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Commemorating Augustus

Commemorating Augustus

Category Archives: Conference

Afterlives of Augustus, AD 14-2014

13 Friday Apr 2018

Posted by weavingsandunpickings in Augustus, Conference, Publications, Research

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Four years and a lot of hard work after the Commemorating Augustus conference, I’m pleased to be able to announce that the edited volume arising from it is being published this month. The volume aims to trace Augustus’ reception history from his death to the present day, and it is entitled Afterlives of Augustus, AD 14-2014.

Afterlives of Augustus front cover

A full listing is available now on the Cambridge University Press catalogue. The official publication date is 26 April, although in fact a few advance copies were spotted on the CUP stand at the Classical Association conference a few days ago. You can read some excerpts, including about half of my own introductory chapter, here.

The full table of contents reads as follows:

  1. Best of emperors or subtle tyrant? Augustus the ambivalent. Penelope J. Goodman
  2. The last days of Augustus. Alison E. Cooley
  3. Seneca’s Augustus: (re)calibrating the imperial model for a young prince. Steven J. Green
  4. Embodying the Augustan in Suetonius and beyond. Patrick Cook
  5. The First Emperor? Augustus and Julius Caesar as rival founders of the principate. Joseph Geiger
  6. Julian Augustus on Augustus: Octavian in the Caesars. Shaun Tougher
  7. Augustus: the harbinger of Peace. Orosius’ reception of Augustus in Historiae Adversus Paganos. Michael C. Sloan
  8. The Byzantine Augustus: the reception of the first Roman emperor in the Byzantine tradition. Kosta Simić
  9. Augustus and the Carolingians. Jürgen Strothmann
  10. Augustus as visionary: the legend of the Augustan altar in S. Maria in Aracoeli, Rome. Kerry Boeye and Nandini B. Pandey
  11. From peacemaker to tyrant: the changing image of Augustus in Italian Renaissance political thought. Robert Black
  12. Augustus in Morisot’s ‘Book 8’ of the Fasti. Bobby Xinyue
  13. The proconsul and the emperor: John Buchan’s Augustus. James T. Chlup
  14. In search of a new princeps: Günther Birkenfeld and his Augustus novels, 1934–1984. Martin Lindner
  15. Augustus in the rhetorical tradition. Kathleen S. Lamp
  16. The Parthian arch of Augustus and its legacy: memory manipulation in imperial Rome and modern scholarship. Maggie L. Popkin
  17. Augustus and the politics of the past in television documentaries today. Fiona Hobden
  18. Augusto reframed: exhibiting Augustus in bimillennial Rome. Anna Clareborn
  19. Augustus’ (non)reception in America and its context. Karl Galinsky

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Augustus is dead, long live Augustus!

19 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by weavingsandunpickings in Anniversaries, Augustus, Conference, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

So this is it – the day itself. It is exactly two thousand years to the day since Augustus died. And, as it happens, 2042 since he took up his first consulship as well.

That second anniversary in itself tells us quite a lot about the sort of man we are commemorating today, because it was not normal for consuls to take up their office in mid-August. Conventionally, consuls entered office on January 1st, and they were supposed to be over forty years old when they did so. Augustus took up his first consulship at the age of nineteen, after the two elected consuls had died in battle alongside him, and he had co-opted their legions, marched at their head to Rome and put himself forward for one of the vacant offices. It’s not that he took it by force. He was very careful to ensure that he was properly elected. But eight loyal legions hanging around the city are hardly conducive to free and fair elections. In fact, Suetonius claims that one of his centurions openly declared that his sword would make Augustus consul if the senate would not cooperate.

This is the man we are dealing with, then – audacious, opportunistic, unafraid to wield force and bend rules, and yet quite well aware of how crucial it was to position himself within a framework of legitimacy and consensus. The same boldness and astuteness can be traced throughout his career, even if he was able to dial back a little on the wielding of force once he had done it enough to wipe out his major political rivals. Sometimes things came close to falling apart for him. Pliny gives a great list of his mishaps and close shaves, several of which could very easily have ended in his death or political overthrow – and history would certainly be quite different if they had. But the risks don’t seem to have put him off, and as things turned out his gambles by and large paid off. He was able to die peacefully in his bed at the age of 75, surrounded by his family, widely believed by contemporary Romans to have saved the state from chaos and already regarded by many provincials as a god.

