#augustus

Augustus be like: I’m such a good dad look at my three ulcers perfect children!

Augustus be writing the res gestae like: me meME it’s all about MEbitch

no bitch i created myself through propaganda

Eastern luxury as a corrupting influence is everywhere in Roman moralizing literature. Livy claims that the moral decline of Rome began in 187 BCE caused by the return of the Roman army from what would become the Roman province of Asia (Western Turkey). Sallust says that Sulla’s return from Asia in 83 BCE had a similar effect.

But I am very keen on amplifying the idea that by locating the foundation story of the Romans in a figure that descends from the east, the seeds of destruction are already sown within the Romans themselves. Thus, at some level, the Augustan cultural project (i.e. Vergil’s Aenied) focuses on returning to the morals of the past while simultaneously creating a narrative that undermines those exact morals.

Or maybe it is not that simple. Maybe it is an attempt to integrate eastern influence as a foundational aspect of what it means to be Roman (how would that sit for a traditionalist?!). Vergil doesn’t shy away from Aeneas’ effeminacy when he makes note of how Aeneas and the Trojans in general are dressed and styled. The offspring of Aeneas and his son Ascanius cannot escape that eastern element when they mix with the native Latins (even though Juno makes it explicit that she wants it eradicated so that none of what is Trojan infects the new mixed race, Aen. 12.820-830). Jupiter responds with commixti corpore tantum subsident Teucri, “The Trojans having been mixed only in body will remain”; a weird way of saying that the only thing Trojan about the resulting mixture will be physical. Thus Romans, according to this narrative, are at some level physically eastern.

For Ovid, women inhabit the landscape as readers and creators of meaning as well as objects of representation; it is by their perversae mentes that the Augustan message of moral rebirth is resisted, reconsidered, and (ultimately) rejected. Far from being passive objects, or even passive recipients, of ideological statements, women for Ovid are a disruptive presence in the landscape, as they refuse to see what they are supposed to see, to imagine what they are supposed to imagine, and to do what they are supposed to do.

• Kristina Milnor, Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life

thoodleoo:

modern day ancient rome au where ovid gets exiled for starting a kung pow penis on one of augustus’s tweets about his new adultery laws

Can we take a moment to appreciate that, even though Livia only had one miscarriage and never gave Augustus an heir that he never divorced her? Say what you will about these two, but that shows an insane amount of respect between them. I don’t think they were “in love” in the modern sense, where passion is highly prized and a relationship is considered failed if it doesn’t have it, but I think they respected and prized each other greatly.

doodles from today