The Revenge of Augustus. Cesar, Augustus and History in Neil Gaiman’s "August" (original) (raw)
Related papers
'I am Master of Nothing': Imperium: Augustus and the Story of Augustus on Screen
New Voices in Classical Reception Studies, 2012
The story of Octavian / Augustus’ life follows a rather problematic narrative trajectory. Reduced to its basic elements, it is the tale of a man who overthrew the Roman Republic and installed himself as an absolute monarch, yet enjoyed widespread contemporary acclaim and died peacefully in his bed. Lacking the moral complexity of Julius Caesar’s story, or the prurient thrills offered by proper ‘bad’ emperors, this narrative has rarely been tackled in full by western story-tellers. Instead, in the 20th century, Octavian / Augustus appeared most frequently on screen as a secondary character in the stories of others – particularly as a villainous foil to Antony and Cleopatra – while only a handful of novelists attempted a fuller biographical approach. Nonetheless, a popular appetite for screen portrayals of Roman history in the early 21st century has kept producers and screenwriters returning to his story, and one TV mini-series, Imperium: Augustus (2003), has now offered the first ever screen biopic of this contradictory character. This paper examines the narrative strategies used in this production and their degree of success in making the story of Octavian / Augustus palatable to contemporary western audiences. Making strong claims to historical accuracy, Imperium: Augustus builds on approaches already established in biographical novels, but also deploys characteristically filmic devices such as the flashback to help create a compelling drama. Audience responses suggest that it was only a partial success, but Augustus’ story still offers ample opportunities for exploring modern concerns such as the crafting of political personas or the relationship between security and civil liberties. These could perhaps be better satisfied in the medium of the documentary, and we can fully expect such treatments to appear in connection with the bimillennium of his death on 19th August 2014.
In 2014, many academic institutions and museums celebrate the bimillenium of the death of Augustus with colloquiums, exhibitions and publications. The life, the political deeds, and the era of the founder of the Roman Empire have not been honoured or discussed to such an extent since 1937-1938, when an exhibition, the 'Mostra augustea della Romanità', at the instigation of the Fascist regime, celebrated the two-thousandth anniversary of the birth of the Emperor. Yet the outcome of the re-examinations in 2014 will not be complete if emphasis is not put on the enduring fame and fortune he experienced in the West, for this renowned figure created an empire which united, for the first time, the Mediterranean with the regions north of the Alps. The importance of this personage throughout our recorded cultural history makes a multidisciplinary approach essential. Specialits of various fields - history, cultural history, literature, art history, semiotics, etc. - will bring together their skills and knowledges to retrace the multiple interpretations and appropriations of Augustus from his death to the present days.
2022
In 2014, numerous academic institutions and museums celebrated the bimillenium of the death of Augustus with colloquiums, exhibitions and publications. The life, the political deeds and the general historical context of the founder of the Roman Empire had not been honoured or discussed to such an extent since 1937-1938, when an exhibition, the Mostra Augustea della Romanità, celebrated the two-thousandth anniversary of the birth of the Emperor at the instigation of the Fascist regime. Yet the outcome of these scholarly reexaminations of Augustus and his era will not be complete if emphasis is not put on the long-term fame and fortune he enjoyed in the Western civilisation. This is why we as editors of the present volume organised an international conference taking place from 6 th-8 th November 2014 at the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels in order to underline the enduring importance of Augustus throughout our recorded cultural history by adopting a multidisciplinary approach. Specialits of various fields-history, cultural history, literature, art history, etc.-brought together their skills and knowledges to retrace the multiple interpretations and appropriations of Augustus from his death to the present days. We are extremely grateful to the numerous colleagues from various countries who responded favourably to our call for papers and contributed towards shedding light on the most diverse aspects of Augustus' posthumous history. The book, as it was already the case for the conference, is divided into five sections that broadly follow the chronological sequence: Antiquity-Middle Ages-Early Modern and Modern period-the era of Totalitarianism-Contemporary history. Within these various sections, the objective was to establish a dialogue between disciplines ranging from history, philology and archaeology to history of architecture or popular culture studies. By so doing, we also tried to shed light on some aspects of Augustus' reception that are still less studied, for instance, the treatment of the first emperor's figure in the medieval literature or in the field of contemporary literature and popular culture. Given the thematic breadth of these numerous contributions, the publication of the proceedings took longer than expected, although the contributions generally refer to a bibliographic context that does not go much beyond 2016. The publication of the present volume required, in fact, a considerable amount of time, and the reasons behind this unfortunate delay are manifold, with none standing out above the others. It is well known that publications bringing together several authors, particularly when they belong to different domains,
