The Haley Classical Journal, Volume I Issue I

The Haley Classical Journal The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College

An Undergraduate Research Publication Affiliated with Hamilton College

Volume I | Issue I | February 2020 The Haley | Volume I | Issue I | February 2020

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College

Hamilton College Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor Layout Editor Copy Editor Peer Editors

August Naston, 2020 Tyler Boudreau, 2020 Jacob Hane, 2022 Allyson D’Antonio, 2020 Tyler Boudreau, 2020 Catharine Pierce, 2020 Madeleine Cavallino, 2021 Kayley Boddy, 2022 Jacob Hane, 2022 Calyn Liss, 2022 Katherine Miller, 2022 Philip Chivily, 2023 Jonathan Setzer, 2023

Classics Department Hamilton College 198 College Hill Road Clinton, NY 13323

Cover Art: Theo Golden, Hamilton College Class of 2020 | instagram, @tgoldenart Cover Image: Kasturi Roy | unsplash, @kasturiroy

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College

Contents nota bene

August Naston

iv

At Home and Abroad: The Relationship between Domi and Foris in Book VI of Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita Justin Muchnick

1

A Façade of Hair: Reimagining Augusta in Flavian Rome

Ian Karp

4

Francesca Gillis

11

Rachel Prichett

14

Jordan Schwed

18

Shannon Coyle

21

Jacob Hane

27

Poets and Politics: 13th Century Florentine Politics and Roman Authors in Dante’s Purgatorio Angus Wilson

30

A Woman’s War: Fulvia’s Political Power during the Perusine War Beer in the Ancient Greek World Bridge to a New Age: Syriac Doctors in the Early Islamic World Man as Model in the Roman World Neglecting Byzantine Bureaucracy:

Redefining Genre: Elegy and Epistolarity in Ovid’s Heroides

Charlotte Houghton

34

John Marshall

39

The Vegetarian Ovid: How Pythagoras’ Speech in Book 15 Relates to the Metamorphoses’ Theme of Transformation Sanjeevani Bhavsar

42

The Decline of Roman Jurisprudence in the mid-to-late era Republic

Winter 2020 Issue Property of the Hamilton College Classics Club

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College

nota bene Χαίρετε Salveteque, Thank you for reading the first-ever issue of The Haley Classical Journal. This has been an enormous and rewarding undertaking, and I have many thanks to give: to Tyler Boudreau and Jacob Hane, whose editorial skills made the process so much easier and more enjoyable; to Dr. Anne Feltovich, who advised me generously on the processes of publication and has always served as a supportive mentor to me; to Dr. Shelley Haley, for her encouragement, kindness, and of course, for lending her name to this publication; and last but not least to our peer editors, whose diligence, patience, and readiness to help have been much appreciated throughout the past semester.

The Haley Classical Journal started with an idea I had over the summer of 2019 while working with another undergraduate research journal. I loved the process of publishing, and wished that there were more opportunities for undergraduates to do so in the Classics specifically; when I pitched the idea of starting our own journal to some fellow classicists at Hamilton College, I was met with enthusiasm and we got the ball rolling, despite obstacles here and there. We knew it was deeply important for undergraduates to have the opportunity to take part in the peer-editing process and to receive adequate recognition for their research by way of publication. We hoped that our journal would open the door for first-generation students, women, queer students, and students of color who might not have as many avenues for publication as students at large research universities or those with well-established connections to undergraduate research journals. Our outreach spanned multiple continents and all submissions were read anonymously to ensure that none of our own unconscious biases slipped in. In this edition, we are publishing a diverse body of work from a diverse body of scholars, and I could not be more proud.

Now is a critical moment for the field of Classics. As we struggle to stay afloat and combat the many issues in our discipline from the appropriation of Classics by the far right to racism and sexism within our own departments, it is crucial that we diversify the field in as many ways as possible. I hope that this journal contributes to that important work by amplifying the voices of underrepresented scholars, and allowing for further opportunities for undergraduates everywhere.

Enjoy this issue of The Haley Classical Journal!

Sincerely, August Naston

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College

At Home and Abroad:

The Relationship Between Domi and Foris in Book VI of Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita Justin Muchnick, Stanford University, Class of 2021

Abstract Book VI of Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, which is composed of parallel storylines taking place at home (domi) and on the battlefield abroad (foris), feels somewhat uneven, with most of the book’s true drama and excitement occuring domi. This essay proposes that these two storylines should not necessarily be seen as discrete narratives of varying quality, for the foris narrative in Book VI actually intensifies and implicitly comments on the domi one. Specifically, this essay examines 6.12–14 as a prime example of Livy’s use of events foris to amplify subsequent events domi.

In Book VI of Ab Urbe Condita, Livy toggles between two different storylines: an exciting one and a boring one. Within the city of Rome, tensions run high between the plebs and the patricians as the city is gripped by high-stakes civic crises like Marcus Manlius Capitolinus’ populist uprising. Meanwhile, the Roman army spends the majority of the book out on campaign, winning a series of unsuspenseful battles against the same old cartoonishly inept (yet continually reappearing) faceless foreign tribes — almost an ancient prefiguration of the conventional Harlem Globetrotters vs. Washington Generals storyline. This distinction between the compelling narratives at home (domi) and the repetitive battles abroad (foris) is magnified by the way that Livy follows the conventions of the annalistic tradition by separating res internae and res externae.1 Nevertheless, though Book VI might read as uneven in the stakes domi and foris, Livy is too competent an author to allow half of his content to be ultimately meaningless. Instead, he crafts external affairs in a way that connects to or amplifies the already exciting home front events. Specifically, in 6.12–14, Livy first encourages us to view domi and foris as related, and then he uses an otherwise unimportant battle scene to heighten the drama in the following episode of civic unrest in Rome.

In an authorial digression in 6.12, Livy implicitly establishes domi and foris as linked concepts. Taken at face value, this digression simply offers a few plausible explanations to anyone reading about Rome’s many consecutive victories over the same few enemy tribes and wondering “from where did the Volsci and Aequi kept getting their supply of soldiers after being defeated so many times.”2 (unde totiens victis Volscis et Aequis suffecerint milites: Liv. 6.12.2) Upon closer reading, it also becomes an exhortation to the reader to choose the explanation that they think is most apt, an appropriate marker of Livy’s characteristic involvement of readers in his historiographical process. For the purposes of this essay, though, it is most fitting to analyze this digression in the context of domi 1 Christina Shuttleworth Krauss, “Introduction,” in Livy: Ab Urbe Condita Book VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 11.

2 All translations are my own.

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and foris.

Consider, for instance, the point in the narrative where Livy inserts his digression. A dictator, Aulus Cornelius Cossus, has been named, allegedly because of an impending war with the Volsci but in actuality to counteract Manlius’ “revolutionary plots” (nova consilia: Liv. 6.11.9). Cossus must decide whether to lead his army out to battle or to keep them in Rome to protect against Manlius’ machinations, and he “thinks that a greater challenge was presented at home than abroad” (maiorem dimicationem propositiam domi quam foris cernebat: Liv. 6.12.1). Immediately before Livy’s digression we encounter a choice that has to be made between, literally, domi and foris. Evaluating the decision, Cossus somewhat surprisingly decides to tackle the lesser problem first — either, thinks Livy, because the military campaign was more time-sensitive or because a victory in battle would legitimate Cossus’ dictatorship (Liv. 6.12.1). Therefore, Cossus leaves Rome with his army and “proceeds into the Pontine Marshes” (in agrum Pomptinum . . . pergit: Liv. 6.12.1), and this is where Livy begins his digression.

Thus, we as readers arrive at the digression at a moment when we are primed to be thinking about the relationship between domi and foris. Cossus has just been forced to choose one over the other and we may be silently evaluating whether he made a wise decision. Moreover, the geographic location at which Livy interrupts his story is a liminal space between domi and foris. The ager Pomptinus (known today as the Pontine Marshes) is certainly not Rome, but neither is it some far-flung locale that could truly be considered abroad. According to classical archaeologist Peter Attema, the Pontine Marshes had been “the object of the first attempts at territorial expansion by the Romans in the 5th and 4th cent. B.C. [sic],”3 so they are a region that Romans like Cossus are beginning to see as theirs. In fact, earlier in Book VI, Camillus’ victories against the Volsci 3 Peter Attema, “Roman Colonisation of the Pontine Region: Aspects of the Rural Landscape from the 6th to the 1st Century B.C.,” in Structures Rurales et sociétés antiques: Actes du colloque de Corfou, 14–16 May 1992 (Besançon: Université de Franche-Comté, 1994), 273.

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College have already made the Pontine Marshes a place “unambiguously in Roman hands” (possessionis [Romanae] haud ambiguae: Liv. 6.5.2). Accordingly, the Pontine Marshes can be seen as a space where domi and foris meet, not just territorially but ideologically. When the issue of the Roman colonization of the Pontine Marshes is first introduced in 6.5, the plebs argue that “the place is far more endangered by the nobility than it had been by the Volsci” (multo eum infestiorem agrum ab nobilitate esse quam a Volscis fuerit: Liv. 6.5.3). Both internal class struggle (the plebs vs. the nobility) and external war (the Romans vs. the Volsci) have emerged on account of the Pontine Marshes, and so the space becomes a marker of the defining conflicts both domi and foris.

It is against this backdrop that Livy begins his digression.

Though he cannot come to a definitive conclusion as to how tribes like the Volsci were continually able furnish more troops after losing battle after battle against the Romans, in providing a potential answer he picks up on the overlaps between domi and foris that the Pontine Marshes themselves represent. One possible explanation, says Livy, is that the Volsci might have prepared for war in advance by conscripting young men into the army during peacetime, “just as it happens now in the Roman conscriptions” (sicut nunc in dilectibus fit Romanis: Liv. 6.12.4). Of course, on one level this comparison serves to give contemporary Roman readers a familiar template to envision how these bygone conscription practices might have looked, but it also seems to fulfill another function. By establishing a connection between the customs of foreign tribes and those of Romans, Livy shows that it is possible to use one’s knowledge of an internal situation to understand an external one. In other words, it is possible that events foris and domi can reflect or speak to one another.

By encouraging us to think in this way, Livy suggests that we should see domi and foris as linked concepts, rather than as discrete arenas of historical action. Under this lens, Book VI becomes more than just a set of two contemporaneous but separate stories. Rather, these two narratives inform one another, with the things that happen foris influencing, commenting on, or amplifying occurrences domi (and vice versa). Kraus points out that Livy is quick to acknowledge when the consequences of external and internal events run together, usually when “external fear inhibits domestic trouble” or “internal conflict [ruins] external successes.”4 But even when the external events seem inconsequential — for instance, when we read about the Romans’ umpteenth battle with the Volsci — they can sometimes still be read in a way that enhances or adds texture to Livy’s narration of internal affairs.

A striking occurrence of this phenomenon occurs, perhaps not coincidentally, directly after Livy’s digression about the Volscan troops. Here, Cossus delivers a rousing pre-battle speech to his Roman soldiers, who proceed to swiftly trounce the Volsci in a characteristically one-sided contest fought in the Pontine Marshes (Liv. 6.12–13). This battle is followed by a shift in focus back to Rome and the growing civic unrest incit4 Kraus, “Introduction,” 11.

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ed by Manlius (Liv. 6.14.1). Livy takes us to the Forum, where Manlius sees a destitute centurion being led away by his creditors. In a great and ostentatious show of populist magnanimity, Manlius loudly pays off the centurion’s debts and, in doing so, further kindles plebeian contempt toward the greedy patricians.

At first glance, the battle against the Volsci and Manlius saving the centurion debtor appear to be unrelated events that occur foris and domi. Indeed, classicist Dirk Anton Pauw sees Livy as setting the stage for the centurion scene with “a dramatic pause in which a victory over the Volsci is described.”5 While I agree with Pauw that the centurion scene is clearly the more compelling of the two, I see the preceding battle as more than just a “pause” in the narrative. The battle scene serves an active dramatic function, and one that is linked to Livy’s prior invitation to his readers to draw comparisons between domi and foris. By emphasizing the Romans’ glorious victory abroad, Livy heightens the effect of the domestic squalor of Roman debtors at home. Specifically, the battle scene suffuses the following centurion scene with a sense of poignant irony: how can Roman soldiers show such heroic might on the battlefield only to be so cruelly mistreated, wracked by poverty and debt when they return to Rome?

The general sense of dissonance between domi and foris is substantiated by Livy’s use of fortuna in each scene. After Cossus gives his speech exhorting his troops to be brave and follow his orders, Livy writes that “neither did the commander disappoint the legions nor did fortune disappoint the commander” (nec dux legiones nec fortuna fefellit ducem: Liv. 6.12.11). In exchange for their courage and obedience, the Roman soldiers get a commander who does not fail them, one who delivers them the fortuna necessary to win the day. But in Rome, upon seeing the debt-addled centurion, Manlius vociferates about “the virtues and fortune of the man.” (virtutibus eius viri fortunaque: Liv. 6.14.3) The verbal echo of “fortuna,” now deployed with ironic force, links the impoverished centurion to the valiant Roman soldiers fighting under Cossus. This centurion possesses all of the same virtutes that those soldiers do; he has fought in many of their campaigns and even has the scars and wounds to prove it (Liv. 6.14.6). But unlike in war, where this would be enough for his dux to bring him fortuna, at home the centurion is let down by those above him. His creditors, who as Romans have reaped the benefits of national security thanks to the bravery of those like the centurion or Cossus’ soldiers, pursue him with fortuna of a very different sort than what he would have experienced on the battlefield. This sorrowful scene domi, of a centurion whose virtues do not correspond to his fortune, is rendered all the more sorrowful because we have just seen how virtues and fortune do correspond foris. And so, while the battle scene in the Pontine Marshes is not especially significant or dramatic in itself, it plays an important role in intensifying the scene that comes next—and it is only able to do so because we are able to see domi and foris as connected concepts.

5 Dirk Anton Pauw, “The Dramatic Elements in Livy’s History,” Acta Classica, 34 (1991): 39.

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College The interrelation of domi and foris carries on throughout Book VI, and the paradigm that Livy presents in his digression in 6.12 can be mapped onto numerous incidents thereafter. In another battle with the Volsci, for instance, the unwillingness of haughty young Lucius Furius to obey the commands of Camillus, a wise and proven war hero, results in near-disaster before Camillus can rally to save the day (6.23), an incident that can perhaps color our reading of Appius Claudius’ climactic oration about how disregarding established traditions invariably leads to total social breakdown and disorder (6.40–41).

For a contrary perspective, someone looking to champion the virtues of the plebs over the ineffective leadership of the patricians can turn to (you guessed it) yet another clash against the Volsci, where the lowly Roman foot-soldiers fight bravely but are impeded by the temeritas and inscitia of their own commanders (6.30).

Yes, the outcome on the battlefield is never truly in doubt whenever the Romans take on bumbling pushovers like the Volsci in Book VI of Ab Urbe Condita, but this predictability is not the result of lazy writing on Livy’s behalf. While reading Book VI’s foris episodes may initially seem like an exercise in repetitive inconsequentiality, it is actually an opportunity to appreciate the subtlety of Livy’s genius. The insignificant events foris are not even insignificant at all—rather, they stand as finely crafted interludes whose true significance only registers when they are placed in conversation with the gripping developments domi.

Works Cited

Attema, Peter. “Roman Colonisation of the Pontine Region: Aspects of the Rural Landscape from the 6th to the 1st Century B.C.” In Structures Ru rales et sociétés antiques: Actes du colloque de Corfou, 14–16 May 1992, 273–282. Besançon: Université de Franche-Comté, 1994.

Kraus, Christina Shuttleworth. “Introduction.” In Livy: Ab Urbe Condita Book VI, 1–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Livy. Livy: Ab Urbe Condita Book VI. Edited by Christina Shuttleworth Kraus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Pauw, Dirk Anton. “The Dramatic Elements in Livy’s History.” Acta Classica, 34 (1991): 33–49.

Kleijwegt, Marc. “Nero’s Helpers: The Role of the Neronian Courtier in Tacitus’ Annals.” Classics Ireland, 2000: 72-98.

Kleiner, Diana E. E., and Susan B. Matheson. I, Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1996.

Smith, Warren S. “Advice on Sex by the Self-Defeating Satirists.” In Satiric Advice on Women and Marriage, 111-128. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2005.

Varner, Eric. “Domitia Longina and the Politics of Portraiture.” American Journal of Archaeology, 1995 : 187-206.

Varner, Eric. “Portraits, Plots, and Politics: Damnatio Memoriae and the Images of Imperial Women.” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 2001: 41-93.

Watson, Pat. “A Matrona Makes up.” In Fantasy and Reality in Juvenal, Sat. 6.457-507, 375-95. Sydney: Rheinisches Museum Für Philologie, 2007.

Wood, Susan. “The Incredible, Vanishing Wives of Nero.” Transformation and Tyranny. 2000.

Wood, Susan. “Who was Diva Domitilla? Some thoughts on the Public Images of the Flavian Women.” American Journal of Archaeology, 2010: 45-57.

Zanker, Paul. The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1988.

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A Façade of Hair: Reimagining Augusta in Flavian Rome

Ian Karp, University of Minnesota, Class of 2020

Abstract

The portrait images of Neronian and Flavian Augustae are comparable in their Classically idealized physiognomies but are extremely disparate in coiffure vogue. This paper examines that difference in light of Tacitus and Juvenal’s similar characterizations of the Augustae at both courts. Neronian Augustae to be discussed are Agrippina Minor and Claudia Octavia, while Julia Fulvia Titi and Domitia Longina represent the Flavian Augustae.

The year 69 CE marked the rise of a new dynasty, the Flavians, and with them a new Imperial image. Looking back, one can see the differences between the timid and stolid hairstyles of the Augustae of the Neronian court and the vogue that developed into the scrupulous coiffure that was to become characteristic of Flavian Augustae. In this paper, I explore how this change in vogue developed through art historical analysis of marble bust portraits and numismatic evidence from the two dynasties, while using anecdotes from Juvenal’s Satire 6 to demonstrate the significance of hairstyle in the cultivation of an image and select passages from Tacitus’ Annals to elucidate the historic moment. Flavian divergence from later Julio-Claudian female hairstyle appears to contain political imagery and motive; so as to renounce any visual association with their dynastic predecessors, Flavian women seem to have reformed the image of the Augusta through a distinct and recognizable coiffure. This new image seemed to express visual distance from Neronian Augustae, yet in light of characterization with similar tropes in literature, the hairstyle in Flavian portraits can suggest the façade of a reformed Imperial house.

Juvenal’s Satire 6 provides insight into the male-plutocratic attitude towards excessive female adornment during his time (1st - 2nd century CE), and attests to the evocative potential of coiffure. In Satire 6, Juvenal perpetuates a glaring convention of abuse from the Roman imagination, the exposed body, to characterize the feminine malice of Domina, who the satire revolves around: Arranging the coif, with her own hair shorn, Is the pitiful Pseca, with bare shoulders and breasts.

‘Why is this curl larger?’ as the taurine lash punishes Successively for the crime and misdeed of a misshapen hair. (Juvenal 6.490-3)1* The brutal punishment of the ornatrix Pseca, a slave specially trained in hairdressing, is made to be comparable to the clandestine female influence that post-Neronian historical evi* All translations are my own.

1 Juvenal, 6.490-3: disponit crinem lacerates ipsa capillis nuda umeros Psecas infelix nudisque mamillis. ‘altior hic quare cincinnus?’ taurea punit Continuo flexi crimen facinusque capilli.

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dence was so often concerned with.2 Indeed, Juvenal’s employment of anecdote regarding the preparation of hair in order to implicitly allude to a specific political identity is exemplary of hair’s ability to indicate and evoke. For this reason, much of Juvenal’s audience would have probably related to the work’s condemnation of a powerful woman, thus reflecting that misogynistic attitude.3 Juvenal’s characterization of Domina embodies the very associations with the Neronian court that the Flavian Augustae would have wanted to avoid. However, a simple change in Imperial image does not indicate true social or political change, as we shall see through comparison of the portraiture of Neronian and Flavian Augustae that feature starkly different hairstyle vogues.

The hairstyle worn by women during Nero’s rule can be seen in portraits of his mother, Agrippina Minor. She was sister to Emperor Caligula, wife to her uncle Emperor Claudius, and eventually mother-of-the-Augustus when her son Nero, through much of her own manipulation, succeeded the purple in 54 CE.4 Accusations of conspiracy, espionage, and poisoning characterize her time as Augusta; these historical condemnations of her person and memory contextualize her portrait’s reception, and give reason for Flavian reinvention of the Augusta image. A bust identified as Agrippina Minor from ca. 40 CE in the Rhode Island School of Design’s collection (hereon the Providence portrait) exemplifies many physiognomic features of the Julio-Claudian gens, as well as contemporary conventions of portrait representation and coiffure (fig. 1, 2.) Her narrow brows are lightly defined. They keep a uniform width, tapering slightly as they extend to snail curls which frame her face. Her almond-shaped eyes are characteristic of Classical idealism. The nose is one of Agrippina’s most identifiable features: a stern bridge protrudes in a quasi-linear fashion, dipping downward into a bulbous, hooked tip with a slightly protruding nasal septum. The artist’s attention to the most minute physiognomic features is noticeable in the depth of the nostrils and depressions around the nasolabial area. The tightly pursed yet nonetheless demarcated lips, and the dimples at the edge of the mouth recall her Julio-Claudian lineage; strikingly similar 2 Bédoyère, 2018.

3 Watson, 387-95.

4 Tacitus, Annals, 12.69.

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College oral features are rendered in portraits of her brother Caligula, as well as the pure portrait of her uncle and husband Claudius. The coiffure of the Providence portrait features mid-late Julio-Claudian vogues: snail curls in the front veiled by marcelled waves of hair that are defined by the artist’s subtraction of material in a sinusoidal track emanating from a middle-part.

In the back, the hair is braided to a queue, with serpentine incisions providing texture to individual locks (fig. 2.)

