1 Taming the Wild Boar: Hunting, Game Meat, and the Dynamics Of

Home , Calydon, Calydonian boar hunt, Cynegeticus, Echion, Hyampolis

Taming the Wild Boar: Hunting, Game Meat, and the Dynamics of Roman Imperialism

Emily J. Martin

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Prerequisite for Honors in Classics under the advisement of Professor Kate Gilhuly

May 2021

Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 4

Chapter I ...... 14

Lions, Tigers, and Boars: Placing Hunting in Imperial Rome ...... 14

Chapter II ...... 39

Myth in Memory: Hunting in Roman Epic Literature ...... 39

Chapter III ...... 65

A Feast of Beasts: Game Meat and Roman Satire ...... 65

Conclusion ...... 89

Bibliography ...... 91

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I’d like to thank Kate Gilhuly, my thesis and major advisor, for encouraging my passion for food history and giving me the opportunity to spend the year thinking about, writing about, and cooking wild boars.

Thank you also to Professor Ray Starr, whose advisement of my independent study my sophomore year provided the basis for this thesis. I’m sure the offhand comment that the project could be the basis for a thesis was not meant to convince me to write two, but I am so glad I got to revisit and expand on this research.

Thank you to Professor Carol Dougherty for encouraging me to take Greek my first semester. Deciding to take Greek and declare a Classics major was one of the best decisions I made at Wellesley.

Thanks also to the rest of my thesis committee, Professors Bryan Burns and Kimberly Cassibry, for offering your expertise and thoughtful commentary on my work. Thank you also to Professor Brenna Greer, my history advisor, for giving me the space and support to complete both of my theses.

Thank you to the Pamela Daniels fellowship for the generous financial support that allowed me to not only write about wild boar but cook it too.

Lastly, I owe a great deal to my friends and family who have supported me through this process:

To Katharine Gavitt, the Classics department’s real MVP, thank you for reading my drafts, talking out my topic, and introducing me to the game of group solitaire.

To Nikki Mauldin, thank you for reminding me to take breaks, dragging me outside to go hiking, and being the perfect road trip buddy.

And to Fia Zhang, thank you for helping me prepare my boar feast and for all of the kitchen companionship.

This project has been a rich and rewarding end to my Classics education at Wellesley.

Introduction

In a memorable scene from Trimalchio’s dinner party in Petronius’ Satyricon, an enslaved man dressed in stereotypical ancient Roman hunting garb places a cooked boar wearing a freeman’s hat on the dinner table before stabbing it with a hunting spear.1 The boar is already dead, and it’s about to be served for dinner, but in this scene, the boar is no longer just a dish at the dinner table. The animal is transformed into a character in an elaborate bit of dinner theater.

Through this hunting charade, the boar becomes an object onto which Petronius, the author, can reference and engage with ideas about hunting, status, and imperialism.

Wild animals were legible symbols on as well as off of the dinner table: hunting was a sport where aristocratic and lower-class Romans alike could perform ideas of masculinity and claim symbolic ownership over the “wild.” Wild animals were often given human-like qualities, as the freeman’s hat-wearing boar at Trimalchio’s dinner party was, bridging together the natural and human worlds. For many elite Romans, consuming wild animals by both eating them and participating in the hunts that captured them were ways to demonstrate their power over not only the “wild” but those who lived there. Investigating the role of wild animals in Imperial Rome points to the many complicated ways that Roman imperialistic policies and ideologies found life outside of the political realm and influenced cultural and culinary practices.

This thesis tracks ideas about wild animals, hunting, and game meat in artistic and literary sources. How do depictions of wild animals, in and outside of the forest, reflect ideas about power and control in imperial Rome? How do these depictions enrich our understanding of how imperialistic ideologies play out in individual’s lives? Were ideas about hunting only

1 All translations in this thesis are original unless otherwise noted. 4 accessible to the upper classes? Authors who reference hunting prominently in their works used the hunt not only to comment on the literal process of hunting, but to project ideas about power, control, masculinity, and roman-ness, or romanitas.2 Contesting and creating “proper” depictions of hunting in ancient Rome was not just about structuring rules and etiquette for participating in hunting as an athletic pursuit; hunting was a space to mediate broader cultural and political values.

In order to engage with how the hunt factored into Roman imperialism, I want to first define Roman imperialism as a political and cultural force and consider some of the scholarly debates that have been associated with attempts to define a “Roman identity” during the Roman empire. Historically, some scholars have found “imperialism” to be something of a fraught term to apply to the Roman empire, viewing “imperialism” as a product of capitalism and the modern world economic order.3 There is also no word in Latin that means “imperialism;” the term imperium from which we derive the English word “imperialism” refers more generally to power, authority, or sovereignty. The absence of a term that refers to a self-conscious policy of expansion has made some scholars view “imperialism” as an anachronism. Yet despite these reservations, recent scholarship has embraced imperialism as a necessary term to help us understand the dynamics of the Roman empire. For the purposes of this thesis, I borrow Craige

Champion’s definition of Roman “imperialism” that refers to the “unequal power relationship between two states in which the dominant state exercises various forms of control, often forcibly, over the weaker state.”4 In this thesis, I use “Rome” to refer to the urban city of Rome and

“Roman Empire” to refer to the wider empire. Roman Italy is used to describe the Italian

2 Romanitas is not a contemporaneous term to the early imperial period, but it is a useful one for describing the roman self-concept. Other scholars have used it in this manner, see Azaza and Colominas 2020. 3 Morley 2010. 4 Champion 2004, 3. 5 peninsula. Though “Roman” was not a fixed identity at this time, I use it within this thesis to mainly refer to the elite class of men who resided in and around the city of Rome.

The “Roman imperial project” refers more broadly to the Roman interest in extending power in the region. While Roman authors often defined their territorial expansion as a reward for “virtue or wise decision making” or as a type of defensive imperialism, there is also ample evidence that Roman imperialism was in part a cultural product spurred on by Roman aristocratic norms that viewed military might and power as a central component of masculinity.5 When I refer to the “imperial project,” I am mostly focused on these cultural dynamics that underpin

Roman imperialism; this thesis is not an investigation of military or diplomatic expansion. While the city of Rome’s territory began to expand in the era of the Republic, I am mostly concerned with the dynamics of imperialism in the era of the emperors. By the time of Trajan’s death in 117

CE, the Roman Empire had grown to include not only the entire Mediterranean but modern-day

France, Britain, and much of the Middle East. The reach of Rome’s territorial holdings was vast, and individuals living in different parts of the empire had necessarily different relationships to

Roman power and influence. Given the vast temporal and geographic scale of Roman imperialism, I also seek to look beyond an author’s individual relationship to the ruling emperor to see more broadly how their writings support—or undermine—a broader and more abstracted

Roman claim to power and influence across the Mediterranean.

While this project interrogates ideas about Roman imperialism, I am mostly interested in how such political ideas play out in the elite literary spheres of urban Rome and Roman Italy.

While I am not solely interested in elite hunting practices, I am mostly interested in how Rome’s elite male class understood and positioned these images of hunting in their literary works. There

5 For example, Cicero writes that, “our people, by defending their allies, have gained dominion over the whole world” Cic. Rep. II.34. 6 are many limitations to this approach—these elite authors ran in mostly closed off and self- referential circles, and do not reflect the opinions of other citizens and subjects residing across the empire. However, they do provide a lens into how Rome’s elite power brokers conceptualized their relationship to hunting and their own political and cultural power in the city of Rome and in the broader Roman empire.

Though this thesis does not ascribe to the now largely dated idea of “romanization,” I am interested in how Roman citizens (mainly those residing in Italy) borrowed from and re- imagined their relationship to the larger empire through the adoption and co-optation especially of hunting practices often associated with Greece, Persia, Assyria, and the “east” more broadly.6

This idea tracks more closely with Andrew Wallace Hadrill’s idea of a “cultural revolution” during the early empire, where the “elite are challenged by groups immediately below and outside of the elite, which successfully establish their claims to a redefined elite.”7 Explanations of what it meant to be elite—and to be Roman, and to exist within the larger Mediterranean were constantly shifting during the imperial period. I suggest that hunting motifs and hunting practices were one way this constantly changing identity was defined, expressed, and contested among different (especially high-status) groups in the heart of Rome.

Ideas about class, social position, and social status were intimately wrapped up in discussions about a Roman identity. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and Judith

Butler’s ideas about gender performativity, I echo Neville Morley ideas about social status as a performance in Ancient Rome and suggest that hunting practices were an essential way of

6 Most scholars have moved towards a paradigm of “globalization” to understand the complex relationship between the movement of goods, ideas, and peoples through the ancient Mediterranean. For a discussion of ideas related to the idea of “romanization,” and its impact on scholarship see MacMullen 2000’s defense of the term. For a comprehensive discussion of globalization theories, see Versluys 2014. 7 Hadrill 2008, 36. 7 performing social position.8 Social positions were being constantly remade and reinforced by repetitive actions—a process of becoming and not merely being that Bourdieu refers to as habitus. Differences between the elite and nouveaux riches, between aristocrats and emperors, and between rich and poor were constantly on display in discussions and depictions and practices of the hunt. Those with the greatest deal of cultural capital understood that a “proper” expression of an aristocratic hunt should echo the mythological heroic hunt and take place in the wild on foot (or, occasionally, on horseback) with dogs. Yet other groups found other forms of hunting equally rewarding and entertaining: hunting in the amphitheater, in game parks, and serving game meat at dinner parties and banquets were all popular and powerful representations of the hunt. While a small subsect of Rome’s moralizing elite tended to imagine themselves above such vulgar imitations of the hunt, the popularity of these spectacles suggests that they themselves became a part of Roman identity as new groups in Rome and across the empire gained the wealth needed to emphasize their own claim to status and luxury through their own depictions, sponsorships, or imitations of the hunt. While I am ultimately somewhat less concerned with the actual substance of moral critiques on different forms of hunting, the need to critique such

“improper” hunting practices in turn suggests the cultural power other groups were attempting to lay claim to by aligning themselves so closely with hunting imagery. At times, it also points to the absurdity and instability of using the hunt to assert imperial authority.

Within the broad dichotomy between poor and wealthy, aristocrat and commoner, there remain many more social divisions that are exemplified through attitudes towards different hunting practices. The choice of members of the upper class to perform one’s wealth through an elaborate banquet or a staged hunt at a country villa spoke not only to wealth, but to their cultural

8 Bourdieu 1979; Butler 1990; Morely 2019. 8 capital. Did their displays of luxury align with aristocratic norms or did they tip over into garish excess? Did their hunts require athletic skill, or were they unflattering charades? Within the performance of extreme wealth in and around Rome, differences in status and positionality were constantly being constructed (and not merely reflected) through the practice and repetition of these activities, and through the self-conscious reflection on the relationship between luxury and morality. As Andrew Wallace-Hadrill points out, these constant debates over luxury and excess amidst a culture that included elaborate (and often politically significant) banquets, funerals, residences “played a central role in the reconceptualization of Roman society itself.”9

Discussions about the consumption of the hunt—in the amphitheater, on the game park, or at the dinner tables—factored into this “reconceptualization,” increasingly aligning the Roman identity and especially the elite Roman identity with a sense of power and control over the wild that supported the broader imperial project.

Ideas about masculinity were a central part of this “elite Roman identity,” especially as they are constructed and reinforced in the hunt. Much like ideas about class and social status, ideas about gender norms are not fixed categories; they were actively constituted in all aspects of public life, especially in many of the artistic and literary texts I reference throughout this thesis.

Judith Butler’s theories on gender performativity provide an important framework through which contemporary classical scholars have sought to understand the public articulation of gender norms in ancient Rome. One such scholar, Maud Gleason, writes that “ideal balance of their constitution” was a major concern for elite men, where, especially at the dinner table, “an ethic of self-conscious frugality competed with gross logic of overconsumption.”10 Proper masculinity involved the ability to navigate these extremes, to display wealth, generosity, and self-restraint.

9 Hadrill 2008, 319. 10 Gleason 1999, 71. 9

Maintaining this “ideal balance” not only involved questions about food, but questions about exercise and how to develop a strong constitution while still situating themselves above the ranks of the working class. Above all, masculinity was about control: bodily control, political control, and economic control. Hunting was an especially symbolic (if often impractical) way of achieving these physical goals, that provided class appropriate physical stimulus while also reasserting wealth, taste, and relationship to an imagined past that associated hunting with warfare and military might with idealized masculinity. J.K. Anderson, at several points in

Hunting in the Ancient World, draws attention to the long history of the hunt’s association with virility.11 In the Iliad and Odyssey, hunting appears at key moments to re-emphasize the skill and virility of the central heroic figures in each epic.

While only the third chapter of this thesis focuses specifically on food, this entire thesis aims to centralize the connection between hunting and consumption that is so often absent from discussions of hunting in the past. What does it mean for elite Romans to consume the hunt—not only to feast on its spoils, but to participate in it, watch it, or sponsor public hunts or banquets where game meat was served? These are not all strictly culinary forms of consumption, but they are all interested in the reduction of ideas about hunting to consumable good and experiences, pieces that could be and were displayed in ways meant to highlight ideas about wealth, taste, and, most importantly, about power. At several points in this thesis, I use Thomas Veblen’s term

“conspicuous consumption” to describe these practices and to place them in their inherently social contexts.12 Though this term is anachronistic, Roman authors depict individuals who were obsessed with the optics of their athletic and culinary pursuits. Though some forms of hunting in its ideal form were meant to be undertaken alone, hunting was in reality a deeply communal

11 Anderson 1985. 12 Veblen 1899. 10 activity, one where the spoils were meant to be displayed to emphasize a hunter’s skill and prowess. Mosaic displays of hunting feats were likewise meant to emphasize the owner’s wealth, taste, and interests—the lines between public and private spaces, activities, and art, was thin enough that feasts, mosaics, and hunting expeditions would have been conspicuously available and viewable.

In the context of Roman literature, the primary source base for this thesis, hunting practices or hunting imagery is rarely depicted unproblematically— rarely are the authors I discuss uncritically upholding or validating the projects they’re describing. More often than not, discussions of hunting both in epic and in satire are part of a broader moralizing or critical project targeting improper, excessive, or overly performative ways of hunting. Yet the prominence of hunting in these critiques, especially those that draw attention to the excesses of

Roman consumer culture, suggests that references to hunting could not only easily evoke ideas about power and authority, but could easily undermine them. Hunting is a powerful metaphor, but much of its power comes from its practice and presence in the lives and material experiences of those in Rome. The strength of hunting as a sport, a piece of mythological storytelling, or an image imposed on a dish, comes from its long classical association to the wild and to warfare and to its ability to evoke both a long literary tradition and a number of contemporary cultural practices. Hunting carries a great deal of significance both as a metaphor or literary embellishment and as an actual sport.

These two ways of viewing hunting have remained largely disconnected from each other in classical scholarship. Purely literary analyses of hunting imagery, especially in epic, detach the text from important historical context. The choice to view hunting practices primarily as a form of sport history and not as a type of production history has created a rich body of

11 scholarship to consider how Romans figured hunting into their leisure activities, but has ignored how consumption and diet figured into these activities. These athletic histories have not dealt comprehensively with the ways that ideas about hunting become mapped onto those who consume the spoils of the hunt. Food is one of the most compelling yet underutilized tools we have to study our past and present—it provides a material window into people’s everyday lives, and it serves as an important site where individuals and communities created and contested meaning over issues of political as well as personal significance. This is as true today as it was in

Imperial Rome. Understanding how the Romans understood and interacted with wild boars on and off the table not only sheds light on daily life in Imperial Rome, it helps us understand the complex power dynamics that provide meaning to the food we eat today.

To make my argument, my research draws heavily on the work of Imperial Roman authors writing from 1st century BC to the 2rd century CE, though the first chapter provides a broad description of hunting practices that dips into slightly earlier sources. The first chapter evaluates artistic and literary descriptions of hunting both in more public beast spectacles, namely venationes, and in aristocratic versions of the hunt. This chapter outlines the relationship between idealized hunting practices and the types of hunting that more commonly occurred in elite game parks and in the amphitheater.

The second chapter looks at depictions of hunting in Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s

Metamorphoses, evaluating how depictions of hunting within these early works of Roman epic helped articulate a new Roman self-concept that borrowed from and built off of Greek epic antecedents. Hunting is generally seen as a Greek or eastern interest, and Roman interest in the hunt is generally seen as an example of “Hellenization” or as an example of Rome copying

Greek culture.13 By evaluating depictions of hunting in epic poetry, this chapter evaluates the limitations of those claims, suggesting that the Roman interest in Greek hunting practices served also as a way of controlling narratives surrounding domination over the wild and over Greek culture. While Virgil and Ovid’s literary projects were very different in scope and in intent, both write about hunting in such a way that emphasizes how ideas about imperial control fit into the creation of a distinctively “Roman” epic.

The third chapter focuses on depictions of hunting and wild animals in Roman banquets, primarily in the writings of satirists such as Horace, Petronius, and Juvenal, and in the writings of other late first century poets such as Martial, Statius, and Pliny. Even though satire provides an over-the-top depiction of Roman life, it points to important and legible cultural symbols. It is an exaggerated depiction of Roman consumption patterns, but not a wholly invented one, allowing us to glimpse the life and reputation of boars out of the forest and onto the dinner table.

Placing wild animals and game meat in a culinary context extends ideas about imperialism and hunting into the domestic realm in a way that highlights the essential absurdity of hunting as a part of the Roman imperial project.

