The Environmental Poetry of Augustan Rome

Brings together environmental literary criticism and classics, generating new readings of Vergil and Horace as ancient environmental poets.

Erik Pugh Fredericksen (Author)

9781009476171, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 December 2024

316 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.2 cm, 0.6 kg

This book reveals central texts of Augustan poetry-Vergil's Eclogues and Georgics, and Horace's Odes-to be environmental poetry. In contrast to readings that assume forms of nature poetry are mere Romantic projections, that suggest Roman authors did not care about the environment, or that relegate place to the status of background and setting, it uses both ecocritical theory and close, contextualized readings to show how Horace and Vergil make issues of place, environment, and ecology central to their poetry. As the book argues, each work also creates a distinctive environmental poetics, in which the nonhuman world and particular local environments help shape the specific qualities of its poetry. By attending to the environmental and place-based poetics of these works, the book generates new readings of Vergil and Horace while deepening and complicating how we understand the traditions and concepts of environmental literature.

Introduction
1. Local dwelling and pastoral place in Vergil's Eclogues
2. The local environments and more-than-human music of the Eclogues
3. Vergil's ecological poem
4. Poetry of place and planet: Fractal locality in Vergil's Georgics
5. Natures and the nonhuman in Horace's Odes
6. Translocal lyric: Horace's Odes and the poetry of place
Epilogue: Ovid in exile and Augustan environmental poetry.

Subject Areas: Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1]