Stamped and preserved with especial detail is an earlier numismatic portrait of Agrippina on an aureus from 50-54 CE, sometime near the end of Claudius’ reign (fig. 3.) This numismatic portrait corroborates the Providence portrait’s identification with Agrippina through their many physiognomic similarities. Formally, the varied height of relief on the numismatic evidence accentuates the same physiognomy rendered in the Providence portrait. The artist who designed the die- a stamplike tool used to print an image into the metal that is to become a coin- has depicted Agrippina with a similar hairstyle as the Providence portrait, demonstrating both the style’s popularity and its identification with the Augusta. From her marriage in 49 CE until her death, Agrippina was characteristically represented with either a veil, diadem, or wreath to explicitly note this aspect of her identity. While the Providence portrait bears none of this symbolic adornment, the numismatic portrait is adorned with a wreath of grain; hence my suggestion of dating the Providence portrait prior to 49 CE. Moreover, from the coin’s legend, we know that the die was used during Claudius’ reign. The fact that nearly the same coiffure was worn by Agrippina both before and during her marriage to Claudius demonstrates that this coiffure style- the anterior snail curls, waves, and braided queue- was a persistent vogue throughout the latter half of Julio-Claudian Rome.

That same vogue is then upheld by the next generation of Julio-Claudian Augustae through Claudia Octavia. Agrippina arranged Nero to marry Claudia to strengthen Nero’s station as Claudius’ heir against Claudius’ natural albeit younger son Britannicus. Britannicus would die by poison in 55 CE, within a year of Nero’s succession. Tacitus describes the psychology of Agrippina and Octavia upon witnessing Brittanicus’ murder: But Agrippina was trembling. Although she was trying to seem normal, the sudden consternation of her mind became noticeable, and so she appeared just as unknowing as Britannicus’ sister, Octavia: certainly deprived of her only chance of rescue, Octavia realized the evidence of her father’s death. But also, despite her youth, she concealed her suffering, and learned to hide all emotion.

Then after just a brief silence, the joy of feasting together began again accordingly. (Tacitus Annals 13.16)5 This passage exemplifies moments that Roman writers and 5 Tacitus, Annals 13.16: At Agrippinae is pavor, ea consternatio mentis, quamvis vultu premeretur, emicuit ut perinde ignaram fuisse atque Octaviam sororem Britannici constiterit: quippe sibi supremum auxilium ereptum et parricidii exemplum intellegebat. Octavia quoque, quamvis rudibus annis, dolorem caritatem, omnis adfectus abscondere didicerat. Ita post breve silentium repetita convivii laetitia.

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later historians often seem fixed on representing as indicative of the volatility and deceit that was supposedly inherent to Nero’s rule. Yet despite the contentions between Nero and Claudia that likely arose from the dinner of Britannicus’ death, provincial numismatic evidence of Nero and Claudia Octavia maintains a united and inviolable dynastic image throughout their marriage (fig. 4.) This tetradrachm is dated sometime after Nero and Octavia’s marriage in 53 CE but before his marriage to Poppaea in 63 CE. The coiffure depicted has noticeable similarities with that worn by Agrippina on the aureus (fig. 3); both feature snail curls and braiding, but Claudia Octavia adorns her neck with a small chignon and a curled lock tucked behind the ear. Claudia also appears to have sectioned her hair further back on the crown of the head than Agrippina, potentially suggesting the use of a weave. Contemporary to each other, Agrippina and Claudia Octavia’s hairstyles should not be understood as competing with one another, but rather alike forms that contribute to a similar imperial image.

Through comparison to numismatic evidence, a portrait bust of a woman in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s collection (hereon the Cleveland portrait) has often been identified as Claudia Octavia (figs. 5, 6.) The portrait is in fine condition, notwithstanding its broken nose. Like many early Imperial portraits of women, the bust features almond-shaped eyes, and full, smooth cheeks and lips to convey the modesty and virtue of the model. The marble coiffure appears more complex in its stature, and informative in its rendering of detail. It involves four features: snail curls, waves, ringlets, and a chignon. Similar to the Providence portrait, the Cleveland portrait’s hair is given texture through fine incisions and cross hatching. The drill work of the ringlets in the back of the head is remarkable, but the artist does not seem to have given the snail curls in front the same attention (fig. 6). They are inconsistent in size and, from the lightness of incising, even begin to lose their texture and suggestive direction of flow. Yet since the Cleveland portrait’s identification as Claudia Octavia relies upon comparative studies of coiffure based on numismatic extrapolation, Diana Kleiner has proposed that “perhaps it is better understood as an example of the influence of imperial styles on non-imperial women.”6 This is a more suitable and much safer suggestion than speculating the portrait model’s identity strictly based on coiffure and the amount of idealism rendered; both are trends of the Julio-Claudian vogue, and are useful in determining a portrait’s dating, but are not reliable in attributing specific identities. Consequently, as Kleiner suggests, the Cleveland portrait’s ambiguous identity but recognizable hairstyle underscores the influential scope of Julio-Claudian coiffure, thus demonstrating the existence of a dynastic image cohered through the vogue of Augustae. These features- a middle part, snail curls, and cascades of hair pouring onto the nape of the neck, with little height or bouffant at all- are characteristic and indicative of female portraiture during the later Julio-Claudian period under Caligula, Claudius, and Nero.

Two Imperial Flavian Augustae are of interest in under6 Kleiner, 168.

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College standing the development of the unique coiffures they are known for: Julia Fulvia, daughter of Titus, and Domitia Longina, wife of Domitian. Early numismatic evidence from the reign of Titus bears the image of his daughter as Augusta (fig.

7.) Her hairstyle as depicted on the dupondius is distinguished by the dominating toupet and a bun in the back that leaves the neck uniquely bare, something scarcely seen in Julio-Claudian styles. Eve D’Ambra used numismatic portraits of Julia, like the dupondius, to identify a much-restored head in the Ludovisi collection as a young Julia Fulvia Titi (Fig. 8.)7. Although the Ludovisi portrait’s identification relies upon extrapolation on the basis of resemblance in hairstyle and physiognomic idealization, it is nevertheless accepted. However, I think it appropriate to acknowledge Diana Kleiner’s comment that the Cleveland portrait’s ambiguous identity is indicative of the influence of Imperial style, and pay the same respect to the Ludovisi head. As D’ambra points out, the Ludovisi portrait has gone under multiple restorations along the nose, neck, and ears.8 Identification through physiognomy must address these portrait-harming alterations. But regardless of identity- Augusta or not- the Ludovisi portrait demonstrates that such a coiffure was in vogue throughout Flavian Rome.

A marble portrait of Julia Titi in the J. Paul Getty Museum (hereon the Getty portrait) is exemplary of the artistry and intricacy involved in representing hairstyles as exquisite as the Flavian Augustae in marmora (Fig 9, 10.) The vertical symmetry of Julia’s face is patent in the portrait’s bulging almond-shaped eyes, idealized nose, plump lips in suggestion of a smile, and the voluptuous coiffure radiating her face. The diadem denoting her status as Augusta sits upon a bouffant of promiscuous curls. Like the Providence, Cleveland, and Ludovisi portraits, incisions are being used to give marble the texture of hair. Yet the incisions used in the Getty portrait appear deeper than the rest, and the drill work used to render details in the coiffure much more comprehensive. This gives the Getty portrait’s curls a more realistic and profuse appearance than those in Julio-Claudian portraiture, which is generally more gestural and less daring in its representation. These developments demonstrate a Flavian shift in artistic focus towards indicative features other than physiognomy, which Julio-Claudian portraiture favored.

Returning to Domina and Pseca, this hairstyle was no doubt what Juvenal had in mind when jeering about women appearing as mythological giants in Sat. 6: She fastens with so many stories, and so many hair ties She builds her hair high: from the front you’ll see Andromache, But from behind she is much shorter, you might believe her someone else. (Juvenal 6.502-5)9 7 D’Ambra, 512: “The Ludovisi head is most often identified with Julia Titi for two reasons: it can be matched by a coin profile dated to ca. 80–81, and it presents an image of a youthful beauty on the brink of maturity.”

8 Ibid.

9 Juvenal, 6.502-5: tot premit ordinibus, tot adhuc conpagibus altum Aedificat caput: Andromachen a fronte videbis,

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Juvenal reveals that the coiffure which Pseca was punished for styling in Sat. 6.490-3 (above) was the Flavian beehive, thus presenting an ekphrastic association between his Domina character and the Flavian Augustae. Through imagery of a recognizable and evocative hairstyle donned by a female character of power, Juvenal evokes the conniving of a Flavian Augusta, possibly Domitia Longina who played a role in her husband Domitian’s assassination.10 Furthermore, the Juvenalian Domina seems to arise from like concerns as Tacitus’ earlier account of Agrippina and the poisoning of her husband Claudius, in which Tacitus notes the simultaneity of the arrangement of Nero’s succession and Claudius’ dead body being wrapped for funerary rites.11 Anecdotes such as these demonstrate that Neronian and Flavian Augustae alike were historically characterized as manipulators of court power structures. It seems Flavian reimagining of the Augusta had not distinguished their portrayal in literature as it did in portraiture.

Varner, building off of work by scholars such as Paul Zanker and Ulrich Hausmann, has outlined a system of typologies for Domitia Longina’s portrait.12 A portrait identified as Domitia in the Stockholm Medelhavsmuseet has been classified as type II due to her donning of a diadem, placing commission of the portrait sometime during Domitian’s reign (fig.

11, 12.)13 Like Julia, Domitia appears youthful, an idealized Augusta. The sculptor has paid much attention to the medium, utilizing a sculptural tenebrism that is manifest in the way that the coiffure blocks light, pouring shadows onto the forehead and sides of the face. Behind the beehive-toupet, hair is braided into plaits and wrapped in a bun at the back of the head. The artist has taken meticulous effort in delineating the three locks that make up each braid. Moreover, the hair holds a different value than that of the head itself, indicating the use of a separate piece of marble to form the coiffure; this would not have been unusual in both Roman hairstyle and portraiture, where detachable hair-pieces were common for those whose hairstyle warranted such additions.14 The toupet uses snail curls which are tighter but more regularized in their spacing. This contrasts the less orderly, more dramatic curls of the Getty head, despite the two portraits depicting nearly the same hair feature.

This underscores the variety of representations that exist within the same convention of style. For instance, all of the marble portraits we have seen conform to Roman ideals of female beauty, yet render the features that contribute to the idealized portrait differently. This is clear when looking at the eyes of the Getty and Medelhavsmuseet heads. Both utilize the idealized almond-shaped eyes, yet on the Getty head, the ridge Post minor est, credas aliam.

10 Varner 1995, 206: “The assassination of Domitian, of which Domitia was an active participant, changed the course of the Empire. Domitia’s career, as documented in her portraits, attests to the fact that female members of the imperial house could be as politically vital as their male counterparts.”

11 Tacitus, Annals, 12.68: cum iam exanimis vestibus et fomentis obtegeretur dum quae res forent firmando Neronis imperio componuntur.

12 Varner, 1995.

13 Ibid.

14 Bartman, 2001.

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College which denotes the lower eyelid furrow dissolves into the rest of the cheek as it would on an actual human face. The eyelid furrows of the Medelhavsmuseet head do not pay this same respect, entirely encapsulating the eyes, thus accentuating their idealized shape yet doing so at the expense of naturalism. The artistic variation which leads to these minute differences in representation of the same ideal is also true of the formal variations we see in coiffure. For instance, the hair of both the Providence and Cleveland portraits include waves directed away from the part, yet the artist of the Providence portrait has incised lines to give the waves directionality, texture, and identity. The Cleveland portrait represents the model with the same hair feature, but the lack of artistic attention given to it suggests that it is not the main focus of the portrait. This is starkly contrasted with the coiffure of the Getty head, whose haphazard whirlpool of curls would have demanded extensively skilled artifice. It seems apparent then that under the Julio-Claudians, portrait artists gave comparatively little attention to coiffure, whereas under the Flavians it assumed center stage. This development defines the image of the Flavian Augusta, and contributes predominantly to its divergence from the Julio-Claudian precedent set by Augusta such as the younger Agrippina, Claudia Octavia, and others.

Thus a new image of Augusta was brought about under the Flavians, and its novelty stemming from that idiosyncratic hairstyle. Yet however dissimilar the portrait images of the two dynasties may be, they are just that: contrived representations of a dynasty which project them as they wish to be seen. The latter end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty is often riddled with suppositions of social, moral, and absolute decadence; so too is the end of the Flavian dynasty under Domitian. What is more is the plutocratic and Senatorial fear of a too-influential Imperial woman, a concern that plagued Rome’s ruling class under Nero; and as Juvenal’s Sat. 6 underscores, misogynistic fear of women in power had not ceased in Flavian and early-Antonine Rome. Although we are flanked by differences in the portraiture of the Augustae of the two dynasties, we should not allow any visual façade to distract from their actual similarities and to eclipse the complexity of the ancient world.

Appendix

Fig. 1. Portrait Bust of Agrippina the Younger. Ca. 40 CE. Marble. Providence, RISD Museum.

Fig. 2. Rear detail of Providence portrait.

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Fig. 5. Portrait Bust of a woman with the hairstyle associated with Claudia Octavia. Marble. Ca. 1st century CE. Cleveland, The Cleveland Museum of Art. Fig. 3. Reverse of Aureus depicting Agrippina Minor as Augusta. Ca. 50-54 CE.

Fig. 4. Tetradrachm of Nero and Claudia Octavia. From an Alexandrian mint.

Ca. 53-62 CE.

Fig. 6. Rear detail of Cleveland portrait.

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Fig. 7. Dupondius depicting Julia Fulvia Titi. Ca. 80-81 CE. Fig. 9. Portrait Head of Julia Titi. Ca. 90 CE. Marble. Height: 33 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum.

Fig. 10. Detail of the Getty portrait.

Fig. 8. Left profile of Ludovisi portrait identified as Julia Fulvia Titi. Marble.

1st century CE. Rome, Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Altemps.

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Works Cited

Bartman, Elizabeth. “Hair and the Artifice of Female Adornment.” American Journal of Archaeology , 2001: 1-25.

Bédoyère, Guy De La. Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome.

London: Yale University Press, 2018.

Crowfoot, J.W. “Some Portraits of the Flavian Age.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1900: 31-43.

D’Ambra, Eve. “Mode and Model in the Flavian Female Portrait.” American Journal of Archaeology, 2013: 511-25.

Fig. 11. Portrait Head of Domitia Longina. Ca. 81-96 CE. Marble. Height: 34.5 cm. Stockholm, Medelhavsmuseet.

Fig. 12. Right profile of Gothenburg portrait.

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A Woman’s War:

Fulvia’s Political Power During the Perusine War Francesca Gills, Macalester College, Class of 2020

Abstract

This paper discusses gender politics between Fulvia and Augustus in Martial’s epigram xi.20. I argue that Augustus’ supposed outcry is intended to devalue Fulvia’s political power and influence during the Perusine War, but instead the quote suggests that Fulvia held considerable authority unique for a Roman woman. Her power was a direct threat to Augustus due to her ambiguous gender role; therefore, he had to reduce her status by noting her inherent and unchangeable passivity as a woman.

In order to fully examine this epigram, I delve into Latin semantics, historical context, and gender theory which all allow a full analysis of the text. Through this evaluation of the text, it becomes clear that Martial uses Augustus’ voice in order to demean Fulvia. However, these affronts to Fulvia’ character, albeit brutal, imply that Fulvia was a powerful figure in the Perusine War.

Spiteful audience who reads these Latin words sorrowfully, read these six brash lines of Augustus: “Because Antony fucks Glaphyra, Fulvia establishes this my punishment – How I should fuck her as well! That I should fuck Fulvia?

What if Manius begged me to fuck him up the ass?

Would I? If I were wise, I would not consider it. She said, ‘Either fuck me or let us go to battle.’

What about my dick being dearer to me than my life?

Sound for battle!”

Of course, exonerate my charming verses. This was Augustus, who you know speaks with Roman frankness.

Martial Epigram xi.20 In 41 B.C.E., a civil war was raging in Rome between the two remaining triumvirates, Augustus (then known as Octavian) and Marc Antony. Yet this war, dubbed the Perusine War, was unique because it was not Marc Antony who instigated the conflict; instead, it was his wife Fulvia and his brother Lucius.1 Despite being a woman during the late Roman Republic, Fulvia had a considerable amount of power. This power, paired with her political ambitions, made her a formidable enemy to Augustus; she was ridiculed for her ambitions and tenacity, whereas her political partner, Lucius, was not ridiculed to a similar extent.2 This rivalry between Fulvia and Augustus is well documented by contemporary authors and continued to be a topic of literature for years after Fulvia’s death. The Roman poet Martial uses this enmity in Book XI of his epigrams.3 In 1 Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth, and Esther Eidinow, eds. The Oxford Classical Dictionary. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

1116 2 Donald Lavigne. “Embodied Poetics in Martial 11.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 138, no. 2 (2008): 275-311.

289n27 3 All Latin text is taken from the online Latin Library

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epigram 20, Martial attempts to use Augustus’ alleged exclamation to insult Fulvia and demote her back to the “correct” status as the simple wife of Marc Antony; however, this quote just demonstrates the true extent of Fulvia’s power within the political sphere during the disputes between her, Augustus, and Antony.

Before discussing the content of this epigram, it is of vitally important to note the author and circumstances in which it was written. Martial wrote this epigram during the reign of Nerva which was over a hundred years after the Perusine War, thus, he is clearly quite removed from the disputes between Augustus, Antony, and Fulvia.4 Furthermore, Martial is reporting a quote that Augustus allegedly said about Fulvia, yet he does not say how he retrieved this quote, only that they are Augustus’ words. Given that Martial was not present during this exclamation and no other authors have written a similar account, there is no evidence that Augustus said this. Moreover, it should be noted that Martial was somewhat removed from Rome. Martial was born in what is currently modern-day Spain and moved to Rome later in life.5 He stayed in Rome during the reigns of Domitian and Nerva, then left during the early reign of Trajan due to his close connection with Domitian who suffered damnatio memoriae. This ability to move within the Empire shows Martial’s disconnection to the political sphere of Rome. Martial did not need to abide by political guidelines when writing his poetry, thus making it easier to write about Augustus and Fulvia.

By looking at Augustus’ quote, readers can discern many implications about Fulvia and her sexual life. Martial’s Augustus sees Fulvia as sexually offensive and it is reflected in his statement. Augustus states that “Fulvia establishes this my punishment, how I should fuck her as well” in response to Antony’s alleged adultery.6 Since this war is apparently a retalia4 Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth, and Esther Eidinow, eds. The Oxford Classical Dictionary. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 904 5 Ibid., 905 6 xi.20 3-4. All translations, including the focal epigram on the title page, are

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College tion to Antony’s mistakes, this punishment of sexual relations with Augustus should be against Antony. Yet, Augustus clearly states mihi poenam rather than poenam eius which would point to the other masculine subject, Antony. With this simple use of pronouns, Augustus firmly establishes that this act would punish him and not Antony, even though the adultery would penetrate Antony’s social sphere and theoretically only hurt him. Clearly, the Latin text shows that Augustus finds the mere thought of having sexual intercourse with Fulvia disgusting.

There are many plausible explanations for Augustus’ disgust, but two motives are more likely than others. First, Augustus could dislike that Fulvia is trying to impose her sexual desires onto Augustus, which puts him in a passive position.7 This passive position insults his status as a vir; he cannot even contemplate having sexual relations with such a powerful, active woman, as seen in his statement “if I were wise, I would not consider it.”8 Second, that fact that Fulvia establishes this punishment suggests that she would willingly commit adultery, thus making her a mulier.9 Her willingness to have sex with other men shows that she is not a proper Roman woman worthy of sex with Augustus, who later created the marriage laws which would require elite Roman men to divorce their wives if adultery was discovered.10 These two explanations do not portray Fulvia in a negative light and show her as a manipulative mulier.

The final sections in Augustus’ exclamation also convey interesting details about Fulvia as a woman with considerable power. Augustus claims that Fulvia told him to “either fuck me or let us go to battle.”11 This ultimatum grants Fulvia a surprising amount of power for a woman, yet this power is still explicitly shared with Augustus. Although Fulvia gives the ultimatum, Augustus still has total control over what happens – he will either choose to fornicate with her or fight her. Thus, some of Fulvia’s agency is removed and she is once again demoted to a simple woman. It was necessary for Martial to soften Fulvia’s political power because even a hundred years later, it was wrong for a woman to have such power in a military setting.12 Moreover, this last section seems to accuse Fulvia of inciting a war due to sexual frustration. Marc Antony is not attentive to Fulvia’s needs so she seeks Augustus instead. This interpretation reiterates the Greek notion that women were unable to control their sexual desires.13 Augustus’ exclamation portrays Fulvia as a simple, lustful woman who only attacks Augustus out of sexual frustration. His response to her ultimatum reduces her political power and enforces gender stereotypes even though she undoubtedly has more power than a normal Roman woman. the author’s unless otherwise noted.

7 Donald Lavigne. “Embodied Poetics in Martial 11.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 138, no. 2 (2008): 275-311. 289 8 xi.20 6 9 Ibid., 289n27 10 G. Karl Galinsky. Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. 130 11 xi.20 7 12 Eve D’Ambra. Roman Women. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 94 13 Sue Blundell. Women in Ancient Greece. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. 101

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Martial’s attempt to reinforce gender stereotypes is unsuccessful because Fulvia’s gender role is ambiguous. Being a person with political and military power puts Fulvia in a different gender category than other elite Roman women. This epigram demonstrates Fulvia’s agency by noting how she creates a punishment and delivers an ultimatum to Augustus. These actions portray her as an active political opponent.14 Fulvia tries to penetrate Augustus’ political and military sphere, which would inherently hurt his status of a vir, but Augustus retaliates by noting her passive role in sex. Given the importance of the “penetrator” and “penetrated,” Augustus is inherently more powerful than Fulvia.15 No matter how hard she tries to take an active role, she will almost always be passive during sex because of her biological nature according to Martial. This message is solidified when Augustus questions, “what if Manius begged me to fuck him up the ass?”16 This hypothetical serves as a metaphor for Fulvia’s loss of power during sex. However, it also is somewhat empowering for Fulvia because it shows that Augustus sees her as having equal power to Antony’s procurator. Although the query is meant to be an insult, it helps define Fulvia’s extent of power in Roman politics. Since Fulvia was able to elicit such a strong reaction from Augustus, it signifies that she is a true political competitor who needed to be controlled. Augustus’ exclamation is his attempt at slandering his political opponent.

Nonetheless, most of Martial’s epigrams are satirical, which is reflected in his brief statements regarding Augustus’ words. This satire is best conveyed through the Latin directly.

