'Augustan' and 'Anti-Augustan': Reflections on Terms of Reference

~'t,fA From RomanPoetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus. n'l~ Anton Powell, ed. London 1997. that readers of texts are caught up in a collusive relationship with those texts, a relationship in which interpretation deemed valid involves the reproduction of the terms and criteria on which the original reception 2 of the text was based. Reproduction involves recontextualisation, and recontextualisation involves change of meaning, however subtle and im• perceptible that may be. The politics of August;an poetry is inextricabl~' linked with the politics of talking about it. A recurrent theme of this 'Augustan' and 'Anti-Augustan': paper will be the way in which the meaning ,of the term 'Augustus' Reflections on Terms of Reference changes as it takes on the ideological colouring of the context in which it is invoked, and continues to be the point of intersection of contesting ideologies here and now, as competing interests attempt to exercise Duncan F. Kennedy control over the discourse of the past. Let us start by reflecting on the English word 'term'. It is etymologi• When we read a classical text and pass a judgement upon it as to cally cognate with the Latin te17llinus, a boundary-stone, suggesting a whether it is 'Augustan' or 'anti-Augustan', there is a tendency to think model of language in which terms are boundary-stones which divide up conceptual space within fixed and defined limits. At first sight, this is that we are doing an obvious and straightforward thing. The 'common• sensical' view is that we are separated from the Romans by two thou• rather reassuring, implying that language is firmly rooted and our con• ceptual space carefully mapped out into neat lots. Language could be sand years, and that this huge chronological gap allows us to adopt the stance of detached observers passing judgements according to a stable figured in other ways with different metaphorical entailments,:! but the set of criteria and in an agreed set of terms. That is, a situation deemed prevalence of the property metaphor (seen, for example, in 'define', 'determine', 'conceptual space', 'limits', 'mapped' in the last two sen• historically determined is studied in accordance with terms and criteria tences alone) indicates how one particular view of what language is, thought not to be so determined. This is an oversimplitication, but not a radical misrepresentation of much of what gets written on the topic of rather than any other, is already inscribed in the very language we use to 'Literature and Politics in the Augustan Age'. But we should pause for describe language, directing our attitude to it and predetermining cer• thought. A term like 'literature', automatically invoked in such a dis• tain guiding assumptions in such a way as to allow them to be taken for cussion, has emerged from a very complex process of development and granted and not examined.3 To use any word is to step into a world in carries in it traces of the forces that have determined its meaning; 1 and which myriad interpretations have already been made on our behalf.4 the Romans had no term which represented the range of meanings that This model of language and the preconceptions it encodes, of language have become associated with the English word 'politics'. Words cannot bF; as static and with fixed referents, underpins not the mode but one mode taken for granted or as something given, but themselves have a history of interpretation, as it happens the one that recently has been dominant and are involved in history. Granting them a history involves consider• over other contending modes. But the questions it is possible to ask ation of what are the determinants of their current usage. Language, about property rights can also be asked about conceptual terms.5Why is and views of what language is and how it operates, are part of the a particular boundary stone set where it is and not in some other place? context which language seeks to describe. In what follows, I shall By whom, and in accordance with what criteria, was it put there? By examine some of the ways in which the context of our interpretation, its what authority does it remain where it is? Whose interests does it serve, in its placing where it is, and whom is it meant to exclude? Property social, political, and cultural presuppositions, the institutions within which such interpretations are produced and the norms they impose, rights can come to seem so natural that they are not challenged; the:' are part of that interpretation and govern what sorts of explanations ,are observed equally by those whom they exclude as by those who critics are prepared to accept and describe as 'valid' or. 'natural' or -:.benefItfrom them. But the siting of property divisions where the~':lre is 'obvious' or 'true', and what terms are deemed 'appropriate' or the result of a long process of conflict and contestation, and is regulated to the finest detail by the massive institution of the law. Thc stability of 'proper'. Thus the discussion will be as much about 'us' as it is about 'them'; but the validity of this distinction also, itself an issue of ideologi• these divisions, their naturalness or rightness, is temporary, conditional, cal contestation, will be put under scrutiny in a consideration of the way even illusory; at any moment they might become subject to challenge or

26 27

[q eA?p '] transgression and be moved (or even suspended) as a result.6 Similarly statuary and the visual arts,12 T.P. Wiseman on topography and archi• the word 'term' gives an initial impression of something not open to tecture,13 and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and Mary Beard on calendars14 dispute, but again this emphasis on stability suppresses the long process have brought out how symbolic associations were mobilised to promote by which particular terms were shaped into their current usages, be• the image and authority of the man whose name they would immedi• came acceptable and thought of as natural or objective 7 - it suppresses ately bring to mind, Augustus. However, language is involved in media• their history, that is, whilst serving the interests of some people at the ting. these associations, and it is difficult, and methodologically problematic, to disentangle it. Words are the principal medium through expense of others. Words no less than property raise questions of pos• session, title, right, authority, and power, and are no less subject to which meaning acts to develop, enact, and sustain relationships of institutional regulation (primarily that of the educational system and the power. 15 academy),9 all the more powerful for not being seen as such (cf. pp. Speaking and writing are social acts, and what gets said or written is 36-8 below). subtly moulded and modified by the context of the utterance and the The boundary stone image of language suggests that terms are neatly anticipated conditions of reception, whether it will meet with consent, circumscribed. On a more technical level, the image constitutes opposition, defiance, or whatever. Every utterance, whether those in• meaning asa static set of autonomous categories based on a system oi volved realise it or not, thus enacts a relationship of power, challenging inclusions and exclusions which are ideologically determined, lOapower• or confirming su~eriority or inferiority, exercising 'a gentle, invisible ful mode of thought which moulds our preconceptions in a process that form of violence', 6 which can be at its most effective when it is not seen even shapes the institutions we work in. In this mode of thought, Lan• in terms of authority and compliance, but concealed under titles such as guage is an autonomous category and the inclusions and exclusions it 'politeness', 'deference', '~propriateness' etc. Relations of power are represents can be seen, for instance, in the preconceptions underlying thus part of the meaning1 of every utterance. When taken on a large the proverb 'actions speak louder than words'. Words are no less part scale, acts of speech and writing will tend to mobilise meaning in one of social action and interaction than deeds, though this mode of thought direction rather than another, to the interests of particular individuals tries to. impose a boundary between the two,11a boundary which has or groups rather than others, and so cumulatively produce the social manifested itself in the different ways the ancient world has been inter• structures and hierarchies of a particular society. Politics are thus in• preted. On the one hand, there is social interactionism, in which lan• scribed in language-in-use as part of its meaning, and create their ef• guage and symbolic systems play little or no part in the analysis; and on fects partly by their ability to conceal their presence. Radical shifts of the other, linguistic formalism, in which language and texts are analysed power within a society are effected not only by force of arms, but more with little or no reference to the specific social and historical conditions subtly by changes in the direction of this mobilisation of meaning in thF• (often consigned to the margins as the 'background' or 'context') in interests of different individuals or groups. which their production and reception were, and are, involved. Institu• Linguistic formalism is a very elaborate methodology which, in its tionally, this distinction is reflected in the division, now becoming less characteristic process of categorisation ('language and power', 'politics emphatic, between historians and literary critics in classical studies and and poetry'), enacts the suppression of the explicitly po!itical in its IJ' object of study. As the dominant methodology of Latin literary studies, classical departments. \t! it accounts for the failure of theories of symbolic power to make the This definition of language has worked to exclude acknowledgement 1.Tl.' of the social, historical, and political, and to suppress the association of headway they have in other areas, and for the considerable concep• language and power. A pointer to the way this system of inclusions and tual!ideological18 resistance they have encountered. The recent recep• exclusions works is the use of the word 'and' (the boundary stone par tion of Horace's Satires provides a noteworthy example and suggests excellence separating demarcated fields) in phrases such as 'Language some reasons for this. Until recently there had been a remarkable and Power', 'Language and Politics'. Recently the autonomy of such consensus on these poems. In 1973, Michael McGann referred to 'the categories has been coming increasingly under question as an aware• generally apolitical nature of the Satires,.19 Nine years later, Gordon Williams could be found to remark: 'there is also theleast reflection on ness grows of the ways in which symbolic meaning works to create, render legitimate, and perpetuate relationships of power and authority, political issues [in the Satires and Epistles]; those are the particular and equally of the ways in which symbolic meaning can be appropriated theme of the Odes,.2o In the same year, Niall Rudd wrote: 'few of these to subvert such relationships. Studies such as those of Paul Zanker on [Satires and Epodes] touch on politics, and those that do conveyatti-

