Lire la Ville 2. Fragments d'une archéologie littéraire de Rome à l'époque flavienne

This book gathers together a set of papers first delivered as lectures at a conference held in Geneva in 2016. The aim of the colloquium was to study the relationship between Latin literature and urban space in Flavian Rome. An earlier volume, published in the same series in 2014 (Lire la Ville, fragments d’une archéologie littéraire de Rome antique, ScriptaAntiqua 65), had focused mainly on texts from the Augustan period, in an attempt to show how literary allusions to the real spaces of Rome and its environs were not limited to the communication of simple topographical information, but also reflected an entire imaginary closely linked to the political and monumental building programmes of Augustus.

In light of that study, it seemed appropriate to try to investigate these same literary interactions after the end of the first imperial dynasty, and to see whether they were still to be found in operation after the advent of a new dynasty and in relation to the second great urban transformation of Rome. The fire of 64 CE, the upheavals which accompanied the death of Nero, and the civil war which followed all created the conditions for a cycle of reconstructions and constructions comparable to that which followed the events of the end of the Republic. But an original aspect of the Flavian context is that its poets and prose writers are greatly inspired by their Augustan predecessors, both following them to a considerable extent but also taking new paths. This more or less explicit literary system echoes the way in which the new dynasty intends to position itself in relation to the old. Eleven contributions make up this literary portrait of Rome around poets and writers like Statius, Martial, and Pliny the Elder, a portrait that reflects the main outlines of the new urban landscape and the major monuments built by the Flavians. This literary enterprise went on to serve as a model for the representations of Renaissance Florence of the Medicis, a striking proof of its longevity and influence.