The literature and art of Augustan Rome are often characterized as classicizing in tendency, aiming at a harmony, sobriety, and seriousness that are in keeping with an Augustan ideology of a revival of traditional Roman morality and common sense. The 'Augustan' is often contrasted with a proclivity to the bizarre and emotional in the neoteric poetry that preceded it, and with the supposed psychological and rhetorical excesses of the culture of post-Augustan imperial Rome. But Augustan culture and poetry are in fact marked by a far-reaching interest in the paradoxical, the marvellous, and the unexpected. In poetry Horace and Ovid are key figures in the development of ideas of poetic licence; Augustan wall-painting and sculpture frequently stray into the fantastic. Augustan authors respond to the amazing growth of Roman empire, and to the paradoxical novelty of Augustus' 'Roman Revolution'. There is a continuing interest in Hellenistic traditions of paradoxography and ethnographic marvels. Ovid's Metamorphoses, the late Augustan poem which takes as its subject-matter the fantastic and marvellous, can be read as a summa of important aspects of Augustan culture and literature. This volume, including contributions by some of the leading students of the Augustan period as well as a number of younger scholars, is the first to survey a broad range of the manifestations of paradox and the marvellous in Augustan poetry, historiography, rhetoric, and art. Book jacket.

Philip Hardie is Senior Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge.