divergent imperial trajectories. Because Cicero had already integrated the figure of the healer into Republican discourse, Augustan writers could soon locate the princeps in this role as well. The regal resonance of the caput, in contrast, made it unavailable as a descriptor of the “first citizen.” It is therefore absent in the works of Vergil, Horace, and Propertius. Yet for a society steeped in organic comparisons and confronted with constitutional change, the utility of the metaphor was obvious. Livy responded to this quandary in his first pentad, which depicts three stages in the life cycle of the Roman body politic: a regal polity topped by a caput, a Republic structured around the Fable of the Belly, and a fusion of these two forms under Camillus. Livy’s narrative thereby helped make the head of state metaphor available for contemporary usage. As Augustus’ rule came to an end, Ovid finally began identifying him as the caput orbis.