Horace

The analysis of Jupiter in Horace shows the importance of genre in assessing the poet’s “philosophy” or “theology.” Our possession of Horace’s works in their entirety lets us see the different faces Jupiter presents: satirist’s ally, desirable lover, cause and punisher of civil war, avatar of Fortune, parallel to Augustus, tribal god of Rome, and many more. The Satires show us a basic alliance between Jupiter and the satirist, both disgusted at human foibles. In the Epodes, Jupiter participates in the impotentia of a world gone awry, sometimes at the mercy of nature, sometimes the recipient of ineffectual prayers, sometimes a player in an impossible fantasy of escape, even though he created the conditions that allowed fratricide to flourish. Odes 1–3 make the god a key player in Horace’s journey from the poetics of war to those of peace, with all that implies about the ascendance of Augustus. The Epistles, the Carmen Saeculare, and Odes 4 represent a diminuendo in Jupiter’s importance as he becomes eclipsed by the new gods of the Augustan regime: Apollo and Augustus himself. In the Ars Poetica, Jupiter has all but disappeared. Perhaps the most comprehensive conclusion is essentially a negative one: Horace makes Jupiter neither a consistent locus for protest nor a consistent purveyor of “Augustan” values.

Conclusion

“Jupiter” was a creation of poetry as much as of philosophy, theology, or cultic practice—if those things can even be separated. What Jupiter, then, did the poets make? Fate’s voice or Fate’s subject? Life-giving rain, cataclysmic storms, the overseer of human bonds, the destroyer of unlucky civilizations, the perfect lover, the tyrannical rapist? The answer, of course, is “all of the above.” His thunderbolt can be used for punishing human hubris or breaking down a girl’s door; Ganymede can be a symbol of rapture or rape. Throughout most of Augustan poetry, the most comprehensive conclusion about the relationship between Jupiter and Augustus is partly a negative one. While the poets’ Jupiter reflects their response to the social and political changes set in motion by the first princeps, the chief Olympian is too multivalent a figure to have his characterization determined entirely by Roman politics. Roman poets found Jupiter, but they also made him. From that conversation emerged a living reality that, like poetry itself, can never be adequately paraphrased.

Ovid

In the beginning, Ovid’s depiction of Jupiter accords with the usual elegiac fare. There is a certain amount of rivalry, as Ovid fears Jupiter might steal his girl; some flippant one-upmanship, as Ovid drops Jupiter-cum-thunderbolt when his girlfriend locks her door; copious irony, as the praeceptor Amoris instructs his pupils to imitate Jupiter in perjuring themselves. Ovid particularly enjoys “correcting” his predecessor Propertius on certain points of Jovian theology. The great works written close to the time of Ovid’s exile add a bitter edge to this playfulness, revisiting elegiac scenarios with a dramatic shift in focalization. Jupiter’s rapes and the suffering they cause are a leitmotif of Ovid’s epic Metamorphoses. In the Fasti, Jupiter is subjected to complex manipulation, instructed, diminished, and reframed according to the poet’s wish-fulfilling fantasies. As Augustus transformed the Roman experience of time by modifying the calendar, so Ovid seizes control of the discourse by shaping the calendar to his own poetic ends. When the thunderbolt strikes, banishing him to the Black Sea, Ovid creates a Jovian/Augustan mythology all his own. Like the Metamorphoses and Fasti, the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto show two possibilities for Jupiter, yet the Tristia’s impression of the cruelly wrathful Thunderer predominates over the Ex Ponto’s possibility of revivifying rain. Most importantly, by figuring himself as the heroes and—especially—heroines persecuted by the autocratic ruler of the Olympian pantheon, Ovid defines his poetry and his very self as a work of artistically fruitful, politically hopeless opposition to the new “Jupiter.”

