Most of the literature
periodized as "Augustan" was in fact written by men—
Vergil,
Horace,
Propertius,
Livy—whose careers were established during the
triumviral years, before Octavian assumed the title Augustus. Strictly speaking,
Ovid is the poet whose work is most thoroughly embedded in the Augustan regime.[2]
Impact and style
Augustan literature produced the most widely read, influential, and enduring of Rome's poets. The
Republican poets
Catullus and
Lucretius are their immediate predecessors;
Lucan,
Martial,
Juvenal and
Statius are their so-called "Silver Age" heirs. Although Vergil has sometimes been considered a "court poet", his Aeneid, the most important of the Latin
epics, also permits complex readings on the source and meaning of Rome's power and the responsibilities of a good leader.[3]
Ovid's works were wildly popular, but the poet was exiled by Augustus in one of literary history's great mysteries; carmen et error ("a poem" or "poetry" and "a mistake") is Ovid's own oblique explanation. Among prose works, the
monumental history of
Livy is preeminent for both its scope and stylistic achievement. The multi-volume work De architectura by
Vitruvius also remains of great informational interest.[3]
Questions pertaining to
tone, or the writer's attitude toward his subject matter, are acute among the preoccupations of scholars who study the period. In particular, Augustan works are analyzed in an effort to understand the extent to which they advance, support, criticize or undermine social and political attitudes promulgated by the regime, official forms of which were often expressed in aesthetic media.[4]
^
abFergus Millar, "Ovid and the Domus Augusta: Rome Seen from Tomoi," Journal of Roman Studies 83 (1993), p. 6.
^
abJoseph Farrell, "The Augustan Period: 40 BC–AD 14," in A Companion to Latin Literature (Blackwell, 2005), pp. 44–57.
^Christopher Pelling, "The Triumviral Period," in The Cambridge Ancient History: The Augustan Empire, 43 B.C.–A.D. 69 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 73
online. See also Farrell, "The Augustan Period."
Further reading
Helmke, Tim (2023). Exemplarisches Krisenwissen: Gender in Narrativ Und Narration Des Fruhen Prinzipats. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
ISBN9783525302286.