CLASSICAL MEMORIES/MODERN IDENTITIES Paul Allen Miller and Richard H. Armstrong, Series Editors Reflections of Romanity DISCOURSES OF SUBJECTIVITY IN IMPERIAL ROME RICHARD ALSTON AND EFROSSINI SPENTZOU THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS / COLUMBUS Copyright © 2011 by The Ohio State University Press. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Alston, Richard, 1965– Reflections of Romanity : discourses of subjectivity in Imperial Rome / Richard Alston and Efrossini Spentzou. p. cm. — (Classical memories/modern identities) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1149-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1149-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9250-1 (cd) 1. Latin literature—History and criticism. 2. Self in literature. 3. Subjectivity in litera- ture. I. Spentzou, Efrossini. II. Title. III. Series: Classical memories/modern identities. PA6003.A45 2011 870.9'353—dc22 2010039574 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (ISBN 978-0-8142-1149-6) CD-ROM (ISBN 978-0-8142-9250-1) Cover design by Laurence J. Nozik Type set in Adobe Garamond Pro Text design by Juliet Williams Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Για τα αγγελάκια μας, το Βασίλη και το Στέφανο Only connect. E. M. Forster, Howards End Contents Series Editors’ Foreword ix Acknowledgments xiii Chapter 1 Introduction. Talking to Strangers: Classical Readings and the Modern Self 1 Chapter 2 Home Alone: Terror and Power 27 Chapter 3 Death and Love: Rationality and Passion 65 Chapter 4 Private Partners and Family Dramas 107 Chapter 5 Living with the Past: Tradition, Invention, and History 141 Chapter 6 Imperial Dreams: Being Roman in a World Empire 193 Chapter 7 Epilogue 225 Bibliography 231 Index 241 Series Editors’ Foreword Talking to strangers can be dangerous. We tell our kids not to. They look so familiar, but looks can be deceiving. Who knows who these people are? Of course, the whole possibility of conversation depends on us not know- ing these people, on a certain constitutive opacity and hence danger. If the other were completely known to us, if the other were not estranged from us, there could be no conversation, indeed there could no meaning. For the absolute presence of the self to the other would not only eliminate the other, and hence the possibility of our exchanging meanings in a conversation, it would also eliminate meaning itself. The possibility of one thing referring to another, of language and signification, is that those things not be the same. Thus in a sense we are always talking to strangers, and we cannot be ourselves or form meaningful existences for ourselves outside that conversation. But at the same time, stranger danger is real. The other always threatens the integrity of the same, the possibility of identity. Richard Alston and Efrossini Spentzou offer us a conversation. It is one held between a variety of strangers, some stranger than others. It begins with the recognition that something strange is happening “in the historical period roughly defined by the reigns of Nero and Trajan (c.e. 54–117).” In the texts of what in a more self-confident time were known as “Silver Age” Latin literature—Lucan, Statius, Valerius Flaccus, Seneca, Tacitus, and Pliny—there is an evident unease. Latecomers in an age of relative peace and stability, immensely talented heirs of an immense tradition, they seek to carve out a place for themselves in the conversation that had become Latin literature. But when the script had already been written, on the political level ix x SERIES Editors’ FOREWORD by Augustus and his successors and on the literary level by Vergil, Horace, Livy, and the elegists, then how do you perform it with a degree of authen- ticity? One of the great problems, indeed, for the writers of the “long first century” is how do they perform Romanness authentically without falling into parody? This predicament is one that is not unfamiliar to the inhabitant of the postmodern condition. We too live in a world where there is no outside, no alternative order whose essence we are meant to perform. For Tacitus, Pliny, and Seneca, what was the alternative to the Roman imperial order? They had received it and they could judge it, but they could not step out- side it or remake it. They performed their status as civis Romanus always under the ironizing shadow of their own, structurally necessary bad faith. The citizen of the global economy faces the same dilemma: how to perform his or her own status as a citizen of the United States, the UK, Europe, or China, without falling into inauthenticity by accepting a Walt Disney com- modified version of individual and communal identity, or irony by assum- ing inauthenticity as the theme of one’s