13 “Hellenization” is also a fraught term, but for different reasons than Romanization, especially when applied to the Roman interest in Greek culture (and not to the expansion of Greek political power). See Hodos 2014. 13

Chapter I

Lions, Tigers, and Boars: Placing Hunting in Imperial Rome

Hunting was a popular motif in Imperial Rome, appearing in literature, art, spectacle and other forms of popular entertainment. Understanding the meaning of hunting in epic and satire, the primary subjects of chapters two and three, first requires understanding why images of hunting had such cultural resonance in Imperial Rome and examining the cultural practices those literary depictions purport to represent. The multiplicity of hunting forms that circulated in

Imperial Rome ensured that hunting imagery held different but interrelated significance for groups of various socioeconomic statuses. Though the Roman literature discussed in chapters two and three tends to focus on elite versions of the hunt, understanding the significance of the hunt to Rome’s commoners and aristocracy alike reveals a motif unique in its relationship to everyday life and in its legibility across classes. It also helps to explain the context in which more specific literary references to hunting and to the consumption of wild animals occur.

This chapter lays out the expressions of hunting among different classes and communities in and around Rome, considering how ideas about imperialism became aligned with various

Roman hunting practices. Hunting was rarely a value-neutral activity—it was often one interested in connecting Roman to a historicized and mythological past and to desirable Greek cultural practices. Conquest over the natural world became a signifier, not only of individual athletic power and prowess, but of broader Roman political power and authority, especially when the hunts were enacted in public venationes (beast-hunts) as entertainment.

Understanding the ways that the Romans participated in, depicted, and engaged in the hunt in Rome and across the Roman empire allows us to understand the significance hunting

14 carries with it when discussed in myth, fiction, and satire. While many historians and classicists who have engaged with ancient hunting practices have tended to treat aristocratic hunting as separate from the hunting practiced in the amphitheater, perhaps unintentionally reiterating the claims of Roman authors who viewed the two types of sport as inherently different, I suggest that these ways of hunting should be read together, as both were different ways of popularizing similar values and motifs, and the evolution of hunting in the amphitheater informed the evolution of broader hunting practices.1 I begin by discussing representations of hunting in the amphitheater, to identify popular late republican and early imperial depictions of hunting, before turning to aristocratic versions of hunting that were circulating during the first century CE. While chapters two and three focus mainly around the early imperial period, this chapter takes a broad temporal lens to consider the evolution of ideas and depictions of hunting from the late republic to the third and fourth centuries in order to consider more fully the longevity and weight assigned to the hunt. Not merely a trivial part of aristocratic life or a purely symbolic motif, discussions and depictions of hunting help bridge the divide between ideology and action in the Roman empire.

Hunting in the Amphitheater

Today, no image quite invokes the Roman imperial period as the spectacles of the amphitheater; gladiatorial combat, beast hunts, and public execution loom large in the contemporary memory of the Roman empire. Damnatio Ad Bestias, or public execution by wild animal, are today better remembered than Venationes, or amphitheater beast hunts, though both forms of spectacle involved wild animals and evoked ideas about Roman power and authority

1 J.K. Anderson offers the most comprehensive account of hunting in the ancient world; he also spares very little attention to hunting in the Amphitheatre, generally only referencing it in passing. See Anderson 1985, 100, 125. 15 throughout the region. The exotic participants in these spectacles, ranging from elephants to lions, were shipped into Rome proper for gruesome executions and entertainment. There were other, generally less deadly, forms of sport hunting that occurred in the amphitheater—involving professional hunters known as bestiarii and venatores, and featuring an array of both exotic animals, like lions and elephants, and more familiar animals, like boars, stags, and even smaller animals such as rabbits.2 Donald Kyle notes that the goal was “always to put on a thrilling but safe show,” as the safety and success of the professional hunters was essential to the projection of the correct imperial image require the hunters to ultimately prevail over the wild animals.3

While animal-related spectacles featuring trained animals likely originated in fourth century Athens and grew in popularity across the Mediterranean over the next century, Chris

Epplett argues that the venationes were more distinctively Roman in form, deriving from staged animal combat that may have existed in Etruscan culture and evolving out of a broader and more distinctively Roman interest in gladiatorial combat.4 Livy writes that the first venatio was given by Marcus Fulvius Nobilior in 186 BCE; beast hunts continued to be held in Roman arenas until they were last held in the sixth century. Though venationes began and grew in popularity under the Roman Republic, where political success was often connected to putting on elaborate and successful venationes, they took off during the empire as Rome expanded in power and territory and quickly became a hallmark of Rome’s burgeoning imperial power.5

2 Kyle 2014, 310. 3 Ibid, 309. 4 Epplett 2014, 507. 5 Vit. Sull. 5. “The responsibility for his defeat, however, be lays upon the populace. They knew, he says, about his friendship with Bocchus, and expected that if he should be made aedile before his praetorship, he would treat them to splendid hunting scenes and combats of Libyan wild beasts, and therefore appointed others to the praetorship, in order to force him into the aedileship.” 16

By the early empire, animal hunts were evidently among the most popular of the public

Roman spectacles.6 These hunts were visual affairs, meant to evoke hunting in the wilderness even as they occurred in the confines of the arena. Donald Kyle notes that, though the death of the animals was nearly guaranteed, the hunts were “compelling,” enriched by sylvan scenery, hunting costumes, and accompanying hunting dogs and hunting spears. The hunters were also dressed in attire meant to evoke hunting in the idyllic past: Juvenal writes in horror of an aristocratic woman who participated in venationes with “gripping a spear with a bared breast”

(“nuda teneat venabula mamma”), presenting an image of a huntress that was not realistic but was certainly evocative (and provocative).7

The aesthetic project of the venationes was meant to capture parts of the aesthetics of an aristocratic and more “natural” form of hunting, while still leaving necessary distance between true hunting and its facsimile. Arena hunting was a much bloodier and violent endeavor, involving animals that were prized for their exoticism and often emphasizing the show and spectacle above the individual. The use of such sylvan and wild imagery aligned participants in the hunt with ideas about masculinity, strength, and power—among the foundational ideas and aspirations of the Roman empire—that were often connected to aristocratic hunting in the wild.

By presenting the hunt in a space where it was not only enacted by a select few, but enjoyed by large crowds, the participants included not only the venatores, but the spectators, providing a space where Rome’s commoners could access and engage with these ideas—though in a way that was ultimately determined and filtered through an imperial lens. Whether or not venatores and spectators fully embraced this project is unclear, but it shows at least a desire to visually connect spectacles to the events they sought to imitate. Venatores occupied a fraught social

6 Epplett 2001, 210. 7 Juv. Sat.1.22-23 17 position, where their positions were considered low status even as they could amass a great deal of celebrity. Their own positionalities, thoughts, and experiences, however, are largely elided from the historic record. However, despite these scholarly silences, the aesthetic project of the

Venationes suggested an extension of the imperial ideas embedded in aristocratic hunting practices to a non-aristocratic audience, ensuring, in turn, the legibility of aristocratic hunting practices and motifs while still distinguishing between different types of hunting.

The setup of hunting spectacles in the arena was tied in other ways to contemporaneous and historic hunting practices. A typical day in the arena began with animal spectacles, to mirror the broader Roman practice of morning hunting practices. Likewise, venatores and bestiarii would be outfitted as hunters, while condemned criminals or other prisoners would often be outfitted as foreigners or mythological figures to emphasize Roman power and control over foreign realms. Tacitus’ Agricola notes that Domitian “purchased from traders those whose clothing and hair resembled the appearance of the captives,” for use in a triumphal procession suggesting the important of building visual connections between hunting, power, and foreign lands.8

Games in Rome were mostly put on by—and for—the emperor. The ability of the emperor to procure a large cast of exotic animals reflected their own imperial skill and might.

Donald Kyle notes that Augustus understood the rich propaganda value in such spectacles—the creating popular entertainment that emphasized the might and power of the Roman empire and of his rule would help “tame and train” the emerging empire.9 At times, the animals displayed in the arena were meant to draw attention to military victories that helped expand the empire, as when

8 Tac. Agr. 39. 9 Kyle 2014, 276.

Augustus brought a hippopotamus to Rome to celebrate his conquest of Egypt and a tiger to draw attention to imperial interests in India, creating a clear link between arena hunting and imperial power.10 Venationes provided a forum to re-emphasize ideas about imperial power for a wider audience.

In addition to hunting spectacles that occurred with venatores and bestiarii, punishments and executions also occurred in staged “hunt” scenes. Kathleen Coleman’s article “Fatal

Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments” notes that prisoners of war were among those who were executed in these spectacles, writing that “The ludi have been described as both a levy on the profits of empire, and an investment; prisoners-of-war, no less than captured beasts, are among the spoils of empire that can be displayed as proof of the success of the imperial venture, and to entertain loyal subjects.”11 These spectacles wee not merely a place where imperial power was demonstrated symbolically, but literally, by publicizing the executions of prisoners of war who stood in the way of Rome’s expansion. Criminals facing execution in these “fatal charades” were unwilling participants in a kind of “mythological role play” whereby their deaths would come through performance of legible, mythologized scenes.12

These “hunts,” where the criminal or prisoner became the hunted instead of the hunter, were not only rhetorically aligned with Rome’s imperial project, but were places were those who opposed the imperial project could be disposed of in such a way that very publicly reinforced Rome’s power and might. Doing this through wild beast displays made these prisoners subservient to the very wild beasts that Rome’s elite had conquered to bring them into the arena.

10Epplett 2014, 509. 11 Coleman 1990, 54. 12 Ibid, 67. 19

Given the intense and complicated logistics of hosting beast hunts featuring a revolving cast of exotic animals who would be slaughtered at the end of the events, scholars have focused a great deal of attention to the question of how these animals were acquired. This was evidently a massive logistical challenge for Rome, especially given the sheer volume of animals killed during games—Augustus reports that 3,500 animals were killed in 29 venationes while Dio

Cassius reports that Titus had 9,000 animals killed in the amphitheater over the course of 100 days.13 Chris Epplett suggests that these numbers were likely exaggerations, but they suggest the blood thirst of Rome’s empire that demanded a constant supply of wild animals to the capital— not even considering the provision of animals for the many provincial displays that happened across the empire.14 Though there is a wealth of literary, archaeological, and artistic evidence on the games themselves, there is relatively little on the planning of the games or in the way they were actually put on. Nicholas Lindberg suggests using imperial systems for grain acquisition from the empire to understand the process of beast acquisition and distribution, in addition to sparse evidence linking guilds of venatores to beast acquisition.15 Soldiers were also used to acquire animals elsewhere in the empire—these military agents of Rome’s imperial power were also responsible for propping up these demonstrations of cultural power and authority.

Michael MacKinnon draws special attention to the distance the Romans would have to traverse to capture even some of the more common exotic beasts from North Africa; in addition to a trip across the Mediterranean, they would have likely traveled down the Nile into Ethiopia; the Roman conquest of other parts of North Africa would have made the acquisition process somewhat easier, but only slightly. Whatever the exact method of capture and transportation is

13Lindberg 2019, 251. 14 Epplett 2014, 579. 15 Lindberg 2019. 20 somewhat inconsequential, especially for spectators. Rome’s power and authority were demonstrated through the mere ability to acquire and display these beasts. That they were meant to be killed only heightens this display of power—no matter the cost of acquisition, their power comes in their ability to go to such great lengths to acquire animals untended for certain, spectacular death.16

The obsession with amphitheater spectacles was something of an existential problem to many of Rome’s moralizing elites, who saw the popularity of such spectacles as a sign of societal and moral decay. As Juvenal famously writes in his tenth satire,

“nam (populus) qui dabat olim imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, panem et circenses.”

“for the people who had once given out imperium, fasces, legions—everything—now restrain themselves and wish anxiously for so few as two things: bread, and circuses.”17

Erik Gunderson suggests that “the arena plays an important role in the moralization and maintenance of Roman social roles and hierarchical relations,” a place where the Rome’s true elite could distinguish themselves from the masses and nouveaux riches with their moralizing language, and where the masses could construct their identity in relation to the spectacles and shows they were watching.18 Catharine Edwards writes that the culture surrounding the policing of morality in ancient Rome which was “central to the way elite Romans thought about themselves, both as a people in relation to those who were not Romans and as individuals in

16 Even animals that were not killed immediately in the amphitheater would be eventually killed and their corpses disposed of. 17 Juv. Sat. 10.77-81 18 Gunderson 1996, 115. 21 relation to the state and to one another.”19 Moral critiques of hunting practices were another way for elites to emphasize Roman superiority and articulate their place within the broader Roman populus. They were able to articulate their own sense of moral righteousness against these hunting practices, even when their critiques landed on other places where Romans expressed power and privilege. They also further distinguish between members of the upper classes: drawing on the ideas of class as a performance outlined in the introduction, these moral critiques were an essential way of highlighting difference between Rome’s elites and between the nouveaux riches who had benefited financially from Rome’s success in the early empire.

Critiques of Roman hunting practices were then a way to both constitute Roman expressions of hunting, and a way to call into question the excess of these practices, while still suggesting the elite’s ultimate position as political and moral authorities.

The public and curated nature of these spectacles that made them subject to intense criticism from Rome’s elite also made them a stage for other less refined members of Rome’s wealthy class to project their own masculinity and self-concept—often unsuccessfully. John

Mouratidis suggests that part of Nero’s downfall came from his obsession with athletics and other sporting events, and that his desire to participate in the spectacle was simply too great a deviation for those of his class position.20 What he perceived as noble pursuits were to traditionalists best left to “criminals, slaves, or professionals.”21 Among the other notable noble participants in this spectacle was Commodus—emperor of Rome at the tail end of the second century. Herodian recounts Commodus’ participation on the games, calling his participation in the spectacles a show of “skill rather than courage” as he threw his spears from a terrace circling

19 Edwards 1993, 2. 20 Mouratidis 1985, 5. 21 Ibid, 6. 22 the arena.22 Where Domitian, Trajan, and Hadrian had supposedly tested and provided their hunting skills out in nature, Commodus’ participation in the games was a perversion of the proper order. Though putting on the games increased an emperor’s stature, participating in them so directly was considered somewhat vulgar. An emperor could—and even should—test their hunting ability in the wild as a way to prove their power but engaging in the hunt in the amphitheater proves only to decrease Commodus’ stature and show the fundamental instability of arena sport hunting, that it was so enjoyed even as it was seen as somewhat vulgar. There was never any risk to Commodus, who was removed from danger on a specially built catwalk. While many of Rome’s elites had enjoyed hunting in vivaria in similarly curated ways, they were not doing so in plain view of spectators only highlighted its absurdity and undermined any claim to skill or virility hunting otherwise imparted on its practitioners and spectators. In addition to its implications for his skill at hunting, it also had the effect of aligning Commodus with gladiators and the professional venatores. While popular, gladiatorial combat was still a low wage activity.

While aristocrats were meant to sponsor these shows and provide entertainment for the masses, they themselves were to be held to higher standards above the bloodshed. No matter how good the charade—these hunts were only ever just that—a charade, one that would always be susceptible to intense criticism.

Statius’s description of Domitian’s saturnalia feast and games in the Silvae 1.6 offers a vision for a more refined emperor’s role in cultivating celebratory games (and banquets). Much of what Statius writes is almost certainly an exaggeration of reality meant to make Domitian look particularly favorable—John Donahue notes that Statius’s account that, “all classes feast together at one table” (“una vescitur omnis ordo mensa”) is almost certainly false.23 But, as Carole

22 Hdn. 1.15.2. See also Toner 2015. 23 Donahue 2017, 21. 23

Newlands points out, these games “provide a paradigm of empire that reinforces both community and hierarchy,” that reinforces Domitian’s place at the top of the social hierarchy while painting him as being particularly benevolent.24 He doesn’t, as Nero did, debase himself by participating in the spectacle, which he understands undermines his position rather than enforces it. Rather, this poem “embodies imperial power from the ground up,” where Domitian takes his authority from the crowd’s passive enjoyment of the games in the amphitheater, his power solidified through his provision of the games themselves and through the crowd’s reception of them.25

These discussions of hunting in the amphitheater offer one of our best insights into the imperialist tendencies of Roman hunting practices. Game hunting in the amphitheater is far removed from “true” hunting in the wilderness but in ways meant to appeal to the passions of the masses and not the sensibilities of the elite. These hunting spectacles were meant to sensationalize violence and bloodshed—to provide displays of death and violence for a bloodthirsty audience. Commodus’s neutered form of participation undermined this goal, thereby drawing attention to the inherent instability of hunting in Rome—that it was meant to express a degree of ownership over the wild even as it became further and further removed from the wild.

Hunting and the Aristocracy

These hunting spectacles provided a backdrop against which Roman aristocrats developed their own ideas about proper and improper hunting in the early and mid-empire.

Aristocratic and spectacle forms of hunting fed off of each other—not only did spectacle hunts

24 Newlands 2002, 243. 25 Ibid, 244. 24 use the trappings of historicized aristocratic hunts, but aristocratic hunts drew from the importance of the public aspects of amphitheater hunting.26

Perhaps the most comprehensive book on hunting in the ancient world, J K Anderson’s

Hunting in the Ancient World primarily targets its focus on aristocratic hunting practices. There is good reason for this focus: in some ways, there is simply more material on ancient aristocratic hunting practices, attested by various authors and represented in mosaics and reliefs.27 While investigating the meaning for hunting outside of aristocratic spheres offers a similarly rich look into Roman interactions with the natural world, I begin my analysis with aristocratic hunting practices to understand what Romans thought the hunt could and should be, and to understand how those ideas played out in the lives of Rome’s wealthiest citizens, before considering how such ideas were disseminated across class lines and across the empire.

Pliny the Younger’s Panegyric in Praise of Trajan offers one such insight into hunting in its purest, most aristocratic form.

“Quodsi quando cum influentibus negotiis paria fecisti, instar refectionis existimas mutationem laboris. Quae enim remissio tibi nisi lustrare saltus, excutere cubilibus feras, superare immensa montium iuga et horrentibus scopulis gradum inferre, nullius manu nullius vestigio adiutum, atque inter haec pia mente adire lucos et occursare numinibus? Olim haec experientia iuventutis, haec voluptas erat, his artibus futuri duces imbuebantur, certare cum fugacibus feris cursu, cum audacibus robore, cum callidis astu; nec mediocre pacis decus habebatur submota campis inruptio ferarum et obsidione quadam liberatus agrestium labor. Usurpabant gloriam istam illi quoque principes qui obire non poterant; usurpabant autem ita ut domitas fractasque claustris feras, ac deinde in ipsorum (quidni?) ludibrium emissas, mentita sagacitate colligerent. Huic par capiendi quaerendique sudor, summusque et idem gratissimus labor invenire.

