Augustus and the Destruction of History explores the intense controversies over the meaning and profile of the past that accompanied the violent transformation of the Roman Republic into the Augustan principate. The ten case studies collected here analyse how different authors and agents (individual and collective) developed specific conceptions of history and articulated them in a wide variety of textual and visual media to position themselves within the emergent (and evolving) new Augustan normal. The chapters consider both hegemonic and subaltern endeavours to reconfigure Roman memoria and pay special attention to power and polemics, chaos, crisis and contingency - not least to challenge some long-standing habits of thought about Augustus and his principate and its representation in historiographical discourse, ancient and modern. Some of the most iconic texts and monuments from ancient Rome receive fresh discussion here, including the Forum Romanum and the Forum of Augustus, Virgil's Aeneid and the Fasti Capitolini.

This volume includes "Iliad" 4.384 "Tude," "Iliad" 15.339 "Mekiste," and Odyssey 19.136 "Odyse" by Jeremy Rau; "Craft Similes and the Construction of Heroes in the "Iliad"" by Naomi Rood; "The Tragic Pattern of the "Iliad"" by Yoav Rinon; "Herodotus and His Descendants: Numbers in Ancient and Modern Narratives of Xerxes' Campaigns" by Catherine Rubincam; "Personal Pronouns as Identity Terms in Ancient Greek: The Surviving Tragedies and Euripides' "Bacchae"" by Chiara Thumiger; "Epicurus' Letter to "Herodotus": Some Textual Notes" by Luis Andres Bredlow Wenda; "Cultural Differences and Cross-Cultural Contact: Greek and Roman Concepts of 'Power'" by Ulrich Gotter; ""Hebescere virtus" (Sallust bc 12.1): Metaphorical Ambiguity" by Christopher Krebs; "Aeneas' Generic Wandering and the Construction of the Latin Literary Past: Ennian Epic vs. Ennian Tragedy in the Language of the "Aeneid"" by Jackie Elliott; "Virgil "Aeneid" 6.445-446: A Critical Note" by Luis Rivero Garcia; "The Poet's Mirror: Horace's "Carmen" 4.10" by Monika Asztalos; "The City and Its Territory in the Province of Achaea and 'Roman Greece'" by Denis Rousset; "Further to Ps.-Quintilian's Longer Declamations" by D. R. Shackleton Bailey; and "Satire, Propaganda, and the Pleasure of Reading: Apuleius' Stories of Curiosity in Context" by Alexander Kirichenko.