Petronius as Massa?: Reading Virgil in Petronius' Satyricon
Susan Gorman, CTCWeb
Augustan Age Literature
Literature under the Roman Empire took control of the past and reorganized it in order to solidify the empire’s claims to power. Augustan Age text was charged with the task of re-crafting history. Importantly, Latin literature helped to condition its readers into accepting new imperial subjectivities. As appropriated by the imperial machine, literature helped to smooth the way for empire and ensure its ascendancy.
Julio-Claudian Age text was charged with the task of re-crafting history in order to solidify the empire’s claims to power. Importantly, Latin literature helped to condition its readers into accepting new imperial subjectivities. By taking control of the past through its literature and thereby emitting its messages through culture and the written word, literature of the early Roman Empire created in its Roman readers passive subjects of empire. Thomas Habinek explores how access to written literature, since its circulation was so strictly controlled, required the authorizing presence of a performer to recite the text. The general audience’s reception of a literary work, therefore, always had a mediator to help them understand it and, to a certain extent, interpret that text for them. This dependence on the authoritarian figure of the performer therefore created a passive literary audience that gave up its own free interpretive will. Habinek claims that this process “helped to reconstitute the potentially free reader of the widely circulated literary text as a subject subject of an imperial regime.” When this audience was later allowed access to the texts, they were still reliant upon an authorized interpretive presence. Imperial ideology as it was contained in Latin literature was able to further work on the subjectivities of its Roman readers in order to impose upon them the legitimacy of the empire.
