Politics and Poetics 13.10.2016
Term 1, HANDOUT 2. Building and staging political power: Livy and Augustus
1.
Discussion:
Kennedy’s ‘Augustan and anti-Augustan: Reflections on terms of reference’ (1997)
1)What are the problems associated with discussing the ‘politics’ of ancient literature?
2)Why might we as classicists argue that investigating ancient Roman political terms/concepts like concordia (concord), amicitia (friendship) or libertas (freedom) simply by looking these words up in a Latin or English dictionary is inadequate?
3)What is the difference between thinking about Augustus as a person and as an idea?
4)Why can ‘no statement, even made by Augustus himself, be categorically “Augustan” or “anti-Augustan”’, as Kennedy puts it?
[You might want to relate this to contemporary politics, and think about how the media, especially, emphasizes and plays on the degree to which meaning is a function of reception. Also think about how political discourses are open to appropriation, and frequently are appropriated, by opposing parties, and about how ‘oppositional’ discourses may actually be constitutive of a particular ideology or politics.]
- Having read and thought about Kennedy’s discussion, compare the following passages from Livy 1 and Augustus Res Gestae: what do the echoes between passage B and C (in the light of A) reveal?
A. Livy, AUC 1 Pref.6
Such traditions (i.e. the early history of Rome) belong to the time before the city was founded, or rather was presently to be founded, and are adorned with poetic legends (magis fabulis) rather than based on trustworthy, monumental proofs of historical events (incorruptis rerum gestarum monumentis).
….Pref.10
‘What in particular makes the study of history healthy and productive is that you look upon every kind of experience set forth as an illuminated monument(inlustri…monumento).
B. Livy, AUC 1.19.3
[Numa was declared King…]
Having in this way obtained the crown, Numa prepared to re-found the city, which had so recently been founded by force of arms, by laws and customs. He saw that this was impossible as long as a state of war lasted, for war brutalised men. Thinking that the ferocity of his subjects might be mitigated by the disuse of arms, he built the temple of Janus at the foot of the Aventine as a symbol of peace and war, so that when it was open it indicated that the State was under arms, and when it was shut that all the surrounding nations were at peace. Twice since Numa's reign has it been shut, once after the first Punic war in the consulship of T. Manlius, and the second time, which heaven has allowed our generation to witness, after the battle of Actium, when peace on land and sea (terra marique) was secured by the emperor Caesar Augustus.
C. Augustus, Res Gestae 13
The temple of Janus Quirinus was ordered by our ancestors to be closed whenever there was peace. So when peace was secured by victory, throughout the whole domain of the Roman people on land and sea (terra marique), that temple, which before my birth is recorded to have been closed only twice in all since the foundation of the city, the senate ordered to be closed three times when I was Princeps.
2.Livy’s politics:
- Patavinitas: paduan provincialism linked to close attachment to traditions of Republic? See Quintilian 1.5.6, 8.1.3.
- Tacitus Annals 4.34 on Livy’s political allegiances and relationship with Augustus:
(25CE, under Tiberius)
‘In the year of the consulship of Cornelius Cossus and Asinius Agrippa, Cremutius Cordus was prosecuted on a new charge, now for the first time heard. He had published a history in which he had praised Marcus Brutus and called Caius Cassius the last of the Romans. His accusers were Satrius Secundus and Pinarius Natta, creatures of Sejanus. This was enough to ruin the accused; and then too the emperor listened with an angry frown to his defence, which Cremutius, resolved to give up his life, began thus:—
"It is my words, Senators, which are condemned, so I am innocent of any guilty act; yet these do not touch the emperor or the emperor's mother, who are alone comprehended under the law of treason. I am said to have praised Brutus and Cassius, whose careers many have described and no one has mentioned without eulogy. Titus Livius, pre-eminently famous for eloquence and truthfulness, extolled Cneius Pompeius in such a panegyric that Augustus called him ‘The Pompeian’, and yet this was no obstacle to their friendship. Scipio, Afranius, this very Cassius, this same Brutus, he nowhere describes as brigands and traitors, terms now applied to them, but repeatedly as illustrious men. Asinius Pollio's writings too hand down a glorious memory of them, and Messala Corvinus used to speak with pride of Cassius as his general. Yet both these men prospered to the end with wealth and preferment. Again, that book of Marcus Cicero, in which he lauded Cato to the skies, how else was it answered by Cæsar the dictator, than by a written oration in reply, as if he was pleading in court? The letters of Antonius, the harangues of Brutus contain reproaches against Augustus, false indeed, but urged with powerful sarcasm; the poems which we read of Bibaculus and Catullus are crammed with invectives on the Cæsars. Yet the Divine Julius, the Divine Augustus themselves bore all this and let it pass, whether in forbearance or in wisdom I cannot easily say. Assuredly what is despised is soon forgotten; when you resent a thing, you seem to recognise it."
- How can we think about the politics of the AUC beyond the basic question:‘what was Livy’s attitude to the Augustan regime?
Various (interlinked) approaches:
1)The politics of space and spectacle, and/or the ideology of form (Kraus, Jaeger, Feldherr)
2)The politics of morality(Langlands, Roller)
3)The politics of rape (Klindienst, Joshel, Vandiver)
4)Exemplarity / the modelling, showcasing and production of aristocratic competition (Habinek, Roller)
Passages to consider:
Nb: You will need to prepare the following selection of passages from Livy 1 for the final exam. However you will be expected to have read and reflected on book 1 as a whole.
Buildingmonumenta, expanding imperium: the repeated performance of foundation
A1.
1.1.pref.4: Moreover my subject involves infinite labour, seeing that it must be traced back beyond seven hundred years, and that proceeding from slender beginnings it has so increased (creverit) as now to be burdened by its own magnitude.
A2
1.2.3 Mezentius now felt… that the Trojan state was growing (crescere) much more rapidly than was altogether safe for its neighbours.
1.4.6: in those days this [the area around the Tiber] was a wild and uninhabited region.
1.4.9: …their band of young men grew larger by the day (crescente in dies grege)
A3 (cf. also B3)
1.8.4: Meanwhile the city was expanding (crescebat) and reaching out its walls to include one place after another.
A4
1.30.1-2: Rome, meanwhile, was increased (crescit) by Alba’s downfall. …. Tullus made the chief Albans senators, so that this branch of the nation might grow (cresceret) too. Such were the Julii, the Servilii, the Quinctii, the Geganii, the Curiatii, and Cloelii. He also built, as a consecrated place for the order he had enlarged, a senate house.
Seeing and being seen: history as spectacle, the reader as spectator
B1.
1.1.pref.4-6: ‘I doubt not that to most readers the earliest origins and the period immediately succeeding them will give little pleasure (voluptas), for they will be hurrying to reach these modern times, in which the power of a people which has long held sway is working its own undoing. I myself, on the contrary, shall seek in this an additional reward for my toil, that I may avert my gaze from the troubles which our age has been witnessing for so many years, so long at least as I am absorbed in remembering the brave days of old, free from every care which, even if it would not divert the historian’s mind from the truth, might nevertheless cause it anxiety.’
B2.
Pref.10
What in particular makes the study of history healthy and productive is that you look upon every kind of experience set forth as an illuminated monument (inlustri…monumento).
B3.
1.9.9-13, 16: The Sabines, too, came with all their people, including their children and wives. They were hospitably entertained in every house, and when they looked at the site of the city, its walls, its numerous buildings, they marvelled that Rome had grown great (crevisse) so quickly. When the time came for the show (spectaculum) to begin, and people’s thoughts and eyes were fixated on it, the pre-planned attack began. At a given signal the young Romans darted this way and that, to seize and carry off the young girls. In most cases these were taken by the men in whose path they happened to be. But some, of exceptional beauty, had been marked out for the chief senators, and were carried off to their houses by plebeians to whom that job had been entrusted. One girl, who far excelled in appearance and grace, was seized, the story goes, by the gang of a certain Thalassius. When they were asked repeatedly to whom they were taking her, they kept shouting that no one should touch her, for they were taking her to Thalassius, and this was the origins of the wedding cry (‘Talasius’, cf. Plutarch Rom.15). The games broke up in a panic, and the parents of the girls fled in grief.
