Imaginary Rome: Utopia and Empire in Late Republican and Augustan Literature
Final Report Abstract
The most important outcome of this project is a monograph (Imaginary Rome: Poetry and Empire in the Republican and Augustan Periods). The book is a seamless continuation of my previous monograph recently published by the Oxford University Press (Greek Literature and the Ideal: The Pragmatics of Space from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Age). I approach the development of non-dramatic Roman poetry from Ennius to Ovid as the next stage (in fact, a series of stages) in the history of “the literary pragmatics of space” that I began to investigate in my study of Greek literature. My goal is to show that, like their Greek predecessors, Roman poets constructed schematic simulacra of contemporary geopolitical configurations and in the process created ideal realities that functioned as vanishing points endowing political geography with a sense of purposeful structure. The history of Roman poetry emerges as a process whereby Roman poets transformed the “spatial pragmatics” of previous literature (both Greek and Latin) in order to account for the shifts within the political space of the Roman Empire. My hope is that my investigation of the history of Roman poetry as a history of adapting inherited patterns of “spatial pragmatics” to the task of conceptualizing Rome’s transformation into an imperium sine fine will allow us to recognize the obsessive intertextuality of Roman poetry and its status as an imperial project as two sides of the same coin. Roman poetry’s engagement with previous literature is an integral part of what could perhaps best be called “diachronic interspatiality.” In my understanding, “diachronic interspatiality” is precisely what allows Roman poetry to gain conceptual mastery over both imperial space and imperial history: it is a process by which both Greek political spaces and their idealized simulacra in Greek poetry become subsumed into the Roman Empire and Rome’s imperial poetry and by which schematic simulacra of Rome itself are added into the mix as they, too, become reshaped into ever new versions of “imaginary Rome.” The book consists of an introduction and seven chapters in which I discuss the works of Ennius, Catullus, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid.
Publications
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„Ovids wohl komponiertes Leben.“ In: Möller, M. (Hrsg.) Ovid-Handbuch. Stuttgart 2020, 162-166.
Alexander Kirichenko
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„Sex, Macht und Fiktion in den Metamorphosen Ovids.“ Thersites: Journal for Transcultural Presences and Diachronic Identities from Antiquity to Date, 11 (2020), 97-116.
Alexander Kirichenko
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Callimachus Romanus. Inventing Origins? Aetiological Thinking in Greek and Roman Antiquity, 65-100. BRILL.
Kirichenko, Alexander
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Ovids Amores und die römische Liebesdichtung. Ovid-Handbuch, 46-52. J.B. Metzler.
Kirichenko, Alexander
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The Transformations of the Writing Body: Rhetoric, Monumental Art, and Poetry in Ovid’sMetamorphoses. Symbolae Osloenses, 95(1), 104-158.
Kirichenko, Alexander