In his opening statement, Martial describes Augustus’ lines as lascivōs, a term that can be translated many ways.17 The reader can understand this single Latin term to either mean “impudent,” “brash,” or “licentious.”18 These three English words each provide a wildly different meaning for Augustus’ lascivōs versūs, and present Augustus in different lights regarding his relationship with Fulvia. Moreover, Martial’s closing statement also contains a hint of satire within the term nīmīrum.19 In the context of satirical poems such as Martial’s epigrams, nīmīrum is taken to mean “of course” ironically.20 Paired with the term libellus, which can be translated as “satirical verse,” the irony within this phrase suggests that Martial wants the reader to know that he created these lines instead of Augustus. Martial simply used the dispute between these famous figures to entertain readers and present his own characterizations of Fulvia and Augustus.

Although this epigram seemingly portrays Fulvia as a rash woman with some political power, a deeper look into the text 14 Donald Lavigne. “Embodied Poetics in Martial 11.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 138, no. 2 (2008): 275-311. 289 15 Jonathan Walters. “Invading the Roman Body: Manliness and Impenetrability in Roman Thought.” In Roman Sexualities, edited by Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner, 29-43. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. 32 16 xi.20 5-6 17 xi.20 1 18 John C. Traupman, ed. New College Latin & English Dictionary. 3rd ed.

New York: Bantam Books, 2007. 242 19 xi.20 9 20 John C. Traupman, ed. New College Latin & English Dictionary. 3rd ed.

New York: Bantam Books, 2007. 277

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College shows that there is more to Augustus’ quick defense of his mentula. Augustus’ disgust at the thought of sexual relations with Fulvia is the central theme of this epigram, but his reaction also demonstrates Fulvia’s power and agency within political sphere of Rome. It is notable and unique that Augustus was in such a rage due to the political exploits of a woman. Martial may have intended to demean Fulvia with his satirical “reproduction” of Augustus’ exclamation, but instead shows her true authority. Fulvia’s political ambitions and aptitude are indirectly noted within this epigram. Overall, Fulvia was not a woman whom men started wars over, but had the rare power to start them herself.

Works Cited

Blundell, Sue. Women in Ancient Greece. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

D’Ambra, Eve. Roman Women. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Galinsky, G. Karl. Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Hornblower, Simon, Antony Spawforth, and Esther Eidinow, eds. The Oxford Classical Dictionary. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Lavigne, Donald. “Embodied Poetics in Martial 11.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 138, no. 2 (2008): 275-311. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40212086.

Traupman, John C., ed. New College Latin & English Dictionary. 3rd ed.

New York: Bantam Books, 2007.

Walters, Jonathan. “Invading the Roman Body: Manliness and Impenetrability in Roman Thought.” In Roman Sexualities, edited by Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner, 29-43. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.

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Beer in the Ancient Greek World Rachel Prichett, The University of Texas at Austin, Class of 2020

Abstract

Beer was a common beverage in many ancient societies, including Bronze Age Greece. However, at some point after the Bronze Age collapse, Greeks stopped brewing beer. By the Archaic period and continuing into the Classical period, beer and even its memory disappeared from Greece. It became a drink of foreigners, so novel that Greek authors had to describe it in detail and coin phrases to refer to it. Meanwhile, beer production continued in adjacent locales such as Egypt and Phrygia. I argue that beer brewing fell out of practice in Greece due to the rise of the city-state. The social structure of these smaller communities made wine a much more practical alcohol, since it could be produced more easily and stored for longer.

Ancient Greece is usually thought of as wine-drinking country, and during its historical period that seems to have been the case. However, archaeological analysis has uncovered evidence of another fermented beverage during the Bronze Age: beer. Early inhabitants of Greece must have discovered or adopted grain-based alcohol along with much of the ancient world. Yet by the Archaic period (800-480 BCE) and certainly by the Classical period (480-323 BCE), both remains and mentions of beer almost entirely disappear from the archaeological and historical record. The strange timeline of beer in Greece leads to several questions. When, why, and how did the Greeks first begin brewing beer?1 Did they completely stop brewing, or did the practice continue? Most curiously, why might an entire group of people stop brewing beer while the rest of the world continued? To answer these questions, I will explore beer brewing in both Ancient Greece and the surrounding cultures.

After tracing the origins of beer brewing in Greece and when — if — it stopped, I will consider what cultures continued to produce beer during this time. Finally, I will explore the social models for beer production and consumption in both Greece and in the cultures that continued brewing in order to discern why beer could remain in one society while disappearing in others. I will use both archaeological and literary evidence to identify beer, beer making processes, and related social factors. Since the presence of beer as a local or foreign beverage becomes a different question during the cultural integration of the Hellenistic Period (323-31 BCE), I limit this paper to the matter of Greek beer before and during the Classical Period.

There are several methods for identifying beer in the archaeological record, all of which require a basic knowledge of how beer was made in the ancient world, especially in Greece. Different traces can be left by each step of the process, and most remains of brewing in the Mediterranean are from early in the process. To make beer, brewers would first gather large amounts of grain (often the classic barley, but also wheat and others).2 The grains had to be dampened and allowed to sprout or “malt” in order to make the sugars and starches in 1 By “Greeks” I also refer to earlier inhabitants of Greece, namely the Minoans and Mycenaeans.

2 Jennings et al. (2005), 279.

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the seed chemically available.3 Since sprouting rots the grains themselves, it is unlikely that a large amount of grains would be intentionally sprouted for a purpose other than brewing. As a result, when archaeologists encounter a large deposit of beerappropriate grains that have been uniformly (and therefore intentionally) sprouted, it is a safe guess that these grains were being malted for beer.4 After malting, grains were usually roasted to halt the sprouting and add flavor. They would typically be ground up at this stage. Therefore, remains of grains that have been sprouted, charred, and/or ground are even more likely to represent brewing than sprouted grains alone. Next, the malted and roasted grains would be added to water and heated — but not boiled — to break down the sugars and starches and transfer them into a sweet liquid, creating “mash.”5 The mash is then boiled to kill any bacteria. It is harder to identify brewing in the archaeological record at this step, although recently multiple studies have recreated a starch profile for mash and used it to analyze similarities with starch remains in vessels.6 However, this method is very new and has not yet been applied at Greek sites. Finally, the mash would be cooled and left to ferment for a few days until enough of the sugars had been converted into alcohol, or the final product. The fermentation process can leave behind a chemical residue of calcium oxalate, the surest way to identify beer in the record. Although this compound is not entirely unique to grain fermentation, the presence of calcium oxalate and the remains of grain or grain starches in a vessel is an almost certain indicator of beer.

Material evidence shows that beer is about as old as agriculture itself, or possibly even older. Although new information continues to push the date back, the earliest evidence for brewing on record currently dates beer to 11,000 BCE at Raqefet Cave, Israel.7 Analysis of starch granules from Natufian mortars in Raqefet Cave show damage patterns consistent with the malting and brewing process.8 The next earliest evidence comes from Göbekli Tepe in modern day Turkey and dates to 10,000 BCE, where the fingerprints of calcium oxalate 3 Ibid, 279-280.

4 Valamoti (2018), 619.

5 Jennings et al. (2005), 279-280.

6 See Perruchini et al. (2018), Wang et al. (2017), Liu et al. (2018).

7 Liu et al. (2018).

8 Ibid.

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College (a by-product of brewing) have been discovered in limestone basins.9 While these examples prove that early humans were able to brew beer, others serve to emphasize the temporal and geographical spread of this practice.

Later on, beer was also being brewed in more Greek-adjacent societies, such as Egypt and Phrygia. In Hierakonpolis, Egypt, vats dated to 3500-3400 BCE contain remains of wheat, barley, and calcium oxalate.10 These three prime suspects together in one container are certain evidence for brewing. One of the most famous examples of beer in the Greek-adjacent world comes from the Tomb of Midas in Phrygia and dates to around 700 BCE, somewhat later than the earliest examples of beer in Greece itself.11 Chemical analysis of vessels in this burial chamber revealed not only calcium oxalate and grain, but also evidence for wine and honey (or mead, since it is unclear whether the honey was fermented).12 This beverage has become known as “Greek grog” despite its Phrygian origin.

Notably, this evidence for beer dates to the beginning of the Greek Archaic period, after beer seems to have disappeared in Greece itself.

Currently there is no identifier of beer that could not also be the remains of something else. In the past, this uncertainty has lead scholars to believe that ancient Greeks never drank beer, even during the Bronze Age. However, the continued discovery of a variety of evidence that almost certainly points to brewing makes this a hard point to argue. At the sites discussed below, beer is suggested by the presence of certain pottery types, calcium oxalate, or intentionally sprouted grains. In the future, further evidence could be uncovered by analysis of grain starches damaged in a manner consistent with brewing, the new methodology first used in 2018 to identify the beer in Raqefet Cave.

The earliest evidence for beer on the Greek mainland comes from Archondiko in the Macedonian region and dates to around 2135-2020 BCE.13 The evidence from this site consists of a large deposit of ground sprouted grains, both wheat and barley, which had been charred after grinding.14 The treatment of these grains corresponds with the malting process for beer, in which grains are usually sprouted to release the starches, sometimes roughly ground, and then roasted to halt the sprouting.

Although there is no direct chemical evidence of fermentation, it is doubtful that grains treated in such a way could be used for any other purpose. Another appearance of the brewing process in the archaeological record comes from Argissa in Thessaly, a site dating to 2100-1700 BCE.15 Once again, the deposit consists of a large quantity of malted and ground grains that had 9 Dietrich et al. (2012), 688.

10 Maksoud et al. (1994).

11 McGovern (1999).

12 Ibid.

13 Some questionable evidence, such as a pottery type associated with beer, may exist before this; Valamoti (2018) 14 Ibid. I am not totally sure whether this char is as a result of intentional roasting, or whether the entire site had been burnt— there is no indication of the latter in the article and it seems to imply that the char means roasting. On the other hand, I would describe that as “roasted” grains and not “charred.”

For my purposes, I assume that the grains were indeed roasted, but the basic argument is not affected much if this is not the case.

15 Ibid.

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no likely use aside from brewing. The presence of brewing at these sites indicates the Greeks did develop beer along with the rest of the world around it. Yet, there is no evidence of Greek beer past the Bronze Age, and as I will argue, it was not present by the Archaic and Classical periods.

Scholars have contested whether brewing stopped sometime during the Iron Age, or before the Archaic and Classical periods, based on both archaeological and literary factors. On the archaeological side, there is only negative evidence: no material record of beer or the brewing process has been found past the Bronze Age. Some have argued that beer does not appear in the record because it was the drink of the lower class, and would not appear in funerary contexts or be depicted on pottery.16 However, given that most archaeological evidence for beer around the world and even in Greece before this time is not found in higher-class contexts, this argument does not stand.

The literary record is considerably more helpful because there exists both negative and positive evidence for the absence of beer. The negative evidence consists of a complete absence of Greek-made beer in Greek literature (beer does appear, but it is only made and drunk by foreigners). Although wine is mentioned in dramas, poetry, and medical texts, there is no extant description of Greek-made beer in Greece. Some scholars, such as Auberger and Goupil, argue that Greek beer does not exist in the literary evidence simply because the writers of surviving literature were upper-class and therefore knowingly omitted mentions of lowly beer.17 However, as Max Nelson points out, there are many texts in which we would expect to see beer if it existed, even if it was a drink for only the lowest class. For instance, even the comically poor in the literary tradition drink wine along with their peasant’s food, most notably in Aristophanes’ Wealth.18 As Nelson states, “the poor have wine while the wealthy have better wine.”19 Beer is also never mentioned in the Hippocratic Corpus, despite its wide overview of both satisfactory and unsatisfactory foods.20 If beer had been a common Greek beverage, it is highly unlikely that it could have been so totally avoided in all literary evidence— not only the idealistic texts, but also the comedic and even the medical.

On the other hand, positive literary evidence that depicts beer as a strange and foreign drink unfamiliar to a Greek audience abounds. Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae preserves mentions of beer (βρῦτος) from Archilocus, Hecataeus, Aeschylus, and Hellanicus.21 Each of these authors portray beer as a foreign drink (Thracian, Phrygian, or Paeonian) either by directly saying so or through describing its consumption by a foreign character. Even more convincingly, in the Anabasis, Xenophon gives a detailed description of the beer the army encounters in Armenia, which makes it clear that he did not expect his audience to be familiar with it. He describes the novel drink in these words: 16 For instance, Auberger and Goupil (2010).

17 Auberger and Goupil (2010): 68-69.

18 Nelson (2014): 20-30.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

21 Ath. Deipn. 10.447a-d.

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College ἦσαν δὲ καὶ πυροὶ καὶ κριθαὶ καὶ ὄσπρια καὶ οἶνος κρίθινος ἐν κρατῆρσιν. ἐνῆσαν δὲ καὶ αὐταὶ αἱ κριθαὶ ἰσοχειλεῖς, καὶ κάλαμοιἐνέκειντο, οἱ μὲν μείζους οἱ δὲ ἐλάττους, γόνατα οὐκ ἔχοντες: τούτους ἔδει ὁπότε τις διψῴη λαβόντα εἰς τὸ στόμα μύζειν. καὶ πάνυἄκρατος ἦν, εἰ μή τις ὕδωρ ἐπιχέοι: καὶ πάνυ ἡδὺ συμμαθόντι τὸ πῶμα ἦν.22

First, Xenophon takes the time to describe the experience of drinking beer in a new and foreign place, despite the fact that there is a lot happening in the plot. If beer had been a common drink in Greece, it is highly unlikely that he would bother to recount the army’s dinner beverage in such detail. Second, the way in which Xenophon explains the beer suggests that his audience needs a detailed description in order to understand what beer was, how it was drunk with a straw, and even what a straw was. Such a description would not have benefited an audience that had drunk, seen, or even heard of beer before. Third, he notes that the “drink was very good to one being accustomed to it,” which implies that the Greek army had not previously been accustomed to beer.

Lastly, Xenophon does not actually call the drink beer, but rather “οἶνος κρίθινος,” or “wine of barley.” This phrase alone suggests that his audience may not even be familiar with a word for beer. Instead, he describes it in terms of an alcoholic drink they would certainly know well (wine) but with a different main ingredient (barley). This is a strange choice considering words for beer did indeed exist. As noted above, several Greek authors refer to beer as βρῦτος, while others such as Theophrastus use the term ζῦθος, although the latter most commonly refers to specifically Egyptian beer.24 Xenophon could have made use of either of these words, but chose not to for risk of alienating his audience. Either he did not expect his readers to know these specific terms, or if they did, he did not expect them to know that the terms referred to an alcoholic drink like their wine. In either case, the term “wine of barley” cannot have been meant for an audience that was already familiar with beer. Xenophon was not alone in using this phrase.

Herodotus also describes Egyptian beer as οἲνῳ ἐκ κριθὲων or “wines out of barley,”25 and Theophrastus describes τοῦς οἴνος ποιοὺντες ἐκ τῶν κριθῶν καὶ τῶν πυρῶν or “wine made out of barley and wheat.”26 Especially since there is evidence of Theophrastus himself using specific words for beer (as noted above), these descriptions strengthen the assumption that the intended Greek audience of Xenophon, Herodotus, and Theo-

phrastus can not have known about the fermented barley beverage from first-hand experience.

In summary, both the negative archaeological evidence and the negative and positive literary evidence strongly suggest that the average local Greek would not have been familiar with beer at all, even as a drink of the lower class. Therefore, it is safe to assume that beer was no longer being brewed in Greece after its apparent disappearance during the dark ages.

While Greeks stopped drinking beer, brewing continued in Egypt, the Near East, Sumeria, Phrygia, and elsewhere.27 The unusual halt in Greek brewing may be connected to the differences in beer and wine production. One difference between the production of wine and the production of beer is the number of steps and difficulty in the operational chain. While grape fermentation requires both aerobic and anaerobic stages, the transition between these requires little human effort. However, grain must undergo more laborious steps to become alcohol: saccharification (the conversion of starches into sugars) and fermentation (the conversion of sugars into alcohol).28 The process of saccharification requires significant human time and effort. Grain must first be germinated (or mixed with saliva) to make the starches available, ground up, then heated in water (but not boiled) since the starches are resistant to permeation by room-temperature water.29 Once most of the starches have been converted to sugar, the resulting mash must be boiled to halt enzyme action and sterilize the product. Only then is the mixture ready for straining and fermentation. By contrast, grapes need only to be mashed up before they are ready for fermentation. While the extra steps may not have been overly onerous in small home production, they become much more significant in mass production, especially considering the final product is less alcoholic and more is therefore required for intoxication.

Another factor of production is the potential for spoilage.

Wine and beer are opposites in this regard. When producing wine, the raw material (grapes) spoils very quickly, while the product itself may last for years if stored properly due to its high alcohol content and acidity. On the other hand, the raw material for beer (grain) may be stored indefinitely in a dry location, while the beverage itself spoils very quickly; ancient beer likely lasted no longer than a week.30 The differences in the storage and production of wine and beer create different benefits and drawbacks of each. Beer is arguably better for large groups of people where a large labor force is able to produce it and there are plenty of drinkers. The base material (grain and water) is cheaper and easier to store in large quantities, making it a good option for mass production.

The multi-step process of brewing also lends itself to mass production, since producing large quantities at each step makes the number of steps more worthwhile and ultimately less labor intensive per output. Furthermore, beer ferments in a matter of days, making it an excellent quick and cheap drink for the

22 Xen. Anabasis 4.5.25-26 23 All translations are my own.

24 Nelson (2014): 34.

25 Hdt. 2.77.4.

26 Theophr. De caus. plant. 6.11.2.

27 See Crewe and Hill (2012), Bouby et al. (2011), Damerow (2012), Homan (2004), and Nelson (2005) for the continuation of beer in other societies.

28 Jennings et al. (2005): 276.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

And there was also wheat, and barley, and pulses, and wine of barley in kraters. And the barley floated on top of this, and reeds were in it, some larger and some smaller, not having joints. Whenever someone was thirsty he had to take these to his mouth and suck in. And it was exceedingly strong, if someone did not pour in water, and the drink was very good to one being accustomed to it.23

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College masses. However, in a world without refrigeration, beer would have spoiled almost as quickly as it was finished fermenting.

If it was being produced in large quantities, it would also need to be drunk in large quantities. In short, beer lends itself to a society where large groups of people are available to prepare and drink alcohol, and it is especially helpful for those who want to do so cheaply.

In terms of production and storage, wine offers nearly opposite pros and cons. It is less labor intensive to make, but the resource is a bit harder to come by. Grapes cannot be stockpiled ahead of time, and they are less environmentally hardy and more limited to certain areas of the world, Greece being one of them. They are likely to be a little more expensive because of these factors, and because water — a very inexpensive ingredient — is not included in the wine fermentation recipe as with beer. Furthermore, wine takes much longer to ferment than beer. However, once wine is made, it does not need to be drunk immediately because it can be stored. These factors make wine a more ideal beverage for smaller groups.

The availability of resources does not matter as much when there are less consumers, but a less labor intensive process is beneficial. Furthermore, an alcohol that can store makes much more sense for a society in which there are less mouths to immediately drink the product. This quality is also beneficial for societies that are not very centralized, since a storable alcohol is also a transportable one.

Following this logic, beer is more practical in cultures that have large, centralized populations. This would include Egypt, Phrygia, or Thrace— all societies that continued brewing beer after its disappearance in Greece. It would also include the Greek Bronze Age palace societies, which would explain the presence of beer during that time. However, the more fragmented Greek city-states that developed in the Archaic and Classical periods would be more conducive to wine. With less centralized power and population, alcohol that could be brewed in small quantities and stored would make much more sense. Furthermore, wine could make an excellent tradeable good between these city-states.

It is likely that beer’s disappearance in Archaic and Classical Greece was as a result of social structures that were much more conducive to wine, especially as compared to other cultures that continued brewing. If beer fell out of production because of its social impracticality along with the cultural shift that led to the Greek dark ages, it is plausible that even its memory could have been gradually lost before the advent of the Archaic period. This hypothesis is probably not the only factor that led to beer’s disappearance: as with any major change, it was probably brought about by a variety of social, cultural, political, and environmental factors. Nevertheless, beer’s incompatibility with the Greek city-states could have played a major role in the collapse of Greek brewing.

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Works Cited

Auberger, Janick and Sébastien Goupil. “Les « Mangeurs de Céréales » et les Autres.” Phoenix 64, no. 1 (2010): 52-79.

Bamforth, Charles. Grape vs. Grain: A Historical, Technological, and Social Comparison of Wine and Beer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Bouby, Laurent, Philippe Boissinot, Philippe Marinval. “Never Mind the Bottle: Archaeobotanical Evidence of Beer-brewing in Mediterranean France and Consumption of Alcoholic Beverages During the 5th Century BC.” Human Ecology 39 (2011): 351-360.

Crewe, Lindy and Ian Hill. “Finding Beer in the Archaeological Record: A Case Study from Kissonerga-Skalia on Bronze Age Cyprus.” Levant 44, no. 2 (2012): 205-237.

Damerow, Peter. “Sumerian Beer: The Origins of Brewing Technology in Ancient Mesopotamia.” Cuneiform Digital Library Journal 2 (2012): 1-20.

Dietrich, Oliver, Manfred Heun, Jens Notroff, Klaus Schmidt, Martin Zarnkow. “The role of cult and feasting in the emergence of Neolithic communities: New evidence from Göbekli Tepe, south-eastern Turkey.” Antiquity 86 (2012): 674-695.

Hornsey, Ian S. A History of Beer and Brewing. Cambridge: The Royal Society of Chemistry, 2003.

Homan, Michael M. “Beer and Its Drinkers: An Ancient near Eastern Love Story.” Near Eastern Archaeology 67, no. 2 (2004): 84-95.

Jennings, Justin, Kathleen Antrobus, Sam Atencio, Erin Glavich, Rebecca Johnson, German Loffler, Christine Luu. “Drinking Beer in a Blissful Mood: Alcohol Production, Operational Chains, and Feasting in the Ancient World.” Current Anthropology 46, no. 2 (2005): 275-303.

Liu, Li, Jiajing Wang, Danny Rosenberg, Hao Zhao, György Lengyel, and Dani Nadel. “Fermented beverage and food storage in 13,000 y-old stone mortars at Raqefet Cave, Israel: Investigating Natufian ritual feasting.”

Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 21 (2018): 783-793.

McGovern, Patrick. Uncorking the Past: the Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

McGovern, Patrick. “The Funerary Banquet of King Midas.” Expedition 42, no. 1 (1999): 21-29.

Nelson, M. “ζυτουργει̑ον: A Scholarly Ghost Word.” Mnemosyne, Fourth Series, 54, no. 6 (2001): 721-23.

Nelson, Max. “Did Ancient Greeks Drink Beer?” Phoenix 68, no. 1/2 (2014): 27-46.

Nelson, Max. “The Cultural Construction of Beer Among Greeks and Romans.” Syllecta Classica 14 (2003): 101-120.

Nelson, Max. Divine or Godless Drinks?. ARAM Periodical, 17 (2005): 129134.

Nelson, Max. The Barbarian’s Beverage: a history of beer in ancient Europe.

London: Routledge, 2005.

Perruchini, E., C. Glatz, M. M. Hald, J. Casana, J. L. Toney. “Revealing Invisible Brews: A new approach to the chemical identification of ancient beer.” Journal of Archaeological Science 100 (2018): 176-190.

Sams, G. Kenneth. “Beer In The City Of Midas.” Archaeology 30, no. 2 (1977): 108-15.

Thone, Frank. “Beer-Making 8,000 Years Ago.” The Science News-Letter 19, no. 531 (1931): 378-80.

Valamoti, Soultana Maria. “Brewing beer in wine country? First archaeobotanical indications for beer making in Early and Middle Bronze Age Greece.” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 27 (2018): 611-625.

Wang, JiaJing, Li Liu, Andreea Georgescu, Vivienne V. Le, Madeleine H. Ota, Silu Tang, and Mahpiya Vander. “Identifying ancient beer brewing through starch analysis: A methodology.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 15 (2017): 150-160.

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Bridge to a New Age: Syriac Doctors in the Early Islamic World

Jordan Schwed, Macalester College, Class of 2021

Abstract

Some of the most impressive achievements of the Islamic golden age came in the field of medicine. In its infancy, however, Islam was a rural society whose understanding of medicine, among other subjects, lagged behind that of the urbanized Byzantine and Sassanid empires. My paper will illustrate how multilingual Christian scholars living in newly acquired Islamic territories communicated classical medical knowledge to Islamic society by serving as translators, medical administrators, and personal physicians to the new rulers.

Islamic society, especially under the Abbasid caliphate, saw an incredible flourishing in the arts and sciences. One science in which Islamic society excelled was medicine, which was highly advanced for the time. The advanced medical system of medieval Islamic society greatly expanded upon the medical systems of the Byzantine and Sassanid empires, which were the two main centers of medical study in the late classical Middle East. These empires suffered major defeats at the hands of the Rashidun caliphate in the 630s, causing Byzantium to lose much of its eastern territories and leading to the total collapse of Sassanid Persian in the 650s. In the wake of these political upheavals physicians and intellectuals began translating the core medical texts of these empires into Arabic. It was not Arabic-speaking Muslims alone who translated that wisdom, rather significant parts of the translation project were overseen and completed by Syriac-speaking Christians who represented a continuity between late classical and Islamic medicine. By serving as doctors, translators, teachers, and hospital administrators in the new society, they built the foundation of the Islamic medical system.

The translation of Greco-Roman and Sassanid texts into Arabic was key to the development of an Islamic medical tradition, and a process in which Syriac scholars played a vital role.

Due to the vast number of texts that needed to be translated, Islamic society relied on educated locals with prior knowledge of these texts to help “pass along the Greek heritage” to the new society.1 The Syriacs were perfectly positioned to become translators. At the time of the Islamic expansion, educated Syriacs spoke Greek, Syriac, and often Persian. Greek and Persian were important as languages of culture and government in the old empires while Syriac was the liturgical language of many eastern Christian denominations. With the reigns of Umayyad caliphs Muawiyah I (661-680) and Abd al-Malik (685-705), and the beginning of their Arabizing reforms, Arabic became the language of government, creating a class of scholars which “Used Arabic for daily life, Syriac for liturgy, and Greek for 1 Remi Brague, The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2009) 164.

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cultural purposes.”2 As a result this group was uniquely positioned to use the knowledge of the old empires to satisfy the curiosity of the new one. This multilingualism enabled them to work as translators, translating the Greek texts that became fundamental to the Islamic understanding of medicine into Arabic.

Perhaps the most important translator to work in the House of Wisdom, an Islamic academy and translation center, was Hunayn ibn Ishaq. Ibn Ishaq, a Nestorian Christian born in modern day Iraq, likely grew up speaking Arabic as an everyday language and Syriac as a liturgical and intellectual language.3 He later learned both Persian and Greek. Ibn Ishaq came from a medical background as his father was a pharmacist. Much of his work — both translated and original — was on medicine.4 The scope and importance of his work is hard to overstate with Osman Ghada estimating that between his translations from Greek to Syriac, Greek to Arabic, and Greek to both Syriac and Arabic, ibn Ishaq was responsible for the translation of as many as ninety works by Galen alone.5 Ibn Ishaq also rendered a linguistic service to Islamic medicine and the Arabic language. Before the translation project Arabic suffered from a severe dearth of scientific and medical terminology. Previous translators often left these terms untranslated in Syriac or Persian, but ibn Ishaq instead opted to appropriate existing Arabic words and phrases and apply them to previously unexpressed medical phenomena.6 This linguistic innovation demonstrates that influential translators like ibn Ishaq did more than just translate, they also played key roles in the establishment of a 2 Brague, Philosophical explorations, 164.

3 Rosanna Goroni, “The Process of Origin and Growth of the Islamic Medicine: The Role of the Translators. A Glimpse on the Figure of Hunayn bin Ishaq” Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine, (2005), 5.

4 Goroni, “Origin and Growth”, 5.

5 Osman Ghada “The Sheikh of the Translators’: The Translation Methodology of Hunayn Ibn Ishaq”, Translation and interpreting studies (2012), 170.

6 Ghada, “The Sheikh of Translators”, 169-70; The example of this process provided by Osman Ghada is the translation of “muscae volitantes (floating specks in front of the eyes)” which had no direct Arabic equivalent. According to Ghada, Ibn Ishaq coined the use of “khayal (shadow or shadow-like)” as a term for this phenomenon.

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College new academic and medical tradition.

Syriac doctors also served as ambassadors when the search for knowledge became a point of diplomatic contact between the Abbasid and Byzantine courts. The Abbasid government gave considerable support to the project of retrieving obscure manuscripts, even sending an official mission to the Byzantine Empire to collect scientific texts. This expedition contained Syriac scholars across many fields, including several notable physicians, Hunayn ibn Ishaq among them. Another scholar-diplomat was Sinan ibn Thabit, a Zoroastrian doctor who served as hospital director and court physician under the Abbasids. Additionally, Yuhanna ibn Masawiyah, a Nestorian gynecological expert and anatomist who had previously directed the House of Wisdom, was a part of the expedition.7 The inclusion of these Syriac experts in the expedition to Byzantium illustrates the extent to which the Abbasids relied on these men to serve as a bridge between the Greco-Roman and Islamic traditions of scholarship.

The works these translators communicated to Islamic society proved to be a jumping off point for a generation of Muslim doctors, influencing both their work and their methodology. The influence of these texts is clear in the transmission of the theory of the humors to Islamic society and in the writings on Greco-Roman medical texts authored by Muslim physicians. Muslim medicine continued to use the theory of the humors and was revolutionary not for rejecting old ideas, but for using them in more productive ways. Although Galen was the foundation of both European and Islamic medicine in the middle ages, the two societies differed greatly in how they applied Galen’s theory. Muslim physicians theorized that the humors were “profoundly influenced by life’s strains and stresses” while European doctors tended to ascribe changes to “‘evils spirits’ or the forces of magic.”8 One of the greatest Islamic physicians, al-Rhazi, simultaneously demonstrates the regard in which Galen was held and the inquisitive nature of Islamic medicine in his book Doubts About Galen. Al-Rahzi opens Doubts by writing “[In writing this book], I am faced with opposing one who is in my eyes the greatest of men, and who has benefited me more than any other person.”9 Yet, out of a belief that “real philosophers should not simply accept the knowledge conveyed to them but should question everything before them,” al-Rhazi goes on to repudiate Galen’s theory of optics.10 The passage shows us that al-Razhi learned from more than just Galen’s conclusions, he also inherited “Galen’s ideal of the learned, thinking practitioner.”11 Important though its contribution was, the Greco-Roman world was not the only source of medical knowledge for the 7 Husain Nagaima, “Islamic Medicine History and Current Practice” Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine, (2003), 23.

8 Howard Turner, Science in Medieval Islam: An Illustrated Introduction, (Austin, University of Texas Press) 131-2.

9 Mohammadli Shoja. “Rhazes Doubting Galen: Ancient and Medieval Theories of Vision” International Journal of History and Philosophy of Medicine, 3.

10 Shoja, “Doubting Galen”, 3 11 Vivian Nutton. “The Fortunes of Galen.” in The Cambridge Companion to Galen, ed R J Hankinson, (Cambridge University Press, 2008) 355–390.

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fledgeling Islamic empire. The other, more obscure contributor to Islamic medicine was Sassanid Persia, a society which was on the cutting edge of late antique medicine but whose practices receive less attention than their Byzantine counterparts. Here too Syriac intellectuals bridged the practices of Sassanid medicine and those of Islamic medicine. As the caliphate took control of Persia they left the Sassanid medical infrastructure intact. The most important component of this infrastructure was the medical academy at Gondishapur, an advanced medical school that produced many of the notable individuals involved with the Abbasid medical system. The Academy at Gondishapur was the main center of medical study during the Sassanid era and received extensive royal patronage. The Academy was notable both for its religious tolerance, accepting Christians and Zoroastrians alike, and for its modern methods. The Academy benefited from native Persian scholarship, from the contributions of a number of Greek scholars who were resettled to Gondishapur by various means during the Sassanid era, and from “added medical knowledge from India.”12 After the fall of the Sassanid empire the Academy became a conduit through which Persian and Indian medical expertise was transferred to the burgeoning Abbasid empire.

Although few descriptions of the hospital at Gondishapur remain its influence on Islamic medicine is made clear by both modern and contemporary sources. Some modern sources have claimed that the Academy was “the first teaching hospital in the history of medicine,” and a model for our modern hospital system.13 In addition to this modern endorsement, sources from Medieval Islamic society continue to reference “prescriptions which ‘used to be employed in the Hospital at Jundi Shapur’” until at least the 12th century.14 These practices and forms were later adopted by the Abbasid hospital system staffed by Syriac practitioners trained in Gondishapur. These physicians went on to serve as high profile physicians and hospital administrators in early Islamic society.

Perhaps the most important group of these practitioners was the Bukhtishu family, a family of Syriac or Persian Nestorian Christian doctors. The Bukhtishu family served as heads of the Academy at Gondishapur before they began serving the caliphs in 768. During the reign of caliph al-Mansur, Jirjis Bukhtishu, then head of the Academy at Gondishapur, traveled to Baghdad to treat the caliph. Both Jirjis’ son and grandson also spent time at court in Baghdad. The caliph Harun alRashid (786-809) later invited Jirjis’ son to Baghdad to head what many consider to be the caliphate’s first modern hospital.15 The success of this hospital lead others to replicate and expand upon the Bukhtishu’s Gondishapur model, thus making it the standard method of hospital administration for the Islamic world. Jirjis’ grandson Jibrail furthered the family’s 12 Nagaima, “Current Practice”, 21.

13 Mohammadli Shoja and RS Tubs, “The History of Anatomy in Persia” Journal of Anatomy, (2010) 361.

14 Cyril Elgood “A Medical History of Persia and the Eastern Caliphate: from the Earliest Times until the Year 1932” (Cambridge University Press, 1951) 50.

15 Nagaima “Current Practices”, 23.

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College contribution to medicine by sponsoring translators, including Hunayn ibn Ishaq, while serving as court physician to both caliphs and other powerful figures such as the Barmakids.16 For approximately three hundred years the family treated caliphs, authored vital medical texts, sponsored translations, ran hospitals, and served as vital leaders in the new Islamic medical system.17 It is important, however, to remember that neither the Byzantine nor the Sassanid traditions evolved in a vacuum. The two cultures had coexisted for centuries before Islamic scientific traditions borrowed from one another. Both cultures contributed to the Islamic perspective on medical topics. In the Syriac intellectuals of the early Islamic period these intertwined but separate traditions fused and created a single tradition built upon by Syriac and Islamic scholars. Two aspects of medicine in which we can observe this fusion are the science of anatomy and the hospital. The core texts and attitudes upon which Islamic anatomy were based came from the Byzantines. The tenth century Muslim surgeon al-Zahrawi cited both Galen and Hippocrates when bemoaning the poor anatomical knowledge of the doctors of his time, a complaint which echoed one made

by Hippocrates himself.18 While the most important anatomical corpus came from the Byzantines, the most important anatomical expert of the late classical transition came from the Sassanid empire. Yuhanna ibn Masawiyah was another graduate of the Academy at Gondishapur who was brought to Baghdad by the caliph. In Baghdad, Masawiyah established a hospital in which he “dissected apes for his anatomical studies and teaching because of their similarity to humans” and wrote extensively on medicine, anatomy, and embryology.19 Masawiyah epitomizes the Syriac scholars and, in fact, the nascent Islamic medical tradition. He was educated in both Greek and Persian traditions of medicine and combined their wisdom to make advancements that were entirely his own.

The contributions of these Syriac physicians as teachers, writers, scholars, administrators, and doctors is hard to overstate. Steeped in the knowledge of both the Byzantine and Sassanid traditions, these Syriac intellectuals crossed religious lines and touched upon almost every aspect of the burgeoning Islamic medical system. Their story speaks to the religious fluidity of the late classical era, a time in which hard lines had not yet been drawn between Islam and other Abrahamic faiths.

This religious fluidity allowed the new Islamic society to adapt efficiently to the new challenges of managing a heavily urbanised empire. It is clear from tracking institutions, such as the medical system, that religious flexibility at court was key to establishing Islam as an empire on par with the old Byzantine and Sassanid empires. By examining major institutions in society through the lens of this religious fluidity one can better understand the rise of Islam and its effects on day to day life.

Works Cited

Brague, Remi. The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009 Elgood, Cyril. A Medical History of Persia and the Eastern Caliphate: from the Earliest Times until the Year 1932. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951.

Gorini, Rosanna. “The Process of Origin and Growth of the Islamic Medicine: The Role of the Translators. A Glimpse on the Figure of Hunayn bin Ishaq.” Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine 4, no. 8 (2005): 1-7.

Nagaima, Husain. “Islamic Medicine History and Current Practice.” jishim 2 (2003): 19-30.

Nagaima, Husain. “The Bukhtīshū’ Family: A Dynasty of Physicians in the Early History of Islamic Medicine.” Journal of the Islamic Medical Association of North America 41 (2009): 7-12.

Nutton, Vivian. “The Fortunes of Galen.” The Cambridge Companion to Galen, edited by R J Hankinson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 355–390.

Osman, Ghada. “‘The Sheikh of the Translators’: The Translation Methodology of Hunayn Ibn Ishaq.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 7 (2012): 161–175.

Shoja, Mohammadali M., Paul S. Agutter, & R. Shane Tubbs. “Rhazes Doubting Galen: Ancient and Medieval Theories of Vision.” International Journal of History and Philosophy of Medicine 5 (2015): 1-6.

Shoja, Mohammadali M, Tubbs RS. The history of anatomy in Persia. Journal of Anatomy 210 (2007): 359-378.

Turner, Howard R. Science in Medieval Islam : An Illustrated Introduction.

1st ed. Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 1997.

16 Husain Nagaima. “The Bukhtīshū’ Family: A Dynasty of Physicians in the Early History of Islamic Medicine.” Journal of the Islamic Medical Association of North America 41 (2009):9-10.

17 Nagaima, “Bukhtishu Family”, 11.

18 Nagaima, “History and Current Practices”, 28.

19 Shoja and Tubbs, “History of Anatomy”, 364.

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College

Man as Model in the Roman World Shannon Coyle, University of Queensland, Class of 2020

Abstract

Many classical historians have adopted structuralist and post-structuralist approaches to understanding gender and power in the ancient world. The idea of ‘otherness’ as a mainstay of gender relations in nearly all societies is readily deployed in scholarship of Roman history. This ahistorical acceptance of the universality of ‘the other’ has resulted in the naturalization of the perceived inferiority of Woman throughout history. It is often assumed that the Romans ideologically and legally viewed Woman as subordinate as a result of Man’s position as a normative model. Historians often argue that the ancient medical conception of women’s bodies as imperfect versions of men’s permeated Roman society. Through an examination of legal, ideological, and medical texts, such as the Julian and Papian-Poppaean Laws, Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, and Galen’s On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, this paper demonstrates that women’s position in Roman society was far from fixed, and indeed differed greatly in separate social realms. Medical texts did not hold the same authority for the Romans as they do in modern societies and were not necessarily used to uphold ideological dogma. It is also clear that women’s ideological position cannot be reconciled with the active/passive, male/female dichotomy commonly accepted in scholarship. To uncritically assume that Woman was Man’s ‘Other’ in Roman society and to employ simple structuralist binarisms is to obfuscate the rich detail preserved in the ancient texts. The role of women was clearly in a state of constant renegotiation and flux.

Few would deny that Roman society was, in essence, patriarchal.1 Men were dominant, particularly in the public sphere, and patresfamilias retained at least theoretical control over the private sphere.2 While men could participate in political, military, and administrative endeavours, women were ideally hidden away in the home, reflecting their innately domestic nature.3 However, to deny the deeply complex nature of Roman society, indeed of any society, by attempting to simplify the intertwined relationships between Man, Woman, and the state, would be unjust and ahistorical.4 In her landmark work, The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir gave 1 Mary Harlow, “In the name of the father: procreation, paternity and patriarchy,” in Thinking Men: Masculinity and its Self-Representation in the Classical Tradition, ed. Lin Foxhall and John Salmon (London and New York: Psychology Press, 1998), 155-69.

2 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, The Roman Antiquities, trans. E. Cary, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), 2.2627. See also Valerius. Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 6.3.10-12; Bruce Frier and Thomas McGinn, A Casebook of Roman Family Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 193-211; Brent Shaw, “Raising and Killing Children: Two Roman Myths,” Mnemosyne 54, no. 1 (2001): 31-77.

3 This view is epitomised in one of Seneca’s writings in which he praises his aunt, Helvia, for that fact that “it would have been greatly to her credit if the province had approved her conduct for a space of sixteen years: it was much more creditable to her that it knew not of her existence.” Seneca, Consolations from a Stoic, trans. A. Stewart (London: George Bell and Sons, 1900), 19.6. C.f. Valerius Maximus, Doings and Sayings, 3.8.6.

4 Claude-Emmanuelle Centlivres Challet, Like Man, Like Woman: Roman Women, Gender Qualities and Conjugal Relationships at the Turn of the First Century (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006), 1-17. Emily Hemelrijk, “Masculinity and Femininity in the Laudatio Turiae,” Classical Quarterly, 54, no.

1 (2004): 189 contends that “the notion of male superiority was so widely accepted that Seneca (Constant. 2.1.1) could use it to ‘prove’ by analogy the superiority of the Stoa over other philosophical schools.” Rather than treating Seneca’s statement as an absolute, it would be better to consider that men were only superior in certain domains.

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a stronger epistemological basis to the idea of “otherness”.5 Historians willingly accepted this basis, coupled with Michel Foucault’s structuralist binarism utilized in the study of the development of sexualities, as a model for understanding Woman and Man in the ancient world.6 This essay seeks to demonstrate the inability and clumsiness of this model when faced with the dynamic nature of sex and gender in Roman society.

Ancient evidence should not be molded to fit a predetermined paradigm, but instead should speak for itself. The idealised and “real” role of women in Roman society never reached a fixed position.7 In flux by its very nature, the operation of social apparatuses constantly renegotiated and redefined the position of women.8 Different social spheres could accommodate different conceptions of gender relations at different times. As such, to broadly state that women were subordinated in Roman society by men or to awkwardly force gendered relations into pre-determined, modern paradigms would be to obscure a vast component of Roman society. Similarly, attempts to explain away abnormalities in the evidence derived from a fundamental mischaracterization of the intricacies of Roman gender roles. This component’s value for understanding the lifeworld of ancient 5 Centlivres Challet, Like Man, 6.

6 Centlivres Challet, Like Man, 5. For the negative impact of such a conception of power relations on historical inquiry see Clifford Ando, Ideology in the Roman Empire (California: University of California Press, 2000), 20.

7 This can be reconciled with Althusser’s notion that all individuals are “always already subjects” in Louis Althuser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 172-173.

8 This overarching argument was developed in light of the advances in ideology critique which attempt to focus on the operation of ideology within a society, rather than simply show its existence. See Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978) and Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1: Reason and the Rationalisation of Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984).

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College Rome cannot be overstated.9 While surviving legal texts give the role of women a fairly inflexible impression, these texts still manage to betray a vignette of women behaving in ways that do not neatly fit into a binary pattern.10 Next, women’s roles and representation in social institutions and Roman ideology will be explicated in the context of these spheres operating as breeding grounds for gender identities and relations. Medical texts most comfortably align with an oppositional conception of subjectivity and present the reflexive self as an aristocratic man; they are predicated on the notion of women as an inferior version of man and promote an unrelenting hierarchy between the sexes. However, as this paper further explores the societal role of these texts, it will become clear that these ideas are by no means foundational or necessarily authoritative.

Legal texts are at best insufficient and at worst misleading evidence for the functioning of a society.11 They do not necessarily reflect norms or actual lived experience.12 This is particularly true for Rome, where it could be argued (at least in elite circles) that the mos maiorum, upheld by social institutions and familial practices, had a much more meaningful impact on the behaviour of individuals. Moreover, the legal codes that we do possess post-date the institution of the laws quite substantially and are redefined in accordance with the point of view of specific jurors, operating within their own legal and societal climate.13 Nonetheless, it would be unwise to entirely deny this evidence value in revealing the role of women in Roman society. Rather, the historian must carefully contextualise and contrast it with other extant evidence. Laws that scholars commonly invoke as evidence for the subjugation of women within Roman society include the harsh proscriptions against women committing adultery and the descriptions of a paterfamilias’s power over his daughters. Documents that are often referred to as implying a relatively free position for women, at least in some spheres, include evidence of women conducting busi-

9 For “lifeworld” see Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 69-74 and Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987), 119-152; Ando, Ideology, 21.

