Power and poetry: Augustus’s image in early Principate literature

Abstract

Throughout his rule, the Emperor Augustus accumulated honors and powers that allowed him to control the Roman public life. The consulship, the almost religious aura arising from the Augustan rank, the total command of the armies, among others, helped increase his authority over the republican institutions. However, the legitimacy of the princeps’s might did not rely solely on the concentration of republican powers and titles. In fact, the sovereign also used a cultural system capable of assisting in the consolidation of his power and in building a positive consensus about his government. In this sense, he stimulated the literary production of his own times, bearing in mind that the works of Latin poets would be of great value in achieving that consensus. That said, the aim of this work is to analyze the ways in which Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid depicted the imperial power in their verses