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Summary

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.

Buchner's reconstruction of the Horologium Augusti continues to be influential, despite fatal flaws demonstrated by Rodríguez-Almeida and Schütz; so we begin by reviewing the state of the evidence. There is no credible indication that Augustus or his successors built an extensive sundial, so we must conclude with Schütz that what Pliny described and what the excavations of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) uncovered was a solar meridian line. We then proceed to discuss its significance in the context of the Augustan building programme. Since the DAI in fact discovered a Flavian reconstruction, the final question to be addressed is what purpose it served Domitian to rebuild a largely symbolic Augustan instrument that had grown inaccurate over time.

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Introduction

Summary

Augustus, Domitian and the So-called Horologium Augusti

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2 results

Introduction

Summary

Augustus, Domitian and the So-called Horologium Augusti