Gender, Sex, and the Domestication of the Empire in Art of the Augustan Age

Roman artistic works from the Augustan period begin to use the bodies of women, but also of men and children, to represent the empire as a household with Augustus as its head. Such representations manipulate developing metaphors of family loyalty and paternal control to express the transformative power of Augustus's imperial policies that made former enemies into subjects or cooperative participants in Roman society. The poetry of Ovid reveals the pervasiveness of this imagery and the range of interpretations placed upon it by a member of the elite now subject to an emperor.