(There would be no cruel weapons, no warships,nor would our bones be rolled in the sea of Actium,
nor would Rome, all too often beaten down with triumphs against herself,
be so tired of tearing out/letting down her hair in grief.)
Specific references to such real historical events and to civil war atrocities in which Octavian was directly involved seem to position Propertius as unambiguously anti-Augustan. Even when Propertius is taken under the wing of a new literary patron, Maecenas (a close personal and political ally of Augustus), the poet remains reluctant to write work that is sympathetic to the princeps or his regime. In the programmatic opening poem of his second book of elegies, in an address to Maecenas, Propertius initially appears to bow to pressure to write poetry which “commemorates your Caesar’s wars and deeds” (2.1.25–6). However, as the poem continues, he offers a damning illustration of the particularly horrific wars and deeds committed by the young Augustus/Octavian (2.1.25–35):
bellaque resque tui memorarem Caesaris, et tu
Caesare sub magno cura secunda fores.
nam quotiens Mutinam aut civilia busta Philippos
aut canerem Siculae classica bella fugae,
eversosque focos antiquae gentis Etruscae,
et Ptolemaeei litora capta Phari,
aut canerem Aegyptum et Nilum, cum attractus in urbem
septem captivis debilis ibat aquis,
aut regum auratis circumdata colla catenis,
Actiaque in Sacra currere rostra Via;
te mea Musa illis semper contexeret armis,
(I would commemorate your Caesar’s wars and deeds, and you
[Maecenas] would be my next concern, second to mighty Caesar
For whenever I sang of Mutina or Philippi, where Roman citizens are buried,
or I sang of naval battles and Sicilian refugees,
or of the ruined hearths of Etruria’s ancient people,
or of the captured beaches of Ptolemaic Pharos,
and if I sang of Egypt and the Nile, when it was dragged into Rome,
flowing weakly with its seven streams captive;
or I sang of the necks of kings encircled with chains of gold,
or the prows of Actian ships sailing along the Sacred Way, then
my Muse would always weave you [Maecenas] into these wars.)
The list of Augustus’ military deeds that Propertius “commemorates” here is effectively a catalog of the many horrors the princeps committed to achieve his ultimate victory in the civil wars; the elegy sardonically “celebrates” Augustus’ brutal triumphs over his fellow Roman citizens. Propertius claims he can’t write of any of these deeds without also implicating Maecenas in the shame and guilt of such atrocities. He could compose an epic celebrating Augustus’ achievements (2.1.41–2), but as a loyal follower of Callimachus he hasn’t the “art” or the heart to write long epic verses about warfare. Nor, he claims, does he have the strength to trace Caesar’s family tree all the way back to his Trojan ancestors just to avoid having to face up to Augustus’ own decidedly unheroic history (as the poet Vergil has just done in his Aeneid). Yet the impression we get from Propertius’ poem and its recusatio (a stylized “refusal” to write on a particular topic) is not that Propertius can’t write epic but that he simply won’t write epic (or anything else) praising Augustus (see Cairns 2006; Heyworth 2007a).
Unlike his poetic predecessors, who had lived through and sometimes experienced at first hand the bloody breakdown of Rome’s democratic government and its chaotic transition from Republic to principate, Ovid entered adult life at a point of relative order and stability in Rome’s recent troubled history. Unlike Horace, who had fought against Octavian during the civil war, or Propertius, who lost his kinsman in the conflict, Ovid had no personal experience of the civil wars that had dominated life for the generation before him, and he knew no other political authority before Augustus. Also significant is the fact that Ovid seems to have written and published his poetry independently – that is, largely without the sponsorship of a literary patron. He tells us in his exile poetry that, as a young poet, he received some kind of support from Tibullus’ patron Messalla and his son Messalinus (Epistulae ex Ponto 1.7), but there is nothing in his writing to suggest the influence of a politically motivated patron at work in the background. Arguably, these two factors set Ovid apart from his lyric and elegiac predecessors and offer us insight into the comparative irreverence for all things political that is the hallmark of Ovid’s own poetry.
Other than this generally light-hearted approach to politics, Ovid’s elegiac poetry does not have very much to say about Augustus himself. No doubt inspired by the genealogical connections invented between Augustus, Aeneas, and Venus as part of the princeps’ personal re-branding (as celebrated by Vergil’s Aeneid and the many monuments and coins promoting this mythology that Augustus issued during his reign), Ovid does have some fun with the idea that Augustus is the great-grandson of the goddess of Venus. He speculates on how the history of Rome might have played out if Venus had had an abortion, meaning that Aeneas and the rest of the Julian family had never been born (Amores 2.14.17–18) – an idea that is likely to have seemed no less shocking (and politically charged) to Ovid’s contemporary Augustan audiences than it does today. Ovid also enjoys pointing out that the supposed family connection between the Julian clan and their eponymous ancestor, Aeneas’ son Iulus Ascanius, makes Cupid one of Augustus’ kinsmen. He begs the mischievously cruel god to copy the good example of his “cousin” or cognati Augustus Caesar (Amores 1.2.51) and to show the poet mercy as he parades him through the streets of Rome in a parody of a military triumph. The tone of this poem is largely playful, but there is a provocative note in the final elegiac couplet, where Ovid sarcastically reminds Cupid that Augustus is famous for showing mercy to those he has vanquished (1.2.52). As Propertius has already reminded us, in those many victories fought and won in the civil wars, the future Augustus was actually infamous for his cruelty and the lack of clemency or mercy he showed to those he had defeated. Similarly, there is also a politically informed intertextual allusion to Propertius at play in Amores 3.12.15–16, where Ovid claims that he had once briefly considered writing epic poetry about Thebes, about Troy, or about Caesar Augustus but that none of these lofty topics had sufficiently inspired his inspiration (ingenium). The one person and the one topic that ever inspired him to write poetry was a mere girl – a puella he calls “Corinna.” The insult to Augustus is casually presented here, but in the context of Augustus’ attempts in this period to reform public morals and restore “old-fashioned” codes of sexual conduct to Rome, it is deliberately provocative (see Barchiesi 1997).
Cultural, Political, and Historical Contexts for Elegy and Lyric: Puellae
Augustus had ambitions not only to control the state and the public lives of Roman citizens, he also had ambitions to control their private lives. The Augustan marriage legislation, or leges Iuliae, first introduced around 18 bce and re-introduced in a lighter form as the lex Papia Poppaea in 9 CE, was therefore one of the cornerstones of Augustus’ principate. Made up of two laws (the lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus and the lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis), this legislation package apparently sought