But whenever you finish the influx of your work, you imagine your type of leisure to be just a new kind of work. What is relaxation for you, other than to traverse the forest, to chase out beats from their lairs, to scale great mountain peaks, and to step foot across

26 I have chosen to deal with amphitheater hunts first both because scholars have traditionally overlooked the amphitheater as a part of hunting history and because the popularity of venationes in the early imperial period offers an apt temporal starting point. 27 Anderson 1985. These same authors also leave us significant literary evidence describing the events of the amphitheater, but hunting in the amphitheater is typically treated alongside other forms of Roman spectacle. 25

craggy rocks, without the hand of anyone and without the path of anyone,; and among these things you visit the sacred groves with a pious mind in order the face the Gods? These were once the training of youth, it was their delight; future leaders were formed through these skills: namely, to compete with the swiftness of beasts, against courageous beats with resolve, against crafty beasts with skill. It was held as no average honor was during times of peace, they swept the assault of beasts off of the plains and freed from the siege the countryside and its work. Even those emperors usurped this glory who were not able to earn it: they claimed however, as they rounded up the wild animals, broken and tamed in captivity, they let lose to grab them in amusement. For indeed, Trajan sees equal merit in seeking as in capturing. 28

Pliny is offering a direct contrast between Trajan’s mode of hunting and the hunting of other, less skilled emperors — Trajan is as involved with the thrill of the chase as with the actual capturing of the animal. By the time Pliny is writing, authors and commentators were increasingly obsessed with the impropriety of the ways in which Rome’s elite were practicing the hunt.29 Trajan’s hunt is allied with a more remote, mythological heroic hunt: exemplified by such stories as the

Calydonian boar hunt, explored further in chapter two, where prowess was determined not merely by the killing the boar, but by conquering the wilds that the boar was terrorizing. Trajan was another incarnation in a long, storied history of the hunt—similar to hunters in the days of old, less concerned with status and prestige than his contemporaries.

Pliny draws special attention to the remote contexts Trajan ostensibly hunted in. The

“vast mountain heights” and “rocky crags” he ventured onto without “a helping hand to show the way” draw attention not only the athletic skill associated with the hunt but imply the civilizing mission that the best hunts could carry.30 Trajan, as emperor, was responsible for one of the largest territorial expansion in Rome’s imperial history.31 His skill in hunting was imagined to

28 Plin. Pan. 81. 29 The objections of several of these authors (namely Varro, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, and Martial) will be explored in the second and third chapters. Anderson 1985, 100. 30 Plin. Pan. 81. 31 Julian Bennet provides a map of Trajan’s expansions of the empire in Bennett 1997, xix. 26 compliment his control and conquest of Dacia and the Parthians. His ability in hunting emphasized his military might; his military might in turn emphasized his skill in hunting. This association was hardly new—the relationship between hunting and military power was stretched back farther than even Archaic Greece. Importantly, this depiction of Trajan does not show him hunting on horseback, but on foot. Hunting on horseback was still associated more with Persia during first and second centuries. Anderson notes that “hunting on horseback seemed to be the exception rather than the rule” except in North Africa, Asia, and the eastern expanses of the

Roman empire.32 Even as hunting was popular throughout the empire, the type of the hunt practiced was shaped by local environment more than by Roman cultural dominance. These imperial images offer a look into cultural ideas from the top down—they do not suggest that these ideas were adopted or accepted, merely that Rome’s elite viewed them as somehow desirable. That different types of hunting found different levels of popularity across the empire serves to reinforce the legibility of these images of hunting, while still stressing the inherent difference between Trajan and his imperial subjects.

This hunting motif continued into visual representations of Trajan’s conquests, as in the depiction of Trajan’s triumph in the north on Trajan’s column. Trajan’s Column is an early second century monument depicting Trajan’s military campaigns in the Dacian wars in Dacia

(modern Romania). The column features boar imagery in the spoliated base, referencing the

Gauls, a people whom the Romans heavily associated with wild boars and whose own battle standards featured boars in the 2nd and 1st century BC.33 Even outside of these depictions of boars, Trajan’s Column is more broadly interested in visually reinforcing Roman dominance

32 Anderson 1985, 93. 33 Greene 2011, 86. 27 over “uncivilized” or “barbaric” locales.34 Pushing further into the second century, Trajan’s successor, Hadrian, is immortalized both in text and in art as an exceptional hunter—Dio

Cassius’s Roman History notes that Hadrian was “so skilled in the hunt that he brought down a boar with a single blow.”35 The Arch of Constantine contains four reliefs depicting Hadrian’s hunting success—his achievement against the boar, the lion, and the bear, with an additional relief depicting his departure for the hunt.

Image 1.1 Tondi Adrianei on the Arch of Constantine, Northern Side, Left Lateral. Left: Boar Hunt, right: Sacrifice to Apollo.

34 See Elizabeth Thill’s discussion of architectural depictions on Trajan’s column. She writes that “Architectural depictions emphasize the skills and permanence of the Roman military and Roman culture, and they paint Dacian culture as primitive, foreign, and transient.” Thill 2009, 39. 35 Dio Cass, 69.10 28

In addition to these formal artistic depiction, JK Anderson notes that Hadrian added the image

“of Heroic Hunter” to imperial coinage at the time, further connecting his imperial power not only to the manly virtue of the hunt but connecting the hunt to the imperial project itself.36

Of course, Pliny’s Panegyricus was hardly an unbiased or authoritative source, and it offers little insight into Trajan’s actual skill in snagging stags. What it does offer is a glimpse into a vision of hunting that re-emphasized Rome’s territorial expansion during the early empire.

The domination of the places previously untouched by Roman political influence—either through the symbolic conquest of boar-filled wilderness of rural Italy, or the literal conquest of

“foreign” lands of the northern Europe or the Mediterranean—remained an active political goal that was reinforced through cultural practices in the heart of the empire. Hunting did not exist merely to serve as a symbolic manifestation of Rome’s imperial might. It was a sport practiced for fun as much as for politics. Peter Toohey writes that “Hunting became part of the normal aristocratic lifestyle and, unquestioningly, became associated with passing time pleasurably, with leisure.”37 But while hunting gained a reputation as a leisure activity, it was uniquely positioned to reinforce political ideologies: not only because engaging in the hunt involves active participation in pseudo-militaristic acts that have long been associated with heroic action and warfare in myth, but because hunting itself was something of an eastern import. Toohey points to major changes in the perception of hunting from the Archaic period onwards, but pays little attention to how shifts in ideas about hunting built off of each other. The emphasis on leisure did not replace the obsession with power and hunting prevalent in the Hellenistic period, but built off of it and identified it with a newer Roman attitude towards interactions with the wild. Hunting is

36 Anderson 1985, 104. Anderson writes “the coinage, which circulated throughout the empire, was used much as postage stamps by modern governments, to convey to the public, by graphic images and short messages, particular aspects of imperial rule.” 37 Toohey 2004, 231. 29 an example not necessarily of “Hellenization,” or Rome’s imperial obsession with Greek culture, but a sign of Roman power over Greek’s historical past.38 Imperial Rome was the inheritor of

Xenophon’s classical Greek hunting practices (which favored hunting on foot over hunting on horseback), not only as a way to align themselves with Greek culture they viewed so favorably, but to subsume that Greek culture into the power structures of Imperial Rome. Grattius, who took up Xenophon’s project of creating a handbook on hunting in his Augustan-era Cynegeticon, provides an extensive catalogue of ideal dog breeds for hunting. 39 J. Wight and Arnold Duff’s introduction to the section on Grattius in the volume Minor Latin Poets write that “the sources of

Grattius are not easy to trace. Some authorities affirm, while other deny, his debt to the

Cynegeticus of Xenophon or (pseudo-Xenophon). It seems at least likely that some Greek author of the period lays behind his list of dogs.”40 The Hellenistic didactic hunting text provided the primary model that Latin authors who attempted a similar task followed. This imperial vision of hunting—on foot in the wild and without an expensive retinue—was hardly representative of how many—or nearly any—imperial Romans engaged in hunting or engaged in this model of hunting. Instead, it serves as a visual and literary marker of status and Rome’s imagined cultural inheritance.

Rome held many other cultural practices of ancient Greece in high regard, and sought to replicate the skill of Greek poets, sculptors, and artisans both out of respect for their skill and out of a desire to legitimize and increase Rome’s own stature. The hunt is a part of this broader process, but I believe it also operates uniquely within this select consumption of Greek cultural

38 Anderson 1985, 84. 39 Grattius, Cynegeticon. 40 J. Wight Duff, Arnold M. Duff 1934, 144.

30 practices, because the range of both “proper” and “improper” representations of the hunt that became popular helped re-define the practice of the hunt outside of the Greek ideal.

Perhaps because hunting practices carried so much rhetorical and historical weight,

Romans sought new ways to domesticate them. Ideas about proper displays of status and wealth were meant to exist somewhere between the lavish and overindulgent displays of the nouveaux riches and an ascetic lifestyle.41 Hunting parks existed somewhere in between-- they were open to criticism because they so completely subverted the typical rules of the hunt, but they were also embedded in the broader Roman elite interest in cultivating and colonizing the countryside.

Roman villas dotted the countryside of Italy, where their “architecture, décor, and productive capacities reflected [their] owners’ elite status, or aspiration to elite status.”42 These villas served economic as well as social functions, and their role in cultivation and food production allowed their owners to claim a connection to an imagined simple agrarian past, even as they often enabled a more luxurious or refined quality of life for the elites. 43

These vivaria exist in something of a grey area—certainly more “improper” than hunting in the true wild, but still much more refined and proper than hunting spectacles, partially through their relationship to the villa and the Italian countryside. There was certainly awareness that hunting on vivaria, or game parks happened in a curated setting where skill was evidently less a question than wealth, as several Roman authors who give us context for the scope and popularity of this practice seem to also gently poke fun at it. 44 Game parks were certainly a more contentious project than the more accepted practices of farming and agricultural production,

41 Beerden 2018. 42 Pollard 2016, 419. 43Pollard 2016, 429. 44 Leporaria, or game enclosures specifically for hares, predate the larger vivaria, though some scholars, namely Anderson 1985, use the terms somewhat interchangeably 31 because the value of hunting or interacting with non-domesticated animals could not be replicated in such pseudo domesticated settings. Taming the wild in agricultural production came from the ability to complete overtake and replace the wild; taming the wild in the hunt came from the ability to directly interact with it, which such pseudo-domesticated game parks render impossible.

Pliny’s Natural Histories recount some of the supposed origins of these game parks, writing that, “Fulvius Lippinus was the first Roman Citizen to invent game preserves for boar and other game… nor were imitators long absent, such as L Lucullus and Q Hortensius,”

(“Vivaria eorum ceterarumque silvestrium primus togati generis invenit Fulvius Lippinus; in

Tarquiniensi feras pascere instituit, nec diu imitatores defuere L. Lucullus et Q. Hortensius”). 45

Inflected in Pliny’s accounts of Roman game parks is his larger fascination with cultural oddities—his recounting of the existence of these game parks fits into a larger, more moralizing project constructing their establishment as something worthy of record and attention. Such vivaria predate the Roman Empire—Xenophon tells us that Cyrus the Great had one, and such

“Persian paradises” dwarfed the scale of Roman game parks—but Pliny’s choice to describe

Fulvius Lippinus as the “primus” implies that they took on something of a new life in ancient

Rome.46 Thomas Allsen’s The Royal Hunt in Eurasian History considers these Roman game parks to be mostly “following fashion, playing with selected elements of a foreign model, invoking the paradise without really duplicating it.” While Allsen is right that elements of

Roman hunting culture had deep histories in Assyria and Persia, Pliny’s emphasis on the Roman

45 Plin. NH. 8.78.21. 46 Xen. Cyr. 1.3.14 32 origins of these practices suggests that this cooptation was not merely imitative but became integrated with Roman cultural identity.47

While Pliny offers a quick description of their origins, it is Varro’s De Re Rustica that offers a more detailed portrait of what these game parks were to their owners and the guests who frequented them. Varro repeats the story that Lippinus was the first to cultivate a game park; he also writes from the perspective of Appius discussing Varro’s own game park.48 Appius notes that “you saw wild boars and roes gather for food at the blowing of a horn at a regular time, when mast was thrown from a platform,” (vidisti ad bucinam inflatam certo tempore apros et capreas convenire ad pabulum.”) 49 These wild animals were kept not only for hunting, but for other types of for entertainment; Ray Starr describes the ritual of feeding animals by noting that

“the display provided to the spectators is at least as important as the nourishment provided to the animals.”50

Other imperial authors offer glimpses into the hunting ritual associated with these game parks. Pliny the Younger remarks in a letter to Cornelius Tacitus on his experiences hunting boar, noting that he caught three boars “without giving up my laziness and quietude,” (non tamen ut omnino ab inertia mea et quiete discederem.”) He notes the incredulity of the situation, recognizing that, “you’ll laugh—and you should” (“Ridebis, et licet rideas,”) at the absurdity of his pseudo-hunt.51 Pliny recognizes that the hunt he engages in is less “hunt” and more

“performance,” an elaborate event established by the upper class to consume both the boars being captured and the traditionally heroic experience being performed, though the perverted

47Allsen 2006, 40. 48 Varro, Rust. 3.12.1 49 Varro, Rust. 3.13.1 50 Starr 1992, 437. 51 Plin. Ep. 1.6. This passage is explored at greater length in chapter two. 33 process makes it lose any of its traditional meaning. This vision of hunting that Pliny describes himself as participating in is far from the vision he identifies with Trajan, though it is far closer to the dominant forms of recreational hunting in game parks that circulated among the upper class. While many of these depictions of the more curated vivaria hunting expeditions often poke fun or raise serious questions about the integrity of these hunting experiences, they point to a real interest in hunting among the upper class—some of whom perhaps wholeheartedly embraced the supposed masculinizing project of hunting that both Pliny the Younger and Pliny the Elder seem to call into question. In other words, it is not important whether the hunt is actually dangerous or authentic, it is important whether you can claim the experience of being a hunter.

For all that this mode of hunting failed the live up to Trajan’s later exemplar, they nevertheless reinforce the same imperialist tendency, while unintentionally representing the many paradoxes of the Roman imperial project. These game parks were as much curated experiences as they were actual representations of the wild. But by establishing such parks and creating such spaces for entertainment, Rome’s aristocracy and nouveaux riches were creating another dimension of ownership over the wild. They were not swooping in and laying claim to untouched and uncivilized lands, as they imagined they were. They were curating an experience that provided them a carefully constructed sense of superiority over a group of animals they held in a pseudo-domesticated state. They were able to possess only a tamed version of the wild—but their desire to possess and domesticate the wild for their own enjoyment and consumption only serves to draw attention to the desire for control and influence, and not to their actual skill, strength, or ability. The complaint of Rome’s moralizing subsect of the elite was that these game park owners did not possess the true skill and prowess to call themselves gifted hunters or

34 understand hunting and the natural world.52 These spaces undermined their claim to power and prestige, even as they also reinforced the desire for power and influence. While these game parks were a tacky shortcut, they still reached the same ultimate end: allowing Rome’s wealthy class control over the wild and an opportunity to demonstrate their wealth and proximity to masculinity. Not everyone could have the imagined hunting skill of Trajan, but anyone with considerable wealth could at least embody a parody of that skill and pass it off as talent.

In De Re Rustica, Appius remarks upon Quintus Hortentius’ game park near Laurentum that when “[Hortentius] blew a horn; when such a crowd of deer, boar, and other quadripeds poured arounds us that it seemed to me no less fine a spectacle than when a hunt happens in the

Circus Maxmimus without African beasts,” (ut tanta circumfluxerit nos cervorum aprorum et ceterarum quadripedum multitudo, ut non minus formosum mihi visum sit spectaculum, quam in

Circo Maximo aedilium sine Africanis bestiis cum fiunt venationes.”)53 Varro’s invocation of the

Circus Maximus reinforces the essential similarities between the aristocratic and popular obsession with such hunting spectacles. Hortentius is inviting a crowd of semi-domesticated and mostly tame animals to join him at a banquet; the animals in the amphitheater were meant to be dangerous and blood thirsty. Yet in both examples, Roman were exercising their domination over the wild; CMC Green describes them both as “public exercises of power over what is by nature free and untamed.”54 Yet while game parks existed to be known by others, shown off to other members of the elite, they also existed for a more private—or at least more exclusive— form of enjoyment. Just as game parks mediate the realm of “domesticated” and “wild,” they too

52 Anderson 1985, 89. 53 Varro, Rust. III.13.1 54 Green 1997, 440.

35 mediate the realm of “public” and “private,” providing a closed off space that can be enjoyed alone but is meant to be shown off primarily to Rome’s wealthy class.

Our understanding of the role and importance of the hunt among the aristocracy in ancient Rome extends beyond extant literary evidence. As Rome’s wealthy class enjoyed ritualized hunting practices in game parks and occasionally in other wild expanses, their obsession with the hunt also played out in the domestic realm, especially through mosaics and other works of art. There are few examples of hunting mosaics in Italy during the early imperial period, but there is wealth of material evidence in the third and fourth centuries.55 While these mosaics may fall outside the primary temporal scope of this thesis, the popularity of elaborate hunting mosaics in the late empire suggest that while elaborate aristocratic hunts were still viewed with skepticism or curiosity in the early empire, they became an increased part of the landscape.