Empire of the Imagination: The Power of Public Fictions in Ovid's 'Reader Response' to Augustan Rome
2011
The idea of an 'Augustan discourse' represents a valuable step forward from the twentieth-century belief that Augustus ruled through patronage and propaganda, insofar as it better accommodates the polyvocality of the literature of his age as well as the delicacy of the princeps' political position between republic and empire. I seek to expand on this approach by drawing literary works into more thoroughgoing dialogue with contemporary 'texts' in other media, including coins and architecture, and by treating all these as examples of reader responses to Augustus that both construct and reflect public interpretations of the emperor. This work focuses in particular on Ovid's readings of the visual iconography of the principate, arguing that these influenced both ancient and modern historians' conception of Augustus as the master architect of his own public image. My project is inspired by poets' creation of a sense of professional rivalry between themselves and the princeps, particularly Ovid's portrayal of Augustus as a fellow manipulator of fictions. However, individual chapters deconstruct this idea by examining how specific 'pro-Augustan' icons cannot be regarded as a tool of propaganda, but rather, exist only within individual representations that often embed critical, evolving, and dialogic perspectives on the emperor. The first chapter analyzes historical evidence for the appearance and interpretation of a comet over Caesar's funeral games in 44 BCE, as well as representations of this sidus Iulium in Roman coins and the poems of Vergil, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid. I argue that the imagistic metamorphosis of the sidus from a star into a comet over the course of Augustus' reign reflects the growth of an ahistorical sense that the young Octavian took a proactive role in deifying Caesar, and a larger tendency to retroject Augustus' mature power onto his early career. My second chapter interweaves an analysis of the archaeological remains of Augustus' temple complex on the Palatine with close readings of Horace, Propertius, and Ovid's literary responses to its architectonics; I argue that these poets' reappropriations of public space for private purposes, particularly Ovid's critique of the Palatine iconography and urban topography, have encouraged modern scholars to overread triumphalist intentions into the Augustan building program. In my last chapter, I compare visual and verbal representations of the triumph ceremony, culminating with Ovid's use of the subject to explore how ritual may be extended 2 through time and space, how writing may be employed to serve empire, and how readers may intervene in a text's creation of meaning. Building on this latter idea, a brief conclusion explores how Ovid's exile poems treat Augustus himself as a text-that is, as a publicly circulating representation of power that was potentially unrepresentative of reality, subject to audience interpretation in defiance of authorial intention, and beholden to the imaginative participation of reader-subjects throughout the empire. Ovid also gives Augustan readers the tools by which to take interpretive control over texts and to examine their own complicity in constructing Augustan power. This parallels my broader theme that modern scholarly interpretations of the period cannot be disentangled from these subjective reader responses to Augustan Rome, and thus become part of a succession of imaginative rereadings and reinterpretations of the figure of Augustus.
History, Barbarians and HBO’s 'Rome' Television Series (Lecture)
2011
HBO’s Rome (season 1) was released for UK audiences in 2006, though it didn’t air on Australian screens until 2008. From the moment of the rolling credits, we are drawn into ancient Rome – the walls are alive, with everyday Romans speaking to us via their graffiti. The first image of the skull and butterfly is a mosaic preserved from the walls of ancient Pompeii. Rome’s streets literally come to life as the cityscape is animated with pictures of Medusa’s slithering snake hair. Soldiers painted on walls are having a duel, and the vibrant plaster décor is lifted straight from Pompeii as well. Images of everyday satire, including depictions of the male phallus, tell us more than reading about Roman life ever could. A closer look reveals a calendar, too, in which the months July and August have not yet been inserted. This is pre-imperial Rome, the very late Republic - the time of orators like Cicero, Caesar and Cato, and legendary generals such as Pompey. What is constant in the opening credits is the theme of blood, indicating the central place of violence and mortality in Roman society at this time. The series provides both a macro view of Roman history (focussing on the rise of Caesar and the politics of the ruling class), as well as a micro view (focussing on the lives of Roman plebeians, soldiers and slaves). Episode 12, the topic of today’s lecture, was written by Bruno Heller, and directed by Alan Taylor. It is the finale to season 1, in which the dictator of the Roman Republic, Julius Caesar, is assassinated. Today I will discuss a brief history of the Roman Republic to the death of Caesar, and provide some context for Roman politics at the time of his death. Then, we look at whether the makers of HBO’s Rome follow a trajectory roughly similar to historians as they tell their stories. I will not be discussing military successes and tactics of ancient Rome. Rather, I will be making some parallels between “ordinary” life in the city and how we can relate to the social history of what was once the world’s most successful classical civilisations.