ROMAN ARCHITEXTURE: THE IDEA OF THE MONUMENT IN THE ROMAN IMAGINATION OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE by Nicholas James Geller A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Classical Studies) in the University of Michigan 2015 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Basil J. Dufallo, Chair Associate Professor Ruth Rothaus Caston Professor Bruce W. Frier Associate Professor Achim Timmermann ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of many people both within and outside of academia. I would first of all like to thank all those on my committee for reading drafts of my work and providing constructive feedback, especially Basil Dufallo and Ruth R. Caston, both of who read my chapters at early stages and pushed me to find what I wanted to say – and say it well. I also cannot thank enough all the graduate students in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan for their support and friendship over the years, without either of which I would have never made it this far. Marin Turk in Slavic Languages and Literature deserves my gratitude, as well, for reading over drafts of my chapters and providing insightful commentary from a non-classicist perspective. And I of course must thank the Department of Classical Studies and Rackham Graduate School for all the financial support that I have received over the years which gave me time and the peace of mind to develop my ideas and write the dissertation that follows. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………………ii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS……………………………………………………………………iv ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………....v CHAPTER I. Introduction: Roman Architexture……………………………………………………………...1 II. Reading Rome Architecturally: Structure, Memory, and Monuments in the Roman Imagination………………………………………………………………………………………12 III. Horace’s Lyric Monumentum: the Augustan Architecture of “Refusal”…………..……..….48 IV. The Cracks in Vergil’s Epic Architexture I: Constructed Caves and Deceptive Labyrinths in the Aeneid…………………………………………………………………………90 V. The Cracks in Vergil’s Epic Architexture II: The “Failure” of Monumenta in the Aeneid…135 VI. The End(s) of Architexture: Ovid, Augustus, and the Transcendence of Structure………..163 VII. Conclusion: Roman Monumentality and the Modern Death(s) of the Monument………..188 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………………205 iii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS OLD The Oxford Latin Dictionary. Oxford, 1968-1982. TLL Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. Leipzig, 1900-. iv ABSTRACT This dissertation explores the idea of the monument in the Roman imagination of the Augustan age (31 BCE – 14 CE). It examines the different ways in which three Augustan poets – Horace in his Odes, Vergil in his Aeneid, and Ovid in his Metamorphoses – imagined their works as monuments that contributed to the broader discourse of monumentality of the period. A survey of the importance of architecture to how the Romans structured the world around them conceptually will be followed in each subsequent chapter by a reading of these poems which seeks to accomplish two goals: [1] to demonstrate the very nuanced manner in which the Augustan poets fashioned their works as monumenta (“monuments”) and [2] to connect aspects of the poems’ monumentality to strategies employed by the princeps himself in his Res Gestae when discussing his reconstruction of Rome on both a literal and metaphorical level. This study will argue that by analyzing the sophisticated manner in which these poets contributed to the monumentalization of their city we can understand better the success that Augustus had in turning Rome from a city of brick to one of marble – not just in its physical landscape, but in the Roman imagination, as well. The conclusion will then look at what the Roman understanding of monumentality in the Augustan age can reveal about possible limitations of the discourse surrounding the idea of the monument today. v CHAPTER I Introduction Roman Architexture “I am leaving behind a city of marble, which I received as a city of brick.”1 Augustus’ famous boast is not without merit. The people of Rome no doubt witnessed an incredible amount of building in their city under the reign of the princeps. For nearly two millennia historians have praised the Augustan age for its prolific and resplendent architecture.2 Classicists in particular have analyzed Augustus’ sophisticated building program in order to show how the visual culture of Rome was an essential component of the so-called Augustan “Cultural Revolution” that saw the city rise out of decades of civil war into an era of peace and relative stability.3 The continual attention to, and fascination with, the physical remains of Rome’s many Augustan monuments – small or large, functional or commemorative – is a testament to just how successfully Augustus 1 Cf. Suet. Div. Aug. 28.3: …Augustus urbem adeo excoluit, ut iure sit gloriatus marmoream se relinquere, quam latericiam accepisse. 