Apollo, Augustus, and the Poets

Apollo's importance in the religion of the Roman state was markedly heightened by the emperor Augustus, who claimed a special affiliation with the god. Contemporary poets variously responded to this appropriation of Phoebus Apollo, both participating in the construction of an imperial symbolism and resisting that ideological project. This book offers a synoptic study of 'Augustan' Apollo in Augustan poetry. Topics explored include the divine self-imaging of late Republican rivals for power, poetic imaginings of Apollo's intervention at the pivotal battle of Actium, how poets 'read' Augustus' new Palatine Temple of Apollo and the deity's role in the reconstituted Saecular Games, and Apollo's key position in the emerging dialectic between poetics - as traditional divine patron of music and literature - and politics - as patron of Augustus. Discussions encompass the major Latin poets (Horace, Virgil, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid) as well as anonymous voices in poetic lampoons, encomia, and contemporary Greek verse.

"Apollo, Augustus, and the Poets offers learned and engaging readings of many of the central works of Augustan poetry. It overlooks no relevant Augustan or Republican evidence and provides an ample account of relevant Greek literary tradition, even including the less-familiar responses to Actium by contemporary Greek poets. ...allows considerable openness to a multiplicity of interpretations, including ones fully resistant to dominant Augustan ideology. ..this book comes highly recommended to all readers of Augustan poetry. --BMCR

John F. Miller is Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia, where he has been Chair of the Department of Classics for many years. He is the author of Ovid's Elegiac Festivals. Studies in the Fasti and of numerous articles on various Roman poets, especially Ovid.