Augustan Rome

This paper is also available in the Preliminary Examination in History and in the Preliminary Examination in History and English.

Rome is "the Eternal City", because throughout European history she has played a central role. This subject looks at the city of Rome and its culture at its highest point and at its crucial period of transition. Augustus, the first emperor, sought to renew the institutions of an ancient city state to fit it to its status as ruler of the Mediterranean world. The governing class, the senate, was purged and prepared for the transition from political elite to imperial bureaucracy; the other orders and the people were depoliticised. Of the monumental centre, Augustus said "I found a city of brick and left a city of marble"; great complexes of public buildings were created, and a network of civic amenities was established. The religious institutions were revived according to a conscious programme. Patronage of literature created the first #Augustan Age&, and an independent canon for Latin literature. In art Rome was the centre of public and private patronage. Beyond Rome lay Italy, and the ideal of a country life based on a revived agriculture.

But there were many tensions. Civil war was not easy to forget; the loss of political liberty was resented among the traditional leaders; changes in the countryside reflected widespread confiscations. The new moral standards were the product of an ethical conservatism widely resented by the literary and social elite.

Archaeology, art history and literary criticism are relevant to this subject, as well as the traditional historical techniques. The texts have been chosen to reflect the various official and unofficial views of the period, to allow the study of its greatest literature within a historical context, and finally to introduce the historian of culture to those classical works which have been the basis of European cultural history from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century - notably Virgil, Ovid, Horace and Vitruvius.