10 This is not to deny the progressively more favourable position women appear to have gained in legal terms. See Susan Looper-Friedman, “The Decline of Manus-Marriage in Rome,” Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschidenis 55, no. 1 (1987): 296 and Serena Witzke, “Violence against Women in the Ancient World,” in The Topography of Violence in the Greco-Roman World (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 2016), 246. Although, c.f. Baerbel von Hesberg-Tonn, Coniunx Carissima: Untersuchungen zum Normcharakter im Erscheinungsbild der römischen Frau (Stuttgart: Historisches Institut der Universität Stuttgart, 1983).

11 It is outside the scope of this paper to examine all of the legal texts which pertain to women. Rather, a few notable examples will be discussed and analysed.

12 Especially given the argument of Y. Thomas, “The Division of the Sexes in Roman Law,” in A History of Women in the West: From Ancient Goddesses to Christian Saints, ed. P.S. Pantel (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 83 that “under Roman law women did not form a distinct juridicial species.”

13 For example, see Paulus’ comment that “if a son under patria potestas should surprise his daughter in the act of adultery, while it is inferred from the terms of the law that he cannot kill her, still, he ought to be permitted to do so.” Paulus “Sententiae,” in Women’s Life in Greece & Rome: A Source Book in Translation, ed. M.R. Lefkowitz and M.B. Fant (London: Duckworth, 1982), 193.

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ness and the last will and testament of Taarpaesis, preserved in the Oxyrhynchus papyri.14 Particularly interesting is that “in accordance with the Julian and Papian-Poppaean Laws, it is only by the right of children that women are freed from guardianship.”15 This quote suggests that the law, especially under Augustus, was mainly concerned with ensuring women fulfill their reproductive duties before embarking upon any other accomplishments.16 When contrasted with the evidence of the praise Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, received, which explicitly focuses on her maternal role, it would appear that this was a recurrent theme within Roman society.17 While Roman law does give the overall impression that men were dominant within Roman society, there is little evidence of women’s inferiority or direct subjugation.18 The institution of patria potestas should not be read as direct subordination of women, but rather a means of maintaining order within society.

Ideologies, in theory, act as “strategies of containment.”19 Relying on “stereotyping, naturalising, universalising, and de-historicising of the self,” they aim to “fix” “representation of the self.”20 The elite disseminate ideologies, and the social institutions that both reflect and shape them, in order to eclipse the arbitrariness of the distribution of power. Furthermore, ideologies act to instruct individuals in maintaining the correct behaviors for their position in society, which is also promulgated by these same processes.21 Thus conceived, ideology simply 14 “P.Oxy 10756” in Women’s Life in Greece & Rome: A Source Book in Translation, ed M.R. Lefkowitz and M.B. Fant (London: Duckworth, 1982) 201. For an overview of women’s involvement in business see Jane Gardner, “Women in Business Life: Some Evidence from Puteoli,” in Female Networks and the Public Sphere in Roman Society, ed. P. Setälä and L. Savunen (Rome: Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae, 1999), 11-28.

15 Gaius, “Insitutiones 1.145” in Roman Civilisation: Selected Readings, Vol. 2, ed. N. Lewis and M. Reinhold (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1990), 91.

16 This is similarly suggested in the Laudatio Turiae (CIL 6.41062) in which a woman is praised for a vast number of activities that modern scholars might describe as “masculine”, while her feminine traits are consistently underlined as well. See Hemelrijk, Masculinity and Feminity, 195. Plutarch’s criticism of Fulvia also fits into this paradigm: “she had no interest in spinning or housekeeping: at Plutarch, The Parallel Lives, Vol. IX, trans. B. Perrin, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), 10.3.

17 The evidence describing Claudia is absolutely coloured by ideology and those presenting her in such a positive way are doing so as a means of projecting a certain message. In addition, a tradition hostile to a certain man (such as Plutarch towards Mark Antony and hence Fulvia in Plutarch, Antony, 28.1) will present his wife in a negative light, and likewise for a tradition favourable towards another. None of this means that evidence such as this is worthless, just that it should be treated with caution, and never treated as reflecting lived experience. See also Cicero on Cornelia’s and Laelia’s eloquence at Cicero, Brutus, 58.211. Also compare Valerius Maximus’s stories of women who admirably speak in public and those who dishonourably invade men’s space at Valerius Maximus, Doings and Sayings, 8.3.

18 C.f. the approach taken by Jane Gardner, “Gender-Role Assumptions in Roman Law,” Echos du Monde Classique: Classical Views 39, no. 3 (1995): 377-400.

19 Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconsciousness: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 52-53.

20 Elizabeth Clark, “Ideology, History and the Construction of ‘Woman’ in Late Ancient Christianity,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2, no. 2 (1994): 155.

21 Anthony Giddens, “Four Theses on Ideology,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 7, no. 1 (1983): 19 and John Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Theory in the Era of Mass Communication (Stan-

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College reflects the ideals of the ruling class(es) and attempts to instill elite notions of selfhood within an entire society, according to each individual’s class and gender.22 Under this framework, Roman ideology as it relates to women would merely encompass behavior control and finitely define womanhood in accordance with “traditional” views.23 Centlivres Challet has identified what she terms “dual discourse” within ideological works, a second voice accompanying the dominant one of pure ideology, which “reflects individual behaviors and everyday interactions that do not follow the ideological rules of the first.”24 This is an incredibly useful tool for examining texts, but remains inadequate for revealing the nuances behind Roman ideology and its broader operation within society. Even the traditional, ideological voice, as conceptualized by Challet, did not always project a strongly resolute design of womanhood, but was also in a state of flux, allowing for deviations and departures from what a modern reader might assume to be traditional Roman gender roles.25 Women were not always subordinated in Roman ideology, indeed, “women” as a category is not particularly clear cut.26 Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita provides the perfect material for demonstrating this point. This work is definitely a constitutive element in Roman ideology, projecting a quintessentially Roman view of history and identity.27 It has long been observed that Livy’s use of mythohistorical characters as exempla served ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 7. Ideology critique appears to have turned away from a Marxist, purely economic conception of ideology and instead taken into consideration intersecting identities. See Michèle Barrett, The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 32-33 and Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 141-57. See also Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 164-169.

22 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1975) 40; Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory, 21.

23 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 132-33; Barrett, Politics of Truth, 19-22; Michél Foucault, Power/knowledge (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1980), 97.

24 Centlivres Challet, Like Man, Like Woman, 10. Her confidence in retrieving the lived experiences of real women through ideology is somewhat misplaced.

Spivak’s foundational notion that the subaltern cannot speak holds true. See Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed., C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-315.

25 The critique of Mary Beard, “Re-Reading (Vestal) Virginity,” in Women in Antiquity, ed. R. Hawley and B. Levick (London: Routledge, 1995), 166-177 centres on the attempts to explain away the seemingly “ambiguous” gender status of the Vestal Virgins. Attempts to explain away female invasion of male spaces and virtues are very common within modern scholarship, e.g. Hemelrijk 2004, “Masculinity and Femininity,” 189 about the military vocabulary used to describe ‘Turia’ and the anecdotes about women’s involvement in war in Appian, The Civil Wars, 4.93-40, Valerius Maximus, Doings and Sayings, 6.7.2-3, Cassius Dio, Roman History, 57.7.4-5 and Velleius Paterculus, Compendium of Roman History, 2.67.1. Given that these “transgressions” appear so commonly, it is clear a new approach, as exemplified by Mary Beard, is needed, instead of attempting to classify the women who commit them as “honorary men” as in Hemelrijk, “Masculinity and Feminity,” 190.

26 The idea of ideologies “in flux” is in part borrowed from the work of John Frow, Marxism and Literary History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 76.

27 Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, 61-62 argues that stories which co-opt the past in order to create a sense of community “justify the exercise of power by those who possess it’ and ‘servile to reconcile others to the fact that they do not.”

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as a means of instructing Livy’s audience on proper conduct, and thus it clearly serves an ideological purpose.28 A traditional reading of women in Livy, particularly in the context of violence perpetrated against them, characterizes them as passive, silent, and remaining within their “proper place”, that is, the private sphere.29 This reading assumes that women are presented as men’s polar opposite. Santoro L’Hoir has less than convincingly argued that Livy used mulier and muliebritas only in a pejorative sense. In L’Hoir’s conception, a mulier character is always a submissive victim.30 The stories of Lucretia and Verginia, as invoked by Joshel, are positioned to highlight their passivity.31 Lucretia and Verginia are both “made dead” so that the male actors can come to the fore and institute powerful change in the state.32 If, however, we turn our attention to the episodes in which Livy draws attention to the assertion of female agency, women themselves become instigators of change rather than simply catalysts.33 Coriolan’s mother, drawing together an ingens mulierum agmens, advances towards her son, imploring him to decide between Rome and herself or the Volscians. “Before I admit your embrace suffer me to know whether it is to an enemy or a son that I have come, whether it is as your prisoner or as your mother that I am in your camp.”34 Here, she draws attention to her maternal power over him, later appealing to his patriotism and love of his family. A mother’s reproductive importance is also made explicit when she laments, “Must it then be that, had I remained childless, no attack would have been made on Rome; had I never had a son, I should have ended my days a free woman in a free country?” It is the strength of her exhortations, coupled with the laments of the agmen mulierum, which forces him to change his mind.35 Other episodes which similarly exemplify the power of women, particularly through their maternal or conjugal influence, are Tanaquil’s assistance in plac28 See Holt Parker, “Loyal Slaves and Loyal Wives: The Crisis of the Outsider-Within and Roman Exemplum Literature,” in Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture, ed. S. Joshel and S. Murnaghan (New York, NY: Routledge, 1998), 152-73.

29 Witzke, “Violence against Women,” 250-5 on Rhea Silvia (Livy 1.4), the Sabine women (Livy, 1.9, Ovid, Ars Amatoria, 1.11-30), Tarpeia (Livy 1.115-9), Lucretia (Livy 1.57-60), Horatia (Livy 1.26), and Verginia (Livy 3.4448). S. Smethurst, “Women in Livy’s History,” Greece and Rome 19, no. 56 (1950): 87: “Women must necessarily play the subordinate part of the foils illustrating the almost entirely masculine virtues that Livy wished to inculcate.”

Also, Joshel, “The Body Female,” 121: “Livy’s account of early Rome creates Woman and her chastity as space, making her a catalyst for male action. …

She is also a blank space – a void; for Livy effectively eliminates her voice, facilitating the perpetuation of male stories about men.”

30 Francesca Santoro L’Hoir, The Rhetoric of Gender Terms: ‘Man’, ‘Woman’, and the Portrayal of Character in Latin Prose (Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1992), 81-82.

31 Joshel, “The Body Female,” reads Livy’s episodes with women’s silence and passivity in mind.

32 Joshel, “The Body Female,” 119, 215.

33 Katarina Mustakallio, “Legendary Women and Female Groups in Livy,” in Female Networks and the Public Sphere in Roman Society, ed. P. Setälä and L. Savunen (Rome: Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae, 1999), 53-64. C.f. Joshel, “The Body Female,” 121.

34 Livy, The History of Rome, trans. W.M. Roberts (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1912), 2.40.1-20.

35 Livy, The History of Rome, trans. W.M. Roberts (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1912), 2.40.10-11; Mustakallio, “Legendary Women,” 59. A temple dedicated to Fortuna Muliebris was built as a result of the women’s actions.

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College ing her husband and son-in-law on the throne; Tullia’s impact on the transformation of kingship into tyranny; and Cloelia’s invocation of a female network demonstrating stoic patriotism, despite her lowly social position. In these tales, women are not simply men’s opposite, inferior simulacrums; they are leading agents in what might be considered masculine affairs.36 When contrasted with the overwhelming majority of texts that do emphasise the passivity of women, this text demonstrates the fluid operation and expression available with regards to ideology.

Indeed, these episodes authenticate the view that ideology was a space in which Romans could (re)navigate their “traditional” gender roles, rather than simply transmit them.37 Despite Lacquer’s persuasive substantiation of the idea that, at least in Greco-Roman medical texts, men and women were not opposite so much as different (hierarchical) manifestations of the same body, his theory still subscribes to structuralist binarism.38 In this conception, women are still the “other” and are defined in terms of men.39 Indeed, women’s inferiority, in a somatic sense, is a unifying theme throughout the nuanced and varied sectarian and non-sectarian medical texts, which can be typified by Galen’s statement that “the female is less perfect than the male.”40 However, in order to establish the role of medicine both in the construction of and reflection of feminine identities, it is necessary to establish the role of medicine within Roman society more generally. Flemming has voiced her concern about the tacit (and sometimes not-so-tacit) assumption of many scholars that medical texts in the ancient world held the same authority as modern medical texts.41 Historians have asserted that ancient medical texts carried out the purpose of naturalizing and legitimating women’s gender roles.42 More recent studies have noted the fractured and highly individual nature of medical practice in Rome, especially since it was not subject to any centralization.43 A physician writing 36 C.f. Joshel, “The Body Female,” 123. This agency should still be viewed within the context of habitus, as conceptualised by Bourdieu, Outline, 20-21.

37 Natalie Kampen, “Omphale and the Instability of Gender,” in Sexuality in Ancient Art: Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Italy, ed. N.B. Kampen and B. Bergmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 234-4.

38 Thomas Lacquer, Maxin Sex: Gender and Body from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 10. See Galen, De usu partium, 14.6-7 on how the female reproductive organs are simply the male ones, but inverted and internal. He compares the female reproductive organs to the mole’s eyes. C.f. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A.L. Peck, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942),.728a.

39 See Celsus’ “sanus homo” in Nadine Brand, “The Sanus Homo in the Medicina of Celsus,” Acta Classica: Proceedings of the Classical Association of South Africa 2, (2007): 29-48 and Celsus, De Medicinia, trans. W.G. Spencer (London: Heinemann, 1935-8), 1.1.1. on a generic “healthy person”.

40 Rebecca Flemming, Medicine and the Making of Roman Women: Gender, Nature, and Authority from Celsus to Galen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 370; Galen. De usu partium, 14.6.

41 Flemming, Medicine, 3; Gardner, “Gender-Role Assumptions,” 378 states that “There was a lay perception of women as biologically inferior, mentally as well as physically, to men and as naturally subordinate to them. This was reinforced by their legal situation, to the extent that, as a number of scholars have already observed, legal writers can actually be found citing these stereotypes as rationale for certain legal rules limiting women’s legal capacity.”

42 Against the term “naturalization” see Lorraine Daston, “The Naturalized Female Intellect,” Science in Context 5, no. 2 (1992): 210 and “The Nature of Nature in Early Modern Europe,” Configurations 6, no. 2 (1998): 149-72.

43 Vivian Nutton, “Healers in the Medical Market Place: Towards a Social

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a medical treatise was doing so to advertise their understanding of the human body and to bolster their authority.44 Even those who belonged to a discrete sect were eager to uphold and justify their cosmological, ontological, and epistemological position. Thus, medical practitioners were likely reinterpreting and reframing the dominant ideas of the aristocratic class, their intended readership, in order to advertise themselves as concordant with elite views. It is therefore important to understand these texts as a response to a wider discourse about women’s bodies and roles rather than as the originators. In this and related spheres, it would appear that ideas about women as subordinate were pre-discursive and firmly entrenched. In medical practice, too, from the extant writings it appears as if women patients had little control over their medical autonomy, and that decision-making was relegated to the male members of the household.

In light of this, it is of particular interest that a number of medical writers invoked the names of alleged female physicians in an apparent attempt to reinforce the strength of their rhetoric.45 Pliny the Elder, on the other hand, in his anthropocentric encyclopedia of the structuring of all things natural, treats the views of women such as Lais, Elephantis, and Salpe with suspicion, drawing attention to the variations between their cures.46 This must be viewed in the context, however, of his hostility towards the medical tradition in its Greek manifestation.47 Pliny is much better disposed towards folk medicine, which does not involve the use of compounded pharmaceuticals. Regardless of his treatment of these women, however, the fact that he is discussing them at all shows that he believed his encyclopedia could not be complete without drawing attention to the medical efforts of real or imagined women. It is certainly of note that a woman’s opinions on medicine could be held in such high regard. It is also evident that the distinction between men and women, in practice, was not nearly as polar as the medical texts themselves would suggest.48 History of Graeco-Roman Medicine,” in Medicine in Society: Historical Essays, ed. A. Wear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 15-58.

44 Heinrich von Staden, “Author and Authority: Celsus and the Construction of a Scientific Self,” in Tradición e innovación de a medicina Latina de la antigüedad y de la Alta Edad Medica, ed. M.E. Vazquez Bujan (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1994), 103-17, and “Anatomy as Rhetoric: Galen on Dissection and Persuasion,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50 (1995): 47-66.

45 F.P. Retief and L. Cilliers, “The Healing Hand: The Role of Women in Graeco-Roman Medicine,” Acta Theologica 26, no. 2 (2006): 165-188 accept that these women, such as Sotira, Salpe, Lais, Elephantis were real, practising physicians. Flemming, Medicine, 41 rejects this, drawing attention to the common practice of pseudonymity in the tradition. She does not, however, deny that the information was originally derived from women. There are a number of inscriptions dedicated to women participating in medical practice, although it is often difficult to determine their precise role. See CIL 9720, CIL 2.497, CIL 6.7581, CIL 6.9619. See also Juvenal, Satire, 2.141 and Martial, Epigrams,.

11.60 and 11.71 for female physicians.

46 Elephantis: Pliny, Natural History, 28.23.81; Lais: Pliny, Natural History, 28.23, 81, 82; Olympias: Pliny, Natural History, 20.89, 225, 28.77.246, 253; Salpe: Pliny, Natural History, 28.7.38, 23.82, 32.47.135, 51.150, 80.262; Sotira: Pliny, Natural History, 28.23.83.

47 Flemming, Medicine, 133.

48 See also Soranus, Gynaecology, 1.3-4 on midwives. For inscriptions referring to midwives see CIL 6.4458, 6.6325, 6.6647, 6.8192, 6.8207, 6.8947-

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College The argument that women were subordinate to men in Roman society, in the sense that man was taken as the model, and women as the inferior, opposite, version of him, is not concordant with the extant evidence. Whilst under the law, the power of the paterfamilias and the harsh adultery proscriptions against women appear overwhelming, it is vital to note that these laws are not reflective of a lived reality and that men, too, were heavily subjectified.49 It is easy, in reading the law with the preconceived notion that women were subordinated, to find evidence to support this position. However, to do so would be to obfuscate much detail. Women do not appear as men’s “other” in Roman law, and their fluctuating role can be quite clearly gleaned. Likewise, women’s ideological portrayals do not conform to the passive/active dichotomy that has often been read into texts such as Livy’s. In separate spheres, at separate times, it is clear that the characterisation of women could comfortably move about, causing little to no anxiety. Women were sometimes passive and sometimes active; sometimes they remained in the home, and sometimes they directly participated within the public sphere. These changes in women’s roles were generally invoked for rhetorical purposes, but their very inclusion within fundamentally ideological texts shows that this was an accepted state of affairs, even amongst the very conservative. The medical texts do give the strongest impression of the idea of antagonistic comparisons between men and women in their description of the physical body. Yet when this discourse is contrasted with the relative authority a woman’s name had with regards to medicine and the space considered in which these texts operated, it becomes clear that they should not be treated as direct evidence for a stagnant conception of women.

8949, 6.9720-5, 6.37810. On their social status see Codex Iustinianeus, 6.43.3.

49 Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 269-276.

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Proceedings of the Classical Association of South Affrica, sup. 2 (2007): 29-48.

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Lacquer, Thomas. Making Sex: Gender and Body from the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge, Mass. And London: Harvard University Press, 1990.

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Mass Communication, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

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Neglecting Byzantine Bureaucracy Jacob Hane, Hamilton College, Class of 2022

Abstract

During his reign as Byzantine Emperor, Constantine XII published a number of guides on Byzantine affairs. His topics range from the ceremonial aspects of the Byzantine government to foreign policy concerning both local and distant people.

In this essay, I explore one such text, De Administrando Imperio. In it, Constantine covers the affairs of the state, focusing on geo-politics and history. Yet, despite supposedly writing on the affairs of the state, Constantine neglects covering topics concerning the functions of Byzantine bureaucracy. I argue that this neglecting of bureaucracy is rooted in three main reasons: Constantine views military offices as more important than civilian; Constantine views bureaucratic offices as ceremonial more so than practical; and Constantine allows his own ego to interfere in his writings.

After 32 years of regencies and co-rulerships in Byzantium, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus ascended to the throne in 945 CE following a successful coup. Marked by military and economic success, Constantine’s reign ushered in a brief golden age. During his tenure as emperor of Byzantium, he wrote a number of handbooks on running the empire so that his son, Romanos II, could rule with his father’s wisdom from beyond the grave. These handbooks, including De Administrando Imperio and De Ceremoniis, are set up to provide a fascinating roadmap to Byzantine government and Byzantium’s place in the medieval world.

The collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and with it the dismantling of the Roman military force, left Byzantium at a crossroads for survival. In order to survive, Byzantium adopted new diplomatic methods for foreign affairs.1 Rome had an extensive bureaucratic network of officials radiating from the capital to each of the provinces, yet with the advent of Constantine I’s reign, these offices split into two divisions: “militares and civiles.”2 The “militares” offices were concerned with the upkeep and functions of the military; these positions included offices such as generals, captains, and other military advisers and commanders.3 Meanwhile, the offices of the “civiles” focused on taxation, city upkeep, and other civilian affairs; these positions included offices such as tax collectors and magistrates.4 Thus, the change in political circumstances forced the Byzantine bureaucracy to adapt. Diplomacy with both external and internal contenders rose to the forefront of the Byzantine political strategy, culminating in the establishment of the Master of the Offices – or “magister officiorum” – under Diocletian and Constantine.5 The foundation of the Master of the Offices demonstrates the importance of the bureaucratic process in the new East1 Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 5.

2 Arthur E. R. Boak and James E. Dunlap, Two Studies In Later Roman And Byzantine Administration, vol. 14, Humanistic Series (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924), 21.

3 Boak and Dunlap, Two Studies, 21.

4 Ibid. 21.

5 Luttwak, The Grand Strategy, 5; Boak and Dunlap, Two Studies, 24.

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ern Roman, or Byzantine, administration. The Master of the Offices served as the chief of staff to the Byzantine emperor, undertaking responsibilities such as overseeing the “secretarial bureaus,” heading the Praetorian Guard, managing the “court ushers,” along with supervising numerous smaller bureaucratic and ceremonial functions.6 In time, however, the court bureaucrats grew in number. By Constantine VII’s reign, the number of honorable offices grew to 18 within the Byzantine system.7 Furthermore, these offices, which oversaw a majority of Byzantium’s internal functions, received high salaries for their work as bureaucrats. In fact, Nicolas Oikonomides, author of “Title and Income at the Byzantine Court,” references Bishop Liutprand’s experience in observing Constantine VII pay his officials.8 With the collapse of the curiales – otherwise known as the city councils – and the diminishing presence of ancient, provincial families, imperial service to the state offered the most efficient way to gain wealth and status.9 These offices appear to undertake important roles in managing the Byzantine Empire. Despite the fact that Byzantium’s bureaucracy is a definitive feature of both its survival and evolution as an empire, Constantine’s handbook De Administrando Imperio lacks any substantial insight and advice regarding these bureaucratic features. He neglected to write on these bureaucratic offices for a number of reasons: he prioritized the importance of understanding generals, captains, and governors over urban bureaucrats; he viewed bureaucratic offices as ceremonial more so than practical; and his own ego limited his ability to accurately assess the crucial importance of Byzantine bureaucracy.

One primary reason Constantine focused the majority of his political advice on provincial military leaders is because of the emergence of the Theme System. Over the course of the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, Byzantine rulers divided Anatolia and Greece into provinces, each headed by a governor with both civilian and military control. Similar to feudalism, 6 Ibid. 28.

7 Ibid. 56.

8 Nicolas Oikonomides, “Title and Income at the Byzantine Court,” in Byzantine Court Culture from 829 to 1204, ed. Henry Maguire (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2016), 201.

9 Oikonomides, “Title and Income,” 206.

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College the emperor gave power to rural rulers in return for their loyalty – so long as they defend their land from foreign invaders.

This system was more centralized however, as upon the death of a viceroy, the province returned to the emperor’s dominion. The increasing predominance of this system caused Constantine to focus on military affairs. For instance, despite the numerous civilian offices, Constantine fails to mention them in his work. Constantine makes no mention of the “notarii, or court stenographers and secretaries,” despite the fact that these officials would have recorded the current political discussions inside the court assemblies.10 Constantine also makes no mention of judicial imperial positions and officials in his text. Nor does Constantine reference laws and functions of the judicial system itself, despite his predecessors’ numerous treatises on law in Byzantium, such as the Codex Justinianus or the Ecloga. His focus remains oriented towards his military advisers.

In providing Romanos and future emperors a guide in dealing with military officials as opposed to civilian officers, Constantine gave them an intellectual advantage; generals, as Luttwak explains in The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, were not “intellectuals.”11 Constantine maps out the behaviors of the military generals and provides historical context for future emperors to reference. For instance, Constantine discusses how the promotion of Eustathius to “deputy military governor” upset the “captain-general” Stauracius Platys, which ultimately caused “certain jealousies and broils [to arise] between them.”12 In arming Romanos with the attitudes of generals, Constantine provided insight into the lives of such leaders. Byzantine rulers depended on foreign aid and diplomacy in warfare. Outsmarting the generals effectively supplements De Administrando Imperio’s sections on foreign peoples, as emperors have the tools to understand and utilize the geo-political power of their neighbors and maintain authority and command over their military officials.

Constantine’s other work from his reign as emperor, De Ceremoniis, or the Book of Ceremonies, highlights his personal perspective on the ceremonial status of political offices in Byzantium. The book itself concerns the pomp and circumstance surrounding the offices as opposed to the actual functions of the offices. In doing this, Constantine manages to redefine each position and strip the political office of its power. Zoe Woodrow, in her dissertation at Durham University, breaks down De Ceremoniis into three sections in order to explain the ceremonial aspects of each office. In her discussion of religious ceremonies, Woodrow mentions that in the 6th Century, an “intensification of state ritual took place.”13 Simultaneously, she argues that the Empire’s increased emphasis on the ceremonial aspects of each bureaucratic office serves as an “attempt by the impe10 Boak and Dunlap, Two Studies, 65.

11 Luttwak, The Grand Strategy, 236.

12 Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperio, trans. Gy. Moravcsik and R. J. H. Jenkins (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2006), 241.

13 Zoe Antonia Woodrow, “Imperial Ideology in Middle Byzantine Court Culture: The Evidence of Constantine Porphyrogenitus’s De Ceremoniis” (PhD diss., Durham University, 2001), 26.

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rial authorities to strengthen that control [of the palace].”14 Thus, Constantine VII’s focus on ceremonial factors supplements his lack of explanation on bureaucratic functions, illustrating his desire for the consolidation of imperial power.

Therefore in neglecting to outline the specific bureaucratic functions of each office, Constantine reduces their political power to merely ceremonial, reducing their overall political power in the realm.

Furthermore, this consolidation of power plays directly into Constantine’s own ego. When considering the historical context, Constantine VII’s consolidation of power stems from his youth, when he lacked the agency to seize power and rule for himself. In leaving out critical information, and instead supplementing the direct power of offices with fabricated pomp in his work, Constantine reaffirmed the strength of his own office and eased his own mind. Constantine evolved from a secondary figure who lacks power into a dominant leader and hero of Byzantium. Likewise, the imposing image of imperial power through ceremonial regalia may have played into Constantine’s lack of discussion about his bureaucratic officials. The court culture of Byzantium mandates that the emperor take on a prestigious image during processions.15 This image of high imperial power may have contributed to Constantine’s own view that the office of the emperor supersedes all bureaucratic offices. Hence, he excluded commentary on bureaucracy, which further reaffirmed his self-image of greatness.

Meanwhile, within the court itself, the emperor ascended to the sole focal point, leading to further development that he is the Byzantine Empire – that the offices under him are irrelevant. In order to join the court, for instance, an individual would have to gain notoriety and favor from the emperor, as he alone would have the authority to uplift that person.16 This established a culture that entirely revolved around the status of the emperor. Likewise, the emperor had virtually total control of each rank in the court: “It is a characteristic of the system that a snap decision by the emperor could raise a man from the dust to the pinnacle of court.”17 In giving the emperor ultimate say in court decisions and establishing him as the heart of court life, Byzantine court culture created an atmosphere that over emphasizes the importance of the emperor and stripped away any societal power and image of courtiers.

The all-enveloping culture of feasts, holidays, and grandiose events further “reinforced a social psychology of dependence and imperial omnipotence.”18 Thus, with such a focus on the emperor as the pinnacle of life, everyone’s status inevitably came to belong to the emperor, which Constantine further highlights through his writings in De Ceremoniis.

There is also evidence within De Administrando Imperio that suggests Constantine adopted many of Byzantium’s bureaucratic successes as an emperor’s achievement. For instance, when Constantine discusses the creation of a new imperial barge during the reign of emperor Leo VI, he not only refers to Leo VI as “the glorious and most wise emper-

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College or,” but also says that Leo VI “constructed the galley.”19 Constantine makes no mention of the bureaucratic functions that transpire between Leo’s request for a ship and the construction of it: he mentions no tax collectors, builders, or architects, only his mandate to construct the ship. However, Constantine does mention the hierarchy of the ship’s crew. Yet, as he discusses navigating the appointment of captains and crewmen, he only reinforces the emperor’s identity as an absolute despotic ruler, furthering his own egotistic image of himself.20 Constantine does this once more in his recording of Diocletian’s reign as emperor. He explains that “Diocletian at once sent to the Chersonites bidding them to join him in war,” yet he does not mention which diplomatic agents Diocletian sent, nor the strategies used to garnish their support.21 Furthermore, in every circumstance, Constantine fails to credit his advisers and aids in his court, rending them obsolete in his guidebook. While Romanos could use his father’s texts to aid in foreign diplomacy and political literacy, he would still find no explanations for running council meetings, no advice on addressing political opponents within the court, and no suggestions on taxation for imperial projects.

Considering how vital these bureaucratic offices were in the upkeep of the Byzantine Empire, Constantine VII’s lack of commentary on the functions of state officials seems significant. Constantine divided De Administrando Imperio into four parts; as R. J. H. Jenkins explains in his introduction: the first two are focused on “foreign policy” and “diplomacy;” the third is “a comprehensive historical and geographical survey.”22 Meanwhile, the last part is primarily focused on “internal history, politics, and organization.”23 In each part, Constantine VII neglected to thoroughly explain the functions of bureaucracy, electing instead to focus on his accomplishments or the realm as a whole. Even in this final part of his book, the lack of references to offices despite his focus on administrative affairs highlights a significant problem in analyzing Constantine’s work: how can one analyze Constantine’s advice on bureaucratic offices if he makes no references to them? In fact, in the final six chapters of his work, which comprise part four, Constantine only references bureaucratic officials once as he discusses the chamberlains, or advisers, of emperors.24 Even in his discussion of the chamberlains, he makes no mention of their deeds nor does he expand upon the duties of their offices.

Furthermore, in the five other chapters in part four, Constantine mainly discusses the role military governors and noblemen have to play in the Byzantine Empire.25 The only other references to the Byzantine bureaucracy Constantine makes are to the offices of the protospatharios, which, while a court position, are offices designated to high-ranking generals.26 He gives virtually no acknowledgement of offices such as the rector or magister officiorum – offices that have purely civilian duties.

Thus he once more reinforced his preference for his military officials over his civilian officers.

Ultimately, De Administrando Imperio serves as a guide for his son Romanos II’s own reign as emperor. While it pro-

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vides good insight into foreign affairs, the book itself lacks the necessary information in regards to bureaucratic affairs due to Constantine VII’s preference for focusing on his military advisers, his evaluation of civilian officers as solely ceremonial, and his concern for his own imperial image. Hence, the lack of guidance in bureaucratic affairs makes the handbook worth studying. Unfortunately, Romanos died only a few years into his tenure as sole emperor, rendering any genuine assessment of De Administrando Imperio as a guidebook inconclusive.

From what is known about Romanos, he almost entirely left the affairs of state in Byzantium to his advisers.27 While his generals achieved great victories in foreign lands, Romanos resigned himself to an imperial image in Byzantine court culture, preferring a life of luxury over governing.28 Thus, in the end, perhaps Constantine did influence Romanos – in neglecting an analysis and explanation of the intricacies of office and instead focusing on the absolute power of the emperor, Constantine established that ruling should be about ceremony and image as opposed to strong leadership.

27 Timothy E. Gregory, “The Beginnings of the Macedonian Identity,” in A History of Byzantium, 2nd ed. (Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2011), 262.

28 Gregory, “Macedonian Identity,” 262.

This paper was originally written for Professor John Eldevik’s course History 236: Byzantine History. Many thanks to both Professor Eldevik for editing this paper, and the Hamilton College Writing Center for providing feedback as well.

Works Cited

Boak, Arthur E. R., and James E. Dunlap. Two Studies In Later Roman And Byzantine Administration. Vol. 14. Humanistic Series. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924.

Gregory, Timothy E. “The Beginnings of the Macedonian Identity.” In A History of Byzantium, 2nd ed., 242–64. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2011.

Kazhdan, Alexander P., and Michael McCormick. “The Social World of the Byzantine Court.” In Byzantine Court Culture from 829-1204, edited by Henry Maguire, 167–97. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2016.

Luttwak, Edward. The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.

Oikonomides, Nicolas. “Title and Income at the Byzantine Court.” In Byzantine Court Culture from 829 to 1204, edited by Henry Maguire, 199–215. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2016.

Porphyrogenitus, Constantine. De Administrando Imperio. Translated by Gy. Moravcsik and R. J. H. Jenkins. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2006.

Woodrow, Zoe Antonia. “Imperial Ideology in Middle Byzantine Court Culture: The Evidence of Constantine Porphyrogenitus’s De Ceremoniis.”

PhD diss., Durham University, 2001.

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Poets and Politics:

13th Century Florentine Politics and Roman Authors in Dante’s Purgatorio Angus Wilson, University of King’s College, Class of 2022

Abstract

Poets and Politics: 13th Century Florentine Politics and Roman Authors in Dante’s Purgatorio follows the lives of the Roman historical personalities that Dante alludes to in his Purgatory Canticle. Dante goes so far as to place pagans in what is typically considered an entirely Christian section of the Commedia - why? This paper explores how Dante’s close engagement in the political ethics of his own time drove his allusions to Roman poets and politicians, and how those Roman figures permeate the structure of the poem.

“So, from the time that Juvenal came down / to dwell among us on the fringe of Hell, / and made your feeling for me plain to see, / my own good will to you have gripped me more / than for any person yet unseen” (Dante, Purgatorio. Transl.

Mandelbaum. XXII.13-17).

The doctrine of Purgatory in Dante’s Purgatorio, as an after-life world of purification, provides a connecting link between earth and heaven. As a device, Purgatory allows Dante to insist that moral virtue and politics reconnect. It provides a poetic structure for exploring the states of being beyond the political life of 13th century Florence. Throughout the Commedia, Florentine politics are a dominant justification for many of Dante’s decisions. His rationale for the introduction of Roman pagans into Purgatorio is, however, less obvious, since the category of Purgatory traditionally requires Christian faith as a prerequisite. Dante considers three factors in the admission of Roman figures into Purgatory: whether they denounce vice and are virtuous; whether they are republican; and, critically, whether they die in the resistance of tyranny – in Dante’s view, a type of martyrdom. Dante’s political commentary is a subtle, but critical, element in determining the specific reasons for the presence of each individual historical personality. There are four significant Roman figures: Cato, Virgil, Statius, and Juvenal. Dante’s use of Juvenal in Canto 22 of Purgatorio allows him to further demonstrate his motivation for the introduction of pagan figures into Purgatory. Juvenal is an unassuming yet central figure in the text, and is used by Dante to give focus to his argument concerning the entrance of pagans into Purgatory.

In order to understand the political motivations for Dante’s placement of the Roman figures throughout the text, we must recall Dante’s political views. Dante was born in Florence during a time of civil war between the Guelfs, who supported an increase in Papal influence in Florence, and the Ghibellines, supporters of the Holy Roman Empire. Dante supported the Guelfs as he became more politically active in his early thirties, but broke off his support following the abdication of Pope Celestine V and Pope Boniface VIII’s subsequent election in late

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1294, as Boniface VIII proved to be a corrupt leader.1 In 1295, the Papacy began to squeeze Florence for funds, confiscating 80,000 Florins from the city’s finances - a great deal of money at the time.2 Boniface VIII’s corruption was a turning point for Dante in his attitude towards the intervention of the Church in the Florentine state, leading to his ceasing to engage in partisan politics between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, and his beginning his activities as a political independent.3 After the death of Dante’s muse Beatrice in 1290, Dante began to study philosophy seriously. By 1295 he had developed a belief in the superiority of a political system interlinked with an ethical code.4 Prior to the ascension of Pope Boniface VIII, that would have meant a close collaboration with the Church, given the Church’s predominant moral and political authority in Catholic Europe. Once the Papacy proved lacking in political ethics (by way of the aforementioned financial confiscation), Dante’s attitude shifted. He maintained a firm belief in Catholic doctrine, but not in the Church’s right to unilateral political control. Following his disenchantment with Papal policy, Dante entered political life independently as one of Florence’s six administrators.5 His attitudes were characterized by “moderation, combined with hostility towards aristocratic and papal interference in the government of Florence.”6 Dante was hostile to any kind of tyranny, and supportive of an independent republican system led by virtuous political figures.

Dante’s vision of the politically virtuous republican who resists tyranny informs his use of the Roman figures in the Commedia. The characteristics Dante uses to determine the selection of the Roman figures into Purgatory are specific. First among them is virtue; for Dante, virtue is tied to a belief in Aristotelian ethics – in this context, an understanding of virtue as a goal determined by the establishment of an individual moral exemplar, and that any emotion can be translated into 1 John Scott, Dante’s Political Purgatory, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996) 7.

2 Scott 10.

3 Ibid. 87.

4 Ibid. 12.

5 Ibid. 7.

6 Ibid. 14.

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College virtue – virtue being the overarching goal of human ethics (Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1.9.17-18). The denunciation of vice is an important part of this. That Dante chooses the denouncing of vice as a criterion of inclusion is in line with the nature of the Commedia; condemnation of sin is a significant part of the work, and therefore a trait important to the author.

Dante’s republicanism is the second characteristic; the only pagans to enter Purgatory are republicans whose ethics were intertwined with their politics, resulting in their lives being lost in their resistance of tyranny. This resistance must be made to the point of death. Any lesser sacrifice is insufficient for Dante, as it would fail to demonstrate the Church’s doctrinal virtue of fortitude. This attachment to Catholic moral doctrine is in line with Dante’s vision of politics as ideally interlinked with an ethical code.

Cato is the first Roman figure to appear in Purgatory.

While Cato’s placement on the outskirts of Mount Purgatory is doubtlessly related to the text’s emphasis on “reciprocity and exchange” between the figures of Brutus and Cassius in the center of Hell, he must also stand alone.7 His placement also has an individual significance beyond a reciprocal relationship with other characters. This individual significance is in Cato’s political stance; in his time, Cato possessed the virtue that Dante praises: “He was as a man possessed by an inspiration about all virtue; and he loved exceedingly that different sort of goodness connected with justice which is not bent or stretched to grace or clemency.” (Plutarch The Life of Cato Minor 4.1). For Dante, Cato’s unwillingness to compromise politically demonstrates an important link between his politics and his ethics.

Cato was a stonewall republican during the civil wars between Caesar and Pompey. When Julius Caesar rose to power, Cato was bold enough to warn the senate that Caesar had plans for his own rise to a dictatorship (Plut. Cat. Mi. 33.3). Cato’s death was a sacrifice to the republican ideal; even the act of his suicide was to deny the tyrant (Caesar) the opportunity to politicize any offer of clemency (Plut. Cat. Mi. 4.1). That his death was a suicide should not consign Cato to the seventh circle of the Inferno, as it otherwise would. First, Cato’s suicide was one of honor; for the Romans, a suicide of pudor (shame, decency), a suicide that acknowledges “a catastrophic collapse in social or political standing. […] It was pudor that did for Cato.”8 Secondly, Cato’s suicide took place prior to the “Medieval view that the individual human life is understood as a ‘fief’ […] his suicide was an affirmation [of his principles]…”9 With a fief being understood to be something within the control of the individual, Cato’s suicide can be seen as not, in fact, a suicide at all: rather, it was closer to a martyrdom. Hence, Dante’s reference to his death is complimentary: He goes in search of liberty. All know – who gave their life for that – how dear it is.

You know yourself. For, dying in that cause, 7 Thomas Curran, “Cato of Utica in Limbo and Purgatory,” Recherché, accessed March 29, 2019. https://xn--recherch-i1a.com/cato-of-utica-in-limbo-and-purgatory/.

8 Anthony Everitt, Augustus, (London: Random House, 2007) 37.

9 Curran Cato of Utica.

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death had, at Utica, no sting for you. (Dante, Purgatorio.

Transl. Kirkpatrick. I.1.71-74) Dante’s applause of Cato’s suicide displays a correlation to the human virtue of fortitude, as described in the Catechism: “[Fortitude] disposes one even to renounce and sacrifice his life in defense of a just cause” (Catechism 3.1.1.7.1.1808).

Therefore, Cato has Aristotelian virtue, and demonstrated zealous devotion to a free republic through his death.

Virgil is another important figure throughout the text. Virgil does not enter Purgatory in any permanent capacity, leaving the text in Canto 30. Virgil, like Cato, lived during both a republic and a dictatorship. Virgil’s virtue is fulfilled in the theological sense by his Fourth Eclogue, in which he apparently predicts the birth of Christ: That boy will assume a godly life He will see gods and heroes united And he himself will be seen of them And he will rule a world pacified by his fatherly virtues.

(Virgil Eclogue IV 15-17) Dante undoubtedly read this, and it inspired his decision to allow Virgil to act as his guide throughout the first two Canticles. As to virtue in politics, Virgil did believe in republicanism. However, he never acted upon this belief when tyranny challenged his view. Virgil describes the intractability of his position as guide in the first Canto: “…I was sent to him / for his deliverance; the only road / I could have taken was the road I took” (Dante, Purgatorio. Transl. Mandelbaum. I.61-63). His failure to fulfill the prerequisite of self sacrifice in life cannot be reconciled in death. Virgil failed to support republicanism in life, as demonstrated by his most famous work. The Aeneid is, in part, a work of propaganda for the reign of the then new emperor, Augustus. Virgil was reluctant to accept the commission, and upon its completion, gave orders for the only manuscript to be destroyed upon his death, although this request was ignored (Suetonius Life of Vergil 39). These qualms must have indicated the pusillanimity of the poet’s principles to Dante.

Virgil, while he had principles, was unwilling to seriously resist oppression to the point of physical harm. This attitude is evident when Virgil attempts to reclaim his land that had since been colonized by Augustan soldiers after the defeat of Brutus and Cassius in Greece in 42 BCE: Virgil justly trusted in his poem, and in the friendship of certain powerful men, although he was bold enough to stand firm before the Centurion Arrius, that man — as he was a soldier — immediately assaulted him with sword in hand, at which time the poet himself hurried into flight, and that pursuit did not end until he had hurled himself into the river and in this manner had swum to the other bank. (Donatus Life of Virgil 261-263) We can be confident that Dante encountered the content of a biography of Virgil in some form, although at his time it was likely misattributed to Donatus rather than Suetonius.10 Therefore, Dante would also have known that Virgil received signifi10 Victoria Kirkham, “The Parallel Lives of Dante and Virgil” Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society 110, (1992): 241.

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College cant personal benefit from the tyranny of Augustus: However, he did not hesitate to accept the good things of someone who had been exiled when offered by Augustus.

He had nearly ten million sesterces out of the generosity of friends, and had a house in Rome on the Esquiline Hill adjoining the Gardens of Maecenas, although he might enjoy more often a withdrawal to Campania and Sicily. (Suet.