28 29 tudes of disgust (Epod. 4), disillusion (Sat. 1. 6) or despair (Epod. 7 and ('few of these poems touch on politics and those that do convey atti• 16)'.21 Horace's perceived responses are comforting to, and reinforce tudes of disgust, disillusion or despair,).26 the self-image of, critics who feel themselves in some way detached So, contrary to a very strong, widely-held, and largely unexamined from the political processes of their own society. The recent assertion of preconception, meaning is a shifting and unstable phenomwon: terms, a wide-ranging political dimtnsion for the Satires22 met with the criti• like property divisions, are not as permanent as they seem to be at first cism that the term 'political' is being used 'in a rather extended sense of glance. Terms and expressions may appear to have a stable meaning in the word,.23These comments are, of course, symptomatic of a tendency their particular context, but this stability (which is an accommodation to in Latin literary criticism to see politics only with reference to formal the established relations of power in which the expression lies, or an political institutions and the personalities directly involved in them; but equilibrium of tensions) is in a crucial way illusory, limited, and proble• there is much more going on here than that, and it is necessary to matic, and is open to disruption, contestation, and change.27 To take a examine the preconceptions underlying these critics' use of the term Roman example: the term libertas had for a long time been a central 'politics' and equally their feeling that its use is not appropriate in and 'stable' one in the ideology of Republican Rome and was perhaps certain contexts. more potent and valued than any other - the prime plot of land, to Significantly, the proper sphere of reference of terms like 'politics', pursue the property image. However, this stability had been disrupted 'political', 'politicise' and so on is usually deemed to be issues of con• because of its appropriation by various interests in the turbulent and flict, overt differences and instances of disruption. However, reconcilia• sectarian aftermath of the assassination of Julius Caesar. Each wanted tion and integration are no less political processes in that they affect the the positive and valued connotations of this word to be associated with distribution of power in specific social contexts, and yet they do not it. One of the many grounds on which this battle was fought out was attract the description 'political'. This conventional restriction has an Horace's Satires. Though the word is rarely used explicitly in the poems, ideological diinension, being symptomatic and illustrative of the way libertas is one of the central preoccupations of the Satires, its delicate our discourse - the words we use and the way that we use them in political connotations being mediated principally through discussions of varying contexts - is, at the moment anyway, mobilised towards quies• the less sensitive term aequitas, through coded readings (presented as cence, and the acceptance and maintenance of the [tanlS quo. For a 'literary' comment) of the 'free' and 'outspoken' aristocrat Lucilius, and long time now, the boundary stones of this term have been so placed as through remarks on the soCialconstraints upon Horace as the son of a to include the 'disruptive', the 'oppositional', and the 'agitational', and freedman.28The ordlibertas in Horace is no less interest-laden than it to exclude the 'consensual' and the 'integrative'.24 There are currently is elsewhere, but ucceeds in not appearing so. Horace's iqsertion of it, widespread attempts to move these boundary stones,25 and the reper• into his own int rational, quietistic discourse, as a non-agitational cussions of this are being registered even in the discourse of Latin quality, constitut d a reassertion of the positive connotations of a va• scholarship ('the term "political" is being used in a rather extended lued but disrupt d and hence partially discredited term. In the Satires, sense of the word'). In an expressed desire to bring about social change, libertas, very ectively presented in such a way as to recuperate its some would wish to apply the word to everything, even the most 'mun• reassuring connotations, was relocated within a political discourse to dane' things - perhaps especially the most mundane things, in order to which it had previously been believed antagonistic, that of an emergent emphasise that potentially everything can contribute to the distribution autocracy. A sense of stability, of 'normality', of 'continuity' with a pre• of power in society - and that what does not get described as 'political' vious tradition was being re-established, but within a new, overarching can be one of the most important factors in that distribution: 'disagree• set of power relations. A term previously mobilised to support a non• ments about the scope and domain of "the political" are themselves monarchical system (imperceptibly, perhaps, to manl of those involved) constitutive features of political discourse' (Ball 1988, 13). As signifi• changed direction to support an autocratic one.2 To return to the cant as the siting of the boundary-stones of the term 'political' in the property image, title to the prime plot of land and its benefits had criticism of Horace is what is deemed to lie in the adjoining fields, , passed to Augustus; but, more than that, the boundary stones had excluded by the boundary stone from the field designated 'politics'. In moved slightly. The word libertas may have looked the same, but its this ideological scheme, Literature is one such field, a repository of meaning had changed. eternal values and truths over against the diurnal sordidness of politics All such abstract terms need to be examined to see what are the specifics of the context in which they are invoked and by which they are

30 31 defined, to see whose interests are served by their invocation and how finds its release in 1. 5, the journey to Brundisium, in which Octavian the abstraction works to conceal the play of interests. Friendship is a and Antony - who could be defined from another perspective as rivals .recurrent theme of the Satires, and its presentation is the focus of much for power (or enemies) - are termed, in their immediate interests, amici of the critical approval of the poems. It is presented in abstract terms as ('friends') in a context where such a paradigm of friendship is presented the pinnacle of right thinking: nil ego colltuleJim iucundo sanus amico: as having widely desirable results: huc velltunts erat Maecenas optimus ('as long as I am in my right mind, I would compare nothing to a atque / Cocceius, missi magnis de rebus uterque / legati, aversos soliti pleasant friend', 1. 5. 44). In a context in which civil strife is figured as compollere amicos ('here we were to be joined by the excellent furor (madness),3° the metaphor sanus encodes the reference to the Maecenas and Cocceius, both sent as envoys on momentous matters, here-and-now, the political charge of what is presented as a 'general' whose custom it is to bring together estranged friends', 27 ff.). This statement about 'friendship'. But what social practices and specific ac• pattern of expectation is aroused within a continuum of experience tions attract the description 'friendship', and whose interests are served which is crucially, for both Horace and his readers and for us, punctu• thereby? 'Friendship' is a highly selective construct of inclusions and ated and organised discursively into two areas deemed to be separate~ exclusions, involving an indulgent forgiveness of what are called by the the 'private' or 'personal', and the 'public'. The Horatian discourse of emollient term 'silly errors', actions which when analysed in context friendship invokes, and in its own view restricts itself to, the 'private', turn out to have a political colouring:31 mihi dulces / ignoscellt, si quid but, beyond its own view of its own workings, operates across the peccaro stultlis, amici: ('my kil1dfriends will pardon me if, in my foolish• boundary as well. ness, I have committed any peccadillo', 1.3. 139-40). Social conflict was The Satires, with their potent mixture of unremarkable received wis• also figured as sin in the Roman discourse of civil war.32The particular dom (that is, the 'knowledge' and beliefs according to which Roman action designated as 'sin' by Horace, but in the same breath distanced society organised itself), their mild and reassuring tone, and their avoid• by the phraseology of si quid peccaro ('if I have committed any pecca• ance or softening of whatever in the circumstances of their composition dillo'), was to have fought for Brutus and Cassius against Octavian at might have been perceived as controversial, sectarian, or antagonistic, the Battle of Philippi. People are the focus for a host of symbolic associ• are an integrational text par excellence. As such, they may well have ations which encode their social position and power. The use of the been as little perceived as 'political' at the time as they have been in plural33 amici suggests the statement is a generalising one, and that it modern criticism (though allowance must be made for the heightened refers merely to people whom Horace knows and has warm feelings sensitivity to language that is a frequent feature of situations of con• towards; but the context of the poem suggests that one in particular is flict), but they were part of the process whereby the young Octavian of meant, Octavian, who is named in the Satires only at the beginning of the proscriptions of the 40s Be was transformed into the saviour of the this poem to which this is a coda, but to whom our attention is turned Republic at Actium. It is less important (and not easy) to quantify the back in the convention ofreading referred to as ring composition. Re• contribution the Satires made to this process,35 than to note their invol• conciliation (so often the effacement of the 'political'), as here, and the vement and investigate the way that involvement (has) managed to con• avoidance of ,excessive' criticism (viz. the accommodation to, or ac• ceal itself. It is only possible to bring into view the dimension of ceptance of, the interests of others), are given an insistent and privi• Horace's poems that they conceal and exclude - their part in the his• leged place within this defmition - as in 1. 3. 25 ff.: cum tua pervideas torical process of the formation and continuing legitimation of a com• oat/is mala tippus inunctis / cur in amiconl1/l vitiis tarl ce17lis acutum / plex of power relations - if we make the effort to see the terms they quam aut aquila aut serpens Epidall1ius? ('whilst you examine your own present (amicitia, libertas and the 'equivalents,36 we substitute for them, faults as a bleary-eyed man might whose eyes are unanointed, why is 'freedom', 'friendship' and so on) not as obvious or given or taken for your sight in the case of your friends' faults as sharp as that of an eagle granted or an unquestioned part of our thinking. This is all the more or Epidaurian serpent?'); also at 43 f.: at pater ut gllati34 sic nos debemus pressing the closer these terms lie to the centre of the value-system amici / si quod vitium sit non fastidire ('we ought not to be offended at through which our social practices are articulated. This is not to regard any fault ofa friend, no more than a father is with the defects of a as morally bad what was previously regarded as good (though inevitably child'); and at 53 f.: opindr, / haec res et iungit, iunctos et servat amicos this process of defamiliarisation will not be entirely without conse• ('this [forebearance], as I see it, makes friends and should keep them quences), but to recognise the way that Horace's text - which margi• once made'). This arouses in the reader a pattern of expectation which nalises the political by demarcating its subject matter as belonging to

32 33 morally overdetermined categories (the 'ethical' or 'the good life') • ferential capacity to make a meaning stick,40 to make libertas signify not 'responds to' (i.e. validates, legitimises) readings which operate in 'freedom' (from a rex) but 'freedom' (through a ... plinceps). The right of categories 'equivalently' overdetermined.37 Terms are always a selective any individual to use a particular expression with a particular meaning designation of social practices, the chopping up of the continuum of in particular circumstances is both an index and issue of power. A social action so as to include certain parts and exclude others. To gain a corollary to this is that stability of meaning, the feeling that words have sense of how Horace's text is working, the question to be asked is: What a fixed and assured meaning, is a hidden function of the stability of power: recall the complaint that is regularly voiced in the conditions of social practices are getting called by the terms liberlas, amicitia etc. in any particular context and whose interests are served thereby? The a radical shift of power in society, the complaint of a Thucydides or a Sallust that 'words are not being used in their proper meanings,.41 From meaning of a term is constituted not only by what it includes, but by what it excludes also; and by the act of placing the boundary-stone this point of view, such stability of meaning is related to what are termed 'institutions', nodes of social relations and concatenations of where it is, the use of one term rather than another, or none. Thus, in material resources which form a relatively stable framework for action, context, in the way they are invoked in relation to interests, terms are of word no less than deed. From this perspective, the emergence of the not politically innocent, nor are they 'stable': their meaning changes in principate might be viewed as the progressive re-organisation of a frag• the act of usage as a function of context. The very abstraction of these terms as disinterested absolutes in mented discourse, whose previous centre was provided by the institu• critical discourse reproduces and masks the means of the Satires' initial tions of the Republic, around the plinceps as the new focus of stable effects. The Satires invite (and have succeeded in securing)38 the collu• meanini)n society. Conven~io~allywe ten~ to look upon Augustus as a sion of their readers in the perpetuation not only of the values they are person, ~but he was more slgmficant as an Idea. The power of Augustus was a collective invention, the symbolic embodiment of the conflicting perceived as embodying - warm approval of 'freedom', 'friendship' and desires, incompatible ambitions and aggressions of the Romans, the so on (and thereby the interests of those with whom those terms are associated) - but on a deeper and more insidious level, the separation instrumental expression of a complex network of clependency, re• pression and fear. 'Power' emerges from this discussion not as some• of experience into the discrete spheres of the 'personal' and the 'politi• thing immanent, an attribute of an individual, but as an analytical cal', promoting compliance and quietism by suggesting that politics are the domain of a limited group of people and should be left to them. The term.43 As a legacy of methodological individualism, its associations of notion that you should restrict yourself to your own sphere is program• immanence imply a structural unity, stability of command, and control matic in the Satires: Qui fit, Maecenas, ut nemo, quam ;;ibisortem / seu of consequences that are belied by the exercise of authority and force.44 ratio dedelit seu Jors obiecelit, illa / contentus vivat, laudet diversa se• Important as the term is, it is equally important to be aware of the dangers of integrating, or collapsing, everything into a single master quentis? ('How does it come about, Maecenas, that no one lives con• tented with the lot which either choice has given him, or chance thrown discourse, the discourse of 'power'. The definition of 'power', it must not be forgotten, is itself ideologically determined. in his way, but rather extols the fortune of the one who follows a differ- ent path?', 1.1. 1-3). Where words are used in such a way as to comply with or reinforce Divisions between the 'public' and the 'private' are ideological in that ,established or dominant relations of power in society (and so to repro• duce them), their usage generally passes without notice: the property they mobilise power in society in sEecific directions and thus serve some interests at the expense of others. 9 The so-called 'personal' is 'political' rights are respected and the boundary-stones are an unremarked part in that the constitution and exercise of power involves compliance. It of the landscape. But where there is no focus of authority in society, or where power is on the move or being challenged; then the use of poten- can be precisely those things that present themselves, or are presented , tially any word can be fraught with the deepest anxieties. Under such as, apolitical that are the most actively political in allowing power to be accumulated and exercised in ways that extend beyond the notice of circumstances, language becomes, in common parlance, 'politicised'. In those involved. Both the act of categorisation and the process, where the absence of stable or agreed meaning, a speaker is aware t~::\t his the boundary-stones are placed and why and in whose interests, are words will align him with a particular ideological position and be per• crucial. ceived as a challenge. There is a reduced possibility - or in extreme Stability of terms is in an important sense illusory, but in an equally circumstances, none at all - of coalescing imperceptibly with the per• ceptions, beliefs, and values of others, that is, of situating oneself with- important sense, it is not. Different individuals or groups have a dif-

34 35 out friction within the network of existing power relationships. The to analyse, robbing it of its specificity. It is the abstraction of action extension of this is anarchy or civil war, where agreement on the from the context of power, of compliance or opposition, of affirmation meaning of key terms has broken down, and the symbolic interchange, or contestation, that invests that action with its signific<\nce.It conjures the symbolic 'violence'45 which organises the distribution of social away the relations of power by which a particular act or utterance is power, extends to physical violence. When language (always the focus constituted as legitimate (or otherwise), acts to the interest of some for contestation, though not always seen in those terms) becomes 'poli• social agents and to the detriment of others, and is reproduced as the ticised', any number of different meanings for the 'same' word can be dominant form of social action. The 'naturalness' of a convention • jockeying for supremacy to become THE meaning, and where there are indeed the description of something as a 'convention' - is a function of conflicting meanings for the same word, a speaker cannot legislate for the observer's ideology, and may.be less interesting as an observation his audience which they are to accept, or predict which they will, for the about the text or its reception than it is indicative of that ideology, that one they will accept will be a function of their ideology.46 However, is, not only what the observer believes to be true, but of his or her place some 'stability' is necessary for even the most minimally organised so• in the dynamic hegemonic process whereby consent to the dominant ciety to function. This is the place of convention, the encoding of a relations of power in society is produced.48 The culture of abstraction specific relationship of power and social structure within an expression and definition, whose mode of thought is essentialising and which ex• or act so that it is taken for granted, affirmed, and reproduced. A presses its believed relation to language in the figure of the boundary convention is thus defined by its unselfconscious accommodation to stone, is highly successful in suppressing in its thought the dynamics of existing networks of power, and is the elision for those involved of the power. enactment in the use of a word, gesture, or deed, of relationships o~ Power is a constituent of the meaning of texts no less than of lan• superiority or inferiority. Where a complex array of conventions is es• guage. The conceptual separation of 'literature' and 'politics' conceals a tablished (and thus power is relatively stable), reception is relatively collusion. The survival and prestige of the works of Horace benefited determined and assured, and can be taken for granted. from, no less than they contributed to, the emergence of all those forces In the light of this, the application by critics of 'convention' as an we collapse into the term 'Augustus'. This is an on-going process in analytical term needs to be given some attention. It is used of both which we are involved. It is.when a text is perceived as replacing conflict social behaviour and literary topic, and slides easily between the two; with reconciliation, as reinstating or reinforcing all that is considered indeed, a collusion can be detected. What are inscribed in society as most central in the tradition (that is to say, the established ideology, social practices are reaffirmed as literary conventions and appear to perceived within the culture as a series of transhistorical truths) that it . justify themselves by 'imitating life'. 'Life', however, is not a pre-given qualifies for the canonical status of a 'classic'.49 It is not insignificant in entity or body of experience but is itself discursively constructed, so that this respect that Horace became a classic in his own lifetime.50 The when we have the sensation of art being like life, what we are feelin.pis canon of classic texts to which a society defers and which it enshrines in 'the momentary congruence of one set of codes with another'.4 In its educational theory and practice is one of the most potent vehicles for either sense of 'convention', its usage generally involves an important the perpetuation of that society's dominant ideology. The canonical suppression. With its reassuring connections with 'coming together' and status of Horace's poems in Western culture and education has played 'agreement', it gives a' comforting impression of stability of meaning its part in reproducing those beliefs, disf,0sitions and values on which about an utterance or act, and consensus about its significance. 'Con• the initial impact of the text depended: 1 Horace's works play an im• ventions' do tend to become more visible as such, as social practices portant part in a process of ideological reproduction which ultimately alter over time, but the use of the term, the description of a specific emerges in modern critical discourse as the unquestioned acceptance of practice as a 'convention', has a flattening effect, implying that regard• the 'Augustan Age' as an organising historical category and point of less of the context in which a particular act or utterance takes place, its perspective for historical analyses of the period.5:! significance will always be the same for all those concerned: it will be Horace's poems remain, then, through the institutions which pro• taken for granted and not be a source of conflict; its role in reproducing mote their reading (that is, their reading in particular ways), inextric• and rendering legitimacy to a hierarchy of power is suppressed. In ably enmeshed in reality in their ability to create effects here and now. eliminating from the start the possibility of a conflict of interests in a They are part, admittedly a much-diminished part, of our society's particular instance, the term depoliticises the situation it is being used canon, and the particular way our society reads them is one vehicle for

