Julius Caesar in Augustan Rome

Abstract

IN 1843, HORACE'S SwISS COMMENTATOR Johann Kaspar von Orelli noted in an obiter dictum that the Augustan poets made little fanfare over the name of Julius Caesar. He assumed that they had shied away instinctively from praising a man whose accomplishments might threaten to overshadow Augustus' own.' Other critics took the point about the low visibility of Caesar, but suspected that the initiative must have proceeded directly from Augustus. Various hypotheses were bruited: perhaps Augustus was jealous of Caesar's superior military gifts; perhaps he was uncomfortable about Caesar's destruction of the Republic; anxious to divert attention from similarities between Caesar's methods and his own; and so on. In this way, during the course of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, the poets' silence about Caesar became a minor motif of scholarly discussion.2 In 1988, the idea is familiar to all as one of the distinctive emphases of Sir Ronald Syme. Syme took up the suggestion that the Augustan poets had downplayed Caesar and lent it much greater currency than it had had before, partly by force of personal authority and partly by the assiduity with which he preached it.3 But a still more important factor in his presentation of the