Paradox and the Marvellous in Augustan Literature and Culture

The literature and art of Augustan Rome are often thought of as the product of an age of high classicism, characterized by maturity, balance, and harmony. This volume examines the presence of what might be seen as an unclassical love of paradox and the marvellous, and shows that it is an important strain in the poetry of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, as well as in prose works of history and rhetoric, and in the Augustan visual arts. The volume includes chapters by some of the leading experts in the Augustan period as well as a number of younger scholars. It will be of interest to all students of Roman literature and culture.

1 - Introduction: Paradox and the marvellous in Augustan literature and culture
2 - Horace's Ars poetica and the marvellous
3 - Where the wild things are: locating the marvellous in Augustan wall-painting
4 - Against nature? Some Augustan responses to man-made marvels
5 - Virgil: a paradoxical poet?
6 - The question of the marvellous in the Georgics of Virgil
7 - In search of the lost Hercules: strategies of the marvellous in the Aeneid
8 - Thaumatographia, or `What is a theme?'
9 - Phaethon and the monsters
10 - Prodigiosa mendacia uatum. Responses to the marvellous in Ovid's narrative of Perseus (Metamorphoses 4-5)
11 - Encountering the fantastic: expectations, forms of communication, reactions
12 - Constructing a narrative of mira deum: the story of Philemon and Baucis (Ovid Metamorphoses 8)
13 - Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.416-51: noua monstra and the foedera naturae
14 - Alien divinities. How to tame monsters through aetiology
15 - Ordering wonderland: Ovid's Pythagoras and the Augustan vision
16 - Delusions of grandeur: Lucretian `passages' in Livy
17 - The strange art of the sententious declaimer

Philip Hardie is Senior Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge.