Content area
Abstract
Carried Away by Bacchus: The Power and Politics of Bacchic Inspiration in the Augustan Poets, explores the intersection of poetry, politics, and religion at Rome through the figure of Bacchus in Augustan literature. The first chapter explains the power dynamics of poetic inspiration in Greek lyric poetry that looks ahead to Horace's Odes . This demonstrates the salient features that the Roman poets share with their Greek predecessors, particularly the notion that poetic inspiration constitutes a power struggle in which the inspired poet paradoxically strives for poetic autonomy from the very gods on whom he relies for assistance. The second chapter explores the social and political ramifications of Bacchus' cult at Rome during the Republic, looking at Livy's account of the Bacchanalia in conjunction with the Pentheus episode of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Here I explain the significance of Bacchic themes and patterns in a Roman context through a discussion of how Livy's account of the Bacchanalian "conspiracy" and Ovid's version of the Pentheus episode import into a Roman context the tensions and paradoxes outlined in chapter one. The third chapter examines how the "Bacchic poetics" of Horace's Odes involve initiation into the god's rites, which impart an exclusive status to the poet and enables him to successfully balance his poetic and political lives. I show that Horace uses the figure of Bacchus, and related figures, to explore his relationship to the emperor and to address issues of inclusion and exclusion in the emergent sociopolitical order of Augustan Rome. In Ovid's Tristia, the topic of chapter four, the poet reflects on an unsuccessful attempt at maneuvering the dynamics of sociopolitical engagement at Rome and calls on Bacchus to help him persuade the emperor to recall him from exile. However, rather than empower the poet to write panegyric, as is the case with Horace, Bacchus provides Ovid with a means of expressing his position of inferiority in his relationship with Augustus. Bacchic inspiration is as much about empowering the poet to praise the emperor as it is a means to assert authority and negotiate power struggles in Augustan society.
