Sophia Papaioannou

Embracing Vergil’s ‘Arcadia’: Constructions and representations of a literary topos in the poetry of the Augustans

The Arcadian landscape was originally developed in Vergil to transcend an actual landscape and identify with an idealized setting temptingly abstract in order to serve as a metaphor for the redesigned pastoral genre as promoted in the Eclogues. Vergil’s Arcadia as described in Eclogue 4, for the first time in Latin literature, was a construction, a literary topos and a symbol of innovative poetics, but also of Roman history and contemporary politics interfused. Vergil’s Arcadia was an imaginary landscape. This utopia becomes — in full awareness of Vergil’s literary contemporaries and the poets following after them — an appropriate setting for the staging of imaginary literary dialogues between shepherds-poets, and the changing poetics is reflected on the changes of the archetypal landscape of the original Arcadia topography. These changes appear first in Tibullus (in selected passages from 1. 1, 1. 3, 1. 5, 1. 7, 1. 10, 2. 1, 2. 3 and 2. 5) and recur in new forms in Propertius, Horace and Ovid. The progre...

The Translation Politics of a Political Translation: The Case of Augustus' Res Gestae

The politics behind the bilingualism of Augustus’ RG can be reviewed through the study of the philosophy of translation as the dissemination of information across cultural and language barriers. On the one hand, the monument displays two texts one written in Latin and the other in Greek, arguing for a desire, among other things, to disseminate information among two culturally and linguistically different audiences. On the other hand, the Greek text is a translation of the Latin; as such, its politics is guided by decisions that take into account the cultural horizon of Greek speakers and includes the transference of a message produced within the center of political power.