36 37 the perpetuation of its ideology and the reproduction of its social struc• ated by people down the centuries from its first appearance. The Latin tures. The institution of scholarship conceals from its members their critic characteristically presents himself as guiding his reader through actual connections with power, and their place in constituting the struc• the errors and oversights of the past to this 'true' meaning. To continue ture of society, by masking from them the part they play in this conti• the religious image, he acts as a sort of priest or hierophant for the nuing process of cultural validation, particularly through the ideological 'ordinary reader' who is so often appealed to (in a coded assertion of self-image of the scholar as detached observer working on an autono• the interpreter's authority and privileged knowledge) in the prefaces to mous text in a politically neutral act of criticism, termed 'literary', a type books of Latin literary criticism. Whilst the reading is characterised as, of criticism seen as good precisely because it is believed to be apoliti• perhaps, 'allowing the text to speak with its oWnvoice', what the reader ca1.53 This is true of literary critics in many disciplines, but the metho• is presented with is another ideologically-coded reading. Reference to dology of Latin literary scholarship is particularly monolithic in this this reading as '(nearer) the truth' or 'the real meaning' are ratifying respect and so has proved well-nigh impervious to self-examination.54 formulae, masking from both critic and reader the partial (in ail senses Characteristically it sees the texts it studies (described in the loaded of the word) nature of the interpretation. Such a formalism extracts term 'classics', and regarded as embodying a set of transcendental texts from the processes which shaped them and conditioned - and truths and values which are to be internalised rather than examined)55 continue to condition - their reception, disabling and frustrating any sustained account of the political in texts designated as literary. Tradi• asminor,sortingliterarythemselve.sand non-literaryout spontaneouslyetc., as ifintothesea hierarchycategoriesofweremajorsom~•~nd tional philological concerns, for all their insights within their own intel• how pre-ordained rather than the result of a succession of specifi lectual framework/8 repres~nt an unexamined appropriation and interest-laden critical judgements in the past. The act of criticism, the acceptance of antiquity's own organising categories (e.g. 'poetry') and fact that a particular set of judgements has been made, is suppressed, processes of periodisation (e.g. 'Augustan'), and a failure to recognise and literary judgement is represented as a simple reflection of an estab• the ways in which these categories owe their development and. privi• lished reality. Latin scholars see themselves, more than most, as guard• 1egedstatus to their complicity with the dominant ideology they helped, ians of a tradition; but 'tradition' is another heavily-loaded term, and help, to reproduce. suggesting a quasi-religious 'handing down', and encourages an attitude There is an underlying assumption in criticism of this type of the of reverence towards these texts as a given, an absolute to be mastered unproblematic equivalence' of terms over history, that they are the • rather than questioned. Such a methodology engenders a docile atti• 'same', that the boundary stones have not moved since antiquity. A tude to authority in general,56 and at the same time an obsession with it, whole cultural identity, the European, is grounded in the assumption of, which finds an expression in the anxiety of scholars to locate themselves or faith in, the translatability of terms. The desire for continuity, to find precisely in the scholarly tradition in which they are working, and not to the same in the past, prompts this essentialising move that constitutes pass judgements which are too far removed from the existing tradition tradition as 'sameness' and views it as apolitical and unproblematic. But or according to criteria or canons not sanctioned by the institution in is Roman culture 'the same' or 'other'? Divergent interests in the pres• which they operate. From this emerge the dominant characteristics of ent rest on the answer, and divergent assumptions and procedures of Latin scholarship: a concentration to the exclusion of nearly everything analysis lead to the different answers.59From the alternative perspec• else on textual detail, which has as its underlying priority and rationale tive, cultures construct other cultures in terms of their own concerns60 the differentiation of the literary from the non-literary. This takes the as represented by their own categories. In our relationship to Roman form of compiling in ever more exhaustive detail Jannal qualities such culture, this often emerges in references to 'immediacy', 'relevance', or as metre, diction, genre, allusion, which are held without further argu• 'modernity',61but this is the product of each age selecting its texts from the past for !!pecial attention, structuring its reading of those texts ment to account for and e~lain the (received) status of a particular work as literature or poetry. around its own concerns and then believing it passively 'sees' those The working assumption that some texts are pre-ordained as lit- concerns as an autonomous part- of those texts.62What is called 'tradi• erature also underlies the dominant mode of commentary, that a text tion', according to this mode of analysis, far from being an inheritance has a 'true' or 'latent' meaning (collapsed into the author's intention 'handed down' from the past, is an active, open process intimately con• and congealed into an apocalyptic moment of composition) outside of nected with the pursuit of particular interests: the selective appropria• the way it has been received, interpreted, worked upon and appropri- tion of the past to serve a particular vision of the present and to project

38 39 that vision into the future.63 This approach puts its emphasis on rup• gustan'; the traces of its constituent discourses were - and still are • tures and discontinuities, and confers significance on the otherness and open to appropriation in the opposite interest. The degree to which a uniqueness of the past; 'continuity' is criticised as illusory, the incidental voice is heard as conflicting or supportive is a function of the audience's contiguity of items wrenched from the specificity of their original con• - or critic's - ideology,67a function, therefore, of reception. Power is texts, described in terms which suggest they are instances of the same successful in so far as it manages not so much to silence or suppress as thing, set in chronological order, with the resulting sequence being to detennine the consumption of the oppositional voice within its dis• deemed a 'tradition'. Methods of analysis which have an interest in course. Critics' responses to Augustan poetry are a measure of the establishing sameness must sacrifice some sensitivity to the process of continuing capacity of Augustan ideology to determine its reception. historical change. If, for example, Horatian categories are accepted by 'Augustan ideology' exists, however, only in an ideal sense, having his readers without differentiation, unreflectively appropriated and un• been shaped and generated by the forces it sought to dominate. An critically perpetuated, then an appreciation of Horatian discourse and idealising framework in retrospect freezes it and attempts to confine it its effects, inwhich we remain involved, will be elusive. to the past and, in line with the liberal/humanist preconception of the Two different theories of language associated with two divergent individual as the source and legitimation of meaning, refers the process ideological outlooks are emerging here: one the static, essentialising to Augustus and his intentions. view, represented by the image of the boundary stones, which attempts Two different modes of explanation, then: the 'static' and the 'dy• to set up categories as discrete and autonomous, stressing the dif• namic'. In practice the two modes are not separable, however much ference between words and the continuities within them; the other the each might seek to purge itself of the traces of the other: thus, a dy• dynamic, discursive view which sees words as the momentary intersec• namic, discursive analysis cannot avoid introducing reifications such as tion of a host of discourses (open-ended, conflicting, and even contra• 'Augustan ideology'. To speak of two modes of explanation is to place dictory), stressing the difference within words, their discontinuities, and boundary-stones on a continuum, and to term these modes the 'static' their capacity to change their meanings. Thus, for example, 'literature' and the 'dynamic' involves an expression of value and ideologicalloca• emerges not as a discrete entity, but a dynamic category encoding so• tion on the user's part. Criticism involves the negotiation of the rival cial, economic, political, philosophical, and a host of oth~r practices claims and rival interests of the two approaches within the ideological and assumptions, all themselves overlapping and interpenetrating. Two network in which the critic is situated. My own critical practice and its consequences flow from the dynamic view. First, what as abstracts are associated strategies need some comment. logically opposite by the process of definition which sets them off Explanations are a means of social control. The increasing accept• against each other, can co-exist within discourse without contradiction, ance of the validity of a particular explanation (so that it becomes as 'war' (its meaning ideologically determined) and 'peace' (its meaning categorised as 'knowledge' or 'fact') is matched by an access of social also ideologically deterinined) do in the ideology which generated the power to the person or group with whom the explanation is associated. power and position of Augustus.64 Second, words, as being the intersec• Arising out of a view that the structure of society is a function of the tion of discourses to a·greater or lesser degree incompatible in their ideological construction of categories within discourse, the deformation interests, are shaped dialogically.65 The dominated voice may not be ~f established categories has become a familiar strategy of recent criti• heard, but is not absent; the potentiality for subversion is inscribed in cism, often in the avowed pursuit of social change. As a corollary to this, every use of every word. Thus it is that discourse, as well as being an such theories of language and the critical strategies associated with instrument and effect of power, is at the same time a focus for resistance them will tend to find the least sympathetic reception in institutions and subversion.66 Establishment discourse is shaped by and contains which are most complicit with established power and have the deepest traces of its opposition (and vice versa), even if the conflicting voice is interest in the reproduction of existing social structures. In raising the not heard in its own right. issue of the stability of categories and their involvement with power, this Within th~s dynamic, dialogical framework, the clear-cut distinction intervention into the discourse of Latin literary studies will be charac• between 'Augustan' and 'anti-Augustan' breaks down. Arising out of a terised in some quarters as 'oppositional' and its reception may already static theory of language, it overlooks the fact that, whatever the be partly determined (d. p. 39 above). However, 'opposition' is an author's intention or however great his desire, no statement (not even ideological term in that it (mis)represents to those who use it that made by Augustus himself) can be categorically 'Augustan' or 'anti-Au- actions are against the system rather than an integral part of its shap-

40 41 , ing.68 'Criticism' itself is a mobile signifier, open to re-definition and .. .iura dedit; quae ita sancta generi hominum agresti fore ratus, si appropriation. Too much of what is termed 'criticism' in the study of se ipse venerabilem insignibus imperii fecisset, cum cetero habitu Latin literature aims at what Edward Said has called 'organic com• se augustiorem, turn maxime lictoribus duodecim sumptis fecit plicity' with the institution of scholarship,69 seeing its role as a valida• tion of existing norms (with their characteristic ideological exclusions ... he gave them laws; and thinking that these would be reverenced and blind-spots) and in so doing manifesting that desire to belong by an uncouth sort of people only in so far as he had made himself (together with its obverse, the desire to exclude) which is constitutive of an object of reverence by the trappings of power, he made himself all cultural formations.7o But as Said goes on to remark, 'solidarity more august not only in the rest of his appearance but especially before criticism means the end of criticism'. 71 by the adoption of twelve lictors. What emerges as 'oppositional' always has the potentiality for re• cuperation in the logic of power. Granted validity, discursive theories of Augustiorem, more august, sticks out here: is Livy 'supporting' a similar langua~e can themselves become the instrument and expression of procedure to the one Augustus adopted? Has he perhaps drawn on his power. 2 Criticism, ever needing to be renewed by the adoption of own experience and observation of Augustus' behaviour to project an strategies not regarded as the norm, acts as a necessary check on the explanation back on to the actions of Romulus? But these questions are authority of totalising, normative explanations. part of the traditional problematic which attempts to ground its answer 'Ideology, in so far as it seeks to sustain relations of domination by exclusively in the individual, Livy. Alternatively it is possible to view the representing them as legitimate, tends to assume a narrative form; criteria of 'valid' explanation which Livy here invokes as part of the stories are told which glorify those in power and se k to justify the discourse which was at the same time prompting, de~ermining the re• status quo.m History is the most important of such nar tives and gain;:; ception of, and conferring legitimacy on, Augustus' behaviour and con• enormous prestige through its association with truth. tories that (in stituting him as a focus of power. Numa no less than Romulus was part line with whatever are the prevailing criteria of 'trut ') 'explain' the 'of a version of Roman history which projected Augustus as its telos, and past, teleologically directing their narratives towards an individual or enabled him to be characterised as the rare individual who could unite movement in the present and suggesting or projecting a continuity into the disparate social practices (and their associated values) condensed the future, are a most effective legitimation of power. Such narratives, in the terms 'war' and 'peace'. Reference to the founding of the temple fluid in their meaning, are therefore the focus for contestation and of Janus by Numa is embedded in a narrative whose trajectory inter• appropriation, and recent studies have shown the way in which the sects the present in the person of Augustus, constructing him as the :1 inscription of Augustus within the most potent charter myths of Rome latest example of a significantly short 'sequence' of rare and emotionally (e.g. those of Romulus, Hercules, and the Golden Age) was disrupted charged contexts in which wars deemed vital for the formation and by Ovid's re-inscription of these myths within his own frivolous dis• preservation of the Roman state are represented as the necessary pre• course.74 Was the disruption a challenge? Was Ovid 'anti-Augustan'? lude to periods of peace so rare as to be nearly unique, and abnormal, Did he set out to be? Possibly; but it must then be equally granted that however welcome (1. 19.3):

