Imaginary Rome: Utopia and Empire in Late Republican and Augustan Literature

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Alexander Kirichenko
• Subject Area: Greek and Latin Philology
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 431064683

The goal of this project is to write a monograph on the role of the utopian imagination in Roman literature from Lucretius to Ovid. The book is supposed to become a sequel to the study of utopianism in Greek literature from Hesiod to Theocritus, which I completed earlier this year. My main focus will be not only on the function of the utopian imagination in the production of ideology but also on the role that it plays in the development of Roman literature. I will argue that individual texts to be analyzed in this book differ from each other not only because they imagine different kinds of ideal realities but also because the conceptual structures of those ideal realities inform different modes of literary meaning production exemplified by the texts themselves. I will concentrate on some of the central works of Roman literature (Lucretius’ De rerum natura, Cicero’s De re publica, Sallust’s Catiline, Livy’s Ab urbe condita, the poetry of Vergil and Horace, Roman love elegy, as well as Ovid’s Metamorphoses and exile poetry) in order to investigate how they project ideal realities inspired by Greek literature onto their own ideological constructs of the Roman Empire. What should become apparent as a result is that these texts, some of which may seem to be at best tangentially linked to each other, in fact form an intertextual continuum within which new literary discourses arise in response to utopian constructs propounded elsewhere in literature. By pointing to both the conceptual similarities and the historically conditioned differences among these texts, I hope to be able to contribute to a better understanding of the fundamental role that literature plays in conceptualizing political reality in Rome from Late Republic to the end of the rule of Augustus.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants