Augustan Literature and Egypt

Catalog description

This seminar studies Hellenistic influence on Latin poetry and Roman ideology in the period of Rome’s slide from a dysfunctional oligarchy to an autocracy. We will focus on how such authors as Virgil, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid assimilate and transform the imperial literature of the Greek East in the time of Augustus’ conquest of Egypt, both accommodating a poetics of monarchy and opening up adversarial standpoints within the same discourse. We will also look at earlier and later Latin poetry and prose texts to place this poetry within literary and political history.