Learned eyes: poets, viewers, image-makers

Periodizations are tools that very few trust but everybody uses. Some periodizations become more popular than others: the Augustan Age, as this volume will no doubt confirm, has achieved unparalleled stability among the many constructs of historicism. This result has many authors, but what is really striking is that the process of stabilization is initiated by poets contemporary with Augustus, people who pioneer the claim (Horace, Odes 4.15.4: tua, Caesar, aetas; Ovid, Tristia 2.560: tua tempora, Caesar) that a new age and a different age has come, perhaps a definitive new age for Rome. Our acceptance of the Augustan age as a well-defined period of history is deeply collusive with strategies of self-representation in Rome during the watch of Octavian-Augustus. The other obvious example that comes to mind, the periodization of the Great Century (or Generation) in 17th century France under Le Roi Soleil, is not an independent term of reference, but the result of conscious appropriation of Augustan models at the court of Louis XIV. True, the Augustan age has consolidated under the influence of many factors, most of them political, but I would say that the crucial factor for modern scholars (and readers) has been the possibility of making multiple connections between political change, material culture, ideology, literature, and the visual arts. © Cambridge University Press 2005.