Chapter 3 - Questioning Consensus on the Palatine

Summary

After victory at Actium left him master of the Roman world, Augustus represented himself to the city by building a temple to Apollo closely integrated with his own home, a library, and a portico on the Palatine Hill (28 BCE). The poets, however, largely sidestep the political messages of this building complex, instead asserting interpretive liberty by voicing perspectives marginalized by Augustus’ supposed consensus universorum (consensus of all the orders). Propertius’ elegies 2.31 and 32 define an aesthetic and moral code of toleration in tacit resistance to Augustus’ intrusions into private life and attempts to control female bodies. The Danaids of the portico prompt meditation, by Horace and Vergil, on individuals’ moral autonomy in arbitrating among the competing claims of justice, clemency, and obedience to paternal authority. In his revisitation of the Palatine from exile in Tristia 3.1, Ovid shows how Augustus’ self-advertising falls short of reality – not least, with his exclusion of books from the Palatine’s supposedly inclusive public library, quickly corrected by the people’s welcoming hands and private judgment. Together, these poets verbally reconstruct the Palatine as a counter-imperial space that celebrates readers’ mental autonomy even as their bodies and books were coming under patriomonialist control.