In Our Time - The Augustan Age

Episode Date: June 11, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests Mary Beard, Catharine Edwards and Duncan Kennedy discuss the political regime and cultural influence of the Roman Emperor Augustus. Called the Augustan Age, it was a golden age of literature with Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphosis among its treasures. But they were forged amidst creeping tyranny and the demands of literary propaganda. Augustus tightened public morals, funded architectural renewal and prosecuted adultery. Ovid was exiled for his saucy love poems but Virgil's Aeneid, a celebration of Rome's grand purpose, was supported by the regime. Indeed, Augustus saw literature, architecture, culture and morality as vehicles for his values. He presented his regime as a return to old Roman virtues of forbearance, valour and moral rectitude, but he created a very new form of power. He was the first Roman Emperor and, above all, he established the idea that Rome would be an empire without end. Catharine Edwards is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck College, University of London; Duncan Kennedy is Professor of Latin Literature and the Theory of Criticism at the University of Bristol; Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at Cambridge University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, and Julius Caesar's will was read, earlier than intended, it contained gifts. Gardens by the Taibo were given to the Roman people.

Money was attributed, but the chief beneficiary was Caesar's nephew, Octavius, whom he adopted as his son. To be Caesar's heir was a troubled and public legacy, but from it, Octavius fashioned a position of power unparalleled before and perhaps since. He was the first Roman emperor, and he called himself Augustus. His reign, the Augustine Age, was a time of strange connections between politics, peace, literature, and encroaching tyranny. It saw the rebuilding of Rome from brick into marble,

the flowering of Virgil, Ovid and Horace, and the slow but relentless turning of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. with me to discuss the Augustine Age are Catherine Edwards Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck College London University Duncan Kennedy, Professor of Latin Literature and the Theory of Criticism at the University of Bristol and Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Cambridge University.

Can you give us an overview of what we mean when we talk about the Augustine Age, Mary Bearder? Well, really it is a or perhaps the key moment in Roman history. It's a key moment in the moment in the... history of Europe. It's the period across the divide between the first century BC and the first century AD when, for the second time in Rome's history, monarchy was established replacing what have been democracy. Rome had been originally governed by kings, it had been democratic, in a funny kind of way. And at the end of the first century BC, we get the advent of another form

of autocracy under the Emperor Augustus, who is looked on forever as the founding, the founding father of the Roman Empire. But what's interesting about it? Just to clear the dates, we're talking about 31 BC to about 18 AD. He dies in 14 AD. 14 AD. But what's interesting about it is that it is a combination

of a period of extraordinary political change, in some sense is revolutionary political change. with cultural, social, architectural, artistic revolution too. And all these ages that get called ages, like the Elizabethan age, often have that kind of linkage between politics and culture. So that really very many of those authors that we instantly think of as Roman authors, virtually mentioned Horace, these people are coming out of the particular revolutionary political ferment that Augustus started.

So the aneerneed, that's a product of the Augustine age, Horace's Oads, but also extraordinary investment in works of art, patronage of great building schemes. Augustus is supposed to have said that he found Rome a city of brick and he left it a city of marble. There's a transformation. an autocratic transformation of the whole city of Roman, really the Roman Empire. And the puzzle, though, I mean, I think these ages often have puzzles attached to them too, is that there is a tremendous artistic flowering, there is a political revolution,

the question is what really is a relationship between those two, and actually quite how nasty is the Augustine age. And it gets looked back to, when you've had a moment, had really bad emperors later, like Caligula and Nero, Augustus looks back to, get to look back to, as a kind of rather avuncular granddad founding father of the Roman Empire, which in some senses he was. But what we can see if we look hard and scratch beneath the surface

of what we know about that period is it was a period of huge political tension. People were conspiring to get rid of him. Not every Roman wanted to live under an autocracy. and although he did have this rather nice cosy title of father of his country, there were people who'd rather like to kill him. The idea of Roma's Republic was a very proud banner for a great many of them, and it carried through for a long time from overthrowing the Tarquins and so on and so forth.

So he undermined that. Was there, you make it say, oh, it seems because it's the age, because this is a conversation very smooth, but weren't there people saying, no, we are a republic? You must not do that. That is what we are. We don't want to be. Have an emperor.

That's a big problem. Julius Caesar had been killed by a disgruntled group of Roman aristocrats in the name of liberty, Republican liberty. And that had been followed, that assassination, had been followed by a really nasty period, 15 years almost of civil war, in which there were still some sense that they were fighting for the restoration, of freedom of government. That becomes increasingly pie in the sky, I think.

But by the time Augustus, Octavius as he then is, manages to defeat his rivals and emerge as leader, he has got exactly the problem that you're talking about. How do you establish autocracy in a nation that is vowed to hate kingship? Catherine, Augustus presented his rule as a return to the old Roman, third years. What was he talking about? Well, it's quite interesting seeing how Romans talk about what was going on in the

late Republic, which we might characterize as a time of political breakdown, but that was often also made sense of in terms of moral breakdown. And there's a sense that the traditional values on which Rome was founded, of sort of agricultural, the sort of soldier farmer ideal, if you like,

that great generals are called from the plough to go in the Roman army, exactly, Cincinnati. That's a sort of an Roman ideal and there's a sense that as Rome's become richer the Roman aristocracy in particular has kind of abandoned that ideal and has become more interested

in the pursuit of luxury and sexual license and in Livy's history for instance which is written in the time of Augustus and which is one of our chief sources for the history of the Roman Republic we get this very strong emphasis on Roman virtue the Romans are people preeminent in virtue

and Augustus in in the course of his reign seems to place increasing emphasis on a kind of return to ancestral virtue. The most conspicuous example of this, perhaps, is the legislation, his moral legislation of 18 BCE,

which is a legislation against adultery. And it's perhaps this, that's one of the things he's referring to when he boasts in his list of his achievements, which has posted up next to his mausoleum in Rome, I brought back by my legislation, the

restored ancestral virtues. From what I read, a lot of people in Rome were very pleased at this. They felt nourished by this. This was where they wanted to go and they put a lot of things down because they abated certain desires they had in order to follow this going back to traditional virtues, whether it was a shimmer or whether it was a reality. Yes, I mean, obviously he was tapping into a kind of nostalgia

for a sort of an earlier, simpler age. I suppose after Civil War as well. Exactly. A sort of sense of going back to kind of a sort of rustic vision of a kind of happy life. But of course that's not terribly compatible with the large metropolis which Rome had become. So there is this kind of paradox about

how do you bring back traditional rustic virtue in this cosmopolitan setting? And in Roman poetry, we find celebrations, particularly in the work of Horace, most notably in the purpose. and the poem that he writes celebrating on the occasion of the secular games of 17 BC. So it's the year after the moral legislation.

He talks about how Augustus has brought back morality and virtue. So can you give us some idea what he did? You say this city, the metropolis, about a million people in Rome, very large by the standards of the ancient world. What does he actually do? We've talked about traditional virtues. We're coming to the adultery legislation. So what is he doing that's attractive to the people that he's...

Well, if we're talking about the city, in a sense, the focus there is on the kind of physical fabric of the city, which is, as Mary says, radically transformed under Augustus. As a massive programme of restoration, obviously during the period of civil war, a lot of buildings had fallen into disrepair. The exact degree of that is hard for us to measure. And a huge amount of new construction,

which, of course, generates employment. Augustus also provides extensive There's about a quarter of a million people getting a free grain ration in Rome There are baths being built There are aqueducts bringing water And there are lots of games So it's bread and circuses to something

That's yes We seem rather shy about saying that I mean you said lots of grain And you said games So it's bread and circuses It is indeed red and circuses Yes That must be where it comes from