….The men excused their act on account of ‘passion’ (cupiditate) and ‘love’ (amore)
B4
1.25.2-6 [The battle between the Horatii and the Curiatii, triplet brothers]: The two armies were drawn up, each in front of its own camp, no longer in any immediate danger, but their concern as great as ever. And no wonder, since empire was being staked on those few men’s valour and good fortune! Alert, therefore, and in suspense, they concentrated their attention on this unpleasing spectacle (minime gratumspectaculum). …The instant they encountered one another, there was a clash of shields and a flash of glittering blades, while a deep shudder ran through the onlookers, who, as long as neither side had the advantage, remained powerless to speak or breathe. Then, in the hand-to-hand fight that followed, during which not just struggling bodies and the play of sword and shield, but also bloody wounds were exhibited to men’s eyes, two of the Romans fell, fatally wounded, on top of one another, while all three Albans were wounded. At the fall of the Romans a great shout of joy burst from the Alban army…
B5
1.28.10-11 (the dismemberment of Mettius Fufetius): He then brought up two four-horse chariots, and caused Mettius to be stretched out and tied to them, after which the horses were whipped up in opposite directions, and bore off in each of the cars fragments of the mangled body, where the limbs held to their fastenings. All eyes were turned away from so dreadful a spectacle. Such was the first and last punishment among the Romans of a kind that disregards the laws of humanity. In other cases we may boast that with no nation have milder punishments found favour.
B6
1.35.7-9: Tarquin’s first war was with the Latins, whose town of Apiolae he took by storm. Returning from there with more booty than rumours about the war had led people to expect, he exhibited games on a more splendid and elaborate scale than former kings had done. It was then that the ground was first marked out for the circus now called Maximus. Places were divided amongst the Fathers and the knights where they might take their seats; these were called ‘rows’. They got their view from seats raised on props to a height of twelve feet above the ground.
B7
1.41.1: The dying Tarquinius had hardly been caught up in the arms of the bystanders when the fugitives were seized by the lictors. Then there was an uproar, as crowds hurried to the scene, asking one another in amazement what the matter was.
B8
1.56.2: these two works (the erection of seats in the Circus, and the great sewer), have hardly been matched by the new splendour of these days.
B9
1.57.7-11, 58.4: “Come! If the vigour of youth is in us, let us mount our horses and see for ourselves the true character of our wives. Let every man regard as the surest test what meets his eyes when the woman’s husband enters unexpectedly.” ….. They saw Lucretia very differently employed from the daughters-in-law of the king. These they had seen at a luxurious banquet, whiling away the time with their young friends. But Lucretia, although it was late at night, was busily engaged with her spinning, while her maids toiled around her in the lamplight in the hall of her house. The prize for this contest in womanly virtues went to Lucretia. As Collatius and the Tarquinii approached, they were graciously received, and the victorious husband politely invited to the young princes to his table. It was there that Sextus Tarquinius was seized with a wicked desire to rape Lucretia (mala libido Lucretiae per vimstuprandae capit). Not only her visible beauty, but also her proven chastity, turned him on. …
When he found her obdurate and not to be moved even by fear of death, he went further and threatened her with disgrace, saying that when she was dead he would kill his slave and lay him naked at her side, so that she might be said to have been killed in adultery with a man of low status. … his victorious libido overcame her modesty by violence.
B10
1.59.3-4: They carried out Lucretia’s corpse from the house and bore it to the market-place, where men crowded around them, attracted inevitably by the miraculous nature of this strange event and by its horror.
Competing male desire and its displacement
C1.
1.6.3: ‘Romulus and Remus were seized by the desire (cupido cepit) to found a city in the region where they had been exposed and brought up’
cf. 1.7.5: Cacus is ‘captivated [captus] by the beauty’ of Hercules’ cattle.
And 1.56.10: …a desire (cupido) sprang up in the hearts of the youths (Titus, Arruns, Brutus) to find out which one of them should be king in Rome.
Compare with B3 and B9. Why are political ambition and political violence eroticized, and to what effect?
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