The boar mosaic in the house of the ancient hunt (or house of the wild boar) at Pompeii is one of few extant hunting mosaics dating before the third century. The mosaic, dating from the first century, depicts a boar being attacked by dogs. Unlike some of the more elaborate polychrome Greek-style mosaics found at Pompeii, the boar mosaic is in the black and white surrounded by geometric patterns. Katherine Dunbabin notes that these “black and white

(bichrome) ornamental mosaics also developed in the last century of the republic,” with colored mosaics becoming increasingly rare from the time of Augustus to the mid second century.56 This more “Roman” style of the mosaic helps reinforce the relationship between hunting—especially boar hunting, a less “exotic” hunting practice as boars are native to Italy—and romanitas.

55 For a comprehensive survey of Mosaics of the ancient Greek and Roman world, see Dunbabin 1999. 56 Dunbabin 1999, 55. 36

Image 1.2 Threshold of the tablinum, House of the Wild Boar, VIII, 3, 8, Pompeii.

In addition to the mosaic, the house contains several colorful frescoes of hunts. Unlike the imperial hunting imagery that referenced Domitian, Trajan, and Hadrian, these mosaics and frescoes contain less of an overt political message, but they all suggest the long-standing popularity of hunting imagery even before these imperial representations in the second century.57

These were not the only pieces of hunting imagery that remain from Pompeii. The House of Citharist at Pompeii included several small animal figures in its central peristyle; among these figures was a boar being attacked by two hunting dogs. Barbara Kellum notes that “No already dead hunting bounty… would do; this is live-action theater frozen in time,” capable of invoking not only the literal hunting practices practiced by elite Romans in their country villas, but famed

57 Tuck 2005.

37 mythological animal stories.58 These stories, such as the Calydonian boar hunt, provided a cultural backdrop on which elite Romans could project their own experiences with the hunt.

Chapter two will consider more fully the legacy of these mythological hunts and evaluate how

Virgil and Ovid helped establish new Roman versions of these hunts for an imperial audience.

58 Kellum 2018, 200. Kellum also notes that these figures stood adjacent to dining rooms where boar and venison were likely on the menu, given their popularity in elite households at this time. The connection between visual, mythological, and culinary practices relating to the hunt will be considered more fully in chapter three. 38

Chapter II

Myth in Memory: Hunting in Roman Epic Literature

Ridebis, et licet rideas. Ego, ille quem nosti, apros tres et quidem pulcherrimos cepi. “Ipse?” inquis. Ipse; non tamen ut omnino ab inertia mea et quiete discederem. Ad retia sedebam; erat in proximo non venabulum aut lancea, sed stilus et pugillares; meditabar aliquid enotabamque, ut si manus vacuas, plenas tamen ceras reportarem. Non est quod contemnas hoc studendi genus; mirum est ut animus agitatione motuque corporis excitetur; iam undique silvae et solitudo ipsumque illud silentium quod venationi datur, magna cogitationis incitamenta sunt. Proinde cum venabere, licebit auctore me ut panarium et lagunculam sic etiam pugillares feras: experieris non Dianam magis montibus quam Minervam inerrare. Vale.

You’ll laugh, as indeed you should, to find out that I—yes, I, your friend-- caught three very fine boars. I’m sure you’ll ask—really, you? But yes, I did, without giving up my laziness and quietude. I was sitting beside the hunting nets, not near any hunting spears, but next to my pen and writing tablets. I was thinking and writing out, that even if I left the hunt empty handed, I could at least bring back a well-marked tablet. Now, don’t look down on this kind of exercise, it is marvelous that the mind is improved by activity and motion. Being here deep in the woods, alone in silence, as is necessary for hunting, is a great incitement for reflection. Next time when you hunt you should use me as an example and bring along with your bread-basket and flask some tablets: you will experience that Diana does not wander the hills any more than Minerva. 1

In lieu of an introduction, I offer this copy of Pliny the Younger’s letter on hunting.

Pliny’s letter comes in the latter half of the first century, long after Ovid and Virgil, the subjects of this chapter, had died. Despite this anachronism, Pliny’s letter on the relationship between hunting and writing provides an important framework to consider the relationship between epic poetry and hunting practices, offering an effective lens to view the poetic legacies of hunting in the Aeneid and Metamorphoses. For Pliny, the pen and tablets (“stilus et pugillares”) rather than the “spear or lance” (“venabulum aut lancea,”) are the essential tools of the hunt—a practice that, by the first century, was less about sport or subsistence than about the careful curation of an experience and way of relating to the wild. For a certain class of elite Romans, hunting was as much as rhetorical practice as it was an athletic one. Pliny didn’t have to lift a spear, only his

1 Plin. Ep. 1.6. 39 pen, to capture three “pulcherrimos” boars; his triumph is reinforced and indeed made real by providing this written record. Pliny’s emphasis on literary triumph amidst his recollection of his successful hunt suggests a complex and self-conscious relationship between poetics and cultural practice. The hunt did not just find life in the forest, but in the literary imagination of Rome’s early imperial authors.2

Across the first century, though hunting grew in popularity alongside the growth and entrenchment of Rome’s imperial dynasty, hunting has remained a relatively marginal topic in

Roman histories. In his 1996 article, “Did the Romans Hunt,” C.M.C. Green responds to a popular late twentieth century scholarly contention that, for many centuries, the Romans did not hunt, or did not view hunting as a part of the Roman aristocratic identity. As discussed in chapter one, there is ample evidence that the Romans hunted even long before the Augustan era; under the early Empire, Roman hunting practices reached a new level of symbolic power, established in part through works of Latin epic poetry.

The need for an article to lay bare a fairly well-documented part of Roman life underscores a historical tendency to view Roman hunting as merely a trivial or incidental part of

Roman life and history. This has resulted in a comparative lack of sources dealing with Roman attitudes towards hunting, especially as compared to ample scholarly assessments of the Greek attitudes towards hunting. Indeed, J.K. Anderson’s pivotal work, Hunting in the Ancient World certainly attends to Roman attitudes towards hunting, but Anderson filters his analysis of Roman hunting practices through a pointedly Greek lens, as part of a larger bias in classical scholarship that views Roman culture as derivative.3 How did Roman attitudes towards hunting reflect the

2 Green 1996. 3 Anderson 1985.

40 types of hunting laid out by Xenophon? How did the expansion of Roman power in the nearby

Mediterranean—and the presence of Greek hostages in Rome—help spread and popularize hunting?

These questions are not trivial, but they assign too much weight to the ways the Romans borrowed from Greek hunting practices, and far too little weight to the ways they deviated from them and transformed them and understood their cultural ownership over the hunt. Anderson’s study reveals many important and illuminating details about the various paradigms of hunting that circulated in the ancient world—the cultural dominance of Xenophon’s ideal hunting on foot, with hounds and nets, versus the far eastern model for hunting on horseback.4 Yet as Tamar

Hodos points out, “by the time ‘Greek’ ideas were adopted, they had become normalized such that they had often lost an explicitly ‘Greek’ meaning.”5 The emphasis on the cultural and intellectual heritage of the hunt obscures the introduction of the hunt into the broader Roman self-concept—to reflect a new, distinctively Roman attitude towards cultural imports. As

Andrew Wallace Hadrill points out, the “political fact of Roman domination is expressed through the stylistic adoption of Hellenistic forms,” ascribing to neither a simply binary of

“Romanization” or “Hellenization.” 6

Understanding some of the normative assumptions about hunting and understanding how they were and were not realized in certain high works of Roman literature—namely, Roman epic poetry—is the primary focus of this chapter. Describing the genre of epic, Allison Keith noted that “Roman epic, as a genre, can be said to construct a comprehensive model of "Roman Order" at home and abroad.”7 Yet it also allows for necessary deviations within that construction of

4 Anderson, 1985, 92. 5 Hodos 2014, 29. 6 Hadrill 2008, 26. 7 Keith 2000, 6. 41

“Roman order;” several of those deviations are noted in Ovid and Virgil’s depictions of the hunt within the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses. There is a comparatively large body of scholarship discussing metaphorical representations of the hunt in Roman epic, yet relatively little of it investigates its relationship to the material practices of Imperial Rome.8 While this scholarship has largely interrogated how hunting similes have functioned within their respective poems— understanding their narrative function—these literary representations of hunting practices serve a second function outside of its narrative intent, linking poetry to materiality. David Mattingly points out that “the Roman upper classes devoted considerable attention to legitimizing and justifying their empire.”9 Both Virgil and Ovid use the hunt to imagine the ideal exercise of

Roman power over the wild, while critiquing the excesses that had become increasingly common in Roman hunting practices. While Ovid is critical of Rome’s imperial power, Virgil is more

(though perhaps not totally) supportive of Augustan expansion—yet both invoke the hunt as a part of Rome’s power, and as a trope with meaning distinctive to Rome and the early empire.

Pliny’s letter suggests that these literary depictions of the hunt are not trivial to our broader understanding of Roman hunting practice. Pliny draws this connection between rhetoric and reality not merely in his brief letter, but elsewhere in his Panegyricus, whose praise of

Trajan draws in part on depicting him as an idealized—and heavily stylized—hunting figure, attached to hunting’s most positive associations and cut off from any undue connections to the far east aristocratic spectacle.10 Pliny’s own letter suggests hunting was more often spectacle than meaningful action, but he clearly understands the complicated relationship between the hunting world and the written word. These depictions of the hunt were established in the Roman

8 For examples of these rhetorically focused analyses of hunting, especially in Virgil, see Manolaraki 2012; Fratantuono 2006; Dunkle 1973; Vance 1981. 9 Mattingly 2014, 17. 10 Plin. Pan. 81-82. For a further analysis of hunting in the Panegyricus, see Manolaraki 2012. 42 canon, in part by Virgil and Ovid, both of whom make frequent use of hunting imagery to advance their own poetic projects.

Virgil and Ovid’s deviations from hunting depictions in the Greek epic tradition reveal the ways these “high” literary sources, which scholars have traditionally mined for their metaphorical meaning, speak to distinctively Roman ways of hunting (that is, types of hunting invented or popularized by elite Romans). The historicized representations of the hunt offered in the stag hunts of Virgil’s Aeneid and in the Calydonian boar hunt of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, when read against the reality of hunting practices in the Augustan era, construct both an idealized image of respectable hunting practices, while drawing attention to the newfound complexity of hunting in Imperial Rome. Where Virgil and Ovid depict the hunt in line with idealized Greek epic depictions of the hunt, it is in service of creating a new Roman epic—of co-opting and complicating a symbol of Greek power. Hunting may be something of an eastern import, but it gained new life and meaning even in the most traditionally inclined texts. These texts illuminate important, complicated, and distinctively Roman ideas about the relationship between the hunt and imperial power, a primary focus of this thesis.

The Hunt’s Hellenic Origins

Hunting is a practice that classicists have tended to more heavily associate with Greece than with Rome.11 There is some good reason for this: Roman authors often borrow heavily from

Greek myths, such as the famed Calydonian boar hunt. J.K. Anderson attributes the nascent popularity of hunting in Rome from 300 BC onwards in part to the influence of Greek literature

11Green 1996.

43 and the knowledge set of Greek noble hostages held in Italy.12 Other forms of hunting had occurred in Italy outside of Greek influence—including limited forms of subsistence hunting and game hunting in rural areas—yet the aristocratic obsession with the hunt complete with dogs, horses, and elaborate entourages was always a very Greek practice, perhaps best articulated by the hunt depicted in Xenophon’s Cynegeticus.

Probing these Hellenic origins to Roman hunting practices is important to understanding the literary tropes that shaped the work of Roman authors. As noted in Ancient Writers: Greece and Rome, Virgil’s Aeneid was a direct response to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, a conscious attempt to co-opt Greek epic poetry and remake it into a part of Rome’s founding mythology.13

Greek associations with the hunt—as a masculinizing force, and as an important part of aristocratic life and practice—have obscured many of the uniquely Roman associations the hunt gained in “high” literature of the Augustan era. To begin my assessment of the Roman hunt, then, I start in Archaic Greece in order to understand how Greek antecedents to Roman writings on hunting shaped and differ from later Roman epic literary depictions of the hunt. This is important not only to provide further historical context, but because Roman authors often borrowed extensively from the common tropes of Greek literature.

The Iliad and Odyssey largely recount two types of hunting stories: aristocratic hunting stories that serve as examples of virtue and virility for the men who undertake them (as in the

Calydonian boar myth), and subsistence hunting stories, where hunting occupies an incidental role that allows characters to feed themselves with the spoils of the hunt. Texts of the first type are often entirely disconnected from the idea of eating the hunted animal (though the hunt may

12Anderson 1985, 84 13 Luce 1982, 684-685.

44 produce important spoils), whereas hunts of the second type tend to facilitate feast scenes, especially in remote locales. While Virgil legitimized these dual categories of subsistence hunting and aristocratic hunting, he also imagined new and suitably epic depictions of hunting practices that spoke to the specific imperial Roman construction of hunting practices.

Homer’s accounting of the Calydonian boar myth in the Iliad from 9.527-549 provides an appropriate starting point to consider the role hunting played in Greek epic poetry.14

μέμνημαι τόδε ἔργον ἐγὼ πάλαι οὔ τι νέον γε ὡς ἦν: ἐν δ᾽ ὑμῖν ἐρέω πάντεσσι φίλοισι. Κουρῆτές τ᾽ ἐμάχοντο καὶ Αἰτωλοὶ μενεχάρμαι ἀμφὶ πόλιν Καλυδῶνα καὶ ἀλλήλους ἐνάριζον, Αἰτωλοὶ μὲν ἀμυνόμενοι Καλυδῶνος ἐραννῆς, Κουρῆτες δὲ διαπραθέειν μεμαῶτες Ἄρηϊ. καὶ γὰρ τοῖσι κακὸν χρυσόθρονος Ἄρτεμις ὦρσε χωσαμένη ὅ οἱ οὔ τι θαλύσια γουνῷ ἀλωῆς Οἰνεὺς ῥέξ᾽: ἄλλοι δὲ θεοὶ δαίνυνθ᾽ ἑκατόμβας, οἴῃ δ᾽ οὐκ ἔρρεξε Διὸς κούρῃ μεγάλοιο. ἢ λάθετ᾽ ἢ οὐκ ἐνόησεν: ἀάσατο δὲ μέγα θυμῷ. ‘ ἣ δὲ χολωσαμένη δῖον γένος ἰοχέαιρα ὦρσεν ἔπι χλούνην σῦν ἄγριον ἀργιόδοντα, ὃς κακὰ πόλλ᾽ ἕρδεσκεν ἔθων Οἰνῆος ἀλωήν: πολλὰ δ᾽ ὅ γε προθέλυμνα χαμαὶ βάλε δένδρεα μακρὰ αὐτῇσιν ῥίζῃσι καὶ αὐτοῖς ἄνθεσι μήλων. τὸν δ᾽ υἱὸς Οἰνῆος ἀπέκτεινεν Μελέαγρος πολλέων ἐκ πολίων θηρήτορας ἄνδρας ἀγείρας καὶ κύνας: οὐ μὲν γάρ κε δάμη παύροισι βροτοῖσι: τόσσος ἔην, πολλοὺς δὲ πυρῆς ἐπέβησ᾽ ἀλεγεινῆς. ἣ δ᾽ ἀμφ᾽ αὐτῷ θῆκε πολὺν κέλαδον καὶ ἀϋτὴν ἀμφὶ συὸς κεφαλῇ καὶ δέρματι λαχνήεντι Κουρήτων τε μεσηγὺ καὶ Αἰτωλῶν μεγαθύμων.

I remember this deed long ago, not recently, how it was, I will tell it to you, who are all friends. The Curetes were fighting, and the Aetolians, staunch in battle, were killing each other around the city of Calydon, and the Aetolians were warding them off from Calydon and the Curetes were eager to sack it for Ares. Upon them Artemis, with a throne of gold, sent a plague Since she was angry that Oeneus did not offer any harvest from the slope of the Orchard: The other gods feasted on hecatombs, To the daughter of great Zeus alone he did not offer any. Either he neither forgot it or did not realize, for he was greatly blinded in his heart. Being angry, the arrow-pouring goddess, child of Zeus

14 Hom. Il. 9. 527-549 45

Set upon them a savage wild boar, with white tusks, Which did many evils, wasting the orchards of Oeneus He fell many tall trees, uprooted onto the ground The roots and apple blossom itself. Then the son of Oeneus, Meleager, slayed him, Having gathered together from many cities huntsmen and hunting dogs, For not the boar could not be overpowered with few men, So great he was, he set many on a grievous pyre. About [his carcass], she placed much clamor and shouting About the head and shaggy hide of the boar Between the Curetes and the great-hearted Aetolians.

The Calydonian boar myth is among the most famous, if not the most famous, Greek hunting myth. While Homer provides the first extant accounting, it is likely that Homer was simply retelling a popular hunting myth, one that maintained a great deal of cultural currency until well into the late Imperial Roman period.15 Homer’s telling of the Calydonian boar myth follows its most classic pattern: Artemis sends a boar to wreak havoc on the countryside because the Oeneus forgot to give proper sacrifice. A hunting party is commissioned to kill the boar, and Meleager kills the boar. A scuffle over the division of the spoils of the hunt ensues, eventually resulting in the death of Meleager’s uncle and Meleager himself taking leave from the battle for the fate of his city, as the Calydonian boar hunt occurs in Homer amidst an ongoing war for the city of

Calydon.

In the Iliad, Phoenix’s retelling of the Calydonian boar hunt is a transparent attempt to encourage Achilles to rejoin the fight.16 Homer’s emphasis on the ongoing battle between the

Aetolians and the Curetes invokes the precarious position of the Greeks at Troy. Achilles, like

Meleager, should give up his wrath and return to the fight. The Meleager story also invokes all of the traditional trappings on the hunt. The boar has already killed several men when Meleager finally slays the boar (though Homer does not name them). This validates the Greek obsession

15 Honea 1994, 3. 16 Rosner 1976. 46 with boars above other hunted animals: among beasts native to Greece, boars were considered the most destructive and the most feared; their sharp tusks and large size made them formidable challengers. The hunt is closely aligned with the ongoing battle for Calydon; Meleager’s triumph over the boar mirrors his essentiality to the Aetolian war effort, which in turn mirrors Achille’s own role in the Greek war effort at Troy. Hunting is the archetypical pastime for a warrior, one that is plunged into confusion only when material possessions—the boar’s hide and skull—are called into question.