Vergil 6.12-13) However, Virgil still had some attachment to republican principles — and it is this contradiction between belief and action (pusillanimity) which causes his stay in Purgatory to be impermanent. Virgil demonstrated his republicanism in his praise of Cato: “The righteous are set apart, with Cato as their lawgiver.”11 Despite being a republican, Virgil was only intellectually resistant to tyranny, and was reluctant to make the ultimate sacrifice for his belief in a republic. He was compromising on his principles. By failing to make the link between his ethics and his politics, Virgil is kept out of Purgatory, and consigned to Limbo.

Statius allows Dante to demonstrate the requirements for entry into Purgatory by exclusion. Statius does not fulfill the requirements of political virtue that Dante requires of a pagan, but he does fulfill a certain theological virtue. Virgil, a figure who takes on the role of a pagan prophet for Christianity in the text, is greatly admired by Statius: “I speak of the Aeneid; when I wrote / verse, it was mother to me, it was nurse, / my work, without it, would not weigh an ounce” (Dante, Purgatorio. Transl. Mandelbaum. XXI.97-102). This admiration allows Statius to follow in Virgil’s footsteps, as evidenced by his own epic poetry – texts written in clear admiration and imitation of Virgil’s own Aeneid.12 For example, Statius’ Thebaid is written in twelve books, and in the meter of dactylic hexameter, like the Aeneid. Statius directly evokes Virgil’s poetry as a standard for him at the conclusion of his own epic poem: “Live, I pray; nor test you the divine Aeneid / But follow from afar, and revere its footsteps always.” (Statius Thebaid 12.816-817). However, bar Statius’ love for Virgil as a means to virtue, the poet fails to be virtuous politically - like Cato or Juvenal. His faith (while historically unproven) is entirely pusillanimous; he did not join other Christians in their persecution under Domitian: “…when Domitian persecuted them, / my own laments accompanied their grief;” (Dante, Purgatorio. Transl. Mandelbaum.

XXII.83-84). He even hid his faith, saying that “…out of fear, I was a secret Christian / and, for a long time, showed myself as pagan” (Dante, Purgatorio. Transl. Mandelbaum. XXII.9091). He was not a martyr to his principles; he did not die for his faith or any other principle, and there is no evidence of republicanism. He appears to have capitulated to the reign of Domitian, by agreeing to give a public performance at the Emperor’s behest: Juvenal mocks him, saying: Of the loveable Thebaid, when Statius made the city happy And promised a day: that man affected the rapt souls with 11 Everitt 236.

12 Teolinda Barolini, “Purgatorio 21,” Digital Dante, accessed April 4, 2019. https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/purgatorio/purgatorio-21/.

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so much charm, And he is heard with such great pleasure of the crowd.

But although he broke the bleachers with his verse, He’d starve, unless he sold his virgin Agave to Paris. (Juvenal Satires 7.83-87) All these failures only emphasize his eventual conversion.

Christianity in any form is a sufficient condition to enter Purgatory. Through the character of Statius, Dante justifies the power of Christian faith by displaying how it surpasses all other virtues, while at the same time outlining what a pagan needs to do to enter Purgatory by negation.

Juvenal is the most unambiguous demonstration of how a pagan enters Purgatory. He most closely demonstrates every trait that Dante required of Cato, every trait that Virgil failed, and those that Statius bypassed, except for dying in resistance to tyranny. This allows Dante to further clarify the necessary devotion to one’s political principles. As explained by Virgil, Juvenal is consigned to Limbo: “So, from the time that Juvenal came down / to dwell among us on the fringe of Hell,” (Dante, Purgatorio. Transl. Kirkpatrick. XXII.13-14). By explaining, even as an aside, that Juvenal is in Limbo, Dante further articulates the qualifications for a pagan’s entry into Purgatory.

Juvenal was virtuous. His sixteen Satires all focus on the denouncing of vice. He was “a fast friend to virtue, and an irreconcilable enemy to vice in every shape…Juvenal may be looked upon as one of those rare meteors, which shone forth even in the darkness of Heathenism.”13 Juvenal was on poor terms with the Emperor Domitian, whose power he resisted.

His resistance to tyranny saw him exiled to Egypt at the age of eighty.14 However, this sacrifice for resistance to tyranny is not sufficient for Dante, especially as the elderly Juvenal returned to living under tyranny in Rome after Domitian’s death.15 Juvenal did not sacrifice his life for the sake of his resistance to tyranny. Therefore, although Juvenal comes close to fulfilling Dante’s requirements for entrance to Purgatory, he is consigned to Limbo.

Dante has a clear affinity for the Roman figures in Purgatorio.16 Linking ethics and politics, these historical figures all represent conflict between republicanism and dictatorship. The figures Dante chose either survived a period of civil war (as was the case for Cato and Virgil), or lived through the reign of a tyrant so terrible that questions were raised about the legitimacy of autocratic rule (both Statius and Juvenal lived under Domitian). Dante is presented with the perfect historical circumstances through which to communicate his own political theory: republican politics must be conjoined with Aristotelian virtue to avoid tyranny and create the ideal government. Juvenal shared this ideal of an ethical democracy. Dante’s writings are reminiscent of Juvenal’s Satires, both consisting of harsh and explicit condemnations of vice in their societies. Their commentaries are thorough, and none, no matter how influ13 Martin Madan, Juvenal and Persius - Introduction (Oxford: Scholar Select, 1850) 3-4.

14 Ibid. 3.

15 Ibid. 3.

16 Scott 180.

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College ential, are safe from criticism. By not allowing someone so like himself into Purgatory, Dante reinforces the necessity for constant virtue in politics, as emphasized in Cantos 22 and 23 of Purgatorio. These Cantos, taking place in the Sixth Terrace (Gluttony), bear a striking resemblance to Juvenal’s Satire VI. This may appear to be a numerical coincidence, but further parallels are found upon investigation. Most notably, the two Cantos have emphasis placed first on the virtuousness of Roman women (Dante, Purgatorio XXII.145-154), and second on the debauchery of contemporary Florentine women – an invective delivered by Foresi Donati (Dante, Purgatorio XXIII.85-112).

Juvenal’s Sixth Satire is a critique of the same issue: the debauchery of contemporary Roman women, and their disingenuous marriages. Dante emphasizes the importance of political virtue in entering Purgatory by mirroring a portion of Juvenal’s socio-political writings. Dante’s social commentary and denouncement of vice takes many forms, including the political.

Even though Purgatory is a meaningless theological category for the pagan, as a setting for post-mortem torments, the medium of the Roman figures of the past allows Dante the opportunity to connect virtue and politics. Purgatorio provides Dante with a doctrinal means of insisting that particular political actions have eternal ethical consequences.

I want to extend my gratitude to Dr. E. King for his support throughout the formulation of this paper, to Dr. T. Curran for his insightful scholarly input on the Commedia, and to Dr. J. Mitchell, Dr. C. Grundke, and Dr. E. Diamond for their support and recommendations for my Greek and Latin translations of the original sources in this essay.

Works Cited

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam Books, 1995.

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Translated by Robin Kirkpatrick. New York: Penguin Books, 2013.

Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Translated by Richard McKeon. New York: Modern Library, 2001.

Barolini, Teodolinda. “Purgatorio 21.” Digital Dante - Columbia University Libraries. https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/purgatorio/purgatorio-21/ (accessed April 4, 2019).

Curran, Thomas. “Cato of Utica in Limbo and Purgatory.” Recherché. https://xn--recherch-i1a.com/cato-of-utica-in-limbo-and-purgatory/ (accessed March 29, 2019) Donatus Auctus, Aelius. Life of Vergil. Translated by the author.

Everitt, Anthony. Augustus. London: Random House, 2007.

Jackson, John. The Aeneid - Introduction. Oxford: Wordsworth Editions,1995.

Juvenal. The Sixteen Satires. Translated by the author.

Kirkham, Victoria. “The Parallel Lives of Dante and Virgil.” Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society 110, (1992): 233-253.

Libreria Editrice Vaticana. “Catechism of the Catholic Church.” Vatican.va. http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM#fonte (accessed 11 April 2019).

Madan, Martin. Juvenal and Persius - Introduction. Oxford: Scholar Select, 1850.

Plutarch. The Life of Cato Minor. Translated by the author.

Scott, John. Dante’s Political Purgatory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.

Statius. Thebaid. Translated by the author.

Suetonius. The Life of Vergil. Translated by the author.

Vergil. The Eclogues of Vergil. Translated by the author.

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Redefining Genre: Elegy and Epistolarity in Ovid’s Heroides

Charlotte Houghton, Macalester College, Class 2020

Abstract

Ovid’s Heroides are a fascinating collection of epistolary poems “written” by mythical women to the lovers who have forsaken them. This article examines the letter from Sappho to her lover, Phaon, and considers how Ovid subverts traditional Roman literary expectations in the poem. In the poems, Ovid combines Roman elegiac and epistolary conventions to create a new genre. The poem presents Sappho’s story in a Roman light; in doing so, it also complicates her narrative, as Ovid adds and changes details to fit his creative requirements. Thus, I also examine the interplay between Ovid’s and Sappho’s voices in the poem, and how the poem interacts with ideas of traditional Roman gender roles and relationships. Ultimately, Ovid uses the character of Sappho to illustrate the complexities and irregularities of his new genre, creating a narrator that, much like his poem, does not conform to expectations. When we interpret the poem through this lens, we gain a better understanding of what makes Ovid’s Heroides a unique collection of poetry.

Ovid’s Heroides are a collection of epistolary poems written by mythical heroines to the men, and lovers, who abandoned them. While generally a fascinating collection of poems, the fifteenth, a letter from Sappho to Phaon, is particularly interesting. The poem raises questions about Ovid’s intentions and choice of subject: why does he write using Sappho’s voice?

Why is she the only historical character in his Heroides? We may never know why Ovid chose to write about Sappho, and his writing still confounds and calls into question our understanding of Roman literature. In the ways Ovid uses genre and authorial voice in Sappho’s story in the fifteenth Heroides, he subverts traditional Roman literary expectations in his writing.

Understanding the importance of the Heroides is crucial to interpreting Ovid’s writing in the Sappho epistle. Written in the early Augustan age, between 20 and 13 BCE,1 Ovid conceives of the Heroides as something new: “tibi composita cantetur Epistola voce: Ignotum hoc aliis ille novavit opus” (Ars Amatoria, III.345-6, quotes in original)2 “Let a Letter be sung for you in a composed voice: That one [Ovid] renewed this work, unknown to others.”3 The Heroides are grouped into the single epistles, in which a mythological woman writes to the man who abandoned her, and the double epistles, a correspondence between the couple.4 They are thought-provoking and avant-garde, an old story retold in a new way, as Ovid claims in his Ars Amatoria.

Many facets of the poems and their composition are unusual: while poetic letters had been written before, Ovid appropriates “situations and characters from mythology and legend.”5 One 1 Laurel Fulkerson, “The Heroides: Female Elegy?,” In A Companion to Ovid, ed. Peter E. Knox (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell 2009), 79.

2 Ovid, Ars Amatoria, ed. T. E. Page (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979).

3 All translations are the author’s, unless otherwise noted.

4 Fulkerson, “The Heroides: Female Elegy?,” 78.

5 Maurice P. Cunningham, “The Novelty of Ovid’s Heroides,” Classical

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hypothesis of what makes the Heroides unique is that Ovid relies on his rhetorical training: he manipulates the suasoria, committing the popular rhetorical form to verse.6 At the time, the suasoria was a rhetorical exercise widely used throughout Roman schools, as a way to practice deliberative and persuasive speaking: a student would give advice to a historical or mythological figure at a difficult time in their life.7 But Ovid is merely influenced by suasoriae; instead of “showing the character of the person addressed,”8 Ovid focuses on the motives or feelings of the author. Additionally, very few words of wisdom are given in the letters—instead, the authors curse the addressees, begging them to come back. Influenced by his rhetorical training, Ovid creates a new form of letter in the Heroides, combining suasoriae with poetry.

A second proposal is that the Heroides are an ignotum opus (unknown work) because they were written to be performed on-stage. We can consider whether Ovid wrote the Heroides as “lyric-dramatic monologues to be presented on the stage with music and dancing,” based on their structure and evidence from Ovid’s other works.9 In many ways, the style and composition of the poems often fail to persuade when read as letters, but are much more convincing when imagined as live monologues: perhaps the poems were composed for the purpose of live performance, not publication.10 Thus, the subversive and unexpected nature of the Heroides is how they transform Roman elegy (a primarily written genre11) into something suitable for Philology 44, no. 2 (1949), 100. https://www.jstor.org/stable/267476.

6 Cunningham, “Novelty,” 100.

7 “Controversia and Suasoria,” Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed.Thomas O. Sloane (Oxford University Press, 2006), http://www.oxfordreference.com. ezproxy.macalester.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780195125955.001.0001/acref9780195125955-e-51?rskey=OrVRs1&result=1.

8 Cunningham, “Novelty,” 104.

9 Ibid. 100.

10 Ibid. 102-3.

11 “Elegy,” The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, ed. M. C. Howat-

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The Sappho poem, however, differs from the other Heroides in several significant ways. Out of all the other authors in the Heroides, Sappho is the only historical character. And like Ovid, she is a poet. Ovid draws on Sappho’s poetry throughout the epistle: he mentions other women in Sappho’s life, Anactoria and Atthis, and her brother Charaxus, all of whom feature in Sappho’s surviving fragments.12 Although Sappho was a real person, there are also elements of fiction in her story, especially as it appears in Ovid. Her love for Phaon, a mythical ferryman beloved by Aphrodite, first appears in Greek Attic comedy:13 there is no evidence from her surviving poems that Sappho ever desired anyone named Phaon. But much like in Menander’s play, Ovid’s Sappho, heartbroken by Phaon, encounters a Naiad, who tells her to seek out the Leucadian cliffs, from which Deucalion once threw himself in an attempt to escape heartbreak like Sappho’s. As the Naiad says, nec mora, versus amor fugit...Deucalion igne levatus est (without delay, love fled backwards...Deucalion was relieved of the fire) (Heroides, XV.169-70).14 This story about Sappho “renders her compatible with the logic of the mythical framework of the Heroides,” making her as suitable an author as Penelope or Dido.15 Sappho is the ideal subject, a combination of real and mythologized, for Ovid to subvert understandings and manipulate stories.

In the Sappho epistle, Ovid pushes the boundaries and expectations of the genres within which he writes. The poem, while composed as a letter, has very few traditional or expected epistolary touches. Sappho’s letter starts, not with the typical opening of a letter (aliquis alicui salutem dicit), but “in a very unusual fashion, with a series of questions.”16 While only a third of the Heroides begin with something bordering on a traditional greeting, the Sappho epistle is only one of two poems in the collection to begin with questions, making it unusual among the Heroides.17 The character of Sappho dispensson, 3rd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2011), http://www.oxfordreference. com.ezproxy.macalester.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780199548545.001.0001/ acref-9780199548545-e-1129?rskey=aKoPy4&result=10.

12 Thea S. Thorsen, Ovid’s Early Poetry: From his single Heroides to his Remedia Amoris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 51.

13 “Phaon,” The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth. 3rd ed. rev. (Oxford University Press, 2005), http://www. oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780198606413.001.0001/acref9780198606413-e-4932?rskey=F5y2A4&result=3.

14 Ovid, Heroides, ed. T. E. Page (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963).

15 Thorsen, Ovid’s Early Poetry, 48.

16 Albert R. Baca, “Ovid’s Epistle from Sappho to Phaon (Heroides 15),” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association (1971), 32, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2935935.

17 The following poems all clearly show a relationship to the traditional epistolary greeting: from Penelope to Odysseus (I), Hanc tua Penelope lento tibi mittit (your Penelope sends this to you, [being] slow); Briseis to Achilles (III), Quam legis, a rapta Briseide littera venit (the letter which you read came from stolen Briseis); Phaedra to Hippolytus (IV), salutem mittit Amazonio Cressa puella viro (the Cretan girl sends greetings to her Amazonian man); Laodamia to Protesilaus (XIII), Mittit et optat amans, quo mittitur, ire

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es with the traditional, expected opening, instead launching straight into what she has to say. In this way, Ovid shows the emotion present in the poem; Sappho cannot contain herself long enough to greet her ex-lover in the traditional, four-word, manner. Sappho herself also notes one other irregularity in her letter, when she says to Phaon, non mandata dedi, neque enim mandata dedissem ulla, nisi ut nolles inmemor esse mei. (Heroides, XV.1056) I did not give [you] any instructions, nor would I have given you Any, except that you don’t want to be forgetful of me.

Mandata (lit. “things having been sent” or “instructions”) were typically tasks given to or requested from friends abroad, and served to strengthen and maintain a relationship. In practice, “the rhetoric associated with mandata...aims at inserting particulars into the texture of an ongoing relationship,” creating a sense of being involved in each other’s lives despite the distance.18 But Sappho does not include any real mandata in her letter to Phaon: all she asks is that Phaon not forget her, a simple task at which he still fails. By mentioning mandata, Ovid creates a letter in poem form; but he then diverts from epistolary conventions by excluding mandata, challenging what a letter should be. Thus, the poem is unsuccessful as a traditional letter, and doesn’t have the expected outcome.

Reinforcing these epistolary irregularities, Sappho occasionally refers to Phaon in the third, rather than second, person: the letter is addressed to him, but she is talking about, rather than to, him. Sappho spends much of the letter telling Phaon about her life since he has left, a conventionality in Roman letters. However, the content of Sappho’s story is not typical for a letter. Sappho is miserable, and she frequents their old haunts, the pressas caespitis herbas (pressed-down blades of grass) where they spent their time, searching for a way to forget about him (Heroides, XV.149-50). She even warns Phaon’s new lovers, saying nec vos decipiant blandae mendacia linguae! quae dicit vobis, dixerat ante mihi. (Heroides, XV.55-6) Let not the lies of a flattering tongue cheat you!

Those things he says to you, he had said to me before.

She is concerned about Phaon’s ability to be faithful, saying hunc ne pro Cephalo raperes, Aurora, timebam (I worried, Aurora, that you abducted him for Cephalus; Heroides, XV.87).

While she worries that Phaon has been stolen away, Sappho denies him any agency in this scenario; rather, Aurora, the subject, has power over him to do what she wants. Furthermore, Aurora might not be the only woman that desires Phaon: hunc si conspiciat quae conspicit omnia Phoebe, iussus erit somnos continuare Phaon; hunc Venus in caelum curru vexisset eburno. (Heroides, salutem...Laudamia viro (Laodamia the lover sends greetings to her man, and hopes they go where sent); and Hypermnestra to Lynceus (XIV), Mittit Hypermnestra de tot modo fratribus uni (Hypermnestra sends [this] to one of the brothers, once so many).

18 Peter White, Cicero in Letters: Epistolary Relations of the Late Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 24.

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College XV.89-91) If Phoebe, who observes all things, were to catch sight of him, Phaon will be compelled to continue his dreams; Venus in the heavens has carried him in [her] ivory chariot.

In these two descriptions, Phaon is a passive object, and the goddesses are the subjects. Literally, Phaon has no agency in any of these scenarios. By structuring the passages in this way, the character of Sappho reveals her feelings towards Phaon: he is not an active part of her life, grammatically or otherwise. For Sappho, Phaon is the object. Structurally relegating Phaon to a passive actor demonstrates Sappho’s perception of his passivity in the letter and the relationship. Because such narrative language is unusual for epistolary writing, Ovid uses it to signal that this is not a typical letter.

Along with deviating from traditional epistolary conventions, Ovid adapts the expectations of elegy in the Sappho epistle. Created in the Greek world, the Romans adapted it for love poetry,19 creating an elegiae flebile carmen (a tearful song of elegy; Heroides, XV.7). Traditionally, the (male) poet is “in love with a woman who is alternately generous and cruel,” but he, unable to live without her, is “forced to beg her for favors… proclaiming that his heart belongs to her.”20 Ovid structures the Sappho poem similarly to conventional elegy, but subverts several common assumptions: “the predominant pattern of the single Heroides at least is an exact reversal of that of Latin (love) elegy. For, in the Heroides, it is regularly the woman who grovels and humiliates herself.”21 The women are simultaneously the authors and the pursuers in these poems, and in making them so, Ovid upsets the traditional elegiac paradigm.

Indeed, Sappho begins by remarking: forsitan et quare mea sint alterna requiras carmina, cum lyricis sim magis apta modis. (Heroides, XV.5-6) Perhaps you even ask why my poems are alternating, When I am more suited to lyric verses.

Here, the character of Sappho comments that the meter she composes in has changed: rather than Sapphic stanzas, composed of hendecasyllabic lines, she now uses elegiac meter, in which dactylic hexameters and pentameters alternate to form couplets.22 From the start, the literary Sappho acknowledges the new meter. She intentionally embraces elegiac couplets, and, therefore, embraces the appropriate content of elegiac poetry. But despite this, she is still a woman, someone who is not supposed to be composing in elegiac couplets, begging for her lover’s attention. In the Heroides, Ovid uses the traditional Roman definition of elegy, but flips the author’s gender, subverting elegiac conventions even as he adheres to the appropriate subject matter.

By combining a Greek poetess and a Roman poetic style, Ovid creates something new and unexpected. Ovid changes Sappho’s story, romanizing her; this innovation is compounded by him telling a new side to Sappho’s story in the letter, one absent in her surviving corpus. When Ovid composes a letter by Sappho in a Roman style, he not only creates a new version of her story, but conflates himself with Sappho. We can see this fusion, this joint authorship, in the letter’s use of first person plural verbs. While first person plural verbs are often used instead of singular (for stylistic or metrical reasons), their use here can be attributed to Ovid acknowledging Sappho as author of the letter as well. Of particular note is the line scribimus, et lacrimis oculi rorantur obortis (we write, and our eyes are moistened with tears welling up; Heroides, XV.97). In this phrase, the act of letter-writing is attributed to both Sappho and Ovid. With both of them as authors, it becomes complicated, if not impossible, to separate when Sappho is writing from when Ovid is telling a story.