I mean it doesn't make it up It comes from tubinal writing somewhat later But Tacitus when he writes about the reign of Augusta Augustus does specifically say that that's how he won over the people of Rome. And the grip at the centre of it was that he controlled the army and then he nationalised the army. Yes. I mean, I think... That's quite important. It is absolutely. I mean, and that's the sort of nitty gritty on what does Augustus power lie. It is control of the army. The troubles of the late Republic had arisen in part because very powerful generals had a huge degree of control over their own armies,

which were never properly recompensed by the state. And so the recompense of the army's had be sorted out by individual generals whose armies then became, you know, closely attached to them, and that enabled them to kind of throw their weight around in ways which became increasingly difficult. So what Augustus did was to sort out payment for retired soldiers through setting up a military treasury. And he also controlled all the provinces of the Roman Empire where there was a significant concentration of armed forces. Duncan Kennedy, let's turn to the literary work. Let's not be valuable, compare one to the other. But one of the great really works and something,

the greatest was Virgil's Iniad, the epic story of Rome's founding on the ruins of Troy, his journey through, let's call it, Mediterranean to Rome. He found Rome. What pleases Augustus about this history, and what place does Virgil give Augustus in this poem? Well, even in the 30s BC, before the Battle of Actium,

Virgil and the Georgics had promised that he was going to write an epic and he was going to put Caesar at the centre, Augustus at the centre. Now, what he does when he writes the epic is not to write an epic about the deeds of Caesar because they were so involved in civil war and so on.

But he... The seizure we're talking about is Augustus. They do run out of Nigeria quickly sometimes, don't they? But he sets it back at the period of the Trojan War, but he uses the device of epic of the supernatural machinery, the gods. And in the first book of the Aeneid, Jupiter pronounces a prophecy to Venus. And what he does is he tells what is going to happen over the years looking forward towards the time in which the poem itself is written. And he effectively prophesies the event.

the familiar events of Roman history, culminating in the rise to power of Augustus. Now, what this does by presenting it as a prophecy is to present what happened as what had to happen, what was, turns into what was to be. And so it creates a sense of determinism around Roman history, and the arrow of time, as it were, intersects with the present, in the figure of Augustus.

But that arrow of time, importantly, goes forward beyond the age of Augustus, because Jupiter prophesies that for the Romans, there will be Imperium sine-fine, there will be empire without limit of time or space. So the idea is that Augustus is a historical necessity, a historical inevitability,

but also that he is part of an ongoing history, which will result in a Roman Empire, which is a world empire and will last forever. And the effect of that is for anyone who buys into this narrative to see themselves as part of this story, to see themselves as part of the destiny of the Roman Empire to rule the world. And then Augustus has his very remarkable place within that. And he's tracking his ancestry back to Ineus, who is the son of a goddess, Venus. So he's giving himself a pretty good genealogy. Yes.

Well, that's in a sense... Or actually, let's get it right. Virgil is giving it to him. Not quite, because Julius Caesar had claimed... He'd already done it. He'd already done it. So Virgil was, in a sense, gathering together quite a few existing traditions

and existing claims for ancestry. And what he does then is, in a sense, to organise a story of Roman history around the emergence of Augustus, as in some sense sanctioned by the gods. So this is a history which is not only determined. It's also providential. I mean, we're not talking at this moment

about what people have said. I mean, I'm known Latinists as wonderful writing and great adventures. Most people know about Dider and Aeneas and so on and so forth. We are talking about it as a sort of propaganda. Did it feel at the time to be a sort of propaganda? I am the emperor, I've got my great part, he's going to do great things for me.

