ABSTRACT
For the Roman aristocrat, the shared inheritance of Republican heroes provides a store of models and links which may allow them to regard Augustus as a present-day hero. Horace organises the Odes, weaving personal, national, civic and poetic themes together into a mosaic to mime Augustan culture. There is a positive reference to Augustus as a 'founder and restorer of temples', as Livy discusses an inscription discovered by Augustus, although he ultimately questions the historical reliability of the information unearthed by the emperor. That rhetoric worked, and Virgil's poem works not just as Augustan propaganda but as a Roman poem, precisely because the ideology of farming held a powerful position in the collective consciousness. Many modern scholars think that the child referred to is the hoped-for product of the political marriage between Antony and Octavian's sister Octavia, which took place that year in an attempt to forge a peace between the two most powerful men in the Roman world.