Whether his life and career can be judged ‘good’ or ‘bad’ overall depends entirely on perspective. In other words, good or bad for whom? A lot of the contemporary expressions of admiration seem to me to be very genuine, but it’s also clear that not everyone loved him, even in his own day. We can see that from the political opposition and conspiracies alone, and of course there must have been many others who resented or even despised him, but were powerless to do anything about it and whose voices are now lost to history.

This is why I called my project from the start ‘Commemorating Augustus’ rather than (for example) ‘Celebrating Augustus’. But the more I have read and thought about memory and commemoration, the more I have realised that even a ‘commemoration’ is not a neutral act. This is clear above all from the sort of people who don’t get commemorated. I noticed two years ago that people were hardly going crazy for the bimillennium of Caligula’s birth, and similarly the only people who ‘commemorated’ the 100th anniversary of Hitler’s birth on 20th April 1989 were a small number of neo-Nazis. In fact, the town council of Braunau in Austria, where he was born, marked the event by erecting a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in front of the family house instead, with an inscription reading “For Peace, Freedom and Democracy. Never Again Fascism. Millions of Dead Remind [us]”. It is an exhortation to remember, then, but one which turns the act of commemoration around, and ensures that it reflects on Hitler only in an utterly negative manner.

Set against those sorts of examples, it becomes clear that if we in the twenty-first century are ‘Commemorating Augustus’ – and we are, on an epic scale – we are saying that he is worth remembering. It is an acknowledgement that he is important to us, and a tacit agreement that it is reasonable for him to be important. But I think I am comfortable with that – and it is engaging with his reception history in the course of this project which has really made me so. The Augustus we think we know is not a real historical individual from 2000 years ago, but an echo mediated to us through multiple centuries of re-imaginings, starting in his lifetime and continuing right up to the present day. This means that when we commemorate Augustus, we are actually commemorating an evolving tradition which has retained its currency for (over) 2000 years, and all the many people who have sustained and transformed it along the way. The tradition in its own right is fascinating and worth commemorating, and that’s what I hope we will be doing at the Commemorating Augustus conference all day today.

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Augustus in CA News

14 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by weavingsandunpickings in Augustus, Conference, Publications

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The latest copy of Classical Association News soared through my letter-box this morning, complete with a little article which I wrote for it about the Augustan bimillennial commemorations going on across the world this year:

My CA news articleThis is very welcome timing, because it means this piece has reached its readers just in time to alert them to one of those events – my own Commemorating Augustus conference – with two days still to go before late booking fees kick in. If you haven’t booked your place yet and would like to do so, you have until midnight on 16th July to get yourself set up! Full registration and payment details are available here.

As for the article, if you’d like to read the whole thing, you can take out membership of the Classical Association, which includes a twice-yearly copy of CA News, here. I would highly recommend CA membership anyway as a great way to keep in touch with new developments and events in the world of Classics, and with other people who share the same interest. But obviously I have a particular vested interest in recommending it just now! I’d also like to thank the CA News editor, Tony Keen,for escorting my article into print, and for providing the excellent accompanying image.

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Conference booking open

19 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by weavingsandunpickings in Augustus, Conference, Leeds, Public talks

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The main event of the Commemorating Augustus project this year will be its conference. In line with the project as a whole, the conference deals with receptions of Augustus across the 2000 years between his death and the present day, and it takes place in Leeds right over the very date of Augustus’ bimillennium, from Monday 18th to Wednesday 20th August 2014. We have a great line-up of speakers from across the globe, offering papers which cover the full span of the 2000 years at stake, so it promises to be a very exciting event.

On other parts of the project website, you can find full details of the conference programme, including speakers, titles and abstracts, and details of how to register, including the various different packages and options available.

