The Poetics of Power: Latin Poetic Responses to Early Imperial Iconography by Nandini B. Pandey

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Poetics of Power: Latin Poetic Responses to Early Imperial Iconography by Nandini B. Pandey Spencer Cole Nandini B. Pandey. The Poetics of Power: Latin Poetic Responses to Early Imperial Iconography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xiii, 302. $105.00. ISBN 978-1-108-42265-9. Augustus' consolidation of autocratic rule is often credited to a concerted cultural project that normalized the emergent Principate with a pervasive new symbolic language of power. Paul Zanker's influential The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor 1988) is a classic analysis of this Augustan "cultural program" that serves as a touchstone for Pandey's erudite and engaging book. Like Zanker—and G. K. Galinsky's Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction (Princeton 1996)—Pandey has a holistic approach that explores dialogic interactions of artifacts and architecture, ritual, and literary texts. Pandey's primary point of departure is a deeper engagement with Augustan poets, with a focus on their "public responses to imperial iconography as a tool for dissecting, debating, even disrupting imperial power" (5). Also central to this study is a sustained analysis of how these poets enact a collaborative public process of constructing authority in the formative years of imperial rule at Rome. For Pandey, imperial authority is not simply imposed by a unified, top-down master plan to orchestrate public perceptions; it also depends on critical affective roles of the populace/audience that determine meanings and delegate power. An important new dimension is therefore introduced into the conventional poet/ princeps power nexus: both modes of imperial and poetic authority are, in Pandey's estimation, produced by "a mutually constitutive relationship with a judging audience" (6). This approach is informed by reader response and reception theory, and questions about the perils of reconstructing ancient interpretive communities are answered with an apt assemblage of ancient evidence and modern scholarship. There is also an astute nod to the phenomenon of 21st-century fandom and its decentralized, social-media powered "participatory culture," although conceiving of ancient Roman social communication as a "bottom-up, largely unregulated process of distributed content creation by individuals from all rungs of society" (10) may be an anachronistic overcorrection of the top-down model that this book interrogates. The argument is structured around four symbolically rich Augustan sites and spectacles: Caesar's comet (Sidus Iulium), the Palatine hill, the Forum Augustum, and early imperial triumphal ritual. The first case-study (chapter 2: "History in Light of the Sidus Iulium") realizes a programmatic goal of the book "to dismantle the impression of finality and conscious design that still attaches to many Augustan symbols" (8). Pandey showcases an agile command of a range of ancient sources (especially literary and numismatic here) and offers powerful proofs of authorial and audience agency in developing and reshaping imperial imagery. The comet that appeared in 44 bce at Julius Caesar's funeral games becomes a principal symbol of Caesar's apotheosis, a symbol that has been seen since Servius as a product of Octavian's masterly spin in response to the fortuitous astronomical event. Pandey counters this reductive, retrospective causality with detailed analysis of representations of the comet on early coinage, and with close readings that track its decades-spanning reception in Horace, Propertius, Vergil, and Ovid. This rich chapter unravels a complex heterogeneous DNA for the comet imagery that belies notions of a calculated early cultural initiative directed by the future emperor. Pandey acknowledges that Augustan poets and their readers represent a "narrow Roman demographic" (4), but attention to public spaces and spectacles [End Page 228] in chapters 3 to 5 facilitates consideration of how broader audiences could participate in the generation of meaning and the granting of power. As with the comet coins, emphasis is placed on divergent receptions at different times and places as imperial buildings and rituals come into focus. Tracing representations of the Augustan Palatine complex from Propertius (2.31/32) through a later Ovidian visitation (Tristia 3.1) again reveals manifold, multi-year accretions of meaning rather than a preconceived program systematically imposed after Actium. The Aeneid plays a big part in this book: discussions of "internal audiences" that figure readers as co-viewers...