SOURCE: "The Emotions of Patriotism: Propertius 4.6," California Studies in Classical Antiquity, Vol. 6, 1974, pp. 171-80.

[In the following excerpt, Johnson explains the importance of considering the Augustan age in order to place Propertius's works in their proper context.]

… The chief and the abiding problem for critics of Augustan poetry is the gentleman with the frank and terrifying blue eyes who succeeded where everyone else had failed and whose signet ring was, appropriately, a sphinx.¹⁹ In the years of his dominance miracle crowded on miracle, but for his contemporaries and his successors and perhaps even for himself the central miracle was Augustus, a combination of brains, looks, luck, stamina, ruthlessness, prudence, egotism and style that beggared even the achievements of Pericles, Alexander and Julius and that transformed the ancient world utterly. His contemporaries could not fail to be impressed and baffled, and we who know more about this portent than they did (and less about it, too) are also impressed and baffled. And until we make some progress in distinguishing what it is about the man that we admire from what it is about the man that puzzles us (and perhaps angers us), we are not going to make much progress in appreciating the complexities of the problems we face in trying to interpret Augustan poetry.

The violently dissimilar responses to Propertius' Actium poem that Williams and I feel may serve as a good index to these difficulties. Both of us regard the poem as an attempt to grapple with the emotions of patriotism: for Williams the attempt ends in failure because the event in history that should have evoked a celebration of the Augustan settlement is not treated with sufficient seriousness; for me the poem succeeds because it forces us to reconsider both the event and the stupendous claims made for the significance of that event, in their proper focus. Part of the problem here lies in what each of us means by "patriotism." To Williams, I may seem to be "contemptuous of national pride";²⁰ to me, Williams is reluctant to distinguish between a nation's pride and a nation's shame, or, to put it less bluntly, he tends to emphasize a nation's grandeur more than its responsibilities. The problem is not so much that Williams approves of Augustus too much, and that I dislike him too much; the problem is rather that Williams and I (and most of our colleagues) keep looking for and grasping at a static situation, an absolute degree of goodness or badness that never existed. What deludes us can be precisely located in the Propertian poem we've been looking at. We are all, in different ways, dupes of Augustan propaganda.

All of us assume a stability for the regime and a constancy of attitude towards the regime that did not exist. The career of Augustus extended over almost six decades. During this unusually ample career he changed several times in respect of what he wanted to be, what he wanted to do and what he wanted to seem to be doing. The audience was extremely heterogeneous during every act of this drama, and the composition of the audience kept changing constantly even as its central character changed. But instead of focusing on the complexities and uncertainties of these patterns, all too frequently we console ourselves with inadequate generalizations that obscure the issues we should be closing with: we talk of the Augustan age, of Augustan poetry and Augustan poets, of Augustus' contemporaries, and of the Augustan Settlement. We are driven to such generalizations not only because they are sometimes useful and necessary but also because they are easy and they seem safe; they allow us, furthermore, to forget what we wish to forget: that the pieces of the puzzle seldom fit as they ought to fit and that the puzzle is never complete because some of the pieces are missing. The hard truths are these: Augustus kept changing throughout his life; the composition of his subjects kept changing throughout his life, and the attitudes of his subjects towards him also kept changing; and the attitudes of the poets kept changing even as their subject (Augustus) and their audience (his subjects) kept changing.

What we must do, then, is to shake ourselves free of these convenient and unglittering generalities and address ourselves to the issue of constant change. We must, on certain occasions, give up talking of the Augustan age and Augustan poetry, and Williams and I (and our respective factions) must forever give up talking about Augustus the Savior or Augustus the Imperialistic Fascist Chauvinist Hypocrite. (Different generations generalize about Augustus in different ways, and the history of these differing generalizations could be the subject of an instructive and fascinating book, but it would be, essentially, not so much a book about Augustus as a book about a certain kind of persistent human delusion.) We must learn instead to think about changing realities and how those realities were apprehended or misapprehended, as they changed, by the men and women who were contemporary with them. It will readily be objected that we do not know enough about the years in question to do this very satisfactorily and that even when we do know enough to do it satisfactorily, it is difficult to do. But this awareness of our ignorance and this awareness of the difficulties that our ignorance imposes on us are the prerequisites for "the act of historical' imagination," and the act of historical imagination is, fortunately or unfortunately, essential for the reading of the poetry that was written throughout the lifetime of Augustus. Such a task may be difficult, and in fact it may be impossible: but it is the task.