existence, or denial by adopting a fundamentalist refusal of that inauthenticity whether in its various religious or political forms. The Roman of the long first century thus becomes a good conversation partner for the postmodern reader: the inhabitant of a global system she inherited but did not make, who is consequently suspicious of the narratives that underwrite that system but still unable to replace them with new narratives no longer parasitic on the old. These Romans, then, are our intimate others. They are people we can talk to because they are not us, but though strangers, they are not unintel- ligible. Instead they occupy that middle position that Socrates in the Lysis says makes friendship possible. The wholly good man and the wholly evil have no need of friends. The completely good man as a self-contained and perfect whole has no need of any other. He is the principle of self-identity, really more a god than a man. The wholly bad man, in so far as he would reject all good things, would also have no need of friendship, which all agree to be good. The friend, then, like the conversation partner will always be in part a stranger, but still recognizeable: the good but not perfect man, the bearer of a certain resemblance to ourselves, yet not our simple reflection. Alston and Spentzou make the strong case that the Romans of the long first century could be such friends and conversation partners. As is common once we start talking to strangers, even while recognizing the dangers they present, their friends become our friends. The people whose conversation we already find most enriching in turn enrich the conversations of our new friends. In the case of Alston and Spentzou, these old friends, the friends from our own community, are Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and SERIES Editors’ FOREWORD xi Jean Luc Nancy, among others. This delegation is not invited here into the text as a panel of experts, whose modern “theory” will elucidate the obscure object of desire that is antiquity. They are not a crack team of pathologists in an episode of CSI: Rome. They are invited as co-doubters, co-interregators of the self and its histories; they arrive with their own aporias and full of unfinished arguments; they join this conversation not as privileged savants, but as something more like “concerned citizens” in this world of worry that links us to our Roman conversationalists. It is a strength of this book that Alston and Spentzou are not afraid of a conversation that bucks the settled confines of disciplinarity. Their threads of discussion wind through ancient texts spanning disparate genres, and pick up modern discussions already in progress. The reader will, for example, watch the panic of a falling emperor, consider the broad patterns of amicitia through Pliny’s letters, contemplate the figure of Lucan’s Caesar, and thence via Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, come face to face with the unique form of alienation the elite Roman of the first century faced: a discursive drought that left one caught between terms of friendship and mastery, susceptible to violent extremes (or at least their imaginative formulation), sudden loneli- ness, and social discontent. By looking to antiquity’s loose ends, cracked foundations, and imagined terrors, the authors thread through a labyrinth of moments they allow to irrupt with their own force, uncontained by a safety net that would reduce such irruptions to the merely historical. Reflections of Romanityserves this series well in that it offers an intelligent challenge to a settled pattern of antiquity’s construal in the modern self. Classical education was long enlisted in a project of modern self-fashioning (for which the German word Bildung sounds so much more apt than our “education”) that cast ancient culture as foundational, solid, natural, and especially clear. This is what supposedly made the ancients safe tutors for good European children for three hundred or so years. Hegel, as rector of the Gymnasium at Nürnberg, enjoined his audience to study antiquity as “the spiritual bath, the secular baptism that first and indelibly attunes and tinctures the soul in respect of taste and knowledge”; this study is not superficial, but requires an intense engagement so as to make us “at home in this [classical] world, the most beautiful that has ever been.”1 We are still, in a sense, struggling with this legacy of appropriation, where antiquity is that realm constituted in opposition to modern (and post-modern) doubt, corrosion, division, and dread. The human spirit, in Hegel’s view, develops from primeval nature and flowers in antiquity, emerging “like a bride from 1. Gymnasial-Reden, I: Am 29 September 1809; translation by Richard Kroner (G.