While the Calydonian boar hunt is inflected with a great deal of complexity, owing to the problems brought on by the divisions of spoils, the validity of hunt itself is not in question.

Homer’s telling of the Calydonian boar myth sets up his accounting of Odysseus’ boar hunt on

Parnassus as a young man. Hunting for the boar on Parnassus does not go exactly as planned, as

Odysseus is wounded in the hunt. Yet that scar becomes a key part of Odysseus’s identification: it is a physical representation of his heroic17 Both stories are examples of what Nancy Rubin and

William Sale describe as a “hunting maturation myth,” where the hunt is the first stage in the development of the heroic persona and acquisition of a wife and long life.18 Though Meleager’s death is not a part of Homer’s retelling of the myth, in the folklore-aligned non-epic tradition brought to us from Apollodorus, his mother kills him in retaliation for the death of one (or two) of his uncles in several other iterations, suggesting that the Odyssey’s boar hunting tale is the realization of a narrative arc unfilled by Meleager and Achilles’ deaths.19

While these two boar hunts identify the militaristic overtones for the hunt, the nominally less war-focused Odyssey contains several other hunting scenes worth consideration. These

17 Hom. Od. 19. 415 18 Rubin and Sale 1983. 19 Barringer 1996. 47 scenes: the goat hunt in book nine, and Odysseus’s stag hunt in book ten, take place entirely apart from military conquest and outside of true “civilization.” In book nine, Odysseus and his men arrive upon an island bereft of men or sedentary agriculture but teeming with goats: an important source of food for his weary crew. Odysseus and his men set off “with curved bows and long hunting-spears,” weapons recognized both as tools of the hunt and as tools of warfare, reinforcing the militaristic and virtuous implications of the hunt established by Homer in the

Iliad and later reinforced in book nineteen of the Odyssey.20 Odysseus’ men participate in the hunt as a communal activity, as intended, and they are richly rewarded for their efforts: each group kills nine goats; Odysseus’s group kills ten. Though the spoils of Greek hunts were often eaten, mythological hunts often distance themselves from this culinary outcome, instead emphasizing the hunt as a proto-militaristic leisure activity. Hunt scenes followed by a feast implied subsistence consumption, rather than a heroic or aristocratic hunt; making these subsistence hunts acceptable then requires aligning the hunt with the virtues of contemporaneous

Greek hunting practices.21

If the goat hunt implies a continued level of civilization, the later stag hunt troubles this reading slightly.22 Odysseus hunts alone. His men are too tired to join him. The communal element is no longer present. Yet Odysseus’s stag hunt, as the goat hunt preceding it, provides a much-needed meal for his crew, while reinforcing Odysseus’s own strength and power.23 Since the hunt, as practiced in ritualized settings, is meant to be a communal activity, Odysseus’s distance from his men suggests a breakdown of the communal order that was present during his

20 Hom. Od. 9.156 21 Vidal-Naquent 1981. 22 Hom. Od. 10.165 23 Scodel 1994.

48 hunt on goat island. However, this breakdown in order is not catastrophic: it does not doom

Odysseus the way his crew’s consumption of the sun cattle do. Even when the hunt is improperly practiced, losing some of its virtuous symbolism, the meanings attached to hunting and not totally absent; they’re just temporarily obscured by Odysseus’s circumstances.

Even outside of Homer’s retelling of these specific stories, hunting similes abound, especially in the Iliad, where warriors were frequently compared to both hunted animals and to animals hunting their own prey.24 Several scholars have investigated the complexity and specific meanings of these similes; I am mostly interested in understanding how similes of these types found continued meaning centuries later in a radically different Imperial Roman cultural context.

Hunting retains much of its Greek and eastern meaning, where hunting was an important leisure activity for aristocrats meant to embody certain essential characteristics of masculinity and war- like prowess.25 Hunting continues to serve this function in early representations of hunting in the

Aeneid, demonstrating warrior-like virtue that helps legitimize Roman imperial might and power.

Considering the hunt’s significance in the Aeneid alongside contemporaneous understanding of the hunt in aristocratic life provides a more enriching understanding of how long-standing motifs about the hunt gained new specific meaning in the Imperial Roman context.

Identifying the origins of the hunt in Greece and the eastern Mediterranean raise several interesting questions when considering the role hunting plays in Roman life and literature. As the

Romans increasingly utilized hunting as a literary trope that embodied their own ownership over wild and uncivilized domains, this close literary relationship between hunting and the Greek world helped encourage this development of a newer, more distinctively Roman way of writing

24 Perhaps the most prominent and most jarring example of this comes as Achilles chases Hector in the Iliad, himself a wild animal threatening to cannibalize Hector’s body. Hom. Il. 22.189. 25 Johnstone 1994; Xen. Cyn.

49 about the hunt. Hunting scenes allowed Virgil the opportunity to understand and articulate his own imperial ideology. There is something ironic when considering that this motif of “Roman- ness” was not even all that Roman and needed to be transformed by Roman authors. While these

Greek texts provided an important framework to understand man’s power in the animal world, and while Greece was considered the only other legitimate literary power by many powerful

Romans, they were still largely viewed as inferior: hence the need for Roman retellings of Greek texts in the first place.

Re-Making Rome: Hunting Scenes in the Aeneid

Writing in Further Voices of the Aeneid R.O.A.M. Lyne writes that though “whatever reputation hunting may have in Roman culture at large, in the Aeneid it turns into a rather ominous motif.”26 Lyne identifies hunting’s reputation in Rome as that of a healthy and manly pastime. And while hunting continued to enjoy the masculinizing reputation so clearly articulated in the Iliad, Odyssey, and Cynegeticus, by the time Virgil was writing, Roman hunting practices had been so completely transformed by the amphitheater and by the proliferation of aristocratic game parks that it can no longer be said that hunting enjoyed a reputation merely as “healthy and manly.” Yet the complexity—and contradictions—embedded in the view of hunting during Virgil’s lifetime allow us to read hunting not merely symbolic, as

Lyne does, but as a reflection of prevailing cultural practices and attitudes.27 Understanding these negative associations Virgil tends to ascribe to hunting throughout the Aeneid does not require divorcing Virgil’s hunts from his historic context but conjoining them more fully.

26Lyne 1992. 27 Indeed, to emphasize the Roman conception of hunting as “healthy and manly,” Lyne cites Horace’s Epistles, where Horace writes that hunting, “the wonted pastime of the heroes of Rome, is good for fame as well as for life and limb—especially when you are in health and can outdo either the hound in speed or the boar in strength.” Hor. 50

Lyne’s discussion represents a tendency to view even the most explicit references to hunting as necessarily metaphorical or shrouded in coded language. As discussed above, there is a long-standing tendency to dismiss or trivialize the role of hunting in ancient Rome. I do not deny the validity of literary focused approaches which illuminate many meaningful ideas about the literary role of the hunt.28 While this scholarship has largely interrogated how hunting similes and imagery have functioned within their respective poems—their narrative function—literary representations of hunting practices serve a function outside of narrative intent. The historicized representations of the hunt offered in the stag hunts of Virgil’s Aeneid and in the Calydonian boar hunt of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, when read against the reality of hunting practices in the

Augustan era, construct both an idealized image of respectable hunting practices, while also drawing attention to the newfound complexity of hunting in imperial Rome.

As Aeneas and his men flee Troy in book one of the Aeneid, they land on the shores of

Libya after being knocked about by a storm. Aeneas goes out to survey the area, and while he finds no sign of man, he spots “three stags on the shore,” (tris litore cervos) followed closely by the “whole heard” (tota armenta).29 Aeneas shoots down seven of the deer and carries them back to the remaining seven ships where his crew begins to prepare a meal of the deer. Wine is brought out from the ships and speeches are made to rally the crew after the day’s hardships. As the animals they consume are hunted, there is no sacrifice, and the preparation of the meal replaces the communal nature of the hunt.

Ep. XVIII.45. Weapons used in the hunt are “virilia,” or manly. While Horace here remarks upon the virtues of hunting, his discussion of “Aetolian nets and… dogs” suggests that he is envisioning the classic Greek aristocratic hunt, complete with a reference to the Calydonian boar, among the most famous mythological Greek hunts. This positive Roman view of the hunt is in fact a very Greek interpretation of the hunt—one that Horace himself undermines in his many satirical references to more distinctively Romans ways of hunting (and eating) boars or hare in his Sermones. 28Stephens 1990. 29 Verg. Aen. 1.180 51

This scene is an early invocation of hunting in Homer, as it shares several important similarities with Odysseus’s stag hunt in book 10 of the Odyssey. Odysseus’s killing of the stag on Circe’s island provides much-needed meat that invigorates his men. It also elevates Odysseus above his men, clarifying and rarifying his status, while also detaching Odysseus from his men and from any sense of civilized community. Ruth Scodel notes that the Homeric tale is told in the

“language of epic battle,” setting up Odysseus’s achievement as a sign of military skills.30

Aeneid’s triumph on the beach creates a direct link between him and Odysseus, further reinforcing his status as a central heroic figure. Interestingly, Virgil chooses to lace this hunting scene right at the beginning of the Aeneid, while hunting scenes in the Odyssey are buried within the middle of the text.31 If Odysseus’ civilizing hunts on Circe’s Island and on Goat Island come only when he is adrift, framing his character’s past more than his present situation (recounting his travels to the Phaeacians), Aeneas’s first actions are the ‘civilized’ action of hunting on

Italy’s shores.32 When Odysseus hunts alone, he is doing so because his men can no longer fulfil a civilizing role on Circe’s Island. When Aeneas hunts alone, he does so purely as an example of his skill.

This scene, the first depiction of hunting in the Aeneid, is a perfect example of the second type hunting of hunting scene seen in Greek epic, where subsistence hunting is allowed in a carefully mitigated circumstance that emphasizes the prowess of a central figure (in this case,

Aeneas) and enables a communal feast scene that provides a chance to re-emphasize a common goal. While hunting is often represented as a communal activity, this scene sees Aeneas stand alone, positioned literally above his men (and the deer) on the beach as he secures their meal.

30Scodel 1994. 31 Staley 1990. 32 Dunkle 1973, 128. 52

Aeneas may no longer be at war, but his skills with a bow continue to serve him well.

Considering the long-standing Greek and Roman tradition that associates hunting skill with military might, this scene reinforces Aeneas’s exceptionalism, building off of a typical paradigm seen in Greek epic where these non-communal hunt scenes elevate the power and status of a central figure while emphasizing their remoteness from civilization.

While Virgil does not stick to the Homeric type scenes, he does make use of them at several other points. Book four’s pivotal moment comes when Aeneas and Dido’s royal hunting party is interrupted by a rainstorm. Yet this interruption—and the consummation of Dido and

Aeneas’ relationship—comes after a brief explanation of the hunting party’s skill, closing in on wild goats and deer (“ferae… caprae” and “cervi,”) perhaps another invocation of Odysseus’s goat hunt, and of the heroic potential of a hunt—though this one is interrupted by the coming storm.33

Virgil’s invocation of the Odyssey serves not only to invoke and legitimize the heroic hunt, but to remake it as a part of his broader project about Rome’s origins. As Rebecca

Armstrong writes, “Virgil is truly appreciative of the greatness and glory of Homer, but not scared to cut up, portion out, and reuse his work as he sees fit.”34 This is all in service of creating a truly “Roman” epic, that makes these Greek and Homeric origins as ultimately subservient to the Roman present.

Whereas the two prior hunting practices mentioned serve mainly to define the ideal hunt and articulate the power of hunting as a civilizing force, and introduce Greek hunting practices as equally Roman, Ascanius’s slaying of Sylvia’s stag articulates a secondary meaning almost entirely divorced from the Greek antecedents that loom large in early hunting scenes. The stag

33 Verg. Aen. 4.151 34Armstrong 2006, 137. 53 that Ascanius kills is not truly wild, as are the stags killed by Aeneas in book one. Nor is Sylvia’s stag truly domesticated—as Eugene Vance describes it, “Sylvia’s beloved Stag is neither entirely domesticated, not entirely wild, but dangerously in between.”35 The deer ceases to be truly wild, occupying instead the liminal category of a non-domesticated animal—wild by its nature but transformed by human contact to become accustomed to humans. Sylvia’s stag provides one of the most nuanced mythologized representations of a non-domesticated animal in Roman epic mythology. Rather than merely providing depictions of the idealized hunt in the Aeneid, Virgil’s discussion of Sylvia’s stag represents some recognition of contemporaneous hunting practices, providing important commentary that suggests the limitations of the traditional hunting paradigm. This scene elevates contemporary roman hunting practices to an epic scale, while also suggesting clear flaws in this new non-domesticated, non-wild animal category.

This hunting scene, aside from being an important example of a literary hunting scene, is arguably among the most pivotal scenes of the Aeneid, as Ascanius’s killing of the stag sparks a war between the Latins and the Trojans. Yet it is also rare among hunting scenes, not only in the

Aeneid, but in any work of Greek or Roman mythology dealing with wild animals, as it introduces a new category of non-domesticated Animal to contend with. Raymond Starr has previously dealt with the legal implications of Sylvia’s Stag, but I am more interested in the connection he draws between Sylvia’s Stag and Rome’s contemporaneous game parks

(vivaria).36 Starr identifies Sylvia’s stag as an invocation of the pseudo-domesticated animals kept in vivaria that exist in a liminal legal category.

As explored in chapter one, at the time Virgil is writing, elite Romans would keep groups of these non-domesticated, non-wild animals (namely boars and stags) in large, forested

35Vance 1981. 36 Starr 1992. 54 enclosures. These parks would serve several functions—chief among them, they provided hunting venues for their owners. This cultural context would have been apparent to Virgil’s intended audience—cultural practices surrounding the hunt only expanded in their importance and prominence during the imperial period. Hunting was an important form of cultural expression for elites during the early Imperial Roman period, even as classicists in the past have tended to view it only for its rhetorical importance to the text, rather than to consider how it works in conjunction with the practices it represents. Virgil’s inclusion of the slaying of Sylvia’s stag, rather than simply reinforcing the rhetorical value and cultural practice of “pure,” idealized hunting, introduces the complexities of contemporary hunting practices, which do not live up to these mythological ideas that are often so divorced from the material reality of Roman hunting practices. The blurring of boundaries between the wild and domestic is not only problematic in the fictional world of the Aeneid but is a threat to Roman aristocratic norms.

This passage, apart from serving as a pivotal moment in the story, also acts as a commentary not only on imagined hunting ideals but on the actual expression of the hunt in

Imperial Rome. Virgil is clearly hesitant towards animals and objects that do not fit neatly into the domesticated and wild paradigm that is traditionally upheld and reinforced by hunting similes and scenes in Roman literature.37 Here, he offers a limited critique of curated Roman hunting practices, especially as they compare to what hunting should be—a place where masculinity is reinforced and civilization is spread, as shown earlier in the Aeneid. The obsession with owning the wild falters, as the wild is no longer “wild.” It is instead something confusingly inauthentic: its failure to conform to traditional expectations of what the hunt should be embroils Aeneas and his men in a messy military conflict. If traditional categories and traditional depictions of

37 Vance 1981. 55 hunting, as seen earlier in the Aeneid, demonstrate the aspirational value of the hunt, Sylvia’s stag suggests the danger embedded in failing to properly uphold these norms and by corrupting the “domestic” versus “wild” paradigm upon which Rome’s communal culinary habits depend.

It also, of course, bears mentioning that the Aeneid’s poetic project helped to articulate the idea of Roman exceptionalism and serve as a nationalistic founding myth that legitimized

Rome’s imperial power. Virgil helped define what it meant to be Roman under the emerging empire. Katharine Toll writes that Virgil “designed the Aeneid strategically to help the Romans meditate on the duties, problems, dangers, and possibilities of a new national identity.”38 Rather than mine the Aeneid for an illumination of Virgil’s relationship to Augustus, I am more broadly interested in how hunting plays into this project of construction a Roman identity. The Aeneid is not a text about hunting or about domesticity, perhaps above all, it is a political text: one that provides a mythologized explanation for the founding of Rome and for Rome’s future destiny as a great empire. The following passage from book VI is generally seen as Virgil’s primary expression of Rome’s imperial might:

Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera, credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore voltus, orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent: tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento; hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem, parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos.”

Others will forge more easily the breathing bronze, They will lead out living faces from the marble, They will plead cases better, and trace the movements of the heavens, and name the rising stars You, Romans, remember to rule your people with authority. For these are your arts—to make peace a custom, To spare the humbled and vanquish the proud in war.39

38 Toll 1997. 39 Verg. Aen. 6.847 56

Rome’s destiny and function are to “regere imperio,” to “rule with imperial authority” and to fan its influence out across Rome and across the continent. While some scholars have debated additional or alternate meanings buried within this text, and some have questioned whether or not Virgil is in fact critiquing the imperial mindset that dominated the time, it is largely unquestioned that this passage functions as a direct expression of the Roman imperial mindset, whether or not Virgil is levying a critique on this imperial way of thinking.40

The model of imperial power that Virgil promotes here is distinctly militaristic. Cultural expressions of power—exemplified through sculpture, oratory, and astronomy—are the domain of the Greeks. Rome’s power does not need to be cultural—only legal. But this emphasis on military power and expression does not necessarily undermine the importance of cultural expression: rather it reframes even Roman cultural dominance through military means. Rebecca

Armstrong argues that despite this straightforward explanation, as is made “implicit throughout the whole poem, an empire is about culture and the arts as well as military success.” Virgil helps uncover this idea through the use of hunting imagery that bridges the world of cultural and military practice.41

Roman legal and militaristic power is defined and articulated in the Aeneid at times, through the description of cultural practices, in ways that both undermine and reinforce this idea of Roman power. As discussed at greater length in chapter one, hunting was not enacted in

Imperial Rome as a utilitarian task. It was not a necessity for survival. Groups outside of the

40 For my part, I am unconvinced that the Aeneid is meant to subvert these traditional explanations of Roman imperial might. While certainly the Aeneid is a complex text that complicates the vision of Imperial might laid out here, I feel that the reliance on hunting metaphors I analyze here make a compelling case that the Aeneid functions as a reflection of Imperial power under Augustus. See also Rudd 1983; Armstrong 2006. 41Armstrong 2006, 134.