Until fairly recently it was fashionable to demonstrate the popularity of the Augustan regime by pointing to the approval given it by the Augustan poets; once this was done, it was not very difficult to demonstrate that the Augustan poets supported the Augustan regime because it was popular. When an appeal to history was needed to substantiate the full circle of this reasoning, the reader was reminded that after a century of bloody civil wars, massive oligarchical corruption, and general dissatisfaction with various impermanent status quos, everyone was happy to have peace at any price, that in times of immense unrest what people want is a leade'r with a firm hand in a velvet glove, that the word libertas had been emptied of any real content for all but a handful or diehard reactionaries who happened to be silly Stoics. Contiguous with these myths were the myths of Antony the oppressor, Maecenas the minister of propaganda, Augustus as dyarchist, Victoria the Empress, Mommsen the objective historian, the Arnolds pére etfils as arbiters of Western Culture and Civilization, and, as a witty coda to the myth entire, the myth of T. S. Eliot, Anglican, Royalist and Classicist, magnanimously bestowing his approval on Vergil, Vater des Abendlandes.

This version of the Augustan myth has been having quite a few difficulties for the past several decades, chiefly because it doesn't fit in very well with what the events of our century have been trying to tell us. Its difficulties are steadily on the increase, and it will probably continue to grow weaker and weaker for a while; but it is a very hardy perennial and will doubtless bloom again. It is, however, being temporarily replaced by another version of the same myth, and it is to this version that I subscribe. In this version of the myth Ovid is not a fatuous rhetorical machine but an extremely serious and extremely gifted poet, and he hates Augustus. Propertius hates Augustus also. Horace can take him or leave him but prefers to leave him. He bores Tibullus to death. Vergil (there are now subspecies of the new version) either despises what Augustus has wrought or he has his head so full of ill-assorted mysticism and philosophy that he has no very clear picture of what is going on around him in real life. We do not think that Maecenas was a minister of propaganda (we are not quite sure of what he was doing or why or when he stopped doing it), and we do not think that Antony was a Machiavellian upstart or that Cleopatra was an ebon-tressed temptress or that Scribonia was divorced because she was a naughty woman. We are very fond of the first dozen pages or so of Tacitus' Annals. We admire Brutus quite a bit, and we doubt that the word libertas was merely a dead metaphor for aristocratic mismanagement of funds and general upperclass deviltry.²¹ We doubt that Augustus intended to restore the republic, and we are extremely interested in such vestiges of his unpopularity as have managed to survive what we regard as one of the most efficient and spectacular promulgations of the Big Lie that the history of the West has endured. We are curious about the details of Augustus' personal life and are quick to note any discrepancy between professions of austerity and simplicity on the one hand and suggestions of lubricity and megalomania on the other. If he was himself an example of the return to the good solid old virtues that flourished before the Gracchi meddled with Romanitas, if he did stamp out the Hellenistic menace, why does he behave like a Hellenistic monarch and why does he assiduously cultivate every Greek he can lay his hands on?²² Why does he tamper with and at last destroy intellectual and personal freedom? Why, in short, is he a totalitarian dictator? Why, in short, does he pretend to be Cato redivivus when he is, in fact and in cold blood, the first of the Roman Ptolemies?

This is the version of the myth that I like. Unfortunately, it is also wrong. I don't know quite where it goes wrong at every point and even when I do, I don't know the degree to which it goes wrong. But I know that it is wrong for two reasons. It is, first of all, too exact, too logical; it arranges such information and facts as we have into a configuration of knowledge that goes far beyond our information and facts; it imposes on some sixty years of complicated and tumultuous human history a reasonable order that is quite impossible. And it is, secondly, too obviously prejudiced by twentieth-century views. The other version, to be sure, is no less grounded in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century views, and it, too, is far too reasonable and too coherent to be accurate, and Williams is probably as mistaken in his trust in progress and empire and great men as am I in my distrust of them. But that does not excuse the inadequacies of my myth. What we still want is the truth.

But where, allowing for the uncertainty of our knowledge and the bondage that both our place in time and our particular temperaments impose on us, where is truth to be found? One would like to say, in the middle, but that gets us nowhere until good historians have managed to adjust the two versions of the Augustan myth in a satisfactory manner. Every literary critic is (or should be) heavily dependent on the historians who work in periods he works in, but critics of "Augustan" poetry are specially dependent on Augustan historians, and what we need now is a careful reevaluation of the two myths so that we may begin to see how the poetry that concerns us fits in with that reevaluation. What we do not need is more defenses or attacks on Augustus and his achievement. He obviously created a great deal and he obviously destroyed a great deal; he did lots of bad things and lots of good things; he was in many ways fine and in many was not fine at all: this sort of thing does not help us. What we want, if it is possible (and it may not be possible), is not a composite picture of the whole man, a summation of his character and his achievement, but a detailed analysis of how he kept changing and why he kept changing. If we can find some way of accommodating both versions of the Augustan myth (instead of being content to call him pleasant or unpleasant names), we may have some hope of understanding why all the extant Augustan poets show, at different times and in different ways, some degree of ambivalence towards him, and we may come to have a better understanding than we now have of why it is that, whatever Augustus was and whatever it was that he did, one of the great bodies of poetry in Western literature was, for the most part, inspired by who he was and what he did.