i'll he could have set out to be ~wo-Augustan' when he wrote in praise of ,~ the Emperor and his family. ) These questions, which seek an ultimate bis deinde post Numae regnum clausus fuit, semel T. Manlio validity for their answers in intentionalism, are those that a mode of consule post Punicum primum perfectum bellum, iterum, quod ,~ analysis based on a static theory of languages poses. Let us take an nostrae aetati 76 di dederunt ut videremus post bellum Actiacum instance and tease out the issues.

ab imperatore Caesare Augusto pace ten'a malique parta. ,[/.1' Romulus and Numa in Book 1of Livy's Ab Urbe Condita are charac• I, terised as polar opposites, representing respectively 'war' and 'peace': twice subsequently after the reign of Numa it was closed, the first (ita duo deinceps reges, alius alia via, i/le bello, hic pace, civitatem aLlXe• ': time when T. Manlius was consu! after the completion of the First nmt ('and so it was that two kings in succession built up the state in \ Punic War, the second time, which the gods have granted to our their respective ways, the former by war, the latter by peace', 1. 21. 6) • age to see, after the Actian War by the commander-in-chief in a treatment that bristles with the terminology and arguments which Caesar Augustus when peace was brought about on land and sea. , ~ legitimated the power of Augustus. For example, when Romulus legis• 'I' lates for his people (1. 8. 2): ..I'·,

43 i~.¥ 42 I' I!

li~ The terms of description invite comparison with Augustus' record of his own achievements (Res Gestae 13): Livy's narrative is shaRed by a logic of social explanation, attested elsewhere at this time, 9 that finds its analogue, and is instantiated, in Augustus' moral crusade. lanum Quirinum, quem claussum esse maiores nostri voluerunt For those involved, these sentiments had meaning (whatever particu• cum per totum imperium populi Romani ten'a marique esset parta lar meanings individuals took away from them) because they were per• victoriis pax, cum, priusquam nascerer, a condit a urbe bis omnino ceived to encapsulate a valid logic of social explanation, even if (or clausum fuisse prodatur memoriae, ter me principe senatus claudendum esse censuit perhaps especially because) Livy, in a self-satisfied gesture, charac• terises the explanation as being more applicable to the 'rud~' past than the 'sophisticated' present. Even .those like Ovid, who might arguably the temple of Janus Quirinus, which our ancestors meant to be have wished to distance themselves from the actions of Augustus, are closed when peace on land and sea had been brought about by nonetheless unable to escape from this discourse, and could be seen as victory throughout the whole jurisdiction of the Roman people, the Senate decreed three times should be closed when I was the contributing to its consequences. Expedit esse deos et, ut expedit, esse first citizen, although it is recorded that, before I was born, it had plltemus (Ars 1. 637) mirrors Livy's 'sophisticated' attitude, but it is been closed only twice in all from the time when the city was embedded in an Ovidian discourse which determines its reception as founded. ironic, and even 'anti-Augustan'. However, Ovid's statement, although rhetorically resisting its own implication in this logic of explanation, Is the verbal similarity emphasised here direct allusion to an 'Augus• cannot be exempted from its effects, for Ovid's ironic and flippant tan creation',77 making Livy a propagandist, albeit perhaps unwittingly? appropriation is part of what gives this logic its social meaning and The rhetoric of an intentionalist and individualist framework of expla• force, and so helps to render legitimate the moral and religious pro• nation methodologically isolates Livy and Augustus as individuals from gramme of Augustus. This is the discursive context which both enables the social and discursive practices of which each is a node, practices the Ars AmatOlia as witty and sophisticated text and constitutes it at the which are' the enabling conditions of the Ab Urbe Condita as historical same time as what-must-be-repressed. This is the logic that helps to text and of the political position of Augustus. Let us rather examine the generate the 'necessity' of an 'Augustus', and thus plays an integral part situation in terms of the discourse of peace at this time. Peace was in creating and sustaining the position of Augustus. perceived and defined as having its dangers. It is a condition that can Thus, relations of domination are created and sustained not simply only come about as the result of victOlY (cf. R. G. 13 te/Ta mmique ...pmta by the perpetuation of topics in the discourse ('Romulus', 'Numa', 'war', victoriis pax),18 and the ~ery absence of warfare is a threat to the inter• 'peace' etc.; topics are abstractions that elide the ideological determi• nal cohesion of the state that requires special measures for its preserva• nants of their categorisation and use), but by the reproduction of the tion: when Numa has' secured a cessation of warfare and closed the criteria of judgement and the logic of 'valid' explanations which served temple of Janus (1. 19.4), to elevate Augustus, and whose perpetuation (sometimes to the present day) enabled his continued (and continuing) authority. Ovid is inextric• ne luxuriarent otio animi quos metus hostium disciplinaque ably entangled in this process.so Compare the logic of explanation in militaris cOhtinuerat, omnium primum, rem ad multitudinem Livy 1. 19.2: imperitam et illis saeculis rudem efficacissimam, deorum metum iniciendum ratus est quibus (sc. legibus et moribus) cum inter bella adsuescere videret (sc. Numa) non posse, quippe efferari militia animos, mitigandum in order that minds, which fear of the enemy and military ferocem populum armorum desuetudine ratus, lanum ad infimum discipline had kept in check, should not run riot in the idleness of Argiletum indicem pacis bellique fecit peace, as the first priority he considered that fear of the gods had to be inculcated, a measure in the highest degree effective for a when Numa saw that they could not grow accustomed to these populace that was ign,orant and in those times unsophisticated. laws and customs in the midst of wars, in as much as their minds were being made savage by militmy service, considering that his

\: wild people had to be tamed by growing less accustomed to

\. '. .1_,1'", "', ~1 44 45

,1'& warfare, he built the temple of Janus at the bottom of the Argiletum as a symbol of war and peace. Elegy represents itself, and is often represented as, 'oppositional'. It constructs itself and sets up its frontiers vis-a-vis other genres through the pairing of terms viewed as abstracts and presented as logical oppo• And in OvidFasti 3.277 ff., which refers also to Numa: sites, notably 'peace' and 'war,.85 For their practitioners, genres were principio nimium promptos ad bella Quirites, entities with defined content and treatment, and generic boundaries molliri placuit iure dellmqlle metu. were regarded as frxed;86they are geared to a mode of reading which inde datae leges, ne firmior omnia posset, accepts them as such, a formalist generic criticism which isolates genre and tabulates its features.87 Of course, the fun<;tionand effect of these coeptaque sunt pure tradita sacra coli exuitur feritas, armisque potent ius aequum est. .. texts is not fully explained by the assumptions and terms with which they were ostensibly operating. 'Peace', for all the elegists' attempts to First Numa resolved that the citizens, too prone to warfare, be appropriate it to their stance, was also associated with and contributed softened by the rule of law and fear of the gods; then laws were to the elevation of Augustus. 'Peace'/pax should not be viewed passively imposed so that the stronger might not have power unchecked, as having an inert lexical meaning, open to possession as a piece of and ancestral rites began to be properly observed. Savagery was property. The meaning ofpax (and 'peace') is in part constituted by the put aside, justice was more powerful than arms... process of contestation over what it is to mean. That is the politics of language. The politicising question ('What practices are getting called 'Direct echoes'? 'Allusions' designed to 'support' or 'criticise' this by the word pax, by whom and in whose interests?') directs us towards mobilisation of an episode in Roman history in the interests of seeing language as a dynamic process, with signifiers having a fluid and Augustus? Again these questions and terms are part of a type of changeable relation to signifieds, and words like pax as carrying in them explanation which is author-centred, individualist, and which specific interest-laden traces that are not wholly under control and I suppresses the social dimension of the discourse.81 Ovid may well have escape notice in proportion to the degree to which one adheres to a i thought he was supporting or criticising Augustus in his various works, static, essentialising view of language. The progressive effect of analyses ~ but control of meaning is always only partial and the sense of control based on a dynamic view of language is to defamiliarise (though not to may be fostered by a belief in language as static.8:! Intentions are open escape) the notion of genre and the generic mode of reading, and to ,:1 to ideological misrecognition; so is reception. The question 'Were penetrate beyond the formalist surface so as to see them as part of the ....•.. Ovid's works read as oppositional or subversive?' involves a slide back process which, whatever elegy's own claim to be anti-Augustan, con• to the old problematic. Both the immediate reception and the history of tributes to the ideological construction of 'Augustus' and the ideologi• that reception are caught up in a contemporary logic of explanation of cal misrecognition of elegy's role in this process. The identification of power in which 'opposition' and 'subversion' are ideological the genre of a particular work is one of the chief ways of determining its (mis)representations of responses that from another perspective are reception, and of reproducing a reading practice.88 integral to the system. Readings of Ovid (then and now) as Conventional academic discourse's demand for rhetorical closure in 'oppositional' or 'subversive' may have had the unforeseen consequence the form of conclusions remains to be negotiated. The presentation of ~IIii for those involved83 of consolidating the position of 'Augustus'. genres, topics, words, conventions, and terms as 'unfamiliar', as 'other', The immediate reception of Ovid's text, and hence its ideological is not a contribution to knowledge in the traditional positivist sense. ~ impact in creating and sustaining specific relations of power, will have Within the framework of meaning as constituted in a process of contest• been a function of the. reading practices of his day. Those reading ation, it invites characterisation as an intervention in an ever-continuing practices and the institutions, both official and unofficial, that fostered process. However, every characterisation, every description (even those them were presumably so constituted as to reproduce the discoursf; " !hat portray themselves as 'open' or 'continuing', d. p. 40 above), which created and sustained the position of Augustus. Modern reading \ exemplifies the characteristic trajectory from arche to telos that history ii practices mimic their categories and interpretative procedures and as• seeks to impose. It is the work of history to plot detennination (a return sumptions, and in so doing reproduce and perpetuate the notion of the to the image of the boundary-stone), a word which, with its image of special, unique individuality of Augustus. Methods of reacing are the enclosure, embraces both limitation and purpose, control and inter• I unacknowledged vehicles of ideologies.84 For example, generic reading. est.89 History-writing, in attempting to impose closure (a manifestation

