PRIMITIVE POLITICS: LUCAN and PETRONIUS Martha Malamud in Roman Literature, Politics and Morality Are Not Distinct Categories

CHAPTER TWELVE PRIMITIVE POLITICS: LUCAN AND PETRONIUS Martha Malamud In Roman literature, politics and morality are not distinct categories: both are implicated in the construction and maintenance of structures of power. Roman virtues are the basis of the res publica, the body politic. In what follows, I take “politics” in a broad sense: “public or social ethics, that branch of moral philosophy dealing with the state or social organism as a whole.”1 As Edwards puts it, “issues which for many in the present day might be ‘political’ or ‘economic’ were moral ones for Roman writers, in that they linked them to the failure of individuals to control themselves.”2 What follows is a case study of how Lucan and Petronius deploy a pair of motifs popular in Roman moralizing discourse (primitive hospitality, as exemplifi ed by the simple meal, and primitive architecture) in ways that refl ect on the politics of early imperial Rome. Embedded in the moralizing tradition is the notion of decline. Roman virtue is always situated in the past, and visions of the primitive, such as the rustic meal and the primitive hut, evoke comparisons with a corrupted present. These themes are present in Roman literature from an early period. Already by the third century bce, there is a growing preoccupation with a decline in ethical standards attributed to luxury and tied to the expansion of Roman power and changes in Rome’s political structure. Anxiety focused around luxurious foods, clothing, art, and architecture. As Purcell observes of Roman views of their own food history, “[d]iet-history is a subdivision of that much larger way of conceptualizing passing time, the history of moral decline and recovery; indeed, it is a way of indexing that history,”3 and one can say the same of architecture-history. From the perspective of Roman moralists and 1 OED s.v. “politic” B3a (pl. “politics”)—a defi nition considered obsolete. For an introduction into the much discussed question of literature and politics in the age of Nero, see Brisset (1964); Rudich (1993); Sullivan (1985); Bartsch (1994); Bartsch (1998); Henderson (1988) 122–64; Masters (1992); Elsner and Masters (1994). 2 Edwards (1993) 4. 3 Purcell (2003) 343. 274 martha malamud ethnographers, diet and architecture are markers that reveal individual and civic character, and as such, they have political implications. Encolpius’ arrival in Croton and visit to Oenothea’s cella (“hut” or “cubicle,” the setting for Sat. 134–8), and Amyclas’ reception of Julius Caesar in Bellum Civile 5.504–59 and a related passage from Bel- lum Civile 9, the sandstorm in the Libyan desert, share certain motifs (shipwreck, fi shermen, primitive architecture, hospitality) and models. While Petronius and Lucan each exploit the comic possibilities of an encounter with the primitive, they also use primitive imagery to engage in a long-standing debate about the moral and ethical soundness of the Roman polity.4 Allusions to Odysseus’ encounters with different groups of men and to epic treatments of primitive hospitality form a sort of anthropological framework for Petronius’ portrait of civic life in Croton; motifs of fi shing and shipwreck index symptoms of social decline relevant to the Neronian period (legacy-hunting, civil war, childlessness). Writing about the primitive is, in fact, one way of writing politics in Rome. Primitive Rome: Romulean Thatch “Primitive Rome” had long been an attractive trope for Roman writers: juxtaposition of past and present allowed them to explore Roman history and character. Vergil, master of chronological confusion, uses the primitive buildings of Evander’s day to provide a moral framework for evaluating the Augustan present against both the primitive Roman past and the Arcadian past evoked by Evander, whose origins are in Arcadia (Aen. 8.359–68). Evander’s cramped house (angusti . tecti, Aen. 8.366, in striking contrast to tectum augustum, ingens, “the huge royal hall” of Latinus’ palace, 7.170) and the couch of leaves draped with a bear hide, are proof of Evander’s virtuous simplicity. The “huge” (ingentem, Aen. 8.367) hero Aeneas, like Hercules before him, is on a scale much 4 As Edwards (1996) 28–9 comments, “the juxtaposition of vastly different images of the past and present . serves to emphasise Rome’s lack of continuity, the tension between past rusticity and present urbanity, and thus to problematise what it means to be a Roman.” See Edwards (1996) 28–43 for a discussion of ancient buildings preserved in Rome. Similarly, ritual meals and accounts of the early Roman diet are revealing. Cf. also Purcell (2003) 341: “[f ]ood for the Romans . plays a notable role, perhaps even a surprising one, in the relationship of the present to various pasts”. Gowers (1993) is indispensable on the cultural signifi cance of food in Roman literature..

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