The Cultural History of Augustan Rome
Texts, Monuments, and Topography

Interdisciplinary study of the interrelationship of the literature, monuments, and urban landscape of Augustan Rome.

Matthew P. Loar (Edited by), Sarah C. Murray (Edited by), Stefano Rebeggiani (Edited by)

9781108727792, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 30 March 2023

206 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.1 cm, 0.309 kg

'… the volume is well produced, with a solid general index … graduate students and scholars of Augustan Rome, as well as those working at the interstices of texts and monuments, will find many worthwhile individual pieces and points of provocation to chew on in this collection.' Evan Jewell, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

This volume wades into the fertile waters of Augustan Rome and the interrelationship of its literature, monuments, and urban landscape. It focused on a pair of questions: how can we productively probe the myriad points of contact between textual and material evidence to write viable cultural histories of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, and what are the limits of these kinds of analysis? The studies gathered here range from monumental absences to monumental texts, from canonical Roman authors such as Cicero, Livy, and Ovid to iconic Roman monuments such as the Rostra, Pantheon, and Solar Meridian of Augustus. Each chapter examines what the texts in, on, and about the city tell us about how the ancients thought about, interacted with, and responded to their urban-monumental landscape. The result is a volume whose methodological and heuristic techniques will be compelling and useful for all scholars of the ancient Mediterranean world.

Introduction Matthew P. Loar, Sarah C. Murray and Stefano Rebeggiani
1. Monumental insignificance: the rhetoric of Roman topography from Livy's Rome D. S. Levene
2. Cicero, quid in alieno saeculo tibi? The 'republican' rostra between Caesar and Augustus Thomas Biggs
3. The Julian Calendar and the Solar Meridian of Augustus: making Rome run on time Peter Heslin
4. Monument men: buildings, inscriptions, and lexicographers in the creation of Augustan Rome Dan-el Padilla Peralta
5. The Porticus Liviae in Ovid's Fasti (6.637–648), Part I: things
Part II: words Maddalena Bassani and Francesca Romana Berno
6. Greek poets on the Palatine: a wild cow chase? Carolyn MacDonald
7. Ovid's two-body problem Stephanie Ann Frampton.

Subject Areas: Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], History of architecture [AMX], History of art: ancient & classical art,BCE to c 500 CE [ACG]