There's a certain amount to that, but propaganda is, it's an awkward term. It's useful here, isn't it? It's handy to see it as a spectrum, because in his early days, Augustus had been at the rude and the crude end of that spectrum, attacking his enemies. But with the defeat of Antony at the Battle of Actium, one finds, the sort of cultural mood changing. And what Virgil in the Inid does is to give people a set of images, a set of ideas, around which they could possibly unite, a story around which they could come together. And, of course, not everyone would buy into this story by any means.

but it does provide against the, in a sense, the chaos of the civil wars. It provides a set of images, some of which are traditional, that Romans rise towards empire, for example, which he can attach to the figure of Augustus, and this is something that people could potentially unite around. Mary Beard, so we've got Augustus with the poets. Can you take us on from there? Is he saying I will patronise these people?

Is he saying these people are as important to me? Or do they just happen to be running alongside each other? It's hard to know, and it goes back to Duncan's question really about how far we're dealing with something we call propaganda here. One image that people have had of this regime is a kind of slightly style in its Ministry of Culture and Propaganda at the centre. with Augustus and his henchman, his cultural henchman Mycinas, kind of sorting out talent and getting them to produce works favorable to the regime and recompensing them for that, guiding the state supply of information.

That's a very unlikely model, I think, for what's going on, or at least, I mean, if it's propaganda, it's fantastically successful propaganda because it's worked for 2,000 years, which most propaganda campaigns don't. And I think you have to see a much more nuanced relationship between writing visual images and politics

than that model suggests. Quite what it looked like on the ground. It's tricky. But also you have to see a more nuanced set of ideas being talked about by these people. I mean, I think that, as Duncan's saying, I mean, in a way, what's happening here is you're being given a new framework within which to think about Rome. And there's a new set of people whose careers actually go back to the civil war. I mean, I think one thing that's quite interesting about the poetry of the Augustine age is it doesn't all start when Augustus gets sold command in 31 BC.

some of the most famous Augustan poetry is coming out of the period of civil war. But what it's doing, it's providing a new way of thinking about Rome's position in the world and Augustus's position in that. It's for the first time really that Rome manages to appropriate to itself

all the difficult strands of Greek culture and reuse them to make a new story. and exactly the story of the Aeneid, you can see also in physical form if you go to Augustus's new forum of Augustus, where he represents himself as new founder of Rome with statues of Aeneas and Romulus,

in a sense, providing his background and ancestry. Very clever. Can we take that on, Catherine Aedna, and give the listener some idea of, does this man come down the way works a system, he's gathering powers around him. It's a very, very clever revolution because it

doesn't look like a revolution at all, except of maybe very cute people, but it doesn't. And how much did this patronage of the poets and turning the city of Brick into Marble, how much did this matter to him? Do we have any evidence that it was more than, you know, cherry on the icing? That's terribly hard. hard to know.

There's this wonderful, one of its poems from exile talks about, just, you know, the busy emperor and does he ever really have time to read poetry? So, you know,

suggesting that perhaps it's not, you know, how do we imagine Augustus? Is he a sort of very serious reader of the Aeneid who gets all the nuances? We do have stories about how it's read out to Augustus and his family, the parts of the Aeneid. But, you know, exactly how he's reacting.

really know. No worry about how he's reacting. Reading allowed isn't a bad thing. It happened for most of the time there's been reading at all. But how much did it matter to him? Did he see this as part of his policy? Or was it something he cared about? And how much effort did he put it to me?

I mean, he put a lot of effort into the city, a lot of money into the city. Clearly, evidently. Yes. And we have, I mean, Mary was talking about the forum of Augustus, and we have Pliny commenting that Augustus himself actually roached the little descriptions of each of these great men of Rome that were kind of attached to the statues of them

that lined the sides of the forum. So there we seem to have a very sort of clear link of Augustus's input into what was going to be very visible to anybody who walked through the city. But with the poetry, it's much less clear exactly what input Augustus might have or my Scenus might have. There's the one scene in the Aeneid in book six

is when Aeneas goes down, into the underworld and he's shown the succession of Roman heroes of the future including members of Augustus' family that there's the young Marcellus for instance Augustus's nephew whom he'd

singled out to succeed him but who died before Augustus himself and there's a great sort of sadness about this and clearly there are ways in which specific bits of the Inead resonate very closely with Augustus's own feelings but it's going to be very hard for us to track

that I think. Marion, then across the donkey. I agree, it's very hard to know, but if there's two things I think make it likely that we can say, yes, he thought this was very important this kind of hearts and minds campaign. The first is it's easier to show, as Catherine says, on the building projects, because that is really pricey.