For the time being, however, I shall continue to embrace the second version of the Augustan myth. But I shall qualify this prejudice in a way that may permit me some kind of merely personal accommodation with the first version. I have suggested that proponents of the positive Augustan myth enlist the poets' approbation to squelch rumors of attempts at assassination and other painful reminders that Augustan propaganda is essentially an ingenious tapestry of falsehoods. I have also suggested that when the universality and constancy of approval for the Augustan regime have been thus demonstrated, this approval is used to demonstrate that, minor indications to the contrary aside, the poets approved of Augustus. I am forced to admit that a rather similar sort of reasoning is not unknown in my camp. We know that intelligent people (poets among them) do not like dictators, and Augustus was a dictator: the poets' attitude towards Augustus shows that he was unpopular, and his unpopularity shows that the poets did not like him.

Well and good. But I suggest that it is entirely possible that each of the extant Augustan poets (along with poets not extant and most other Augustan citizens) approved of Augustus at some times and at some times disapproved of him. Sometimes the approval or disapproval would be based upon something he had done or not done, and sometimes it would be based upon something that the poets and other Romans (each in his own way, at his own time) imagined him to have done or not to have done. If we view the problem in this way, what we have is a complicated pattern of some people who are pleased or displeased some of the time and of many people who are pleased or displeased a great deal of the time, or various parts of the constituency in various states of satisfaction or elation or bewilderment or anger at different times. At the center of this complicated rhythm of pleasure and displeasure is the man who is responsible for its existence, its constant shiftings, and, ultimately, its success. Sometimes he knew what he was about, and sometimes he did not know what he was about; sometimes he confused his constituencies without intending to do so, and sometimes he deliberately confused his constituencies. This elaborate pavan of understanding and misunderstanding, of pleasure and of displeasure, is called being ruled and ruling. And all human beings, anywhere and anytime, have some sort of experience of it.

What makes the issue before us unusual, if not in fact unique, is that, at a moment of extreme cultural and political crisis, in the final destruction of traditional Roman government and the desolation of Roman culture, there appeared a group of poets whose extraordinary talents were matched by an extraordinary dedication to technical excellence that is, in its sophistication and precision and delicacy, all but incomparable. These fortunate poets were presented with a magnificent theme: the ruin of civilization and its salvation and its savior. They had, indeed, no particular expertise in political science, but, at least at the outset, that did not matter. In a way that has few parallels in the literature of the West, great poets and a great theme had found one another at the perfect moment and in the perfect milieu. The early attempts of these poets to rise to the occasion produced sublime poetry, and their later bitterness and boredom in respect of the futility of their efforts at celebration also produced poetry no less sublime. But, for the moment, we are concerned with their early efforts to meet the challenge of celebrating the escape from chaos.

It cannot be too strongly emphasized that these poets were Wastelanders. The world they grew up in was a world of ruins, memories of ruin, and rumors of ruin It is all very well to talk of "professional pessimism,"²³ but these poets had the anguish of Lucretius and Cicero's de Officiis and of Sallust deep in their hearts and their minds; and they were aware that, whatever dangers it was propertied with, libertas was a reality and was near to being a lost reality. They were also aware that, at this point in time, the gods and philosophy (whatever they might have counted for in the past) were not going to help all that much. Then came a miracle called Octavian. The past century of Roman history had been a graveyard of miracles that were not unlike this one. But this one seemed to endure; and it kept enduring and kept enduring. So, perhaps, this was the miracle after all. That the miracle continued to endure was in most ways a wonderful relief because, minor vexations aside, it was nice to have the really bad nightmare permanently dislodged. Then, very slowly, small nightmares began returning, and, by the time the poets had awakened, the really bad nightmare was back to stay, for good.

What I am trying to say does not admit of proper generalizations because my subject is changes, changes of mind and of heart (many minds and many hearts), some of them fairly clear, some of them rather subtle, and some of them quite obscure. Augustus was fascinating, tremendously competent, and he was miraculous: he not only provided solutions, he was a solution. At the beginning of his career he probably did not intend to institute a Hellenistic monarchy, and he probably did intend, in some way or other, to reinstitute a republic of some sort or other, sooner or later. This much the poets could grasp, and, each in his own way, they were eager to grasp it. Their difficulties in responding to the poetic material that the Augustan miracle offered them seems to have begun at the time when they began to misunderstand Augustus because they could not understand what Augustus himself had, finally and reluctantly, begun to understand: that he could not be what he wished to be (merely a benevolent, rather unobstructive miracle) and that he could not do what he wished to do (undo what Julius had accomplished and accomplish what Sulla had been unable to accomplish).