57 metropole who hunted for subsistence (or were believed to hunt for subsistence) were viewed as being uncivilized.42 Hunting is only appropriate when done as a sign of civilization and as an expansion of authority into the natural realm. Domesticated animals remain the only appropriate animals for religious sacrifices and rituals and continue to make up the vast majority of meat consumption. Hunting does not define meat consumption in civilized nations; instead, it defines certain elite cultural preferences or practices.

Hunting in the Roman Empire was, alternatively, a leisure practice for the rich, or a spectacle for the peasantry. In both of these instances, however, there was a clear desire to imbue the hunt with military authority and significance. In the Aeneid, hunting is transformed into a pseudo-militaristic expression through which Aeneas imparts civilization through his dominance of the wild. It is a vehicle through which Aeneas is able to properly enact ideals of Roman expansion even before led to military action. When Ascanius hunts an animal that does not properly fit into the category of the uncivilized wild, his actions, rather than enacting a form of legitimized ritual violence, cause a much more destructive literal form of warfare. Hunting might be a pseudo-military act, but it is one that, properly conducted, is meant to reinforce existing power hierarchies, not generate additional conflict and strife.

The hunt is a metaphorical pseudo-military act, but it is also the performance of an activity with intense— and intensely contested—cultural meaning. Ultimately, however,

Virgil’s articulation of imperial power as military power helps us understand how images of hunting in the Aeneid reinforced ideas about military power and dominance even as they relied on an understanding of hunting as a cultural practice imbued with specific significance to Roman audiences. Though Virgil’s articulation of Roman power might rely on legal and military

42 This idea has its origins in Classical Greece. See Shaw 1983. 58 definitions of power, Virgil’s extensive deployment of hunting imagery suggests that the line between political and cultural might was thin and ever shifting. Hunting holds power in the

Aeneid because it is a cultural practice that fits into this martial perspective: it reinforces imperial expressions and ideologies and extends them outside of the political and military arena.

Hunting in Ovid’ Metamorphoses

Virgil’s hunting narratives rely primarily on non-mythological subsistence hunts. While hunting similes might elevate Aeneas by providing important mythological connections or invoking literary antecedents, his encounters with wild animals are not mere retellings of hunting myths. To understand the importance of Roman retellings of hunting myths, I turn my consideration of epic depictions of the hunt to the Calydonian Boar Hunt in Ovid’s

Metamorphoses. While the Metamorphoses defies genre classification in several key respects, it shares enough essential characteristics with epic to include it in this survey of “high” literary representations of the hunt. While the first extant literary record of the hunt for the Calydonian boar takes place in The Iliad, the most prominent retelling from the imperial Roman period—and indeed one of the most prominent retellings, period—is in Book VIII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Ovid’s depictions of the boar provide key context in understanding another way of thinking about the Roman literary significance of hunting practices, poetry, and imperialism.

Though Virgil’s project may be more complicated than first appears, Ovid’s purpose is even more opaque and contradictory. While Virgil is writing at the dawn of the Roman Empire, amidst the essential messiness of creating and legitimizing a new regime, Ovid is writing at the dawn of the first century AD, several decades after Virgil’s death and the publication of the

Aeneid. Augustus’ power—and Roman imperial rule—has already been established.

Consequently, Ovid is far less concerned—and has far less reason to be concerned—with writing for the establishment of a new Roman order.

Ovid’s relationship to empire is also far more complicated and difficult to unpack than

Virgil’s. Many scholars read Ovid’s work as critical of Roman imperial power and imperialism.

Even if Virgil himself is not a completely uncritical supporter of Roman imperial rule (though he may be), the Aeneid nevertheless conjures up a Roman and Italian-centric world order. The

Metamorphoses—and Ovid’s entire literary canon—rejects such a project, preferring instead to construct in the Metamorphoses an Ovidian epic, and not a “Roman” one. As Thomas Habinek explains,

“Ovid’s position as both subject and object of the Imperial gaze in many ways resembles our own, exploration of his politics invites uncomfortable self-scrutiny on the part of the critic – a consideration that may explain why most studies of Ovidian politics may limit themselves to examining the degree to which the poet distances himself from the princeps rather than considering the extent to which his writing is implicated in Roman imperialism.”43

While Ovid’s relationship to Augustus and imperial power is far too fraught or complicated to be covered here in its entirety, it is not an entirely critical one.44 Ovid’s writings deal extensively with ideas of conquest—conquest of genre, of the self, of women, and in the

Calydonian boar myth, of the wild. His relationship to these ideas may be over the top in ways intended to poke fun or destabilize prevailing ideas about the relationship between, for example, hunting, power, and masculinity, but they do not reject them out of hand.45 I suggest that Ovid’s writing about the Calydonian boar myth can be understood in relation to ideas of “Roman-ness” and “imperialism” that scholars tend to ascribe to Virgil’s poetry. While Ovid does not portray

43Habinek 2006. 44 For a comprehensive accounting of the relationship between Ovid and Augustus, see Barchiesi 1997. 45 Morgan 2003. 60 the Calydonian boar hunt in entirely sympathetic terms, and switches the focus away from the heroic aristocratic hunt first inscribed by Homer towards a more romantic tale that fits into his broader literary interests, his choice to expand and rewrite the Calydonian boar myth, reveals what I describe as an “anti-imperial imperialist” attitude: one that buys into imperial tropes despite a broader disinterest in Augustus himself or the “politics” of Roman political power.

Even where Ovid does not recognize his relationship to empire as being positive, his telling of Calydonian boar myth suggests that the hunt—a contemporary cultural practice at home in epic—was one lens that allowed him to write about his relationship to Roman power.

Scholars who do look to Ovid to understand cultural practices of the first century rarely look to the Metamorphoses, whose collection of myths and stories feel frequently intentionally detached from the Ovidian present. Instead, scholars tend to turn their attention to Ovid’s Fasti, which purports to explain the Roman calendar and related local and national traditions. The

Metamorphoses is Ovid’s most explicitly literary work—it is his longest poem, his only one published in dactylic hexameter, his attempt at epic that deconstructs the genre’s meaning at every turn and has led many scholars to declare that it defies generic categorization. Yet, at least in the case of the Calydonian boar, it is overly limiting to view Ovid’s intervention solely as a mythological, as he effectively parodies the tropes of hunting as common in Virgil and other literary works as in the lives of Rome’s aristocracy.

Ovid’s Roman retelling of the Calydonian boar myth largely consists of creating a more critical and extended portrayal of the epic hunt. Just as Virgil is often critical of the many excesses of the hunt in his time, exemplified in his depiction of Sylvia’s stag, Ovid seems similarly distrustful of such excess. Yet while Virgil stays close to the refined Homeric model of depicting the hunt, offering only limited criticism through its outcome, Ovid creates a spectacle

61 on the page. Where Virgil borrows from type-scenes offered in the Odyssey, Ovid is retelling the same Calydonian boar myth first brought to us in the Iliad. Homer’s depiction of the hunt only takes up only twenty-three lines (the aftermath takes up several more), Ovid’s Calydonian boar myth is stretched across the middle third of book eight of the Metamorphoses, encompassing several hundred lines of the text. Though there are longer texts on the Calydonian boar that have not survived—including a full-length play about Meleager by Euripides—much of Ovid’s intervention into the story seems to be playing up the personal drama and unheroic qualities of our heroes. If Homer’s Calydonian boar myth is understated and restrained, Ovid’s is intimately detailed. In one typical passage describing the boar sent to ravage the area, Ovid writes

“sanguine et igne micant oculi, riget horrida cervix, et setae similes rigidis hastilibus horrent fervida cum rauco latos stridore per armos spuma fluit, dentes aequantur dentibus Indis, fulmen ab ore venit, frondes afflatibus ardent.”

“His eyes shone with blood and fire, his neck was stiff, and the hair on his neck bristled as a line of pointed swords With violent grunts, hot foam fell upon its shoulders His tusks were like those of an Indian Elephant, Lightning flashed from his mouth; his breath set ablaze the green fields46

Charles Segal notes that Ovid “goes above and beyond both Homer and Bacchylides” in recounting such superficial details, magnifying not only the “horror of the beast,” but the absurdity of the entire situation.47 This boar is a parody of the kind of “pulcherrimos” wild boar killed in the first century by Pliny; its monstrousness serves to both emphasize a common rhetorical focus on boars in hunting, while undermining the very Roman obsession with boar hunting. In this passage, Ovid aligns the boar’s appearance with “rigidis hastilibus,” using the

46 Ov. Met. 8.285 47 Segal 1996. 62 military language commonly aligned with the hunt to describe the boar itself. He makes the

Calydonian boar myth Roman in part by building up the story’s excess. Though Ovid introduces a catalogue of heroes common in such a mythological tale, he does not identify these heroes with heroic actions. Ovid writes that “Nestor almost perished [in the hunt] before he went to Troy,” destabilizing Nestor’s role in the Iliad as a great warrior of old. Further adding to this insult,

Ovid tells the readers that he “vaulted [over the boar] to land on a nearby tree,” to escape the boar after his failed attack. O.D. Watkins views this scene as “influenced by a desire to poke fun at the epic tradition,” indicative of a broader intent to, “not take that tradition completely seriously.”48

Nestor’s cowardly actions are far from the only scene that invokes such a comical reading. Ancaeus is killed by the boar when “summa ferus geminos derexit ad inguina dentes.”49

The boar kills Ancaeus through an act of penetration in the groin. Rather than achieving the valor he longed for, his manhood is destroyed both through his failure as a hero and through the literal penetration of his groin by the tusks of the boar, rendering him the passive agent in a crude reconstruction of a homosexual act. Allison Keith notes that Ancaeus has been further

“unmanned” in his mode of death; his failed attempt at valor strips him (rhetorically and actually) of his manhood.50 Ovid’s deconstruction of the heroic signifiers of the hunt—taken together with his deconstruction of the epic genre—suggest a project that is critical of Roman cultural norms while still accepting of the cultural power those new norms tend to represent.

The very choice to rewrite the story and claim the language of the hunt suggests that even

Ovid’s writings advance the colonial meanings of the hunt. Elizabeth Young’s Translation as

48 Watkins Watkins, “Ovid, ‘Metamorphoses’, 8, 365-8.” 49 Ov. Met. 8.400 50 Keith 1999, 228.

Muse proposes the idea that “Catullus and his generation transformed Greek ideas, words, and things into new kinds of cultural capital.”51 While Ovid is writing long after Catullus, I suggest that this art of “transformation” has continued and intensified in the intervening decades. The

Roman relationship to Greek literary forms was a complicated, and not wholly one-sided, indication of Roman imperial power. Despite the popularity of Greek literature, and the deference to Greek poetic power afforded by Virgil and extended in Ovid’s choice to retell a popular Greek myth, Virgil and Ovid retain the ultimate artistic and cultural authorities within their works. The decision to translate—or otherwise retell a Greek myth while re-inventing a

Greek poetic style, as Ovid does—suggests a deep desire to conform to “Roman convention and tastes,” even as he questions the very same Roman convention and taste. This relationship to

empire, paradoxical and contradictory as it appears in the Calydonian boar text, nonetheless reinforces the underlying imperial impulses of Ovid’s very poetic project.

The next chapter looks beyond these epic depictions of hunting practices towards another genre more traditionally aligned with Rome and Roman writing: satire. While epic constructs hunting on a grand scale, satire, spends a great deal more time poking fun at that scale, parodying such mythological stories.

51 Young 2015, 21.

Chapter III

A Feast of Beasts: Game Meat and Roman Satire

It’s not uncommon to find wild boar gracing the menus of contemporary Italian restaurants. Pappardelle al ragù di cinghiale—or pasta with wild boar ragu—remains a popular

Tuscan dish. Ground boar meat is also a popular component in some types of Italian sausages.1

For contemporary and ancient hunters and chefs alike, there is no animal in the forest more ferocious—or more delicious—than the wild boar. More than any other hunted wild game in ancient Italy, the wild boar was one of the most dangerous opponents a huntsman could encounter. Wild boars are armed with several natural defenses, including two sharp tusks, a 200- pound frame and an ability to run fast, posing a significant bodily risk to anyone who dared hunt one.2 Both despite and because of this risk, wild boar meat quickly became a symbol of status for wealthy Romans, a mainstay on the dining table that evoked ideas about hunting that were circulating in ancient Rome. Killing—and serving—wild boar meat was the ultimate expression of power and authority on the dining table, a dish capable of easily serving Roman domestication and control over the wild.

Boars were only one of several game animals eaten in ancient Rome—deer and hare were also commonly eaten—but wild boar loom particularly large in extant literary sources, with their voracious consumption serving as a site of scorn for moralizing subsects of Rome’s elites. While this chapter is concerned with how depictions of hunting in dining helped to often simultaneously reinforce and undermine Roman imperial power during the first two centuries of

1 I bring up these contemporary recipes as a reminder that ancient foodways are not as far removed from contemporary foodways as we often think. 2 Greene 2011.

65 the Roman republic, it focuses around depictions of wild boars, as they were the animal most frequently mentioned and widely consumed. The reputation of the boar—as a particularly ferocious and dangerous animal, and certainly among the most feared wild animal native to

Italy—makes it a particularly apt case study to consider how the consumption of hunted animals helped shape the expression of the Roman imperial project. The consumption of wild boar and other wild animals in ancient Rome allows us to understand how ideas about the hunt articulated in game parks, in the amphitheater, or in the pages of epic poetry extended into the culinary and cultural lives of Rome’s elite. If the hunt in all its forms was a place where Romans could express control of the wild, consuming the spoils of the hunt took this process one step further, extending the supposed benefits of the hunt not merely to sportsmen and hunters, but to dinner guests and spectators.

While the literary and artistic depictions of the hunt offer necessary context for understanding how hunting practices became a part of the Roman imperial landscape, the extension of these ideas to Roman dietary practices extends and amplifies them. Romans were not only able to not only consume ideas about the hunt, but could consume the literal spoils of the hunt and move hunting practices out of the game park, forest, or amphitheater and into the dining room. The consumption of boars were simply another stage in the Roman domestication of the wild, though this form of consumption did not happen without controversy or scorn, especially by Roman satirists, for whom food was often a central motif in their writings.3 That satirists so commonly critiqued the excess and theatricality that occurred at these dinners suggests that there were limitations to the perceptions of this imperial project. While hosts used hunted animals to project power and authority, this does not mean that guests unilaterally ceded

3 Gowers 1993, 109.

66 such power and authority to the host; it does, however, suggest that the consumption of hunted animals was a site where such cultural manifestations of imperial power were made, critiqued, and reshaped. When read against the beliefs around hunting and Romanitas expressed in chapters one and two, this helps to emphasize the importance of hunted animals as a richly symbolic part of Roman foodways.

This chapter draws extensively on literary and especially satirical sources to consider the relationship between boar consumption, power, and the Roman imperial identity. As Emily

Gowers reminds us, “the significance of food in its literary representation lies both in its simple existence and in a bundle of metaphorical associations, a capacity to evoke a whole world of wider experience.”4 For the Roman authors considered in this chapter—namely, Horace, Juvenal,

Petronius, Pliny the Elder, and Martial—depictions of hunted animals were meant to invoke far more than just realistic representations of ancient roman dietary habits. Instead, their writings referencing hunted animals as a part of Roman foodways suggests the ways that imperial power, authority, and identity found life on the table during the Roman empire, even as they were often critical of the excess and spectacle that allowed a cooked boar to be described in the language of a mythological beast. These depictions were exaggerated and fantastical and do not serve as literal portraits of a Roman dinner party. But the choice to play up the associations between boars, the wild, and Rome’s mythological past suggests that these were certainly legible descriptors, even as Roman satirists frequently used these associations to critique the perceived immorality of members of Rome’s elite. It’s important to note that the practice of consuming game meat or participating in lavish banquets was rarely under fire, merely the ways in which

4 Gowers 1993, 5. 67 these rituals had become bloated and perverted, allowing satirists to reinforce the importance of the ideal hunt by focusing mainly on its misappropriation in dinner settings.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between food and hunting practices both in the lives of Rome’s commoners and in the lives of the elite, as represented in the archeological record and as exaggerated and critiqued in works of satire. This aims to first contextualize the place of hunted animal consumption in ancient Rome and understand how these ideas about diet and power resonated across classes and were not merely matters of concern for the elite. I then turn to representations of game meat in satire to understand how satirists used the genre of satire in order to reference the association between game meat, the process of hunting, and expressions of control over the wild, while critiquing the excesses of Rome’s wealthy class. Their critiques were, in some ways, similar to critiques of improper hunting embedded in Vergil’s Aeneid and

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, though their positionalities as authors of satire occasionally placed them in opposition to the imperial project that Vergil had helped to articulate. Satirists are not questioning that wild animals could and should be hunted and consumed, they are merely questioning the aspects of the dinner spectacle that had changed the original aristocratic meanings and undermined the claim to virtus that hunting should carry.5 As with works of

Roman epic, depictions of feasting in satire should not be taken as literal representations of

Roman banquets, nor should the attitudes of satirists be taken as the dominant or only attitudes towards feasting among Rome’s elite. Instead, their critiques of Roman dining culture offer us an exaggerated window into the ideas and values that were commonly contested at banquets.