But the main purpose of this post is to make sure that followers of this blog know that booking is open, and also that a late fee of £25 will apply to any bookings made from 17th July onwards. This means that there is just under a month remaining to make a booking without incurring the fee. Booking closes entirely on 1st August.

Meanwhile, this is also a good time to mention that I am giving a free talk for the general public entitled ‘2000 years of Augustus: the world view’ next Thursday, 26th June, at Leeds City Museum. The talk runs from 13:15-13:45, and is part of the popular Classics in our Lunchtimes series. Full details are available here.

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Fancy taking part in some Augustus-related research?

07 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by weavingsandunpickings in Augustus, Conference, Research

≈ 4 Comments

As regular visitors to this web page will know, a major element in the Commemorating Augustus project is the conference on receptions of Augustus which will take place this August, over the bimillennium itself. Loads of really exciting papers are lined up for the conference, and I’m currently working on organising them into themed panels so that we can put the programme and abstracts up on this site.

For the time being, though, two of the conference speakers need your help. Melissa Beattie and Amanda Potter will be giving a paper on audience responses to the characters in HBO’s Rome, and would like to interview anyone who has seen the series.

Octavian triumph

You don’t have to be an expert on Roman history, Augustus, or television drama, or even to have a particularly in-depth knowledge of the show, to help with this. As far as I know, it doesn’t matter what country you are based in either. They are simply interested in exploring what viewers of all kinds made of what they saw.

This is Melissa’s call for participants, with details of what to do if you’re interested:

Did you watch the BBC/HBO series Rome? If so, would you be willing to take a short interview by email (around 30 minutes) for a research paper? Please contact Melissa at meb19@aber.ac.uk for details. Your assistance would be greatly appreciated and your identities and responses will be kept strictly confidential.

Do get in touch with her if you fancy a nice chat about the series!

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One year today! A project update

19 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by weavingsandunpickings in Augustus, Conference, Public talks, Research

≈ 1 Comment

Today marks exactly one year until the bimillennium of Augustus’ death. Put another way, he died 1999 years ago today.

That’s actually a rather neat illustration of how round-number anniversaries work. We are one year closer to the event in time this year than we will be next year, but there is still some strange sense that next year we will be closer. It is pure numerology really. Like any anniversary, it is really just about the resemblance between two dates. Simply put, 19th August 2014 matches up with 19th August AD 14 better than 19th August 2013 does.

But it’s also about the fact that we can’t think about everything all the time. This time next year I will be in the middle of running a big conference about Augustus, and the ways in which people have responded to him over the past two thousand years. I’m really looking forward to it and it’s definitely something worth doing – but obviously I couldn’t do that every single day. Round number anniversaries also work for us because they help us to focus our interests, spurring us on to do something appropriate on a designated occasion, but also making it OK not to do that every single day in between.

So I’m working on Augustus today, because that’s my main research project for the moment, and will continue to be until this time next year (and indeed a little beyond). But there’s no big event going on for this year’s anniversary. Instead, it seems like a good time to update this blog with a report on how the project as a whole is coming along.

The conference

This is what I’ll be doing this time next year for the bimillennium itself. I began circulating the call for papers in April, and I’ve been thrilled by the response. The deadline for abstracts isn’t until 1st December, but because I asked people to contact me in advance to discuss their topics (in order to prevent overlaps), I already have a good sense of how interested people are. At the time of writing, I’ve had offers for nearly 40 papers, covering almost all of the major topics I hoped would come up. Obviously no individual papers are confirmed yet. I will need to wait until the formal abstracts come in, review them carefully with the help of the conference committee, and then send out official confirmations. So as excited as I am about some of the proposals I’ve received, I can’t really share any details about them yet. But I can definitely promise a good spread of topics at the conference, covering Augustus’ death and its immediate impact, later Roman emperors, provincial responses, late antiquity, the Byzantine empire, early Christian thought, early medieval literature, early modern philosophy and literature, 20th-century literature, contemporary popular culture, political theory and Augustan monuments.