';1: 46 47 ji .1 ~ of the will-to-power),90paradoxically denies the historicity of history.91 15. Cf. Thompson (1984),1-15. To invoke any term is both to involve oneself in history and at the same \f16. Cf. Bourdieu (1977),192; Thompson (1984), 55-8. time to attempt to escape it and deny its contingency. 'Augustus' '. ,17. Not, however, to be found in dictionaries, the sleeping policemen offered, and continues to offer, the impression of a reassuring closure.92 .ofcategorical, uncontextual meaning. '7 18. Eliding the 'and' to produce a continuum. Notes ) 19. McGann (1973), 64. 20. Williams (1982), 15. 21. Rudd (1982), 370. The works used for reference in this essay are referred to in these notes 14\,· 22. DuQuesnay (1984), 19-58. by author's name and year of publication only; their full details are 23. Rudd (1986), 54 n. given in the Bibliography which follows (pp. 55-8). 24.,All these terms are in turn ideologically charged and can give bnly a partial representation of a situation to those who use them. The 1. Cf. R. Williams (1983), 183-8. 'term 'consensus' smoothes out the forces of opposition and dissent that, 2. E.g. as a river, as when meaning is described as 'fluid'. in seeking to deny or pass over, it implies; for the term 'oppositional' cf. 3. All figuring is partial, and the 'rule of metaphor' is perhaps most pp. 43-6. The definition of the term 'ideological' is, of course, itself a powerful when least recognised, cf. Ball (1988), 11. The figure of function of ideology, as is its invocation, or avoidance, in any context. boundary-stones obfuscates as much as it illuminates, and is always 25. Cf. Maier (1987),1-24. open to new interpretation and appropriation. L",26. Cf. Erskine-Hill (1983), 6, discussing the civil war of Octavian 4. Cf. Thompson (1984), 9,133 f.; Ball, Farr, and Hanson (1989),1. and Antony: 'The war of propaganda preceded, and followed, the war 5. Thus appropriating the figure for another mode of interpretation of ships and men. It ranged from the cntdest vilification to the ex• involving different ideological assumptions. pression of the most deeply-held beliefs, entered the high art of Virgil and 6. Anadumbration of the way the figuring of language is tied up with Horace, and in different ways and to different degrees was absorbed our politics. An ideology of possession and ownership is inscribed in the into histOliography so that it has deeply influenced Renaissance and metaphor. A challenge to preconceptions about language has its corre• even modern views of the two great competitors' (italics mine). Cf. also late in our conception of how we organise ourselves politically (cf. p. 42 the remarkable act of demarcation in G. Williams (1983), 233-4, below). , founded on the same preconceptions, between 'ideas' and 'ideology', 7. Cf. R. Williams (1983),passim. associating the latter with Augustus' Res Gestae and the former with the 8.Cf. Thompson (1984), 1 f., 7 f. Aeneid. 9. Cf. Said (1984). • 27. Cf. Thompson (1984), 132; Ball (1988), 13 f. 10.Cf. Frow (1986), 61: 'I take the following to be the general 28. Cf. DuQuesnay (1984), 29-32. requirements of a working theory of ideology. First, that it not assert a 29. A major point of transition is its appropriation in Octavian's relationship of truth to falsity (and so its own mastery over error) but propaganda to represent the issue involved in the civil wars, cf. HoT. concern rather the production and the conditions of production of ca• Epod. 9. 7 ff. (on the war with Sextus Pompeius), ut lluper, actus cum tegories and entities within the field of discourse ... ' For a critique of freto Neptunius / dux fugit ustis navibus, / minatus Urbi vine/a, quae some widely-held associations of the term 'ideology' (including its char• detraxerat / servis amicus perfidis ('just as recently, when driven from the acterisation as the thought of the other, of someone other than oneself, sea, Neptune's son, the Captain, fled after his ships were burnt, and he its reification as 'systems of thought', and the view that ideology is pure had threatened Rome with the shackles, which, friend of faithless illusion, an inverted or distorted version of what is 'rea!'), cf. Thompson slaves, he had taken from them'; and on the aftermath of the battle of (1984), 1 ff. Actium (Cann. 1. 37. 1 f.): nunc est bibendum, mmc pede libero / put• 11. Cf. Thompson (1984), 42 f.; Ball, Farr, and Hanson (1989), 2 f. sanda tel/us ('now should we drink, now should the earth be struck with 12. Zanker (1988). free foot'); see also Maria Wyke's article in this volume. On the shield of 13. Wiseman (1984); (1987). Aeneas in Aeneid 8, the battle of Actium (675-753) is inscribed in a 14. Wallace-Hadrill (1987); Beard (1987). version of Roman history as the most recent and 'central' (cf. in medio,

48 49 675) of a series of events represented as defences of Rome's libertas: 42. The product of a mode of explanation referred to as methodo• Aeneadae in ferrnm pro libertate 11lebant ('the descendants of AeI~eas logical individualism. For a critique of some of its assumptions, cf. were charging against the sword for the sake of freedom', Aen. 8. 648). Lukes (1973), 110 ff.; and for an examination of the theory as a cultu• 30. E.g. Aen. 1. 294; HOLEpod. 7.13 f.; Call1l. 4.15.17. rally specific historical construct cf. Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes 31. Cf. DuQuesnay (1984), 36. (1985). Its chief manifestation in literary criticism is intentionalism and 32. Cf. Wallace-Hadrill (1982), 19-36. the poetics of presence (d. n. 81 below), in history the biographical 33. On syntactical structure as articulating ideological point of view, mode (termed 'fallacy' by those who would wish to escape from it), d. Fowler (1986), 130 ff.; Thompson (1984),137. which interprets history as the product of a single man's will, and reads 34. The paradigm of harmony held emblematically to have been back from events to the intentions of the protagonists. On modern breached in the civilwars, e.g. inAen 6. 828-31, Ov. Met. 1. 144 ff. literary theory as an attempt to decentre the individual as the legitimate 35. We should recall, however, the considerable cultural authority of source of meaning, d. Young (1981), 8 ff. For the effect of methodo• logical individualism on the study of imperial ruler-cult, d. Price (1984), poetry at this time, even poetry which disclaimed the term of itself (e.g. 9-11. Sat. 1. 4). Horatian irony functions as a mode of collusion with, and accommodation to, power whilst leaving the impression of distance 43. Cf. Foucault (1982), 216-25. On the association of the traditional from it. notion of power with a figure ('The King') and with ideas of sovereignty 36. Cf. p. 38 below. (the definition of power in accordance with methodological individua• 37. Cf. Sat. 1. 1. 1 ff.; these poems are programmatically de vita beata, lism), d. Foucault (1979), 97; (1986), 230-2. Ban (1988), 80-105, traces the way that the concept of power as the political equivalent of efficient concerned with the 'good' life (cf. 1. 1. 117 f.). Cf. the way Macleod '/ (1977; 1979a; 1979b; 1981), following (i.e. reproducing and authorised causation is being contested, and perhaps is in the course of being superseded, by an alternative account which views power as a constitu• by) Horace's lead, collapses Horatian discourse into the 'ethical'. My tive feature of social life. own collapsing of it into a category designated the 'political' is a tactical act of defamiliarisation, not an assertion that this is THE meaning of 44. Cf. Foucault (1986), 232-4; Barnes (1989), 61-3. the text. 45. So termed by Bourdieu (1977), 192, as a means of defamiliarising " I, 38. For a discussion of analyses of Horace's texts as propaganda the conceptual division between word and deed. I .. which unwittingly demonstrate their continuing success as propaganda .j ,I here and now, for which academic criticism is the vehicle, d. Kennedy tion46.ofForhisaorwriter,her workthis anxietyinvolvescana widebe particularlyand remoteapute,audiencefor theoverrecep•an (1984), 157-60. extended period of time, during which this nexus of keaning and power 39. Where this division is placed is itself constitutive of political can change dramatically, leading to different conditions and modes of discourse, cf. Ball (1988), 13. In recent criticism, feminism has played a reception and appropriation. Ovid's AI'S Amatoria and Salman Rush• paradigmatic role in deconstructing conventional distinctions between . die's The Satanic Verses are two cases in point (cf. further n. 81 below). 'public' and 'private', with a view to showing the part such distinctions Thus the function and meaning of a text are not fixed but inevitably play in the cultural construction of gender roles, and the interests .change over time. served thereby; cf. Greene and Kahn (1985), 15-17. These terms, as 47. Ruthven (1984), 77. fluid as any in political discourse, are particularly open to unexamined 48. Cf. Kennedy (1988), from which these remarks are taken, for an reproduction and recontextualisation; cf. Zanker's assertion that examination of the ideological issues and hegemonic norms involved in '(t]here is no doubt that the private life of luxury and aesthetic pleasures the recent critical reception of Ovid'sArs Amatoria. in country villas enabled an already enfeebled aristocracy to accept 49. Cf. Eagleton (1984), 25. more easily the transition to one-man rule' (1988,31), which accommo• 50. Cf. Hor. Epist. 1. 20. 17 f.: hoc quoque te manet, ut pueros dates itself unproblematically within, and accepts as true, the assump• elelllenta docentem/occupet in 'vicis balba senectlls ('this too awaii.syou, tions of the Roman discourse of otiUI1l ('leisure'). that stammering old age will find you teaching boys their ABCs in the 40. Cf. Thompson(1984), 132. streets', Juv. 7. 226). 41. Thuc. 3. 82; Sall. Cat. 52. 11. Cf. also Rudd (1986), 54 n.: 'they 51. Cf. Kennedy (1984) for the way that acts of 'criticism' are acts of (elements in Satires 1] can only be called 'political' in a rather extended ideological reproduction. sense of the word'.