I mean, Augustus is putting huge amounts of money into massive building campaigns and artworks. We don't know how much Virgil cost. We can guess how much. He didn't come cheap. I'm very pleased to hear it. But we can make a good guess at what the Forum of Augustus

and the altar of peace and so on cost. And so he's putting his money where his mouth is, I think. But the other thing is, in a sense, more general Augustine problem for him, is that what's going on here is not just a revolution in the city of Rome and Roman government, but a revolution in Augustus' own image.

I mean, when Octavus was fighting the Civil War, He was one of the nastiest, most brutal. We're still talking about Augustus with Octavius. We have to keep reminding, folks. They change their name so often. It's worse than of it, right. I mean, metamorphosis. And in fact, part of the New Deal of Augustus

was changing his name from being Octavius to being Augustus, which was a completely invented name, which sort of meant only one, you know. You're talking about him being a nasty beggar in the Civil War. He's a nasty beggar in the Civil War. And what an awful lot of this literature and are, and cultural politics does, is it's part of the transformation, the metamorphosis of Octavius, from Octavius the nasty thug who would tear someone's eyes out with his bare hands, as the story went, to being the re-founder of Rome in an honorable, holy one way. And I think it's very clear that

the fulcrum between nasty Octavius and nice, relatively nice, Augustus, is. through the cultural politics of the regime. Duncan, Duncan Kennedy, marriage led us to, so, was literature part of his reinvention, representation of himself? Did he take a lot of care about to say how Horace talked about him?

Very much so. Can you give us an example? Yes. In Latin, then your own translation. Well, think about Horace's Roman odes, the first six odes, which begin which begin book three of the odes,

in which he presents a view of the changing atmosphere and culture of Rome. And in the fourth ode, he says we see Jupiter reigning in heaven, and he says that Augustus will be accounted a god on earth when he has added the Parthians and the Brithans to the empire. So there's that sense in which the figure, of Jupiter is used as a kind of model against which people can think about the role of Augustus on Earth and the power that he has in relation to the world around him. It's very interesting how they're always calling in a god, aren't they, or a goddess? And it matters to people, doesn't it? I mean, this isn't a literary conceit. It is important for him. His public place and his place in history and his place, it is immortal place.

Well, Jupiter is extremely important. Another god who's very important to him is Apollo. He adopts Apollo as a kind of patron god. Quite good adopt a god. Yes. Next door to his house on the Palatine.

Never mind. Next door to his house on the Palatine. He builds a temple to Apollo and within it he places a library and that's where many of the poets in fact would have gone to do their writing, to do their research. So in some sense they were next door to

Augustus. Catherine Edwards, he seems to have had, well, let's use the word genius, for accruing power without terrifying the life out of old Republicans and present-day inhabitants of Rome. Now, there's been a civil war, so the sense of relief there. There was a lot of prosperity, so that was a great help. But how did he actually do it, in fact? How did he actually do it, in fact? he politic his way to that. Well, he was incredibly clever in how he did it. And obviously, the example... Clearly stopped tearing people's eyes on.

He stopped tearing people's eyes out, which was a big step forward. But he was also very conscious of the example of Julius Caesar. That was not an example that he wanted to be following, of being assassinated for... Julius Caesar was dictator. He was very obviously excluding the Roman aristocracy from what they saw as their traditional rights to participating in power. So Augustus is very careful to maintain the dignity.

of the Senate is one of the things he does. So that being a consul, being a senator, is in some ways, you know, goes on being an important thing, even though actually so much power as concentrated in his hands. He's very careful about the titles he uses. He doesn't even dominate the consulship. Can you give us some examples?

