Libertas, Peace, and Divine Dependence

Abstract This chapter demonstrates that the motif of divinization is centrally involved in the poets’ attempts to understand and reconcile with the changing parameters of libertas as Rome gradually falls under Augustus’ control. It argues that, from as early as the Eclogues, libertas is already characterized as something that can only be mediated by the acceptance of a more authoritarian regime. The pastoral drama of Eclogue 1 in particular presents libertas and dependence on extraordinary political power as notionally compatible, thereby foreshadowing the defining ideological character of the Augustan Principate. As the new regime takes shape, however, the poets’ depiction of Augustus as a divine guarantor of peace becomes a way of reflecting on the limits of libertas under the Principate. Through a close examination of Livy’s Preface, the sphragis of the Virgil’s Georgics, and Propertius 3.4, the second half of this chapter argues that these authors frame the return of peace to Rome under Augustus as a form of civic security underpinned by political subordination; and that the divine portraits of Augustus in Georgics 4 and Propertius 3.4 highlight the simultaneously overwhelming and indispensable nature of Augustan power.