50 51 52. Stahl (1985) demonstrates the way that critics have unwittingly , 69. Cf. Said (1984), 24; along similar lines, but in a more disruptive aligned themselves with some of the assumptions underlying Augustan Ispirit,Terry Eagleton invokes the term 'servility' (1983, 124). ideology in such a way as to demonstrate a continuing involvement in its "', 70. Criticism which casts itself as 'oppositional' at the moment effects. He shows how two of the most influential critical ideas about characteristically appeals to 'realities', with which it aligns itself, 'out• Propertius in this century, those of his alleged 'illogicality' and of his side' the institution of scholarship: For a shrewd analysis of this rhetoric 'development' towards a 'mature' Augustan stance, arise out of an un• of 'inside/outside', d. Heath (1987). perceived internalisation of Augustan perspectives, judgements, and , 71. Said (1984), 28. values; cf.Kennedy (1987). 72. Kennedy (1989). 53. Cf. Said (1984), 21. , 73. Thompson (1984), 136. 54. Cf. Peradotto (1983), especially 17-19. 74. Cf. Wallace-Hadrill (1982); Myerowitz (1985), 62-7; Hinds 55. Cf. Said (1982/3),18 (= [1983,24]); Kennedy (1988), 78. (forthcoming). 56. Cf. Jardine and Grafton (1987), 217. 75. As for example inArs 1. 177 ff.;Met.15. 852 ff.; or Fast. 1.1 ff. 57. Cf. Bennett (1979), 6-9, and Lentricchia (1983), 90: 'formalism is 76. Here we see the process of historical periodisation in action, by merely the abstraction of technique from the context of power that which an age will be demarcated (with the battle of Actium, charac• lends it its significance'; Bourdieu (1989), 214 f. terised as the transition from war to peace, as one of its boundaries) 58. It is salutary to recall that all insights are produced only within and to which the name of Augustus will be attached. On the ideology of some intellectual framework which at the same time occludes, offering periodisation, d. Martindale (forthcoming). explanations that are only partial. The (always frustrated) desire for 77. Cf. Ogilvie (1965), 94, on 1. 19.3: pace ten'a manque parta. panoptic inclusiveness is the scholarly expression of the will to power. 78. Cf. Aen 6. 851 ff,: tll rege/'(~imperio poplilos, Romane, memento / Cf. p. 47 below. (hae tibi el1l1lt artes) pacique imponere 11l0rem, / parcere subiectis et 59. Cf. Kennedy (1989). debellare superbos ('Roman, remember to rule peoples with your auth• 60. Cf. Said (1985), 67; MacCabe (1986); Mitter (1987). ority (these will be your skills), and to impose custom upon peace, to 61. However, works which draw attention to themselves as interven• spare the conquered and subdue the arrogant'); Gruen (1986), 57-9, for tions in a current ideological debate breach the discursive convention of further passages and discussion, and 62 for a discussioll of the Ara Pacis 'apolitical objectivity' and attract the accusation that they are not 'scho• as representing the accomplishment of peace as inseparable from suc• larship'. cess m war. 62. Cf.Kennedy (1988),74. 79. Cf. for example Ov.Ars 1. 637, Fast. 3. 277 ff. (both cited below); 63. Cf. Lentricchia (1983), 125. and Veyne (1989), 165, on the way such notions, taken to be self-evi• 64. Cf. Gruen (1986), 51-72. Their co-existence without apparent dent, form the 'commonsense' of their day; however, as we shall see contradiction, the subject of Gruen's investigation, is remarkable and immediately below, these notions can 'mean' different things, and per• worthy of note only within an essentialising framework of analysis, and form different functions, in different circumstances, often beyond the is paradoxical only in so far as one reproduces the assumptions of the purview of their authors. Roman discourse of peace (assumptions which include the essentialis• 80. Cf. for example some of Ovid's references to the term pax: First, ing of terms). The place of 'war' and 'peace' in Augustan ideology and Met. 15. 832 f.:pace data terris animum ad civilia vertet (sc Augustus) / their attempted appropriation by the elegists will be the subject of iura suum legesque Jeret iustissimus auctor / exemploque suo mores reget further analysis below, ,see pp. 42-7. ('when peace has been imposed on the world, Augustus will turn his 65. Cf. Bakhtin(1981); Jameson (1981); Dowling (1984), 131. attention to civil laws and, most just of legislators, will bring forward his 66. Cf. Foucault (1979), 100 f. measures, and by his own example he will regulate morals') - 'peace' is 67. Cf. Cairns (1979), who presents a reading of Propertius 2. 7 as seen as the result of victory in war, and it is assumed that Augustus will supportive of Augustus, within, however, a rigidly intentionalist frame• follow his role as Romulus with that of Numa and mould his people by work which is an over-accommodation to the hegemonic norms of Latin legislation to meet the 'demands' of peace. Secondly, Fast. 1. 711 ff.: literary scholarship. jrolldibus Actiacis comptos redimita capillos, / Pax, ades et toto mitis in 68. Cf. Fish (1983/4); Lentricchia (1983), 15;,Williams (1977),112-13. orbe malle. / dum desillt llOstes, desit quoque causa tnumphi: / tu ducibus

52 53 bello gloria maior eris ('Lend your presence and tarry in your gentleness throughout the whole world, Peace, your neat hair bound with the 88. Cf. Jameson (1981), 106: 'genres are essentially literary institu• leaves of Actium. So long as foes are lacking, let the reason for a tions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose triumph be absent also: you will be for our leaders a glory greater than function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact'. 89. Cf. Gasche (1987), 151. war') - peace is associated with the outcome of the battle of Actium, seen as a world-wide settlement: toto ...in orbe (712) recalls the phrase 90. Cf. Henderson (1989), 68: 'History is a Discourse of traditional pace te"a marique pana. For the association of the end of hostilities scholarship practising willed-wilful imposition as an institution, instal• with the need to supervise morals, d. also Tr. 2. 231-4. ling the trope of wilful imposition in the academy of culture'; though of 81. Though our conventional reading practices encourage us to look Course the imposition he describes is not to be confined only to the through the text and the discourses which constitute it to an extra-tex• academic sphere. Any invocation of any term imposes its own closure. tual individual (cf. Bourdieu, 1989,211), 'Ovid', no less than 'Augustus', 91. Cf. Attridge, Bennington, and Young (1987), 9: 'history is or• is the focus for a host of symbolic associations and is similarly always ganised only by a certain closure, a "shutting doWn"of historicity'. open to ideological appropriation, often expressed in the rhetoric of the 92. I am grateful to Catharine Edwards, JoJtn Henderson, Stepheu poet's 'success' or 'failure': cf. e.g. Syme (1978), 215-29, a chapter en• Hinds, Charles Martindale, Anton Powen, and Maria Wyke for their titled 'The Error of Caesar Augustus'; and Salman Rushdie, in a review perceptive observations at various stages in the evolution of this paper. of Christoph Ransmayr's The Last World, which takes Ovid's composi• mihi dulces ignoscent, si quid peccaro stultus, amici. tion of the Metamorphoses in exile as its subject, finds in Ovid a prede• cessor of his own experience: 'Artists, even the highest and finest of all, can be crushed effortlessly at any old tyrant's whim' (The Independent Bibliography on Sunday, 13 May 1990). Although such judgements are presented as final, they are a function of the ideological situation in which they are . Attridge, D., Bennington, G., and Young, R. (eds), Post-StlUcturalism made and continue to oscillate accordingly. 82. The topographical metaphor offers an image for the loss of that and the Question of History (Cambridge, 1987) .. Bakhtin,M.(ed. M. Holquist, tr. C. Emerson),17le Dialogic Imagination: belief: the abyss. The image expresses a fear of the deferral of meaning Four Essays (Austin, 1981). (Derrida's difference), justifying the epistemology it is produced by, and Ban, T., Transfonning Political Discourse (Oxford, 1988). supports in turn, by means of the reassuringly solid and sensual meta• Ban, T., Fan, J., and Hanson, R. L. (eds), Political Innovation and phor of 'grounds'. Conceptual Change (Cambridge, 1989). 83. Within the framework of methodological individualism, social Barnes, B., 17le Nature of Power (Oxford, 1989). structures can only be explained as the unforeseen consequences of individual actions, d. Callinicos (1987),2. Beard,PCPhSM.,213'A(1987),1-13.complex of times: no more sheep on Romulus' birthday', 84. Cf. Jameson (1981), 58: 'the working theoretical framework or Bennett, T., Fonnalism and Marxism (London, 1979). presuppositions of a given method are in general the ideology which that method seeks to perpetuate'. Bourdieu, P. (tr. R. Nice), Outline of a 17leory of Practice (Cambridge, 85. Cf. Stahl (1985) .. -1977); 'Flaubert's Point of View', in P. Desan, P. P. Ferguson, W. 86. Cf. Hor.Ars P. 73 ff., Ov. Rem. 361-96. These boundaries seem to /;'<1989),211-34'Griswold (eds),.. Literature and Social Practice (Chicago and London, have been as firmly observed and policed in theory (whatever about practice) as that between history and the novel today. ' Cairns,185-204.F., 'Propertius on Augustus' marriage law (II. 7)'; GB 8 (1979), 87. Exemplified in a writer such as Menander Rhetor, and repro• Callinicos,A., Making History (Oxford, 1987). duced in contemporary generic criticism. Formalism takes relations of power for granted and suppresses the role of language in constituting ,Carrithers, M., CoHins, S., Lukes, S. (eds), 17le Category of tlte Person ''\'' (Cambridge, 1985). i those relations of power; cf. Jameson (1981), 99 f.; Lentricchia (1983), .I 90. bOWling,W. C., Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to the ,t 'Politicalii" Unconscious' (London, 1984).

