ABSTRACT
In this chapter I attempt a deliberately, I fear provocatively, summary survey of some features of certain texts which will be recognized when I refer to them under the familiar — and yet somewhat oxymoronic — rubric ‘Augustan poetry’: these two adjectives, indeed, and their doubleness as well, are no doubt part of what is there, somewhere, to be surveyed. I shall invoke styles of discourse for which I am, certainly and (given the antiquity of the texts involved) appropriately, indebted to other scholars and critics, 1 distinguished in this field and in others too: but, apart from what this footnote acknowledges, I have avoided the nomenclature of either parricide or parasitism, and chosen rather to use the space this format allows2 to expatiate a little upon two bodies of text which have particularly seized me and which permit at once a concentration and a diffusion of many of those features of the larger ‘Augustan’ corpus to which I shall be attending. These are the Epistles of Horace and the fourth book of Propertius’ Elegies. In the last and longest section of this chapter I discuss these in relation to the place of history, society, truth and desire in Augustan poetry - and vice versa - and, again, in relation to the function of what (if a portmanteau word can claim the excuse of brevity) one might hopefully name ‘authoriality’ as it stands towards these places, placings, displacements and replacements. The three preceding, shorter sections consider respectively some
general issues of critical theory, the notion of ‘Augustan poetry’ and a few of its refractions in the last generation of classical critical scholarship.
