Copyright by Paul Jerome Hay 2017 The Dissertation Committee for Paul Jerome Hay certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Time, Saecularity, and the First Century BCE Roman World Committee: Andrew Riggsby, Supervisor Penelope Davies Karl Galinsky Ayelet Haimson Lushkov Molly Pasco-Pranger Time, Saecularity, and the First Century BCE Roman World by Paul Jerome Hay, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2017 To my loving and supportive family Acknowledgements Throughout my career, I have had many sources of encouragement and guidance whose influence helped me reach this stage and to whom I will always be grateful. First of all, my deepest and sincerest thanks go to Andrew Riggsby, whose support has had a profound effect not only on this dissertation, but on my scholarly interests, my approach to research, and my enthusiasm for this field. His patience and thoughtful advice were deeply instrumental to the success of this project, and one of the great joys of my time in this program was the opportunity to work closely with him for the last three years. He has truly served as a role model for how I hope to engage with my own students in the future. I would also like to thank Karl Galinsky and Ayelet Haimson Lushkov, whose mentorship throughout my time in Austin was enormously influential. I spent many hours in their offices discussing my research ideas, as well as my career path in the future as a member of the professoriate. They were very generous with their time and energy during my final stages of research and my job search, and their help and encouragement will not soon be forgotten. I am also grateful for the valuable feedback I received from Penelope Davies and Molly Pasco-Pranger over the years, both of whom frequently brought up important questions and perspectives that I had not considered. Their incisive comments contributed greatly to the evolution and enhancement of this project. From the Department of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin, there has been an enormous number of faculty members, staff members, and graduate students— too many to name—who have provided generous scholarly, emotional, and financial support to me in the seven years I have been in Austin. Without each of their v contributions, my progress on this dissertation and through the program would have been arduous if not impossible. I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to them all. As an undergraduate at Case Western Reserve University, I received wonderful training and guidance on how to be a classicist from many professors, but especially from Paul Iversen, Rachel Sternberg, and Martin Helzle. I absorbed their teachings deeply, and with their help I was able to realize what I wanted to pursue as my career. I will always be thankful for the opportunity to study under them and for their interest in cultivating my passion for the field. Sally Hofmeister taught me Latin for four years at Poland Seminary High School and introduced me both to the diligence necessary for effective Latin study and to the marvels of the world of Roman literature. Her influence runs throughout this entire dissertation and throughout every class I teach. But most of all, I want to thank my family for supporting me wholeheartedly my entire life in whatever I wanted to do and encouraged lifelong learning that continues to this day. My aunt Kathy and uncle Hans have provided enormous emotional and logistical support, without which my move to Austin would have felt like a burden and not like the blessing it truly was. My sister-in-law Jessica has been extremely supportive of my academic career, and my brother John has been a generous source of feedback on this project (and on all my intellectual pursuits throughout my life). My parents have supported and guided me in countless ways and have always believed in me, and that more than anything else has made this all possible. To them, I owe it all. vi Time, Saecularity, and the First Century BCE Roman World Paul Jerome Hay, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2017 Supervisor: Andrew Riggsby This dissertation examines the practice of historical periodization by Roman thinkers in the first century BCE and demonstrates that this discourse binds many of the intellectual developments of that time. I argue that during the dictatorship of Sulla, the concept of the saeculum (an Etruscan divinatory term) became adapted into a new idea for historical narrativization among the Roman intellectual community. The result of this development was saecularity, a discursive mode that applied periodization to both the past and the future and thus situated present activity within a broader historical arc. The adoption of saecularity affected the progress of intellectual engagement in a variety of sociopolitical topics. Roman moral decline narratives, traditionally focused on the selection of a single turning point, subsequently developed a more sophisticated vocabulary for explaining the changes in Roman habits, and offered a look to the future of social mores. The rising class of Romans with expert knowledge could historicize the development of their chosen field with “technical histories,” tightly focused narratives inflected by saecularity. The customary trope of attempting literary immortality was transformed, through saecularity, into a weapon against one’s rivals and a source of anxiety for poets seeking a stable fame despite shifting popular tastes. Transitions between each saeculum became a model for Romans who sought to explain instability in vii their own time. Such transitions increased the Roman interest in a new kind of period, the “post-Roman world,” which saecularity helped hypothesize and structure. Simultaneously, the language of saecularity also influenced the ways that the new Roman Principate and the aristocratic community negotiated their relative statuses within Rome at the end of the first century BCE. My dissertation thus demonstrates how many of the sociopolitical preoccupations typical of the Augustan world emerge from a longer tradition of Roman explorations in temporality. viii Table of Contents Introduction - From Periodization to Saecularity ....................................................1 Chapter One - Saeculum and Saecularity ..............................................................10 1. Sociopolitical Commentary ......................................................................18 2. Progress/Decline Narratives ......................................................................24 3. Metallic Age Mythology ...........................................................................28 Chapter Two - Origins of Saecularity ....................................................................38 1. Evidence for Saecularity in Literature Before Sulla .................................38 2. The History of the Ludi Saeculares ..........................................................53 3. Sulla ..........................................................................................................63 4. Sullan Saecularity, Etruscan Saeculum.....................................................77 Chapter Three - Saecular Discourse and the Reception of Greek Philosophy ......87 1. Repetition and Cyclicality in Saecular Discourse .....................................89 1a. Vergil and the Empedoclean Cosmic Cycle...................................89 1b. Saecular Souls and Metempsychosis .............................................92 1c. Epicureanism and Palingenesis ......................................................96 2. Flames, Floods, and Mythological Metakosmesis ....................................98 2a. Stoic Cyclical Cataclysms ..............................................................99 2b. The Phenomenology of Metakosmesis ........................................104 2c. Deucalion, Pyrrha, and Phaethon .................................................109 3. The Occasional Apocalypse ....................................................................116 3a. Academic and Peripatetic Thought ..............................................116 3b. Periodic Disasters and the Post-Roman World ............................122 3c. The Post-Roman World in Post-Sullan Latin Literature ..............126 Chapter Four - Saecularity in the Roman Sociopolitical World ..........................136 1. Moral Decline Narratives ........................................................................136 1a. Propertius, Tibullus, and Saecular Outliers..................................140 1b. Horace and Saecular Moral Exemplarity .....................................146 ix 1c. Ovid's Responses ..........................................................................147 2. The Culture Hero as a Metakosmetic Figure ..........................................150 3. The Technical History.............................................................................162 4. Ciceronian Saecula..................................................................................169 5. Augustus and Augustan Rome ................................................................175 5a. Cosmic Calculations for the Birth of Augustus ...........................178 5b. The General Audience for the Ludi Saeculares ...........................182 5c. The Challenges of the Ara Pacis ..................................................186