I am still keen to receive more proposals, though. My initial plan was to run the whole conference on a plenary basis – that is, not to have parallel sessions, but only a single session at any one time so that all delegates can attend all of the papers. But doing it that way does mean that only a limited number of papers can be presented in the time available. Meanwhile, earlier in the summer my colleague Emma Stafford ran an absolutely excellent conference entitled Hercules: a hero for all ages, and applied a genius solution to the problem of parallel sessions. She simply ensured that every paper was recorded (in audio format), and the recordings uploaded afterwards to a password-protected website. This means that all of the delegates now can listen to each others’ papers – and, as a bonus, the conference team was able to offer ‘virtual delegate’ status to people who couldn’t attend in person, but wanted to be able to listen to the papers presented.

So if the number and quality of the abstracts submitted in December mean that (at least some) parallel sessions will be needed to fit them all in, I will go with Emma’s solution of recording the papers, rather than having to turn down good proposals because there isn’t space for them on the programme. And that means there is definitely room for more material.

Some ‘hot topics’ which are really important for Augustus’ reception history, but which I haven’t had proposals on yet, include:

  • Augustus in medieval Christian legend
  • Dante
  • Petrarch
  • Early modern royalty (e.g. Charles II, Louis XIV)
  • Alexander Pope
  • Voltaire
  • Augustus in the visual arts

If you have anything to say on receptions of Augustus in any of those contexts, please get in touch with a proposal!

The monograph

And this is my own personal day-to-day research focus at the moment. While the conference deals with receptions of Augustus right from his death up to the present day, the monograph is a close study of his two big bimillennia: his birth in 1938 and his death in 2014. I’m studying them from a receptions perspective, in the sense that I am looking at what they reveal about the public perception of Augustus in each period, how he was used to serve contemporary agendas, and how looking at all this can help us to understand Augustus better for ourselves. But I’m also setting them in a wider framework of commemorative practices, and particularly anniversary commemorations. Here, I’m looking at how the commemorative context encourages or suppresses particular responses to Augustus, how his bimillennia compare with other round-number anniversary commemorations, and what difference it makes to commemorate an event which took place so long ago and in a culture of which no-one can now claim direct membership.

Obviously the 2014 anniversary hasn’t happened yet, so there’s not much I can study! But I’m pleased to say that a growing number of commemorations of various different kinds are emerging as we get closer to the date. I’ve put a list here of the ones which are already in the public arena, but actually there are about as many again which I know are being planned but which haven’t been publicly announced yet. So I am confident I’ll have plenty to talk about, and am looking forward to seeing as many of them as possible for myself and talking to the people involved.

Meanwhile, I’m concentrating on the first half of the monograph: i.e. the introductory material setting up the issues of anniversary commemorations and Augustus’ receptions, and the chapters covering the 1938 bimillennium and its impact. I reckon I have about 15,000 words of fairly solid academic prose in the bag now, which includes the two introductory chapters, and the beginnings of the third chapter. This is the exciting one, where I get into the 1938 bimillennium commemorations in real detail, and there is so much to say! As I’ve already indicated in my previous posts on my research trip to New York and the paper which I gave at the colloquium which launched the project in May, I have uncovered a whole world of commemorative events which extend way beyond the ones everyone knows about in fascist Italy, and I am enjoying teasing out what they can tell us about Augustus’ role in the discourses of the day, and how they help to illuminate the historical Augustus in the process.

Public talks

I’m also getting out and about and talking about my work to all sorts of different audiences. I’ve already blogged here about two of these talks: one at Leeds Museum on a survey about public perceptions of Augustus which I gave in January, and one about the 1938 commemorations which I gave at the project launch colloquium. Since then, I’ve also given a talk on how to get the most out of Augustus’ anniversary next year in a classroom context at the JACT annual general meeting. This was a great event, which was more a conference than an AGM really, and which one of the other participants, Prof. Kate Cooper, has blogged in full here. It included a fantastic keynote speech from the JACT president, Caroline Lawrence, about her famous Roman Mysteries series and the ancient theory of the four humours, which she has also published in blog form. And in fact Caroline also tweeted a picture of me giving my own talk, so you can see me in action here:

