Augustan Poetry and Roman Mythmaking

Augustan poets such as Virgil, Horace and Ovid wrote under the new regime created by Augustus. Their poems used myth, rural memory, love elegy, epic ancestry and moral reflection to respond to civil war and imperial renewal.

The period matters because literature became deeply entangled with patronage, public ideology and private unease. The Aeneid, Odes, Fasti, Heroides and Metamorphoses all handle myth and power in different ways.

This context supports Latin poetry, Roman mythological collections and fiction about the cultural politics of Augustus’s Rome.