Propertius

While Augustus in Propertius stands for Roman military power, Jupiter’s additional association with sex makes him a far more complex figure. The erotic rivalry between Jupiter and Propertius throughout book 2, the lovesickness book, would devolve into even greater absurdity if Jupiter were metonymy for Augustus. Whether or not Augustus is on his way to becoming a “Jupiter figure,” the four poems in which he and the god are juxtaposed make clear the increasing concentration of power in the hands of one man. In book 2, Jupiter’s unsung Gigantomachy, followed immediately by Augustus’s unsung Aeneid, creates a connection; the inability of either Jupiter or Caesar to separate devoted lovers strengthens it. Book 3 floats the idea—playfully, one hopes—of an opposition between the chief man and the chief god, as the poet claims that Rome should not fear even Jupiter while Augustus is safe. By book 4, Jupiter has been further upstaged by Augustus, merely sitting in the audience while Caesar’s victory at Actium is sung. On the other hand, the rise and fall of Jupiter the Lover throughout Propertius’s poems does tell us something about the changing mores of Augustan Rome. The absence of this figure from book 4, and his replacement with the censorious persona who refuses to “suffer” Tarpeia’s love-wounds, may reflect the moral climate that Augustus’s marriage and adultery legislation sought to foster. Yet like the revenant Cynthia of 4.8, combining Juno’s wrath with Jupiter’s might, amor cannot really be killed.

Tibullus

Despite playing a relatively minor role in Tibullan elegy, Jupiter exhibits a remarkable range of activities and symbolic valences. Book 1 makes the god, like Messalla, primarily a foil and competitor to the values of the elegiac world. As Messalla is introduced fighting on land and sea while the poet languishes before his mistress’s troublesome door, so Jupiter is introduced as the wielder of the rain and thunderbolts that could penetrate that door. Jupiter the dominus, in fact, is the one who brought into being Messalla’s world of war, wounds, and “roads” of death. Priapus’s insistence that Jupiter forbade lovers’ oaths to be binding implicitly casts Jupiter as one with a background in amorous perjury; as with Messalla’s imagined epiphany in the following poem, the god enters the elegiac sphere to succeed where the poet fails. The Nile’s supplantation of “rainy Jupiter” as the all-encompassing husband and father aligns with Tibullus’s covert exclusion of Augustus from his pastoral world. Jupiter’s transformation in book 2 into the victorious god of Rome signals Tibullus’s changing purposes. Like Virgil, Tibullus hints at the inherent instability of the Golden Age ideal, since Jupiter’s expulsion of Saturn signals the end of a utopian era even as Augustus’s victory clears the way for a new one. When Jupiter assigns the Laurentian fields to the proto-Romans, he is lodged between flitting Love and flitting Victory. Whether stability or instability will predominate is something not even the Sibyl can foresee.

Virgil

What emerges most stunningly in Virgil is his ability to help us see the world and human history through many different eyes. The poet never allows us either to rest confident in the morality of empire or to ignore its manifold benefits, not least of which is the poetic art itself. Characterizing “Jupiter in Virgil” is as difficult as characterizing Virgil himself. The portrayal of the god in the Eclogues is fairly conventional, with only the whisper of an association with Octavian; if anything, it is Asinius Pollio who is the “Jupiter figure.” The Georgics presents everything from the menacing architect of the Iron Age to a baby fed by bees. In the Aeneid, Jupiter’s concerns are reduced to fama and imperium, with his complexity deriving mainly from that of those concepts. While we should be cautious about attributing these shifts in focus and tone to changes in Roman society—the three poems, after all, have different genres and purposes—the god’s Virgilian trajectory at least demonstrates some of the ways Augustan poets could use Jupiter as a focus for complex reflections on the centralization and consequences of power.

Introduction

After explaining briefly who “Jupiter” is and why this quintessential “god of Rome” cannot simply be equated with Zeus, the introduction sets the stage with a brief overview of three aspects of the Augustan poets’ cultural milieu: Greek Zeus, whom they knew primarily through literature and visual art; Roman religion, which they lived and breathed; and the rise of Augustus, which would transform Roman society and, subsequently, nearly all human societies. It then explains the book’s author-by-author structure and varying organization within each discussion; its attempt to examine all appearances of Jupiter; and several of the book’s themes, such as the tension between opposites, lover versus thunderer, and parallels between Jupiter and Augustus.