2 In the very first chapter of his Siècle de Louis XIV, for example, Voltaire lists the age of Augustus as one of the only “lucky ages...in which the arts were perfected and which – by serving at the time the greatness of the human spirit – are the example for posterity” (âges heureux...où les arts ont été perfectionnés, et qui, servant d’époque à la grandeur de l’esprit humain, sont l’exemple de la postérité, 1751 [1819], 188-189). The twentieth-century architectural theorist Sigfried Giedion (1949, 646-647) would even go so far as to say that “[w]e do not doubt that in some periods there has existed a unity of culture. In those periods imagination and the external world flowed into one another. Then the spirit was not condemned to go its way alone, and reality had not the single meaning of struggle for existence. Those were the happy hours of mankind, but they have been rare and of tragic brevity. [...] [S]o it was in Rome during the lustrous reign of Augustus. [...] These periods, with their unity of intellectual, emotional, and political culture, are those in which life has been able to manifest such splendor as is possible to man.” 3 Zanker 1988 is still in many ways the standard for an approach to Roman architecture of the Augustan age which focuses on the remains that have survived either physically or through the images from coins, painting, and literature. See also F. R. Brown 1961, Ward-Perkins 1981 [1994], 21-45, Gros 1976, Kellum 1981, Favro 1996, Galinsky 1996, Larmour and Spencer 2007a, and Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 73-211. 1 employed architecture to monumentalize not just the city of Rome, but the very idea of the city in the imagination of the Romans, as well as in the minds of their cultural inheritors.4 This dissertation is not about the physical monuments that Augustus constructed.5 The different focus of my dissertation arises from the fact that some of the most important monumental constructions that Augustus accomplished were not constructed with extravagant, long-lasting marble, but with the words of the Latin language in his Res Gestae.6 Augustus did monumentalize the city of Rome, of course, but he also “constructed” the res publica anew after years of civil strife had left it in “ruin.” That was his charge, after all, when he first assumed power as a triumvir rei publicae constituendae.7 As this study will suggest, an essential part of Augustus’ success in accomplishing this task was in how he skillfully used architectural discourse to establish his novel constitutio for Rome – the one in the imagination as much as the physical one – upon foundations that were at the same time traditional.8 4 See Edwards 1996, esp. 69-135, and Galinsky 2014, 135-162. 5 Important work still remains to be done in that field of study, of course, as classicists complete the “spatial turn” and transition from an examination of space to that of movement in and through space. See Ewald and Noreña 2010a, Laurence and Newsome 2011, and now Favro 2014. 6 For Augustus as a rhetorical figure see Lamp 2013. Lamp argues that “Augustus and his administration turned to traditional Roman rhetorical theory and practice…to inform the Augustan cultural campaigns.” The rhetorical “artifacts” that the scholar analyzes range from speeches to “buildings, monuments, coins, altars, and even city planning” (6). The Res Gestae itself has been the topic of much recent scholarship concerning the way Augustus’ inscribed “autobiography” helped fashion a particular image of the princeps and the Augustan age, including Ramage 1987, Ridley 2003, Cooley 2009, 1-43. See also Stuart 1905, 429-440, for an outdated but still useful examination of Augustus’ inscriptional practices when it comes to the monuments of the period, and Syme 1939, 520-524, presenting an insightful (though perhaps overly hostile) account of the rhetorical stance that Augustus takes up in the Res Gestae. 7 RGDA 1.4: “In the same year, moreover, the people elected me as consul…and as triumvir for the purpose of establishing the state” (populus autem eodem anno me consulem…et triumvirum rei publicae constituendae creavit). 8 Although classicists have treated the “discourse of monumentality” in the ancient world previously, an application to the poetry of the Augustan age is largely lacking. Although Elsner 1994 presents a useful overview of how the discourse functions in ancient historians from Herodotus to Pausanias, the approach most similar to mine can be found in Fowler 2000, 193-219. His discussion of the very thin line between “monument” and “ruin” has been particularly influential for my own reading of Roman poetry in the Augustan age. For other classicist discussions of Roman monumentality see also Bodel 1987, Rea 2007, E. Thomas 2007, Roller 2010, Thomas and Meyers 2012, and now Jenkyns 2013, 311-364. 2 Augustus was not alone in using architectural discourse to articulate the work he did to reshape the idea of Rome.