ABSTRACT
This is a remarkable promise of a future epic poem which will celebrate Octavian’s military exploits at the furthest ends of the world, a promise that will be fulfilled, if in rather oblique terms, in the Aeneid. The passage is important in several respects. First, Virgil explicitly promises an appropriation of Greek literature for Roman purposes and even claims that all of Greece will abandon its celebration of its festivals to participate in his festival. Second, he introduces his poetic exploit in distinctly militaristic terms, as if he were a triumphing general. Third, he uses the monumental image of a temple to depict his poetry, so creating an equivalence with the temples in Rome built and restored by Octavian (Achievements of the Divine Augustus 19-21). Fourth, he situates his own architectural achievement not in Rome but in his home city of Mantua, beside the river Mincius, so linking Roman military and political power with the land and people of Italy in a way that matched Octavian’s own drive to unify Italy. Fifth, he places Caesar ‘as patron god’ in the centre of the temple, elevating Octavian to extraordinary superhuman status and responding to that with his own role as the priest in charge of the sacrifices and ceremony. And sixth, he promises an ecphrasis (see Chapter 14.11) of carvings on the temple doors which will glorify the military achievements of Caesar, here called ‘our Romulus’, a reference to one of the names Octavian contemplated taking before he settled on ‘Augustus’ in 27 BCE. This elaborate evocation of a physical monument is at once a high compliment to Caesar, an assertion of Virgil’s future poetic ambitions, and a statement that political leaders need poets.
