Divinization and Didactic Efficacy in Virgil’s Georgics
By Bobby Xinyue
Abstract: Virgil’s Georgics offers near-contemporary responses to and repeated meditations on the subject of the divinization of Octavian, the soon-to-be Augustus, who in the wake of his victory at Actium in 31 BCE stood poised to usher in a new political era for Rome. This chapter suggests that discussions of Octavian’s divinization in the Georgics function as a means by which Virgil considers the effectiveness and relevance of not just didactic poetry, but poetic mediation more generally, in the face of an emergent Augustan regime. By presenting the divinization of Octavian as a topic unable to be affected by Virgilian didactic, the Georgics couches in disarming terms both the inevitability of Octavian’s drive towards singular power and the diminishing effect of poetry’s mediating role in Rome’s shift towards autocracy.
Chapter in Reflections and New Perspectives on Virgil’s Georgics, edited by B. Xinyue and N. Freer, pp. 93-103.
Published by Bloomsbury, 2019,