The poets, who wanted the miracle very much, became by slow turns (in different ways and at different times) restive, confused, disenchanted; in a sense, they became locked into their desire for the impossible dead ideals that their idol had symbolized. But the idol had learned and he kept on learning about things as they are: it is (and this violates the version of the myth that I favor) the Emperor who is truly ironic, not the poets. The poets who are alive after the Secular Games have moved from enthusiasm to minor disenchantment to casual ridicule and cool detachment; they have increasingly caught the scent of tyranny, but they do not understand (or have forgotten) that their idol had not wanted tyranny either. But by now everyone misunderstands everything and everyone: the poets find that their Muse has gone sour, and the Muse, at first hurt because his poets snub him, thinks about them what Frederick said about Voltaire. There is still Ovid to come; but by that time the idol himself has moved from secular wisdom and usefulness to despair, diseased grandeur and unreality: the fruits of the confrontation between Ovid in his maturity and Augustus grown very old are the Metamorphoses, the greatest poem in the Latin language, and misery for both the poet and his frightened lonely Muse.

Augustus had, perhaps, wanted something from the poets, and they had certainly wanted something from him. At first there had been a sense of a common enterprise, certain reservations, much hope and a fair amount of goodwill; but increasingly there was less and less chance that the statesman's clear understanding of how the world must work could be reconciled with the poet's tenuous yet priceless intuitions of how the world ought to work. What each of the Augustan poets understood (each in his own way) was the importance of Graeco-Roman humanitas. This is what they had to bequeath to the world to come (this is what had been—but just barely—bequeathed to them), and they expected Augustus to ensure its continuance. What Augustus saw, increasingly and steadily, was the fact that humanitas is sometimes something of a luxury. So, at last, the idol failed his poets, and they turned away from the idol.

Augustus, Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius gradually decided that the whole thing had been a bad mistake, and they gradually drifted off on their separate ways, none of them feeling excessive rancor. But Vergil could not let the thing drop. He kept trying to write an epic poem. But the epic poem kept turning into a lyrical tragedy about how humanitas is always being betrayed by power and about how what should be cannot be. In one way, Augustus had betrayed the poets and they were right to attack him, and history has vindicated them. In another way, the poets totally misunderstood who Augustus was and what he was doing (they were, after all, only poets), and history has vindicated him as well. So, in an unsatisfactory zigzag way that suits our experience of day-to-dayness, the versions of the myth do somehow merge. In all this muddled and vital story, only Vergil was willing to risk madness or death or whatever, if only Poetry and History might achieve the bright consummation that both Augustus and his poets had dreamt of in the late thirties and early twenties. Only Vergil did not waken from the dream. It was an honorable and courageous sleep, and it deserves all the homage that Europe has all but constantly accorded it. Stern realists may decide that such a venture (I mean trying to write the Aeneid) could only interest a madman and that the poem is another of those ambitious, eccentric and magnificent failures that litter the summits of Western literature. One can hardly refute this argument; one can only suggest that it is rather too cynical.

This whole story (its initial hopes and celebrations, its gradual confusions and disenchantments, its final sardonic rage) is a wry story. But in this story, the opposed versions of the Augustan myth find some points of convergence, and the story helps to account for the great momentum and the great profundity that Augustan poetry is possessed of. Many people do not like Augustan poetry, though they are not always clear about the reasons for their dislike. Taken all in all, it is a poetry about losing battles, about promise that is blighted, about humanitas besieged and overwhelmed, about the center's not holding, and, finally, about coming to terms with the kind of world in which such things happen. It is a poetry about a moment in history when things that seemed to be about to work did not, finally, work.

Notes

.¹⁹See Suetonius, Divus Augustus, 50. See Schuckburgh's note on the passage in his edition (Cambridge 1896) 107. Apparently some Romans did not find the sphinx very amusing.

²⁰ Williams, 426.

²¹ This view is so prevalent today that it is pointless for a literary critic to try to combat it. One can only point out that a number of distinguished Romans, from Cato and Cicero on, did not care to believe that liberty was dead. One of these Romans was Horace, and the poems we call the Roman Odes are mostly about Cato and Cicero.

²² See G. W. Bowersock's Augustus and the Greek World (Oxford 1965). Of particular interest to us here is his excellent description of the relationship between Augustus and Crinagoras (in particular 36-37 and 61). He also has some wry and witty things to say about the attitude of certain Romans to the Hellenization of their country and their city (78ff).

²³ Williams, 75.