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

这个项目的目标是写一本关于乌托邦想象在从卢克莱修到奥维德的罗马文学中的作用的专著。这本书应该是我今年早些时候完成的从赫西奥德到泰奥克里托斯的希腊文学乌托邦主义研究的续集。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，还包括它在罗马文学发展中所扮演的角色。我将论证，在这本书中分析的个别文本彼此不同，不仅因为它们想象了不同种类的理想现实，还因为这些理想现实的概念结构告知了不同的文学意义生产模式，以文本本身为例。我将集中讨论罗马文学的一些核心作品（卢克莱修的《自然之事》，西塞罗的《共和之事》，萨洛斯特的《卡提林》，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》和流放诗歌），以便研究他们是如何将受希腊文学启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上的。结果应该变得明显的是，这些文本，其中一些可能看起来充其量是相互关联的，实际上形成了一个互文连续体，在这个连续体中，新的文学话语出现了，以回应文学中其他地方提出的乌托邦结构。通过指出这些文本之间概念上的相似性和历史条件下的差异，我希望能够有助于更好地理解文学在罗马从共和国晚期到奥古斯都统治结束期间概念化政治现实方面所起的基本作用。

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.