Imaginary Rome: Utopia and Empire in Late Republican and Augustan Literature

这个项目的目标是写一本关于从卢克莱修到奥维德的罗马文学中乌托邦想象的作用的专著。这本书应该是我今年早些时候完成的从赫西俄德到忒奥克里托斯的希腊文学中乌托邦研究的续集。我的主要关注点不仅是乌托邦想象在意识形态产生中的作用，而且是它在罗马文学发展中所起的作用。我认为，本书所要分析的各个文本之所以彼此不同，不仅是因为它们想象了不同类型的理想现实，而且还因为这些理想现实的概念结构为文本本身所体现的不同的文学意义生产模式提供了信息。我将专注于罗马文学的一些核心作品（卢克莱修的《自然的道德》、西塞罗的《道德》、萨卢斯特的《喀提林》、李维的《城市的条件》、维吉尔和贺拉斯的诗歌、罗马爱情挽歌以及奥维德的《变形记》和流放诗），以研究他们如何将希腊文学激发的理想现实投射到他们自己对罗马帝国的意识形态建构中。因此，显而易见的是，这些文本，其中一些似乎最多是彼此相切地联系在一起，实际上形成了一个互文连续体，在这个连续体中，新的文学话语出现，以回应文学中其他地方提出的乌托邦建构。通过指出这些文本之间的概念相似性和历史条件差异，我希望能够有助于更好地理解文学在概念化罗马从共和国晚期到奥古斯都统治结束的政治现实中所起的基本作用。

The goal of this project is to write a monograph on the role of the utopian imagination in Roman literature from Lucretius to Ovid. The book is supposed to become a sequel to the study of utopianism in Greek literature from Hesiod to Theocritus, which I completed earlier this year. My main focus will be not only on the function of the utopian imagination in the production of ideology but also on the role that it plays in the development of Roman literature. I will argue that individual texts to be analyzed in this book differ from each other not only because they imagine different kinds of ideal realities but also because the conceptual structures of those ideal realities inform different modes of literary meaning production exemplified by the texts themselves. I will concentrate on some of the central works of Roman literature (Lucretius’ De rerum natura, Cicero’s De re publica, Sallust’s Catiline, Livy’s Ab urbe condita, the poetry of Vergil and Horace, Roman love elegy, as well as Ovid’s Metamorphoses and exile poetry) in order to investigate how they project ideal realities inspired by Greek literature onto their own ideological constructs of the Roman Empire. What should become apparent as a result is that these texts, some of which may seem to be at best tangentially linked to each other, in fact form an intertextual continuum within which new literary discourses arise in response to utopian constructs propounded elsewhere in literature. By pointing to both the conceptual similarities and the historically conditioned differences among these texts, I hope to be able to contribute to a better understanding of the fundamental role that literature plays in conceptualizing political reality in Rome from Late Republic to the end of the rule of Augustus.