Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Pater Patriae - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Here Horace is telling the audience that Rome has been saved by men produced from chaste marriages and moral backgrounds and that the same cannot be said for Rome of the late republic.
    - - This critique of Augustan imperial expansion is interesting anyway, but is especially interesting considering the use of the chaste and faithful wife to juxtapose the imperial campaigning. This is indicative of a school of thought that always prioritised the chaste and desirable marital relationship over other exploits.
      - 'Your morals deserve a different wife!'
      - 'On whatever day fate sends you safely home, modest Galla will hang about your neck.'
      - 'Postumus will be another Ulysses with a wifely wonder: such long delay did him no harm: ten years of war; the Cicones' Mount Ismara; Calpe; then the burning of your eye-socket Polyphemus; Circe's beguilement; the lotus, its binding spell; Scylla and Charybdis...'
  - - - These lines seem to allude to a great misdeed committed by a prior generation. It could even refer to the very founding of Rome, when Romulus killed his twin brother Remus. This was the first act of civil conflict in Rome, and some Romans believed that the civil wars that had plagued all of Rome's history were punishment for this act.
      - Horace proceeds to suggest another reason: the gods are angry because the people have neglected their religious duties and hammers his point home with a catalogue of Rome's recent military embarrassments (lines 9-16)
    - - Here Horace is making explicit reference to the weakened state of Rome during the Punic wars against Carthage and the war against Cleopatra at Actium.
  - - - Here Horace presents two of the leading women in the imperial family, dressed in holy ribbons - indicative of their role as chaste married women in Roman religion.
- - - - Here Augustus is shown to be ensuring the continued peace of Rome and thus acting as the father of his nation.
    - - 17 - 'Four times I helped the treasury with my own money, so that I transferred to those who ran the treasury one hundred and fifty million sesterces.'
      - 18 - 'when the taxes were insufficient, I gave out, from my own granary and inheritance, grain and money, sometimes to one hundred thousand men, sometimes in excess of that number.'
      - 15 - 'I personally bought grain and distributed twelve rations of it to each man'
      - 5 - 'I freed the whole population from fear and immediate fanger, at my own cost and effort.'
      - 6 - ' by the consent of the Senate and people of Rome, I alone was to be responsible for the laws and morals, with supreme power
      - 8 - 'By new laws passed on my authority, I bought back many examples of ancestral practices that were becoming absolete in our time and I myself handed on many exemplary practices to posterity that could be imitated.'
      - 20 - 'I rebuilt aqueducts that had fallen into disrepair, and I doubled the capacity of the aqueduct called Marcia, by bringing in water from a new spring. I completed the Forum of Julius and the basilica between the Temple of Castor and the Temple of Saturn, works started and almost completed by my father, and when the basilica was consumed by fire, I expanded it. [...] In my sixth consulship I restored eighty two temples of the gods in the city by the authority of the senate, missing out none that needed to be rebuilt at that time. In my seventh consulship, I rebuilt the Flaminian Way from the city to Ariminium, and all the bridges except the Mulvian and the Minucian.'
    - - 'He both revised existing laws and enacted new ones, for example on profligacy, adultery, chastity, bribery and to encourage marriage and procreation among the Senatorial and Equestrian orders
      - Augustus shorted the legal period between betrothal and marriage and limited the number of divorces per individual to stop Romans from working around the new laws
      - Upon being awarded the title of Pater Patriae, Augustus is said to have replied to the Senate 'Fathers of the Senate, having achieved my greatest wish, what more can I ask of the immortal gods, but to retain your unanimous approval to the very end of my days?' with tears in his eyes.
    - - The statue of Augustus in the centre of the Forum of Augustus showed the title 'Pater Patriae'.
        
        The subtle but notable distinction between 'pater' which was used by significant Senators through Rome's history, like Cicero, and 'parens' which had only been used by Caesar shows the king of father of the nation Augustus wanted to be seen as.