Staging Memory, Staging Strife: Empire and Civil War in the Octavia
by Lauren Donovan Ginsberg
Abstract: This book situates the Octavia within the literary and political context of Nero’s reign and the years after his death. As a product of these turbulent years, the Octavia powerfully challenges the image of the Julio-Claudians as bringers of peace. Instead, it re-envisions their history as a series of bloody civil wars that the imperial family waged on itself and on its people. In order to rewrite the dynasty’s history, the Octavia engages with the literature of Julio-Claudian Rome, using the words of celebrated authors to stage a new reading of the past that fills the drama with conflicting memories of what the first imperial family meant to Rome. Chief among these are Vergil’s Aeneid and Lucan’s Bellum Civile, strife-ridden epics that bookend the dynasty’s time in power with very different ideologies of one-man rule. The words of Horace, Livy, Propertius, Ovid, and Seneca also hover behind the play’s language, as do more public scripts like the Res Gestae. The play opens a dialogue about literary versions of history and about the legitimacy of those accounts. Through an innovative combination of intertextual analysis and cultural memory theory, the book elucidates the roles that literature and the literary manipulation of memory play in negotiating the transition between the Julio-Claudian and Flavian regimes. It thus claims for the Octavia a central role in current debates over the ways in which Nero and his family were remembered, as well as the politics of literary and cultural memory in the early Roman Empire.
Published by Oxford University Press, 2017.