Augustan Poetry and the Irrational
Philip Hardie
Abstract
The establishment of the Augustan regime presents itself as the assertion of order and rationality in the political, ideological, and artistic spheres, after the disorder and madness of the civil wars of the late Republic. But the classical, Apollonian, poetry of the Augustan period is fascinated by the irrational in both public and private spheres. There is a vivid memory of the political and military furor that destroyed the Republic, and an anxiety that that furor may resurface. Epic and elegy are both obsessed with erotic madness: Dido experiences in her very public role the disabling effe ... More
The establishment of the Augustan regime presents itself as the assertion of order and rationality in the political, ideological, and artistic spheres, after the disorder and madness of the civil wars of the late Republic. But the classical, Apollonian, poetry of the Augustan period is fascinated by the irrational in both public and private spheres. There is a vivid memory of the political and military furor that destroyed the Republic, and an anxiety that that furor may resurface. Epic and elegy are both obsessed with erotic madness: Dido experiences in her very public role the disabling effects of love that are both lamented and celebrated by the love elegists. Didactic (especially the Georgics) and the related Horatian exercises in sermo, satire, and epistle offer programmes for constructing rational order in the natural, political, and psychological worlds, but at best contain uneasily an ever-present threat of confusion and backsliding, and for the most part fall short of the austere standards of rational exposition set by Lucretius. Dionysus and the Dionysiac enjoy a prominence in Augustan poetry and art that goes well beyond the merely ornamental. The person of the emperor Augustus himself tests the limits of rational categorization. This volume contains an introduction surveying the field as a whole, and essays on a wide range of manifestations of the irrational in Augustan poetry, together with some discussion of post-classical reception.
Keywords:
Augustan,
classical,
irrational,
madness,
civil war,
erotic,
Dionysiac
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198724728 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198724728.001.0001 |