Well, the way in which he comes to date his reign is by the number of years he's held the tribunition power. And the power of the tribune is actually not a very major power. It's a power that's traditionally associated with protecting the rights of the common people in Rome. So in sort of choosing that as the label that he wants to date his reign by, he's saying something quite important about this sort of modesty, really, of his ambitions. Tastas talks about that.

This is the Summi-Fastigi vocabulary. This is the sort of title of supreme power. But that's a kind of cynical way of seeing just what a kind of front that is for what's much power that's really dependent on the armies. which, of course, the tribunes would never have had. Yeah, but the tribune gave him the right to speak first in the Senate, and so he could make his point first. Absolutely, yes.

Also, he lived conspicuously modestly, didn't he? That's absolutely right. And I think that's a very, very important part of how he presented himself, that there's all this concern about the excesses of the aristocracy in the late Republic, the kind of increasingly lavish houses and so on. And Augustus, yes, he lived right next door to the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine, in a very obvious place. But Swaytonius talks about how very modest his house was

and how he wore clothes that had been made from cloths spun by, woven by members of his family, which is particularly sort of ludicrous when one thinks about the kind of stories about the wild lives of his daughters, daughter and granddaughter. But, you know, so there's this sort of sense of trying to live this very old-fashioned life. Can I imagine, have a brief moment? Have we any idea? How much evidence have we got?

Do we know, the average Roman, of course, It wasn't an average Roman. Do you know what people thought about it? What was the general view of him? Was he a god? Was he a re-invention? Was he a shady character to keep on the right side of? That's a bad one shady character.

But anyway... Yes, that's quite difficult to say because virtually all of the literature we have comes from a fairly closed aristocratic elite. And so what we get within the literature is really the projection of what the poets and the poets possibly under the advice and influence of Augustus himself wanted to the image that he wanted to project.

But in other ways, the image would have penetrated down into the people to a certain extent through the way in which the emperor was on public display, as it were. for example the secular games of 17 BC that Catherine mentioned Why they called secular games? Because they referred to a psychulum which was a period of about a hundred years So the games would...

So it was rather lucky you got the hundred year games in it. Well he was the one who organised it. I see. He invented the hundred years ago. They had taken place before as so often he builds upon something but at the secular games the idea was that the new Ero was being proclaimed.

And Augustus was very much at the centre of this because he was the one who carried out the sacrifices. He was very much the focus of attention at these games. And so there were public occasions on which the Emperor could

display his image for the people. Mary Beard. Before you, I know you would say something, if I ask you, just to tag back what you said at the beginning of the programme, which was very arresting, that this was an extraordinary important moment in the Roman Empire and a key moment, perhaps in Western history. Can you just refresh that before you tell us what you're going to tell us?

Why is it a key moment in Western history? I think it invents the idea, in some senses, of a constitutional monarch. All right. That, you know, can you actually ever give autocracy a good name? Well, one of the achievements of Augustus, bizarrely, is that this violent takeover of power, this nationalisation of the army, this... considerable control on culture, because I think that must be the case underneath, actually manages to work.

I mean, in most cases it doesn't. Augustus has, for the rest of the Roman Empire, down to Mussolini, a good name. And that's extraordinary surprising. And part of it, what I was wanting to say was that outside the poets, the kind of anecdotes told about Augustus, you get, the stress is really on his kivilitas, on, that's his being a good citizen, you know, being a good bloke in our terms. And you get repeated anecdotes, true or not, of the way that he deals one to one as if,

as if an equal with men on the street or other senators. And there's a nice story about him going outside the palace one day. And he sees a man who looks very like him, strikingly like him. and he says to the guy, did your mother ever work in the palace? And this is a sharp cookie that he's met. And he replies, no, but my father did, thereby impuging Augustus's paternity.