5 For an explanation of how hunting connected to ideas of virtus, see Tuck 2005. 68

Game Consumption in Context

Most scholarship on hunting in ancient Rome has tended to overlook or trivialize the place of culinary preparation in shaping or informing ideas about Roman hunting practices.6

Likewise, a great deal of scholarship on Roman foodways has overlooked the place of game meat, citing the relatively low prevalence of bones of game meat in Roman archeological sites.

At Nea Halos, in southern Thessaly, wild animals account for only 4% of faunal remains; at a shrine of Artemis at Hyampolis is Phocis, Goddess of hunting, wild animals still account only for

6% of wild bones at the site.7 These numbers suggest that wild animals made up only a small percentage of the diet, yet the cultural interest in hunting and the prevalence of game meat in literary sources suggests that game played an outsized role in Roman foodways relative to the amount it was actually consumed.

The importance of eating the spoils of the hunt is similarly obscured by depictions of

Roman hunting. In a context such as a large, ritualized hunt—or else a large festival where meat was served—the boar (or pig) would likely have been consumed by the community rather than the individual.8 However, this process of communal dining is often absent in hunt narratives and in discussions of hunt narratives, and there are no textual antecedents that depict the eventual consumption of the Calydonian boar (though there are references to the Calydonian boar within culinary narratives).9 Consuming the spoils of the hunt was a necessary part of subsistence hunting in early antiquity that constituted the proper enjoyment of the labor and heroism of the

6 As in Anderson, 1985. 7 Chandezon 2015, 137. 8 Such ritualized heroic hunts occur more in myth than in actuality, but they’re still an important reference to understand the relationship hunting has always held to animal consumption. 9 In a separate paper, I argue that consumption narratives exist separately from hunting narratives because it poses too great a threat to connection between the hunt and the battle. Depicting the consumption of the killed animal, is too similar to depicting the consumption of a killed opponent. Creating a distinction between scenes of battle, 69 hunt. Even when hunting for sport and not subsistence, the boar would be eaten, especially since it was a fairly prized cut of meat. Recentering the place of food in hunting allows us to understand the broader application of ideas about hunting—and the changes these ideas underwent—in Roman society. Since proper heroic stories of the Calydonian boar never include mention of the boar being consumed, later depictions of boar consumption, especially those which reference the Calydonian boar myth, demonstrate a deviation from the properly constructed heroic and masculine hunting myths.10 The centralization of culinary concerns undermines the original focus of the hunt and hunting stories.

More than other types of domesticated meat that were eaten in Rome, Michael

MacKinnon writes that “hunted wild game, in particular, was prized” by Romans, and was afforded a higher status and more refined reputation than other types of meat.11 Game meat held symbolic value that reinforced the imagined skill of the Romans as hunters and conquerors outside the hunt. As John Donahue’s The Roman Community at Table During the Principate reminds us, food and feasting “strike at the very essence of a people’s self-identity.”12 For those living in Rome during the early empire, this self-identity was increasingly tied to Rome’s power and prestige across the region. Serving wild boar at such grand events, even if boar meat made up only a tiny percentage of broader meat consumption, is significant because of its symbolic prominence relative to its actual rarity. It might not reveal much about quotidian foodways, but it does suggest the outsized role game meat played in developing a Roman self-concept through food and such conspicuous consumption. Banqueting rituals occurred across the empire and

feasting, and hunt, allow the examination of similarities between hunting and battle scenes while making them entirely distinct from consumption, at risk of creating a depiction of cannibalism. 10 For one of the most direct reference to the Calydonian boar myth in a consumption narrative, see Juv. Sat. 5.115. 11 Mackinnon 2006, 20. 12 Donahue 2017, 1.

70 involved a range of groups who used occurrences of social feasting to negotiate power. To turn back to the term “romanization,” it would be a mistake to view imperial feasts as a one-sided spectacle where Rome dominated and overtook the culture of various localities outside the metropole. But these feasts, similarly to Roman hunting events, still functioned as a place where the elite articulated their subjectivities and could project status, power, and influence.13

Foodways across the empire did change in the wake of Roman conquest, including in ways that privileged wild game meat as a part of diet more than in the pre-Roman period.14

Again, while it would be reductive to view this as a merely one-sided exchange, it does suggest a tangible link between Roman political expansion and changes in diet. Mohamed Azaza and Lídia

Colominas have also suggested more broadly that Roman conquest changed the local dietary patterns of Tunisia. Cattle consumption decreased, while pig consumption increased. These high levels of pork consumption have been suggested as a feature of romanitas, as pork (in both its domesticated and non-domesticated forms) appear frequently both in faunal and literary evidence.15 Non-domesticated mammals made up only a small portion of both pre- and post-

Roman faunal remains, but there was a modest increase in their prevalence at some Roman sites.

While this evidence does not point out anything specific about the role of hunted animals (as the prevalence of wild animal bones at the sites discussed was not statistically significant), it does suggest that dietary changes did occur as a result of Roman occupation, and that diet was a legible way for groups to conceptualize their self-concept relative to the rest of the empire. In

Roman Britain, Martyn Allen writes that “Where present, specimens tend to be of antler,

13 Donahue, 4,37. 14 Allen 2014. 15 MacKinnon 2001, 649.

71 demonstrating that venison was rarely consumed prior to the Roman Conquest.”16 Under Roman occupation, meanwhile, the prevalence of deer bones not only suggests that animals were hunted and eaten, but demonstrates that “venison was eaten in ‘unusual circumstances’ in Roman Britain which would suggest that deer meat was highly-prized,” a noticeable change from earlier attitudes towards deer meat.17 In the appearance of deer, wild boar or other game at feasts

(especially those exaggerated in works of Roman satire) elite Romans were extending their hunting ideology out of the forest and amphitheater and into other aspects of life.

Before moving to the elaborate depictions of wild boars in Roman satire and at banquets,

I want to first turn to the occasional consumption of hunted animals by members of the lower classes, looking at how access to meat (and especially game meat) helped to reinforce Roman authority. Meat consumption more broadly was generally restricted to the upper classes. Only at certain public feasts and festivals would it be provided for free to the lower classes.18 These occasions would have been eagerly anticipated by Rome’s lower-class residents and acted as opportunities for emperors and other members of Rome’s elites to curry favor with Rome’s population by positioning themselves as their benefactors. Michael MacKinnon suggests that the animals killed in the amphitheater had been provided to spectators as a way or disposing of the animals while reinforcing their power and generosity.19 Especially during the imperial period when games were given by the emperor, giving meat, especially cuts of more rarified game meat, to spectators helped reinforce their own power and authority and benevolence, while also directly involving spectators more in the games themselves and providing them a space to engage more

16 Allen 2014, 175. 17 Ibid, 177. 18 Chadezon 2015. 19 Mackinnon 2006. 72 deeply in the sport.20 By making spectators active participants in the games, they included the lower classes in the benefits of Rome’s imperial might while also reinforcing the ultimate authority held by the emperor.

These distributions of game meat were likely not particularly common, but their extension to the lower classes even in this specific and limited setting reminds us that the lower classes were also active participants in hunting rituals. Even where they did not participate in aristocratic hunts, hunting was still a legible and important symbol that would have been understood and enjoyed, albeit in a different context. This is as true of the dietary dimensions of hunting as it is of the actual practice and performance of hunting in the ancient world. That being said, issues relating to hunting were still primarily contested and constructed in literature that focused mostly around the lives of Rome’s elite—in epic poetry, as outlined in chapter two, and in satire.

Hunted Animals in Roman Satire and Imperial Literature

We find evidence for the modest consumption of hunted animals in faunal and archeological evidence, but suggestions of the scale and theatricality of the limited consumption that did occur comes to us mostly through the works of Roman satirists and social commentators who draw attention to the grandiose culinary displays involving game that flourished in the first century. As Pliny the Elder records, “the first Roman to bring a whole boar to the table was P

Servilius Rullus” (“solidum aprum Romanorum primus in epulis adposuit P. Servilius”) during

Cicero’s consulship.21 Pliny goes on to point out “how short a time ago these things began which now happen every day” (“tam propinqua origo nunc cotidianae rei est”), demonstrating that the

20Kyle 2014, 311. . 21 Plin. HN. 8.210 73 interest in such conspicuous consumption of boar meat is both relatively recent and began at the end of the Republic as Rome’s political influence was rapidly expanding.22 When Horace takes on the topic of boar consumption in his Satires, he is referencing a relatively recent phenomenon, but when Martial and Juvenal invoke boar consumption, they are doing so long after these activities have become a normal part of banqueting culture.23

While it’s clear that satire, as a genre, owes something to Greece and Greek authors, it also took on something of a distinctively Roman flair. Writing about Lucilius, a second century

BC author often referred to as the first Roman satirist, Kirk Freudenberg writes that the poem’s

“romanitas explodes off the poet's every page not by chance, but because that is largely their point;” from it’s earliest full articulations, satire helped articulate what it meant—and should mean—to be Roman.24 Daniel Hooley takes on the problem of defining Roman satire, identifying it as “a latecomer to the generic party, unsure of itself, clearly parasitical on others of nobler parentage… satire seeks to make a name for itself because it is a lowborn genre on the make.” The looser generic classifications tend to hinge around content, which “generally turn on some kind of criticism.”25

It’s important to remember, however, that Roman satire, as a genre, is not a monolith and things that hold true for some authors do not hold true for others. This is especially true of

Horace, an Augustan era poet whose satires are a “less aggressive, more civilized form of sermo” than seen in his successors, whose work is generally far more pointed and critical.26 There are several important stylistic distinctions between especially Juvenal and Horace (both verse

22 Plin. HN. 8.210 23 Donahue 2014, 37. 24 Lucilius was likely not the first Roman satirist, but Quintilian described him as “the first to achieve distinction” in satire. Freudenburg 2005, 4. 25 Hooley 2009, 3. 26 Gowers 2012, 13. 74

Satirists)—Juvenal was creating “a grand style appropriate to the heights of epic or rhetorical display;” Horace’s project, by comparison, was far more modest.27 These differences are more than merely rhetorical—they’re also somewhat indicative of the political culture of the time. Just as Vergil was writing at the state of the imperial period, before Rome’s imperial power had been quite so firmly solidified, Horace was writing his Satires relatively early in Augustus’ reign.

Juvenal, meanwhile, was writing “in an age of social breakdown,” and viewed Horace’s satires with scorn for their emphasis on the status quo.28 He was also writing after the death of

Domitian—the primary political target of several of his satires. As Osman Umurhan writes,

“whereas Martial, Pliny the Elder, and Strabo are generally more favorable towards the princeps and his established rule, Juvenal is not only scarcely celebratory… but also more reactionary and emotional in his articulation of the effects of empire. Juvenal’s experience of daily life at Rome sees a fuller maturation of the mechanisms of empire that other writers before him were just beginning to observe in its nascent stages.”

Juvenal understands Rome—and his criticisms of Rome’s moral decays—as a part of a broader system of globalization that is remaking the distribution and circulation of power. In writing his

Satires, he is showing a discomfort with the risks these systems of interconnectedness pose to the

Roman institutions.29 If Horace was fundamentally articulating “the standards of the powerful elite group at Rome with which he was associated,” Juvenal was wading into far more contentious waters with his satires, by questioning the consequences of Rome’s imperial power structures.30

Martial, though not properly a satirist, certainly composed many satirical epigrams, poking fun at the excesses of much of Roman culture of the era. Yet he also lavished extensive

27 Braund 1996, 25. 28 Gowers 2012, 25. 29 Umurhan 2018, 40. 30 Braund 1996, 13. 75 praise on Domitian—like Horace, he was not particularly invested in questioning the existing political regime, just the excesses associated with certain wealthy factions.31 Each of these authors, despite their own specific agendas, however, makes use of similar motifs about hunting and the consumption of hunted animals such as boar to level critiques against the excess of the age. Their differences lay in their perception of the consequences of this excess, and in their view of Rome as either a more isolated city or part of a global empire. Taken together, the prominence of hunting language in the discussion of serving game meat suggests that these performances of class, power, and authority were legible and visible, and places where such meaning was contested.

Not all authors who offer us descriptions of wild animal meat being served at banquets are doing so in service of a subversive or satirical project. One notable example of this comes from Statius’ Silvae, a book of “occasional” poetry which references and (praises) the culture of the nobility under Domitian. Silvae, writing of a particularly pleasant dinner party where he learned of Novius Vindex’s statuette of Hercules, includes a digression noting that “wretched are those who take pleasure in knowing… why Tuscan boar is superior to Umbrian” (a miseri, quos nosse iuvat…cur Tuscus aper generosior Umbro”)32 He is situating the dinner with Vindex as being superior to such dinner parties where the boar’s origins are a matter of some concern to the dinner guests, suggesting such matters are merely trivial. Statius, in defending the social class, clarifies that this dinner party was not interested in such frivolities. This is especially relevant because Horace’s second book of Satires references the origins of boar being served at several points. In satire 2.4, he writes, “let Umbrian boar fattened on oak acorns bend the round dishes of those who dislike flavorless meat, for Laurentius boar is bad,” (“Umber et iligna nutritus glande

31 Spisak 1999. 32 Stat. Silv. 4.6.8-9 76 rotundascurvat aper lances carnem vitantis inertem; nam Laurens malus est, ulvis et harundine pinguis.”) 33 Statius is careful to distance himself from any similar framing of his dinner party with Vindex, focusing instead on the artistic discussion, because critiques of dinner parties are so often a result of this the appearance of excess or frivolity—and what could be more frivolous than a discussion of the origins of a piece of meat? But the resonance of this motif also suggests it did hold some weight—that people were invested in questions of the provenance, description and depiction of the boar.

The depictions of boar in works of satire often invoke the practice of hunting as part of the description of the animal being served. Petronius offers the clearest criticism of the upper class through his articulation of a pseudo-hunt on the dinner table. He offers a depiction of a feast that closely mirrors that of a traditional boar hunt, complete with nets, spears, a huntsman, and hunting dogs. He writes :

“’Sophos!’ universi clamamus, et sublatis manibus ad camaram iuramus Hipparchum Aratumque comparandos illi homines non fuisse, donec advenerunt ministri ac toralia praeposuerunt toris, in quibus retia erant picta subsessoresque cum venabulis et totus venationis apparatus. Necdum sciebamus mitteremus suspiciones nostras, cum extra triclinium clamor sublatus est ingens, et ecce canes Laconici etiam circa mensam discurrere coeperunt. Secutum est hos repositorium, in quo positus erat primae magnitudinis aper, et quidem pilleatus, e cuius dentibus sportellae dependebant duae palmulis textae, altera caryatis, altera thebaicis repleta. Circa autem minores porcelli ex coptoplacentis facti, quasi uberibus imminerent, scrofam esse positam significabant. Et hi quidem apophoreti fuerunt. Ceterum ad scindendum aprum non ille Carpus accessit, qui altilia laceraverat, sed barbatus ingens, fasciis cruralibus alligatus et alicula subornatus polymita, strictoque venatorio cultro latus apri vehementer percussit, ex cuius plaga turdi evolaverunt.

“Bravo! We all cried, and with hands lifted to the ceiling we sore that Hipparchus and Aratus were not to be held in equal esteem to that man, until the severs arrived and spread coverlets decorated with nets over the couches, on which there were pictured men with hunting spears and all the equipment of the hunt, yet we were wondering which way we might direct our attentions, when a great shout was raised outside of the dining room, and laconian dogs began running around the table. Following them was a tray on which there was a boar of the greatest size, on which there was placed a felt-cap of freedom, and from

33 Hor. Sat. 2.4.40-42 77

whose fangs two little woven baskets of dates hung, one full of dry dates and the other of fresh ones. Around it were little suckling pigs made from simnel, leaning towards the teats, showing that it was a sow before us. These were for favors for guests to take. Carver the carver, who had divided the fattened birds, but a huge bearded man with bands bound around his legs and wearing a woven hunting dress, with a drawn hunting knife, violently pierced the side of the boar, from which a trap of thrushes flew out. 34

Petronius’s depiction of the consumption of the boar is an obvious farce and should not be read as a realistic depiction of the consumption of wild boars in ancient Rome. Christopher B. Jones identified this scene as a type of “dinner theater,” writing that “this scene, as we see it, is not so much meant to recall hunting in the wild in the guise in which it was most familiar to the citizen of a Greek or Roman citizen of the era.”35 This form of dinner theater evoked images of both venationes and of the kind of curated game park hunting popular among the elite. It also renders visible the underlying supply chain that is necessary for the wealthy to eat boar they have not killed but does so in a way that centralizes the perspective of the elite, by showing the hunt as a type of urban performance or spectacle.

This passage manifests the preoccupation with consuming masculinized and heroic images of the hunt. The hunt transforms from the process of killing the animal of consumption to the process of serving the already-prepared dish for consumption—the boar is already dead. The

Satyricon is “a book obsessed with luxury and death;” this scene suggests the underlying interest in reanimating what is dead and using it for the entertainment of the rich.36 In this scene,

Trimalchio doesn’t gain power over the wild by participating in the hunt, even in its more aristocratic-friendly forms. By highlighting the idea of the hunt as the primary performance in this scene, Trimalchio imbues himself with all the status and virtus traditionally attained through

34 Pet. Sat. 40 35 Jones 1991, 186. 36 Arrowsmith 1966, 304. 78 the hunt, and by serving a boar rather than any other animal hunted for sport, he draws on a rich history that specifically gives boars legitimacy above all other wild game. The absurdity of his performance is that the dinner table is now so many steps removed from actual mythologized hunting that it is nearly illegible as any actual kind of “hunting.” But the obsession with control and dominion over the wild is perhaps even more prominent because of this absurdity—that

Trimalchio is attempting to display his own power and authority by having an enslaved man dress up as a hunted to carve a boar for guests.

