The Shadow of Virgil and Augustus on Chaucer’s House of Fame

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In Chaucer’s House of Fame, the narrator describes statues of Virgil and of Ovid (1481-87), the lines long-interpreted as implying the predominance of Mars over Jupiter in the Aeneid. It is apparent, however, that Chaucer—ironic in his use of “auctorite,” and familiar with a range of contrasts between Virgil and Ovid—particularly with the latter’s irreverent, subversive and carnivalesque approach to imperial myths in the Heroides and Fasti—in fact, described those statues to comment incisively on Virgil’s role in bolstering the political prestige of Augustus, first Roman emperor.
Furthermore, Virgil’s exaltation of Augustus’s authority by implicit analogy with “pius Aeneas” was consistent and complementary with Augustus’s own self-construction in the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, which appealed to the Latin concept of auctoritas and to the ideals of filial piety and symbolic fatherhood to mystify the princeps’ authoritarian usurpation of political power. Thus, also, Chaucer’s equivalent use of Middle-English term, auctorite, and his symbolic descriptions of the statues of Virgil and Ovid, highlight new evidence of Chaucer’s ironic perspective of political and literary authority.

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