The Fabrication of Tradition: Horace, Augustus and the Secular Games

Abstract

Now, at this season when selected girlsAnd the boys who are about to venture upon them,Though still in bud, sing what will please London…(C.H. Sisson, 1974)Rome's first emperor proved remarkably successful in shaping a positive image for himself in his own and subsequent eras. Here was a man who came to power through that most criminal of means, through victory in civil war, and yet managed to persuade his own and succeeding generations of his right to rule. How did the enthusiastic proscriber of the innocent and the brutal destroyer of Perusia transform himself into the sublime Augustus? Here was one of Rome's great militarists, a man who, by one reckoning, doubled the size of the Roman empire. How could this warlord be perceived as a ‘prince of peace’? One answer to these questions is that this transformation of perception, both ancient and modern, was achieved through die emperor's promotion of a complex of ideas designed to accomplish precisely this perceptual shift, a complex of ideas which we variously call ‘Augustan ideology’, ‘Augustan discourse’ or even ‘Augustan cultural thematics’.