This introductory chapter reflects on the importance of monuments, topography and symbolic space in the production of Augustan ideology, both reviewing the manifold ways in which the princeps sought to impose himself on the urban and Italian landscape, and seeking to contextualise these within wider patterns in the literary and cultural construction of space in the first century BC. After a brief review of the ‘spatial turn’ in Classical Studies, it goes on to identify six broad categories within which the construction and representation of space in ancient literary texts has typically been considered in recent scholarship: the relation between written and physical cities; the relation between space and hegemonic power; the contrasting paradigms of hodological and cartographic space; the relation between centre and periphery; space as a site of cultural memory; and the conceptualisation of poetics in spatial terms. A final section traces some key themes that emerge from the volume’s remaining chapters and relates them to these wider trends in Classical Studies.