It is worth paying additional attention to this scene, as it provides the most thoughtful articulation of the complex interplay between the hunt and the consumption of the hunt. It is nearly certain that Trimalchio himself did not hunt the boar. But by presenting the boar to the guests as a pretend hunt, complete with dogs, nets, spears, and well-dressed huntsmen, the guests are able to consume the same experience consumed by those “hunting” on game preserves or in the amphitheater.37 The boar has already been killed by man, and now, finally, it will be eaten by man—the final step in the hunting process, and the one that even further “domesticates” the hunt by bringing its many associations firmly into the domestic realm as a part of the dinner party. It extends the ideology associated with game parks—that hunting can be curated for aristocratic enjoyment in such a way that emphasizes the individual claim to the wild even when they have done nothing to actually engage in its domestication.

Similar depictions and references to boar hunts exist within dining scenes, though few are as long as detailed as the one Petronius provides. Horace similarly draws on the associations of hunters through clothing in his Satire 2.3. He writes, “you sleep in the Lucanian winter wearing hunting leggings so that I might feast on boar” (in nive Lucana dormis ocreatus, ut aprum

37 Anderson 1985, 89. 79 cenem ego;) implying that the purpose of hunting a boar is for consumption by the elite.38 The hunt is constituted primarily through the presence of specific leggings (ocreatus) and through the implication of the mental and physical hardships imposed by the hunt, though the scene is brief—meant to evoke quickly and succinctly the physical difficulty of the hunt that makes it an apt site to reinforce masculinity in the first place. While Horace contextualizes this line as happening in Lucania, Petronius places the appearance of the hunting cloak (alicula) directly within the dining room. This demonstrates two models for engaging with the hunt in dining scenes—either through the recreation of the hunt in the dining room or through verbal references to hunting that coincide with mentions of boars served as food. Horace is clearly contrasting the difficulty of the hunt with the leisure of the banquet, while also suggesting that participants in such a banquet might (wrongly) feel they have claim to the hunting practices that sustain their dining habits. The relationship between the hunt and the actual dining experience is, in reality, quite remote—which is exactly what Petronius and Horace are poking fun at. Martial further highlights the absurdity of the spectacle of presenting boar in such an elaborate fashion in one of his epigrams, writing that “none [of the boar] was given to us, we looked on as spectators, as hunting spectacles normally place boars in front of us,” (“Et nihil inde datum est; tantum spectavimus omnes: ponere aprum nobis sic et harena solet”).39 While Martial is writing about a boar he was not able to eat, he compares the spectacle of looking at the boar of the spectacle of watching a boar be hunted—undermining both the culinary associations with the boar and poking fun at the relationship of hunting to hunting spectacles. Despite the disconnection of these experiences, these depictions suggest there was at least some attempt to align the consumption of wild boar with its origins as the spoil of a hunt. This attempted alignment re-

38 Hor. Sat. 2.3.234 39 Mar. Ep. 1.43 80 emphasized hunting as a means for individual Roman elite men to participate in the broader imperial project and domesticate the wild.

These connections are made even more overt in the associations of game meat, not merely with vague references to hunting, but with connections specifically to famous mythological boar hunts. These depictions elevate the ideas around hunting one step further, placing the hosts now in conversation with Rome’s mythological past and cultural heritage. As discussed in chapter two, the Roman adaptation of Greek hunting myths, like the Calydonian boar myth, helped demonstrate not only a Roman connection to hunting but also Roman dominance over Greek culture.40 Allowing these myths—or references to these myths—to play out in a social setting extends that domination over the wild even to those wealthy individuals completely lacking from any actual athletic skill or power over the wild. The act of literary translation is taken another step further, allowing Romans not only to access Roman inflected retellings but to eat boars that are associated with the Calydonian boar specifically. As outlined in chapter two, hunting in epic poetry often references to or retells these stories as a part of the construction of a Roman imperial identity. Bringing these heroic myths to a banquet—a distinctively unheroic and mostly performative event meant to demonstrate the wealth and privilege of Rome’s elite—is meant to elevate the event to a level of mythological power and legitimacy. Associating the dinners, not just with the hunt, but with the Meleager’s heroic hunt, expressed further dominion over even the most dangerous, wild, and ferocious parts of the wild, even as the participants in the dinner were not exposed to danger.

Wild boars are also frequently referenced as foaming—Martial and Juvenal both use the verb spumo to refer to an already dead boar, mirroring the use of spumo in Ovid’s retelling of the

40 Boyle 2008.

Calydonian boar.41 The boar cooked upon the spit in epigram 14.221 is “foaming.” Juvenal’s fifth satire uses spumo to refer to a boar that is specifically “worthy of blond Meleager’s spear”

(“flaui dignus ferro Meleagri,”) representing an even further connection between Meleager’s boar and the verb spumo. Martial’s ruinous boar is epigram 7.27 described as being “second in fame to the Aetolian boar,” (“Aetolae fama secunda ferae”).42 For these authors, expressing the relationship between Meleager’s boar and between the boar being consumed is a way of highlighting the essential absurdity of the consumption of wild animals that it would be a legible comment to say that dinner hosts would frequently relate the meat being served to the mythological past. When Juvenal relates the boar to Meleager’s boar, he is also making clear that the food does not deserve this comparison: Emily Gowers points out that his use of “inaequales” in line 38 is not merely referencing the relationship between patron and client, but the relationship between the foodstuffs served and their mythological counterparts.43 There are of course few similarities between eating boar at a banquet and Meleager’s boar hunt—but it is very telling that individuals expressed their power or privilege by associating their conspicuous consumption with stories meant to emphasize their power and skill, even where it didn’t exist.

These associations with the Calydonian boar not only connect the boar to broader mythological discourses but are meant to present the animal being served as particularly fearsome. The emphasis on the danger and ferocity of the boar places those feasting on the boar as its superiors. They are not only partaking of a boar, but of a boar exceptional in its might and destructive power. Feasting on that specific boar imbues them with a special degree of control and authority. It suggests an exceptional degree of domination over the wild and foreign,

41 See Mar. Ep. 14.70; 14.221; Juv. Sat. 5.115-116; Ov. Met. 8.288. 42 Mar. Ep. 7.27. 43 Gowers 1993, 213. 82 transforming something that poses a theoretical threat due to its ferocity can be turned into a tool to reenforce a host’s own wealth, power, and benevolence.44 The individual positionality of the host in relation to the boar acts as a mirror or the imagined Roman empire’s relationship to the world—as a conqueror of the wild whose position is reinforced by a mythological past that has been co-opted from Greek mythology.

Of interest for several of these authors was not only the provenance of the boars being eaten, but the diet of the boars being consumed. Martial draws attention to “a wild boar, devourer of Tuscan acorns” (“Tuscae glandis aper populator”), that would be prepared for a feast were it not so prohibitively expensive to prepare.45 Martial situates the boar in place—Tuscany (which remains the primary boar-associated region of Italy) and associates it specifically with acorns.

Likewise, Petronius’s Satyricon references the diet of the boar being served, inviting guests to look at “all the fine acorns the woodland boar was eating,” (“Etiam videte, quam porcus ille silvaticus lotam comederit glandem”) as the boar is being served to the guests. 46

Acorns are invoked somewhat frequently in Roman literature, especially as the barbaric or uncivilized predecessor to the grain-based diet. Apuleius’ Golden Ass praises Ceres for

“[removing] the primitive diet of acorns” (“vetustae glandis ferino remoto pabulo”) and showing

“sweet nourishment” (“miti… cibo”).47 Elsewhere, Lucretius and Virgil both remark that acorns were the first nourishment for men before they entered into civilized agricultural society—an assertion that dates back to Hesiod.48 Book 16 of Pliny’s Natural Histories also dedicates significant time to cataloguing contemporary edible acorns, noting that, “acorns now constitute

44 The consumption of hunted animals are not the only culinary instance where Romans demonstrated their control over the wild. See also Beerden 2018. 45 Mar. Ep. 7.27. 46 Pet. Sat. 41. 47 Apul. Met. 10.2. 48 Vir. G. 1.6. 83 the means of many races, even as they’re enjoying peace” (“Glande opes nunc quoque multarum gentium etiam pace gaudentium constant”) aligning acorn consumption with non-Roman groups.49 His reference that they are eaten “etiam pace” suggests the strangeness of acorns as a dietary staple and not merely a subsistence food. These invocations of acorn eating tend to identify the practice with primitivism and barbarity—the precursors to the Roman diet before civilization, but not something that should be practiced. Pliny identifies it mostly as a series of cultural oddities when he explains which types of acorns are eaten by various groups.

The association between boars being served and the acorn-based diet of boars serves not only to identify the boar more firmly with the forest and the “wild,” but with the primate groups that still eat acorns and with the remote past where hunting once occurred for subsistence. The taste of the boar is elevated (especially with Martial’s specific reference to the Tuscan pedigree of the boar) and its wildness is reinforced. As is its relationship to Roman history. If acorn eating represents the past, then eating contemporary acorn eaters (in this case, boars), is a way to gain control of the historical narrative and emphasize current Roman power at the dinner tables. I’d like to suggest that this consumption of the acorn-eating boar also has a more sinister effect. The boar also acts as a stand in for other “acorn eaters”— those living on the edges of the empire.

Eating the wild boar is not only consuming a product of elevated taste, it is also a way for the

Romans themselves to consume the consumer of the primitive diet—the barbaric peoples who populate the Roman empire. Eating the boar becomes a pseudo-cannibalistic act by elevating the boar beyond being simply a wild animal towards an embodiment of not only the primitive past but the primitive present.

49 Plin. HN. 16.6.16. 84

The Satyricon offers other critical images of the cannibalistic edge eating game meat can take on. Habbinas, one of the guests at Trimalchio’s dinner party wonders “and if, I say, a bear eats a man, is it not more right for a man to eat a bear? (“et si, inquam, ursus homuncionem comest, quanto magis homuncio debet ursum comesse?”).50 Victoria Rimell and William

Arrowsmith view this passage as indicative of the Satyricon’s guiding obsession with death and interest in confusing the boundaries between inside and outside, dead and alive, savage and civilized.51 Arrowsmith writes “Habinnas will be the thing he eats, just as Echion will be the thing he watches. But if bears eat men, what is the word for men who eat man-eating bears?

Cannibals, surely.”52 Habbinas’ specific comparison of the tainted bear meat to boar meat (“for it tasted like boar meat itself,” “nam ipsum aprum sapiebat”) evokes the earlier human-like boar served, making all of the guests at Petronius’ dinner party, and not merely Habbinas, complicit in the pseudo cannibalistic act: an act that both exemplifies ultimate domination of the uncivilized and the ultimate perversion of the Roman imperial obsession.

As mentioned above, the carcasses from animals of the amphitheater were likely occasionally given to spectators. Writing in the late second or early third century, Tertullian’s

Apologeticus takes issue with this trend, writing “Those who feast on the flesh of wild animals from the arena, who is seeking out boar or stag? That boar wiped the blood off of he who he bloodied, that stag lay in the blood of a gladiator,” (“Item illi qui de arena ferinis obsoniis coenant, qui de apro, qui de cervo petunt? Aper ille quem cruentavit, conluctando detersit.

Cervus ille in gladiatoris sanguine iacuit.”)53 Eating these animals in the amphitheater is compared directly by Tertullian to a form of cannibalism. Whatever the animal consumed would

50 Pet. Sat. 66 51 Rimell, 2002; Arrowsmith 1966. 52 Arrowmith 1966, 315. 53 Tert. Apol. 9.11 85 also be consumed in turn by the individual. While this text dates after the first century, when the other authors I have considered were writing, Tertullian’s indictment of these culinary practices suggests that there was some limited association with certain kinds of beast consumption with cannibalistic or pseudo-cannibalistic actions. The wild ferociousness that made beasts so prized by Romans encouraged these associations. Tertullian may have been rallying against them, but the continued interest in beast consumption and the theatricality often associated with beast hunting and consumption suggests that such a display of power over both wild animals and humans they either represent or killed was desirable. 54

These representations of boar meat on the dinner table suggest the far reach and legibility of hunting motifs. While these satirical depictions of hunting in the dining room exist largely as a critique of excess among Rome’s nouveau-riche, the emphasis on hunting, an important symbol especially during the imperial period, and one that would have been fairly accessible even to those outside of Rome’s wealthy class, expands the Roman obsession with expanding power off of the battlefield, out of the arena, and into the dining room. John Donahue points out that

Roman dining was never a truly private endeavor—even though such events were exclusive to the elites, they were meant to be visible and serve as a model—as a display of wealth, generosity, and taste.55 The choice of satirists drawing attention to the inappropriate excesses of the cena to so frequently reference wild boars and game meat as an important component of these events reminds us of the outsized role hunting and hunted animals played in constructing a Roman

54 Juvenal’s fifteenth satire also includes a discussion of cannibalism but identifies Egyptian groups as cannibals. His depictions of cannibalism is suitably different from the pseudo-cannibalism of eating game meat, but still provides an interesting articulation of the limits of civilization and the potential excesses of imperialism . Juvenal identifies both Rome’s “obsessive appetite for natural and cultural resources and the Ombi and Tentyrite habit for human consumption” both as highly deviant and suspect. Civilization and Rome’s civilizing project are a “mere façade;” the animal kingdom instead provides the only tenable model for peace and prosperity. Juv. Sat. 15; Umurhan 2018, 126-127. 55 Donahue 2014. 86 identity. Associating with wild animals, even when they were only very occasional parts of the diet, suggests that the symbolic value of hunting and hunted animals was so important to the performance of Romanitas as to be regularly included among references to dinner parties in

Roman literature.

The predisposition of these references to be found in works of satire, however, reminds us of the limitations of these imperial overtones. The frequency and similarity of hunting motifs from the first century BCE to the second century AD suggests that actual references to hunting in such settings was meant to increase the appearance of individual power and authority. Yet the frequency with which these practices were critiqued shows the real limitations to aligning the broader imperial project with contentious social practices. Both Juvenal and Horace, for all of the differences in their broader projects, both seem to suggest that these elaborate hunting associations with banqueting are a symbol of decay and excess, rather than a display of strength.

Outside of satire, authors such as Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, and Tacitus associate an emperor’s banqueting habits with their reign. Nero and Domitian’s moral depravities are linked to their excessive and over the top banqueting, while Trajan’s beneficence and restraint are indicative of his outstanding moral character. These emperors, to different degrees of success, linked themselves to hunting and sport as a way to reinforce their power by presenting themselves as conquerors of the wild—Steven Tuck suggests that Domitian was the first to make use of hunting imagery as a way to redefine “virtus,” yet his excesses elsewhere undermined this attempt and his political opponents were able to successfully undermine his legacy.56 This link—between hunting, banqueting, and expressions of imperial power—reminds us that ideas about the “proper” expression of Roman authority through the hunt were being constantly

56 Tuck 2005, 221.

87 contested. The essential problem was not that the hunt was a bad symbol to represent imperial power, but that its misrepresentations in banqueting undermined the very experiences dinner hosts were attempting to claim. The marginalization of the consumption of hunted animals in the growing field of Roman food studies has obscured these connections, and their importance in understanding, not only Roman banqueting practices, but the ways imperial power was expressed outside of the battlefield.

Conclusion

On August 4, 2019, amidst a swirling debate on American gun laws, Willie McNabb tweeted, “Legit question for rural Americans - How do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 mins while my small kids play?” This tweet was instantly meme-able—a seemingly inexplicable and extremely specific tangent about the feral hog (or wild boar) infestation running wild in the South. It sparked a number of think pieces and podcast episodes trying to explain the problem to urban Americans unfamiliar with the danger these animals pose, and unfamiliar with the broader hunting culture that has allowed them to thrive. I reference this anecdote to suggest that ideas about hunting, and about wild boars more generally, are a part of the cultural life of Americans even today. There is value in trying to understand the role ideas about hunting and game meat have played in different places at different time, pointing us towards the cultural lives we develop around and in relationship to the wild.

In the contemporary southern United States, hunting is no longer part of an aristocratic or upper-class masculine sensibility, but is more closely aligned to a rugged, working class, and rural one. After-all, the tweet in question was pointing out the elite detachment from the environmental struggles of the rural south, where the uncontrolled feral hog problem is a genuine threat to the livelihoods of many. Today’s boar infestation can perhaps be viewed as a sign of the hubris of contemporary hunters, who were so interested in a more interesting hunting experience that they inadvertently introduced an invasive predator to the American southeast. I am not trying to suggest any similarities or continuities between the role of hunting in the ancient and modern world, simply pointing towards the continued relevance of seeking to understand the role

89 hunting plays in meditating our relationship, not only to the natural world, but to those groups we deem less important or desirable.

This thesis has sought to demonstrate the relationship between Imperial Roman hunting practices and between broader dynamics of imperialism, suggesting that hunting became a way to elites residing in Rome to express their literal and metaphorical power over the wild and over

Rome’s colonies. There was no single meaning of the hunt—even within the relatively insular groups in Imperial Rome, different authors within the same or different genres express different beliefs about the hunt. For some, hunting in game parks was an acceptable and uncontroversial leisurely activity. For others, it was a symbol of Roman moral decay. And behind Petronius or

Juvenal’s larger than life dinner hosts were perhaps real men who rhapsodized about the heroic qualities of the boars that graced their dinner tables. The exact relationship between reality and rhetoric in these texts will likely remain remote, constrained by our available sources.

This thesis is not an exhaustive accounting of these cultural and political dynamics that sprung up around hunting. For one, it focuses mainly on two genres of literature written by a small subsect of elite men. It is not an exhaustive accounting of all writing or ideas about hunting during the imperial period, nor does it map out what hunting looked like to different groups across the empire. Hunting, and sport history more generally, could stand to consider more critically the absence of women from these histories. There is more work to be done to move beyond the few published works on the subject to better understand the cultural roles hunting played in imperial Rome, not to mention the many other periods and places in the ancient

Mediterranean where hunting was popular. Hunting—as an elite pastime, a mythological motif, or a culinary object—was a place where Rome’s elite helped articulate who they were, and who they wished to be.

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