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In Our Time

The Augustan Age

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.69.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2009

⏱️ 42 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests Mary Beard, Catharine Edwards and Duncan Kennedy discuss the political regime and cultural influence of the Roman Emperor Augustus. Called the Augustan Age, it was a golden age of literature with Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphosis among its treasures. But they were forged amidst creeping tyranny and the demands of literary propaganda. Augustus tightened public morals, funded architectural renewal and prosecuted adultery. Ovid was exiled for his saucy love poems but Virgil's Aeneid, a celebration of Rome's grand purpose, was supported by the regime. Indeed, Augustus saw literature, architecture, culture and morality as vehicles for his values. He presented his regime as a return to old Roman virtues of forbearance, valour and moral rectitude, but he created a very new form of power. He was the first Roman Emperor and, above all, he established the idea that Rome would be an empire without end. Catharine Edwards is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck College, University of London; Duncan Kennedy is Professor of Latin Literature and the Theory of Criticism at the University of Bristol; Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at Cambridge University.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Thanks for downloading the Inartime podcast. For more details about Inartime and for our terms of use,

0:05.4

please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for. I hope you enjoy the program.

0:11.5

Hello, and Julius Caesar's wheel was read earlier than intended.

0:14.9

It contained gifts. Gardens by the Tiber were given to the Roman people.

0:19.4

Money was attributed, but the chief beneficuous Caesar's nephew, Octavius,

0:24.1

whom he adopted as his son. To be Caesar's heir was a troubled and public legacy,

0:28.6

but from it Octavius fashioned a position of power unparalleled before and perhaps since.

0:33.2

He was the first Roman Emperor, and he called himself Augustus. His reign,

0:37.9

Augustine age, was a time of strange connections between politics, peace, literature,

0:42.2

and encroaching tyranny. It saw the rebuilding of Rome from brick into marble, the flowering

0:47.0

of Virgil, Ovid and Horus, and the slow but relentless turning of the Roman Republic into the

0:51.9

Roman Empire. With me to discuss the Augustine age,

0:55.8

Catherine Edwards, Professor of Classics and Ancient History,

0:58.7

Birkbeck College London University, Duncan Kennedy, Professor of Latin literature,

1:03.2

and the theory of criticism at the University of Bristol, and Mary Beard, Professor of Classics,

1:08.1

at Cambridge University. Can you give us an overview of what we mean when we talk about

1:13.5

your Augustine age, Mary Beard? Well, really, it is a or perhaps the key moment in Roman history.

1:21.1

It's a key moment in the history of Europe. It's the period across the divide between the

1:29.2

first century BC and the first century AD, when for the second time in Rome's history,

1:35.9

Monarchy was established replacing what had been democracy. Rome had been originally governed by

1:42.0

kings, then been democratic in a funny kind of way, and at the end of the first century BC,

1:50.1

we get the advent of another form of autocracy under the emperor Augustus, who is looked on forever

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