Leaving Rome: Alienation from and Attachment to the City in Augustan Literature

Leaving Rome: Alienation from and Attachment to the City in Augustan Literature, explores how Roman authors of the Augustan period (31 BC-AD 14) write about leaving Rome as a way of discussing different levels of attachment to the city. The authors I consider are the historian Livy, the epic and pastoral poet Vergil, the satirist Horace, and the love poets Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid. I focus on episodes in these authors which feature departures or absence from Rome, thereby exploring a variety of perspectives on departure and alienation from the city and elucidating the increasingly complex relationship between the Romans and their city amid the pervasive political and physical changes in Rome during the Augustan period.