And Augustus just laughed. And there's another nice story, which must be in Suetonia, I think, about how he goes, when he goes into the Senate, to a Senate meeting, he says hello to every senator by name when he goes in. Now, how many other? It could be 600.

You think, A, this is told in his favour. B, this must have taken forever. And C, while this story is being told in its favour, I think it does give you a chink of a glimpse of what the other side might be because there must have been some guy sitting in the Senate when he was doing that, you know, metaphorically being sick. That there's always another side.

You know, when Livia is seen, Mrs. Augusta, is seen, you know, spinning and weaving in the palatine house, in which is the house in the palatine in which he lives, making the clothes for Augustus, and it's apparently on view, there must have been people who said, what a ghastly photo opportunity this is. Well, that comes across really clearly, isn't it, in Tastus account of what people say at the funeral of Augustus.

There are some people who say, well, you know, goodness, he brought peace, he brought prosperity, it's all so much better now than it was, you know, things are really great, and there are other people who say, come on, it's all, it was all his, lust for power, you know, liberty has disappeared, you know, where's the Republic gone? And one of the worst things is Libya, this terrible stepmother who's been brought into the palace, scheming, manipulating. I mean, that's one of the things for Tastus that is the most dreadful aspect of the principal, is that it gives this sort of new kind of quadi public role to the

female members of the imperial family. Well, I'm with you, Catherine, can you tell, Tasset has said, and we'd be talking or implying this great time of great poetry, and he said that the greatest character of Augustus regime was language. Well, I mean, there's a sense in which the sort of traditional terminology of Roman politics is kind of undermined from the inside, if you like. It's still called the Republic, the race publicer, although exactly what's meant by that term is perhaps not entirely clear. Augustus talks about giving back the Republic to the Roman people. So he's talking about him fiddling, fiddling that. Yes.

Yes. And, you know, to return to the... Finescing. Finescing. There's a lot of finessing. A lot of finessing. And Catherine's mention of the funeral, I think, is very important. Because if you replay a different version of the Augustan regime,

which is one of these conspiracies actually worked, then the after history of Augustus would have been told by people who hated him when we have a completely different view. We've got to turn to. the poems of Ovid and adultery. Now then. He made a big play in morality, Augustus. He brought in laws,

I'm sorry, I have to rush you a bit so instead of you saying. Brought in laws condemning adultery. People had three children. They were properly married. They got tax breaks. If you didn't, you didn't get any tax breaks. He shored up the family, condemned adultery, and then ran into his daughters.

His daughter and then his granddaughter, who were, which one of you is going to take this? Catherine. Right. Well, yes. The jewel in Augustus' is crowned, the adultery legislation

in 18 BC, and then in 2 BC, he finds himself in this situation where he can't avoid acknowledging that his own daughter is engaged in

adulterous relationships with not one, but several young Roman aristocrats and their status, the fact that they come from powerful traditional families. She was on her third marriage by this time,

I think third, she was at this time married to Tiberius, poor Julia had been a sort of, first of all, she's married to Marcellus who dies, then she's married to a gripper for whom she produces five children, but then after the death of a gripper, she's married to Tiberius, who is the son of Augustus' new wife, Libya, and she is allegedly involved in adultery.

And Augustus can't avoid this scandal. So to make an example of his own daughter, he actually imposes on her penalties that are more severe than those prescribed by the legislation. She's sent into exile to some sort of. remote and miserable island in the Mediterranean Pandeteria, where she spends the rest of her days and her lovers are either exiled or executed. And happens again with her daughter, with his granddaughter. And indeed it does, yes. Ten years later, in the year 8 AD, Augustus finds himself

having to go through the same procedure, so it seems, with Julia's daughter also called Julia, so we usually refer to them as the elder Julia and the younger Julia. She too ends up in exile And her lovers again A number of young aristocrats And one of them I think it's Silanas decides that Self-imposed exile is the obvious thing to do at that point

