Entre mots et marbre. Les métamorphoses d’Auguste

The success of the sumptuous exhibition “Moi, Auguste, empereur de Rome”, which was organised in Paris in 2014 for the bi-millennium of the princeps’ death, shows that Octavian-Augustus, who founded the principate while defending the cause of liberty and res publica, is still nowadays fascinating people. Yet, concurrently with the official iconography, literature gives valued testimonies on the political, legal, moral, social, and cultural ambivalence which depicts the prince’s action and the set-up of the new regime. But, even if they have been lucid witnesses of their time, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Livy, and the other writers played also a crucial part in the renewing of artistic forms and in the drawing up of a new political imagery. The articles collected in this volume, which originates from the symposium “Augustus in words”, organised in the wake of the Parisian exhibition, focus on the relationship – sometimes harmonious, sometimes conflicting, but always ambivalent – between Politics and Literature, around Augustus’ image.