1 Taming the Wild Boar: Hunting, Game Meat, and the Dynamics Of
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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 © 2021 Emily Martin 1 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 2 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. 3 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