Art, Text, & the City of Rome

This paper analyzes the representation of ancestors in Adrastus’ palace at Argos (Theb. 2.213-225), in order to examine how and to what ends Statius blends traditional Roman cultural practices with those of a mythical Greek past.

Critics have long recognized similarities between the parade of heroes in Vergil’s Underworld (Aeneid 6.637-892) and the statues of the Julii and summi viri in the Forum Augustum (20-2 BCE). However, problems of dating and influence have distracted from the question of reception: how might Romans understand and (re)interpret Augustus’ sculptural program and Vergil’s catalogue of heroes in light of one another after the Forum had opened?

The pleasant image of a meadow screened with shade and featuring water is the basis of the locus amoenus: a highly rhetoricized natural landscape which Ovid in particular developed as a setting charged with expectations, both of sexual encounter and of violence (Hinds 2002: 123). Newby has recently argued that, from the Augustan period, the atmosphere of a locus amoenus was created within the domesticated space of Roman villas and houses by means of painting and sculptural programs, evoking a voyeuristic and even frightening atmosphere (Newby 2012: 380-81).

This paper outlines the dynamics of how a fragment of Naevius’ late 3^rd century BCE epic the Bellum Punicum interacts with the first public painting on a historical theme at Rome, that of Manius Valerius Messalla on the side of the Curia Hostilia. By analyzing the reception of this instance of mixed-media poetics, Naevius’ poem is shown to co-opt the representational power of senatorial public art and in turn define some key modes of visualization within Roman epic for his successors.