Poetic Autonomy in Ancient Rome

Abstract

Poetic Autonomy in Ancient Rome offers a major new approach to the study of ancient Roman poetry. In the modern interpretation of art and literature, autonomy is a central concern: ‘aesthetic autonomy’ refers to the idea that art (literature, music, visual art) belongs to a realm of its own, separate from ordinary activities and everyday concerns. It is often asserted that aesthetic autonomy is a distinctly modern concept and cannot be applied to other historical periods. This book, however, argues that poets in ancient Rome employed their own ‘rhetoric of autonomy’” that is distinct from yet comparable to modern ‘aesthetic autonomy’. Roman poets represented their poetry as different from other cultural products, not reliant on external criteria of value, and socially and politically independent. Chapters devoted to close readings of Lucilius, Catullus, Propertius, Horace, Virgil, Tibullus, Statius, Martial, and Juvenal examine how these poets sought to define themselves and their poetry in autonomist terms. This study of ideas of autonomy in Roman poetry explores both differences and points of contact between modern and ancient aesthetic thought, and engages with major modern thinkers such as Kant, Adorno, and Habermas. Interpreters of Roman poetry have long struggled with questions of aesthetics and history, poetry and propaganda, loyal and dissident poetic attitudes, but have rarely considered the Roman rhetoric of autonomy that motivates and informs these familiar debates. Poetic Autonomy in Ancient Rome affords fresh insight into ancient literary texts and reinvigorates the dialogue between ancient and modern aesthetics.