But this does him nothing but good As I understand Mary Beard He's seen by Rome to be taking his own laws seriously Even in his own family And he does it And instead of bringing him down, it shores him up Yeah, I mean that's what it looks like and that got picked up even by Robert Grains

in that wonderfully memorable scene in the television series when he goes through these senators and says, is there anybody in Rome who has not slept with my daughter? But it also kind of evokes the paradoxicality of the regime too because Julia is both abominated but is also a kind of feisty woman in some ways, the elder Julia. So it's within the apparent,

current calm control of the Augustine regime, it isn't all boring old family stuff, that there's a sort of feisterness about this woman and the stories that she, of her, get told and retold, slightly admiringly. Can we turn to the poet of it? It's one of perhaps the greatest influence of the three, if we're going to talk about influences.

We've probably not enough time, unfortunately, but the metamorphosis fed in Shakespeare, right up we've got Ted Hughes's translation, and it all over the place. Now, Ovid wrote the Art of Love at a time when people are writing things which are sort of abandoning, the immorality that that might apply, the lack of morality that that might apply and the metamorphosis. He was exiled too. So can you bring Ovid into poetry and morals and the tone of Augustus imperialhip?

Yes. Ovid writes the art of love in 2VC. It's in fact the very year in which the elder Julia is exiled. And it's a very lighthearted, indeed almost comic poem about the art of seduction. So it's how do you find your girl? Where do you find her? How do you get her into bed? And he tells his prospective pupils,

well, the best places to find a girl are in such places as the buildings which Augustus and his family have sponsored. You will find... So the art galleries of the day. Well, the portico of Livia, for example, the wife of Augustus. But also you can find them at such things as triumph ceremonies, where you can find all sorts of girls.

Rome is the capital city of the world. But you can't have been exhal for telling people how to find girls. So how do the exile fit in? I'm sorry, Der Roche. I haven't got much time. It's completely... Anyway, there you go. So he's exiled, which is part of the morality.

Yes. But curiously, he's not exiled until 10 years after he writes the Ars Cemetery. And he's exiled in the same year that the younger Julia, not the elder Julia, is exiled. So there's been... It's a lot of one of those operas, but we just haven't got to have. So there's a huge amount of speculation about, you know, what was behind this. And he says, well, there was the poem. the art of love itself was one of the reasons for his exile.

But he also says he made some kind of mistake and error. But he doesn't specify what this is, rather subtly, actually, because the effect of... It's very annoyingly. Annoyingly, but it means we're still talking about it. Yes, yes. We're still speculating about it. You think it was brilliant.

It was a brilliant. It was a brilliant. Say nothing. So how do you bind this, the business of exiling of it? one of Augustus's great poets and the morality and the error. Sorry to give you all this in a plate. Bring it all together.

What's it saying? It's actually encapsulating the whole wonderful, paradoxical mystery of the Augustan regime. Ovid, the best poet. The whole of Renaissance art is really a commentary on Ovid's metamorphosis. And I would put him ahead of Virgil.

Rome's best poet A lot of nodding going on that. ends up on the Black Sea writing poetry about how awful it is not being in Rome. What could be a better key than that? Catherine? Absolutely. I mean, I totally endorse Mary's claim that of it's the best poet of the Augustan regime.

And in some ways, although he plays all these games with Augustine morality, in some ways he's the poet who is most kind of fully committed to Rome itself. He fantasises about Rome on the Black Sea. He describes the gleaming marble. And Ovid doesn't want to live in the past. He wants to live in the Augustine present. And of course, it's somewhat embarrassing for Augustus

to find this poet who celebrates love and playfulness, claiming the Augustine age as his own age. And at the end of the Metamorphoses, he also lays claim to the Roman Empire as the kind of matrix through which Ovid's name is going to be spread throughout the world. Well, thank you for being such good support. On that one, thank you very much,

Mary Beard, Catherine, Edens, and Duncan, Ken. really. 1600 years on next week, Elizabethan revenge tragedists. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as thinking aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit bbc.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4.