Anniversary talk at JACT AGMSource credit: Caroline Lawrence

The slide shown in the picture was my montage of logos from recent and forthcoming anniversary commemorations, which I used to explain how anniversaries work and why they fascinate people. But the real focus of my talk was on how to use the anniversary to help school pupils get to grips with some of the aspects of Augustus’ career which they often find difficult – especially trying to make sense of the very different responses, from flowing praise to attempted assassinations, which he provoked (both in his own lifetime and ever since). I’ve now written up my talk in the form of an article for the JACT magazine, The Journal of Classical Teaching, and that should come out in September.

Other upcoming Augustus gigs include:

  • 1st October: presenting my research on the 1938 commemorations in the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, Liverpool
  • 31st October: a talk on Augustus for pupils at Fettes College, Edinburgh
  • 16th November: a full day event on Augustus for current and prospective Classics or Ancient History teachers in Manchester
  • 26th June 2014: another talk at Leeds Museum on what people are doing to commemorate Augustus in his bimillennial year
  • 31st July 2014: two sessions on Augustus’ own use of anniversaries and varying responses to him through time at the ARLT summer school in Durham

Quite a busy schedule, then. Apart from the Fettes College talk, I believe all of those are open to anyone who wants to come – although obviously they are aimed at different audiences and the ARLT summer school charges a fee. So do come along and see me in action if you are interested!

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Countdown to the BimillenniumAugust 19, 2014
Suetonius, Augustus 100.1: "He died in the same room as his father Octavius, in the consulship of two Sextuses, Pompeius and Appuleius, on the fourteenth day before the Kalends of September at the ninth hour, just thirty-five days before his seventy-sixth birthday."

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On This Day Two Thousand Years Ago

No upcoming events

2012 anniversaries

  • Charles Dickens bicentenary (birth)
  • Gaius Caligula bimillennium (birth)
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau tercentenary (birth)
  • The Queen's Diamond Jubilee
  • Titanic centenary

2013 anniversaries

  • Beatle's first album 50th anniversary
  • Benjamin Britten centenary (birth)
  • C.S. Lewis 50th anniversary (death)
  • David Lloyd George 150th anniversary (birth)
  • Diderot tricentenary (birth)
  • Doctor Who 50th anniversary
  • Emily Davison, suffragette, centenary (death)
  • First Bollywood film centenary
  • Football Association 150th anniversary
  • Giuseppe Verdi bicentenary (birth)
  • John F Kennedy assassination 50th annivesary
  • John Snow bicentenary (birth)
  • London Underground 150th anniversary
  • Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech 50th anniversary
  • Munich agreement 75th anniversary
  • Orson Welles radio adaptation of 'War of the Worlds' 75th anniversary
  • Peter Cushing centenary (birth)
  • Pride and Prejudice bicentenary
  • Richard Wagner bicentenary (birth)
  • Sir Thomas Bodley 400th anniversary (death)

2014 anniversaries

  • Battle of Bannockburn 700th anniversary
  • Battle of Bouvines 800th anniversary
  • Charlemagne 1200th anniversary (death)
  • Christoph Willbard Gluck tercentenary (birth)
  • D-Day 1944 70th anniversary
  • Dylan Thomas centenary (birth)
  • Fall of the Berlin Wall 25th anniversary
  • First World War centenary
  • Forth Road Bridge 50th anniversary
  • George I tercentenary (coronation)
  • Jean-Philippe Rameau 250th anniversary (death)
  • Louis IX of France (St. Louis) 800th anniversary (birth)
  • Michelangelo 450th anniversary (death)
  • Star Spangled Banner bicentenary
  • William Shakespeare 450th anniversary (birth)

2015 anniversaries

  • Battle of Agincourt 600th anniversary
  • Battle of Waterloo bicentenary
  • De Montfort Parliament 750th anniversary
  • Signing of the Magna Carta 800th anniversary
  • Women's Institute centenary

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