The poetics of place: The Augustan writers and the urban landscape of Rome

This thesis examines the relationship between literature, place, and memory in several Latin texts, and analyzes the means by which three Early Augustan writers imposed meaning on Rome's cityscape during a period of rapid topographical and political change. A study of Cicero's de Domo Sua and Catullus poems 15 and 55 illustrates the skill with which Late Republican writers, for rhetorical purposes and to organize their work, manipulated urban space by means of verbal performance and literary reference. Heirs to this tradition, the Augustan writers used it to reinterpret Rome.;In the Satires, Horace uses the walk through the city (the structure of the rhetorical ars memoriae) as a narrative device. The Satirist walks among men and measures them against the moral background of the city. The Epodes, too, portray Roman society, but a society centered on two loci, that of the city (represented by the static city center and the dynamic Esquiline), and that of the sick body. Together they call for a purge of the city center.;Horace's Odes (1.2; 1.8; 3.7; 3.12; 4.1) and Vergil's Aeneid commemorate contemporary development on the Campus Martius. By focusing attention on the Tiber and the Campus' grassy meadows, by presenting them in terms reminiscent of literary descriptions of the battlefield outside of Troy, Horace competes with the changes wrought by Agrippa and Augustus. Vergil uses Roman topography to give structure to Aeneid 6, and commemorates the Campus by superimposing images that identify it with Elysium.;These writers used the urban landscape not to add "mundane detail" or give a "Roman flavor" to a Latin representative of a Greek genre, but to set up a dialogue between the material and the literary city, one that asserts the power of writing to record and to define the city's meaning.;Livy uses topography both to organize his narrative and to turn the story of Manlius Capitolinus (Book 6) into an extended pun on the identity and meaning of the city's "head." Manlius' story asserts the importance of national memory and the superiority of literary to non-literary monumenta.