In the last two centuries BC, with the Republic limping towards its end, the cultivated ruling elite began to lose its moral and political authority.1 Its members not only held themselves responsible for the so-called crisis of tradition, but at the same time also conveyed the impression of a loss of memory, as if all Romans were suffering from some kind of amnesia or identity crisis.2 In particular, institutional figures such as pontiffs and augurs, who had preserved Rome’s memory throughout its history, were accused of neglecting their duties and, by extension, of allowing ancient practices and values to slowly disappear.3 Accordingly, Cicero and Varro, both perfect representatives of this elite, employed recurrent terms such as neglect (neglegentia/neglegere), involuntary abandon (amittere), oblivion (oblivio), vanishing of institutions (evanescere), and ignorance (ignoratio/ignorare) to describe this critical loss of information; they depicted the citizenry of Rome (civitas) as disoriented and estranged, incapable of sharing any common knowledge or values.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between Augustus/Octavian and Apollo’s incarnation as citharoedus (lyre-player). The main contention of the chapter is that the Augustan period fostered a revival of music which resonated with, and to some degree embodied, a restorative political message. Not only did Augustus integrate images of Apollo Citharoedus into his own imagery (both in Rome and in the commemorative monuments around the gulf of Actium), but he also exploited harmonia as a metaphor for his newly established regime, imbuing musical rituals like the Ludi Saeculares of 17 BCE with powerful symbolic resonances. The chapter also makes a case for seeing Mark Antony’s use of music as a key part of a project to present himself through the symbolic language of Hellenistic kingship, against which Octavian in turn defined his own musical ‘programme’.

This chapter addresses the more common subject of mythological representations, focusing on one of the most frequently depicted mythological lovers in Roman wall painting, the cyclops Polyphemus. Beginning with the earliest extant Roman depiction of Polyphemus as a lover, a now much damaged fresco in the so-called House of Livia on the Palatine (30s BCE), the analysis proceeds by exploring the creation of a tender iconography for this well-known monster over the course of the first century CE. At the same time, it considers different literary treatments of this myth by Theocritus, Virgil, and Ovid. These poetic and pictorial portrayals of Polyphemus as a long-suffering, sympathetic romantic protagonist likewise point to the emergence of a Roman aesthetic of tenderness, capable of transforming even the most savage of Homeric characters into a pitiable, domesticated creature. This study of Polyphemus as a lover in Roman poetry and painting also traces the reception of the Roman aesthetic of tenderness among non-elite contexts on the Bay of Naples. A well-known Campanian image of Polyphemus receiving a love letter points to the influence of Latin elegy in the representation of this well-known mythical character in Roman art.