f. i I 54 55 I,'I

DuQuesnay, I. M. Le M., 'Horace and Maecenas: The Propaganda ; (1979a), 21-31 (= Collected essays [Oxford, 1983], 225-35). 'The Value of Sennones 1', in T. Woodman and D. West (eds), Poetry and Poetry of Ethics: Horace, Epistles 1', JRS 69 (1979b), 16-27 (= Politics in theAge of Augustus (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 19-58. Collected essays [Oxford, 1983], 280-91); 'Ethics and Poetry in Eagleton, T., Literary Theory (Oxford, 1983); 17zeFunction of Criticism"z Horace's Odes, Part II', GR 28 (1981), 141-9 (= Collected essays (London, 1984). [Oxford, 1983],236-44, Erskine-Hill, H., 17zeAugustan Idea in English Literature (London, McGann, M. J., 'The Three Worlds of Horace's Satires', in C. D. N. 1983); Costa (ed.),Horace (London, 1973), 59-72. Fish, S., 'Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and Self-loathing in LiterallY ~Maier, C. S. (ed.), Changing Boundaries of the Political (Cambridge, Studies', CriticalInquiry 10 (1983/4), 349-64. ' 1987). Foucault, M., The History of Sexuality:An Introduction (tr. R. Hurley) Martindale, C. A., 'Redeeming the Text: The Validity of Comparisons (London, 1979); 'The Subject and Power' in H. L. Dreyfus and P. of Classical and Post-Classical Literature' (forthcoming). Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond StlUcturalism and 'Mitter, P., 'Can We Ever Understand Alien Cultures?', Comparative Henneneutics (Brighton, 1982),208-26. Criticism9 (1987), 3-34. Fowler, R., Linguistic Criticism (Oxford, 1986). i, Myerowitz, M., Ovid's Games of Love (Detroit, 1985). Frow, J., Marxism and Literary History (Oxford, 1986). Ogilvie,R. M.,A Commentary on Livy Books 1-5 (Oxford, 1965). Gasche, R., 'Of Aesthetic and Historical Determination', in Attridge, , Peradotto, J. J., 'Texts and Unrefracted Facts: Philology, Hermeneutics Bennington and Young (op.cit.), pp. 139-61. and Semiotics', Arethusa 16 (1983), 15-33 . Greene, G. and Kahn, C, Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Price, S. R. F., Rituals of Power (Cambridge, 1984). Criticism (London, 1985). Rudd, N., 'Horace', in E. J. Kenney and W. V. Clausen (eds), Gruen, E. S., 'Augustus and the Ideology of War and Peace' in R. Camblidge History of Classical Literature II: Latin Literature Winkes (ed.), TheAge of Augustus (Louvain, 1986), 51-72. (Cambridge, 1982), 370-404. Also Themes in Roman Satire (London, Heath, S., 'Literary theory etc.', Comparative Criticism 9 (1987), , 1986). r 281-326. Ruthven, K. K., Feminist Literary Studies (Cambridge, 1984). Henderson, J., 'Livy and the Invention of History', in Averil Cameron Said, E. W., 'Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community', (ed.), History as Text (London, 1989), 66-85. Critical Inquiry 9 (1982/3), 1-26 (= W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), 17ze Hinds, S., 'Anna in Ovid's Fasti', Arethusa (forthcoming), Politics of Interpretation,Chicago and London, 1983), 7-32). Also 171e Jameson, F., 17zePolitical Unconscious: Nan'ative as a Socially Symbolic World, the Text, and the Oitic (London, 1984); Orientalism (London, Act (London, 1981). 1985). Jardine, L. and Grafton, A., From Humanism to the Humanities Stahl, H.-P., Propertius: 'Love' and 'War': Individual and State under (London, 1987). Augustus (Berkeley and London, 1985). Kennedy,D. F., Review of T. Woodman and D. West (eds) Poetry and Thompson, J. B., Studies in the 171eoryof Ideology (Oxford, 1984). Politics in the Age of Augustus (Cambridge, 1984) LCM 9 (1984), Veyne, P., Roman Erotic Elegy: Love, Poetry and the West (tr. D. 157-60. Review of Stahl (1985) LCM 12 (1987), 72-7. Review of Pellauer) (Chicago and London, 1989). Myerowitz(1985) LCM 13 (1988), 72-8. Review of T. D. Papanghelis, Wallace-Hadrill, A., 'The Golden Age and Sin in Augustan Ideology', Propertius: A Hellenistic Poet on Love and Death (Cambridge, 1987) Past and Present 95 (1982), 19-36. Also 'Time for Augustus: Ovid, LCM 14 (1989), 141~4. Augustus, and the Fasti' in M. Whitby, P. Hardie, and M. Whitby Lentricchia, F., Criticism and Social Change (Chicago and London, (eds), Homo Viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble (Bristol, 1983).. 1987),221-30. Lukes, S., Individualism (Oxford, 1973). Williams, G., 'Phases in Political Patronage of Literature in Rome' in B. MacCabe, C., 'Broken:English', CriticalQUalterly28 (1986), 3-14. K. Gold (ed.), Literary and Artistic Patronage in Ancient Rome Macleod, C. W., 'The Poet, the Critic, and the Moralist: Horace, (Austin, 1982), 3-27. Also Technique and Ideas in the Aeneid (New Epistles 1. 19', CQ n:s. 27 (1977), 359-76 (= Collected essays [Oxford, Haven and London, 1983). 1983],262-79); 'Ethics and poetry in Horace's Odes, Part 1', GR 26

56 57 t Williams, R., Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977); also Keywords I;' (London, 1983). 1!1 Wiseman, T. P., 'Cybele, Virgil, and Augustus', in T. Woodman and D. I' West (eds), Poetry and Politics in the Age of Augustus (Cambridge, 3 Iii 1984), 117-28. Also 'Conspicui postes tectaque digna deo: The Public ~!1 Image of Aristocratic and Imperial Housing in the Late Republic and i! II; Early Empire', Collection de l'Ecole Fralu;aise de Rome 98 (1987), if Augustan Poets I' 293-313. Ii III Young, R., Untyingthe Text (London, 1981). and the Mutability of Rome1 I Zanker, P., The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (tl. Alan ~~\ Shapiro) (Ann Arbor, 1988). Iii: Philip Hardie

Two centuries before Gibbon heard the barefQoted friars singing Ves• pers in the temple of Jupiter, Joachim Du Bell~y mused on the half-bu• ried remains of Rome and was led to write his sonnet sequence Les amiquites de Rome, a work translated by Edmund Spenser as The Rubles of Rome. The end of the third poem gives the flavour:

Rome now of Rome is th' only funerall, And onely Rome of Rome hath victorie; Ne ought save Tyber hastning to his fall Remaines of all. a worlds inconstancie! That which is firme doth flit and fall away, And that is flitting doth abide and stay.

Such musings were not peculiar to the post-antique period; a num• ber of Hellenistic epigrams dwell on the bitter-sweet pleasure to be derived from the contemplation of the former grandeur of cities such as Mycenae, now the territory of a few shepherds. - The topos was taken up by Lucan with a new and savage force in his description of Caesar's visit to the site of Troy in Book 9 of the Bellum Civile (950-79), where Caesar's careless and unwitting violation of the once holy places of the city is only too clearly analogous to what he is doing, and will continue to do, to the city of Rome itself. The analogy is driven home more forcefully for the reader who recognises the Virgilian model for Cae• sar's tour of the vanished Troy at the transient moment of Rome's

Of:. \ greatest glory, in Aeneas' tour in Aeneid 8 of the humble landmarks of \ 'Pallanteum at the point where Rome's history is about to begin. Eut Lucan was by no means the first Roman to see in the destruction of another great city a warning for Rome itself: in 146 Be, a date which later generations were to regard as both the final seal on Rome's hege• mony and the era of future decay, no less an imperialist than Scipio

58 59