This joint authorship poses problems when creating a cohesive image of Sappho’s story in the poem. As the letter’s author says, iam canitur toto nomen in orbe meum (already my name is sung across the whole globe; Heroides, XV.28). But because they are both authors of the letter, it is hard to separate where Ovid is inhabiting the character of Sappho, telling her story, and where he is acting as a poet in his own right, embellishing and editing her story to fit his own creative ideal. Moreover, there are multiple purposes for writing the letter: “revisiting a famous story with a twist, and, within the story, having some effect.”23 But these purposes are not necessarily separable — in Sappho trying to change her story and make Phaon come back, Ovid rewrites the known story, confounds the reader’s expectations.24 The task of separating authors and purposes becomes nearly impossible, especially because “poet meets poet more directly in Heroides 15” than in the other Heroides.25 The female characters in the other Heroides are fictional, created by someone else. But Ovid brings Sappho into direct conversation with himself. Indeed, “at no other point in the Heroides is the Ovidian heroine as author more transparently the Ovidan author as heroine.”26 By making his heroine, a poet herself, the author of the poem alongside him, Ovid casts himself as the heroine alongside Sappho.

Ovid sees himself reflected in Sappho as she becomes an author of elegy, a male-dominated genre, and Ovid characterizes her as masculine. If Ovid is ultimately the one writing the story, then the letter is penned by a man, but read in the voice of a woman, refusing to be definitively gendered. Although “Sappho describes herself in vocabulary technically appropriate for a woman….[t]he context crosses over into male territory.”27 She is described with terms that aren’t applied to the other her-

19 “Elegy,” The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature.

20 Fulkerson, “The Heroides: Female Elegy?,” 82-3.

21 Ibid. 84.

22 “Meter, Greek,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome, ed, Michael Gagarin (Oxford University Press, 2010), http://www. oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195170726.001.0001/ acref-9780195170726-e-800?rskey=EJMzxE&result=2.

23 Fulkerson, “The Heroides: Female Elegy?,” 86.

24 Ibid. 86.

25 Thorsen, Ovid’s Early Poetry, 50.

26 Ibid. 50.

27 Pamela Gordon, “The Lover’s Voice in Heroides 15: Or, Why Is Sappho a Man?,” in Roman Sexualities, ed. Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 283.

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College oines, such as docta (learned, skilled; Heroides, XV.1.), she is totiens ingeniosa (so often clever; Heroides, XV.194), she is renowned for her music and poetry. Her beauty, a key characteristic for the women in the Heroides, is barely mentioned; instead, she is the exact opposite of beautiful: ecce, iacent collo sparsi sine lege capelli, nec premit articulos lucida gemma meos; veste tegor vili, nullum est in crinibus aurum… (Heroides, XV.73-5) Look at me! My hair lies disheveled upon my neck, without order, Nor does a shining jewel rest upon my knuckles; I’m covered in cheap cloth, there’s nothing gold in my hair...

Sappho does not conform to how women present themselves: she does not wear makeup or jewelry or expensive clothing.

In these ways, Ovid describes her as un-feminine. Choosing a woman who is not conventionally feminine makes it easier for her to inhabit the traditionally masculine role of elegiac pursuer. Additionally, Sappho is the active lover throughout the letter (sexually and otherwise), a masculine trait for the Romans.28 She reads her poems to Phaon and te plus solito lascivia nostra iuvabat (our fun pleased you more than usual), both of which suggest Sappho’s active participation in the relationship (Heroides, XV. 41; XV. 47). Moreover, the way Sappho describes Phaon shows her masculinization. Phaon is nec adhuc iuvenis, nec iam puer (not yet a youth, nor now a boy; Heroides, XV.93), but rather of anni quos vir amare potest (the years during which a man can love; Heroides, XV.86). All these descriptors are considered attractive or relevant to men.

Thus, “pursuing a pretty boy, Sappho conforms to the Greek stylistics of male sexual behavior”29 and Roman notions of sexual pursuit in her love for Phaon. But did Ovid do this intentionally, or is it a consequence of how the two authors’ voices have become entangled?

Sappho is in a unique, almost paradoxical position throughout the poem. As an elegiac poet, she is beholden to her fickle lover; but as the woman in an elegiac couple, she has power, she dictates the relationship. By making these opposing positions coexist in Sappho, Ovid does not conform to the expectations of elegy. Ovid creates a singularly complicated character who should not exist but does, and therefore defies every stereotype. So although Sappho is an abandoned lover, she is by no means a helpless one. She embraces Phaon as part of her romantic history, along with the Lesbian women before him. In the Heroides, “the laments of...Ovid’s other heroines stress not passion for the absent lover, but the predicament in which he has left her,” and that is what Sappho reflects on in

this poem.30 Although she feels abandoned, unable to live without Phaon, her reputation as a poet attests to her life beyond him. While all of “Ovid’s heroines possess a certain autonomy within their mythical contexts,”31 Sappho especially does. As she reiterates, her carmina (songs) have earned her fame the world over (Heroides, XV.28). Thus, while Phaon has forsaken her for his new Sicilian maids, her songs give her something more to live for. By drawing on Sappho’s poems, envisioning himself as Sappho, Ovid empowers Sappho; he gives her, uniquely among his heroines, a way out of her situation.

Throughout the poem, Ovid empowers Sappho via her story and the language itself. In the very first line, Ovid acknowledges Sappho’s reputation: she is described, before anything else, as studiosa.32 In doing so, he subverts the expected—in the rest of the Heroides, the women lament their lost lovers, while Sappho, although sad, is first and foremost a scholar. By focusing on her poems, Ovid conceives of Sappho as something beyond a forsaken lover, overturning the paradigm he establishes in the previous fourteen Heroides. She refuses to be defined by Phaon, as it would mar her reputation as a famous poet, reduce her to nothing more than a broken-hearted lover.

Thus, in perhaps the only way he can while still adhering to the rumors and myths around Sappho’s life, Ovid gives her an escape from the cycle that the rest of the heroines are trapped in.

Throughout the letter, Ovid continually deviates from Roman literary conventions. He sets out the known expectations of the genre he appropriates, before willfully overturning them.

The Sappho epistle is the epitome of Ovid’s new poetry, subversive at every turn. Sappho is both real and mythological, simultaneously the forsaken elegiac author and the unattainable, experienced elegiac woman, but with a man’s desires. She defies every stereotype, challenges every expectation. Ovid created this portrayal of Sappho to exemplify his new style of writing, which defies expectations itself — what subject and author could be better suited? In taking a historical figure, turning her into a character that reflects himself, Ovid empowers Sappho, giving her an agency she has long been denied. Perhaps what makes Ovid’s Heroides the most subversive is that his writing supports those without power, forcing his readers to confront their assumptions even as Ovid rewrites the stories.

30 Gordon, “Lover’s Voice,” 280.

31 R. Alden Smith, “Fantasy, Myth, and Love Letters: Text and Tale in Ovid’s Heroides,” Arethusa, 27, no. 2 (Spring 1994), 257, https://www.jstor. org/stable/26309648.

32 Baca, “Ovid’s Epistle from Sappho to Phaon,” 34.

28 For more information on Roman society and conception of gender roles, see Jonathan Walters “Invading the Roman Body” in Roman Sexualities (1997). Additionally, we should note that this active portrayal of Sappho could very well be intentional. In Roman society, tribades, or women who sexually desired other women, were often masculinized, especially in literature.

29 Gordon, “Lover’s Voice,” 285.

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College Works Cited

Baca, Albert R. “Ovid’s Epistle from Sappho to Phaon (Heroides 15).”

Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 102 (1971): 29-38. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2935935.

“Controversia and Suasoria.” Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, edited by Thomas O. Sloane. Oxford University Press, 2006. http://www.oxfordreference.com.ezproxy.macalester.edu/view/10.1093/ acref/9780195125955.001.0001/acref-9780195125955-e-51?rskey=OrVRs1&result=1.

Cunningham, Maurice P. “The Novelty of Ovid’s Heroides.” Classical Philology 44, no. 2 (1949): 100-6. https://www.jstor.org/stable/267476.

“Elegy.” The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, edited

by M. C. Howatson. 3rd ed. Oxford University Press, 2011. http:// www.oxfordreference.com.ezproxy.macalester.edu/view/10.1093/ acref/9780199548545.001.0001/acref-9780199548545-e-1129?rskey=aKoPy4&result=10.

Fulkerson, Laurel. “The Heroides: Female Elegy?” In A Companion to Ovid, edited by Peter E. Knox, 78-89. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Gordon, Pamela. “The Lover’s Voice in Heroides 15: Or, Why Is Sappho a Man?” In Roman Sexualities, edited by Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner, 274-91. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

“Meter, Greek.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome, edited by Michael Gagarin. Oxford University Press, 2010. http://www. oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195170726.001.0001/ acref-9780195170726-e-800?rskey=EJMzxE&result=2.

Ovid. Ars Amatoria, edited by T. E. Page. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979.

Ovid. Heroides, edited by T. E. Page. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.

“Phaon.” The Oxford Classical Dictionary, edited by Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth. 3rd ed. revised. Oxford University Press, 2005. http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/ acref/9780198606413.001.0001/acref-9780198606413-e-4932?rskey=F5y2A4&result=3.

Smith, R. Alden. “Fantasy, Myth, and Love Letters: Text and Tale in Ovid’s Heroides.” Arethusa, 27, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 247-273. https://www. jstor.org/stable/26309648.

White, Peter. Cicero in Letters: Epistolary Relations of the Late Republic.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

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The Decline of Roman Jurisprudence in the mid-to-late Republic Era John Marshall, Dalhousie University, Class of 2020

Abstract

The nature of the conflicts that emerged between the Patrician and Plebeian citizens of Rome continue to be an important topic within the study of Roman history. Plebeian and Patrician conflict repeatedly manifested into crises that left big impressions on Roman policy and governance. This is in large part due to the inability, and often the unwillingness of Roman leadership to properly address the various socio-economic issues that plagued the city-state. From the early Republic to the Second Century mid-to-late Republic, socio-economic problems resulting from economic and political power struggles between the two classes amounted to the majority of Rome’s concerns at home, waxing and waning in severity and presence. These issues deeply impacted Rome, and subsequently resulted in the decline of the ‘farmer-soldier’ dynamic that had become the predominant way of life for the plebeian citizens. Likewise, it led to the decline of Roman jurisprudence, demonstrated by the decay of respect held for Roman law by Roman Senators, exemplified in their actions against Tiberius Gracchus and also in the progression of their attitude towards the struggles of their plebeian citizens.

The Struggle of the Orders of the Early Republic, and the times of the Gracchi brothers during the second century BCE are strong, contrasting examples of how the socio-economic conflict of Rome evolved with the development of Roman politics over time; both in the nature of how the different conflicts arose, and in how the Senate dealt with them. The two crises demonstrate the changing nature of the city-state as it evolved and developed in response to the increasing imperium (military and political power) it received through the conquest of the East. While both the Struggle of the Orders and the actions of the Gracchi brothers shared the similar goal of improving the lives of the plebeian citizens, the differences in political culture and societal context resulted in widespread differences in the issues faced by the Roman plebeian citizens, and likewise in the manner the politicians of Rome attempted to address these issues. When the two are compared, the Gracchi-brother affair inarguably demonstrates the decay of respect for Roman values and jurisprudence.

The Struggle of the Orders began officially with the fall of the Roman monarchy around 500 BCE. The immediate start of the crisis following the abolition of the monarchy is implicative of this socio-economic discontent existing prior between the two classes. The underlying causes of this crisis were numerous and varied between the different plebeian classes of citizens. However, the need for a voice within the political system, and the need to protect the lives and property of Roman peasant citizens from arbitrary displays of imperium continued to remain prevalent. The solutions that Rome adopted in response to the crisis reflect these socio-economic issues, with laws and policies that primarily concerned the ability for plebeian citizens to take part in Roman politics, and have a voice in what laws and bills would ultimately affect their lives.

Such laws and policies include the creation of the tribuni plebis between the years of 500 - 450 BCE, which were in charge 1

2

1 Boatwright, Mary T., et al. The Romans From Village to Empire. 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2012. Page 71.

2 Ibid. 50.

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of the defense of the lives and property of the plebeians.3The power of the tribune of the plebs stemmed not from any statute, but from an oath of their sacrosanctity, which was granted to them through the Valerio-Horatian laws of 450 BCE. This sacrosanctity protected the plebeian tribunes from physical harm by punishing the offender with death, regardless of plebeian or patrician status. The Licinio-Sextian laws of 367 BCE likewise guaranteed that one of the serving consuls of Rome must be a plebeian. Ultimately, the crisis was drawn to a finish through the Hortensian law of 287 BCE, which reaffirmed the powers of the tribuni plebis, allowing them to create binding laws which would affect all facets of Roman society, while also reaffirming the ability for each tribune to veto any potential law or act by any magistrate.

Each of these laws benefited the plebeian lower classes of Roman society by providing them with more political influence, and allowing them the chance to defend themselves from being exploited by the Patrician classes through legislation and policy. The creation of the Twelve Tables between the years of 451 — 450 BCE is another example, which allowed the plebeian citizens to inform themselves of Roman law, and provide themselves a proper defense if called upon in court.8 The end of the crisis is brought upon by the legislative equalization of political power between the two classes, by allowing the plebeian tribunes to enact laws that affect all aspects of Roman society, and therefore, enabling them to protect themselves from exploitation.

There is the appearance of similarities between the two crises. Tiberius Gracchus most certainly intended to protect the largely agrarian-based lifestyle of the Roman people. Howev4

5

6

7

3 Cary, M. et al. The Oxford Classical Dictionary (1st ed.). Oxford Claredon Press, 1949. Page 923.

4 Ibid. 923.

5 Ibid. 923.

6 Abbott, Frank Frost. A History and Description of Roman Political Institutions. Vol. 1, Adamant Media, 2001. Page 36, 41.

7 Ibid. 51.

8 Cary, M. et al. p. 929.

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College er, the need for plebeian legislative representation in Roman politics was not present, because of the legal protection provided by the legislation the plebeians had earned during the Struggle of the Orders. This had succeeded in granted them legal equality with the patricians. Tiberius Gracchus faced a different array of socio-economic issues, primarily concerned with the Roman plebeian way of life. The agrarian-based lifestyle of the Roman people had become increasingly unsustainable, in large part due to the sharp rise in military campaigns the city-state conducted.9 This increased strain on conscripted Roman soldiers threatened the ‘farmer-soldier’ dynamic that had become integral to the fabric of Roman society, and likewise the predominant lifestyle for the plebeians.

Most Roman soldiers were small-scale farmers, and the long absences due to military service threatened their ability to provide for themselves and their families, ultimately leading some to abandon the land in favour of moving to the cities.10 The excess public land as a result of Roman conquest had also led to the rise of latifundia, which were massive, landed estate farms that prioritized agriculture and dominated the Roman industries.11 The Licinio-Sextian laws had specified that no citizen could own more than 500 jugera of ager publicus (public land), and that any land occupied above this amount would be confiscated by the state. This law was largely ignored, which led to increased competition and economic pressure on the average Roman farmer.12 This was further exacerbated by the practice of wealthy landowners hiring slaves in favour of free labourers, due to the latter being subject to conscription.13 Tiberius Gracchus was a tribune of the plebs in 133 BCE, who became known as the great reformer, and founder of the party of the Populares.14 According to his brother Gaius, Tiberius became convinced by his visit to an Etrurian latifundia that agrarian reform was needed.15 In accordance with his duty as a tribuni plebis, Tiberius presented an agrarian reform bill that would recover vast amounts of public land, where poor Roman citizens would then be relocated as tenants, with rent being paid to the treasury.16 Such a reform would have eased the rapid flow of urban immigration, which Tiberius hoped would lead to a return of the ‘farmer-soldier’ dynamic that had been the backbone of the Roman armies.17 In full accordance with Roman law, Tiberius bypassed the Roman senate, due to the intense opposition by the wealthy patrician landowners that filled it.18 Tiberius’ exclusion of the Roman senate resulted in the opposition of another Roman tribune, Octavius, who vetoed the agrarian reform bill two times before the concilium plebis. Tiberius created a constitutional crisis by then insisting 9 Boatwright, Mary T., et al. p. 137, 138.

10 Ibid. 138.

11 Cary, M. et al. p. 480.

12 Crook, J. A., et al. The Cambridge Ancient History. 2nd ed., vol. 9, Cambridge University Press, 2008. Page 64.

13 Boatwright, Mary T., et al. p. 138.

14 Ibid. 392.

15 Ibid. 392.

16 Ibid. 392.

17 Ibid. 392.

18 Ibid. 392.

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on the deposition of Octavius, on the grounds of having failed to protect the people’s rights by not allowing them to vote.19 To this end he was successful; however ultimately Tiberius’ agrarian bill was never enacted. Despite the sacrosanctity of the tribuni plebis, Tiberius was murdered by a crowd of senators, led by Scipio Nasica in 132 BCE.20 The death of TIberius Gracchus is of special importance due to the symbolism it presents. The sacrosanctity of the tribuni plebis had been reaffirmed by the Valerio-Horatian laws of 450 BCE. Despite this, little was done to bring the offenders to justice. Furthermore, a large number of Tiberius’ followers were subsequently executed without trial following the end of the crisis.21 Likewise, the conflict stemmed at least partially from the lack of implementation of a law created during the Struggle of the Orders, designed in part to specifically avoid this type of plebeian versus patrician conflict. This demonstrates a profound decay in the respect for Roman jurisprudence, especially when contrasted with the Struggle of the Orders.

During the times of the Struggle of the Orders, there was no latifundia that threatened the livelihood of Roman citizens, and the senatorial role was treated with more earnest as a result. Arbitrary displays of imperium by patrician magistrates continued to threaten the livelihood of the plebeians, and the best solution proved to be the implementation of legislation that provided the plebeian citizens with a voice in their political system, and likewise a voice that would be listened to and respected by the senators. In the case of Tiberius Gracchus, the legislation needed to provide the Roman citizens with a voice was already present, it was simply made ineffective by the greed of the patrician Senators. The socio-economic issues presented by latifundia directly threatened the traditional ‘farmer-soldier’ dynamic that had been integral to Roman society, and despite this the Senate stood in direct opposition of agrarian reform, further contributing to its decline. The strongest example of this phenomenon however remains the murder of a sacrosanct tribune of the plebs at the hands of Roman senators, exemplified in the death of Tiberius Gracchus, and brought out of a resistence to the idea of addressing the socio-economic concerns that resulted from latifundia. The latifundia system was a catalyst for the circumstances that inevitably devolved into violence, in large part due to the senators’ inability to resist the potential wealth the latifundia system offered, and in spite of the demonstrated harm it was inflicting on traditional ways of Roman of life.

The influence of Greek schools of thought on Roman society during this time period should not be overlooked. The education in Greek philosophy that Tiberius Gracchus received ultimately influenced the manner in which he attempted to address the issue of agrarian reform.22 His method of politics led to the emergence of the populares, a style of politics which turned to the plebeian masses for support, in place of the patrician 19 Cary, M. et al. p. 392.

20 Cary, M. et al. p. 392.

21 Cary, M. et al. p. 392.

22 Ibid. 392.

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The Haley Classical Journal, an undergraduate research publication affiliated with Hamilton College elite.23 The emergence of the term novus homo (latin for new man) is also indicative of the changes occurring in the political landscape of Roman society during this time period, describing Roman politicians who turned to ordinary Roman citizens for support, in place of the mostly-Patrician senate.24 Each of these demonstrate the rapid changes in culture and policy that surrounded the late Roman republic, and likewise, demonstrate the cultural decay for the original Roman jurisprudence that had served the early republic. Ultimately, the patricians failed to prioritize the plebian citizens they were supposed to govern, which gave way to the novus homo and the party populares, institutions and people that refused to do things the Roman way once it had become ineffective. This inevitably resulted in the decline of their Republican culture, and most certainly helped pave the way for Rome as an empire.

23 Ibid. 717.

24 Ibid. 613.

Special thanks to Dr. Grundke, Dr. O’Brien and Dr. Mitchell of the Dalhousie Classics Department.

Works Cited

Abbott, Frank Frost. A History and Description of Roman Political Institu tions. Vol. 1, Adamant Media, 2001.

Boatwright, Mary T., et al. The Romans From Village to Empire. 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2012.

Cary, M. et al. The Oxford Classical Dictionary (1st ed.). Oxford Claredon Press, 1949.

Crook, J. A., et al. The Cambridge Ancient History. 2nd ed., Vol. 9, Cam bridge University Press, 2008.

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The Vegetarian Ovid:

How Pythagoras’ Speech in Book 15 Relates to the Metamorphoses’ Theme of Transformation Sanjeevani Bhavsar, Washington University in St. Louis, Class of 2021

Abstract

The Metamorphoses, seemingly held together by the subject of transformation, has fascinated scholars for centuries.

Through this lens of transformation, the epic has undertaken the task of relating the history and mythology of the ancient world up to Ovid’s present day. In this context, Book 15, which, in its majority, is a philosophical and didactic poem in the first-person perspective of Pythagoras of Samos, has confounded many classicists. In recent times, the discussion concerning Book 15 has taken a turn from discussing the philosophical message behind Pythagoras’ speech and its function in the Metamorphoses as a whole to examining its intertextuality with a plethora of other authors and how Ovid changed earlier literary traditions.

However, considering how conscientious Ovid is in his choice of narratives included in the Metamorphoses, the decision to ignore how Pythagoras’ speech and Book 15 at large fit into the Metamorphoses can diminish the richness and complexity of those sections, especially when juxtaposed with the other fourteen books. Two of the main themes of Pythagoras’ speech are vegetarianism and metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls into new bodies. The most obvious connection to be formed here is with metempsychosis as a transformation of sorts for the body, however, there is also a connection to be made with vegetarianism and the stories of anthropophagy which persist in the Metamorphoses.

One such episode described in the great detail is the story of Philomela and Procne, in which Procne feeds her son Itys to Tereus as revenge for the rape of her sister Philomela.

In the Metamorphoses, as Procne kills Itys, she is described as a “tigress dragging off an unweaned fawn.”1 Later, as she watches Tereus eat his own son, she is described as “crudelia gaudia”2. The use of “crudelia” reflects that the reader should feel some horror towards Procne, who has fed her son to Tereus. Furthermore, Tereus, who has eaten human flesh is filled with disgust and says that “if he could, he would tear open his body, and reveal the dreadful substance of the feast, and his half-consumed child.”3 This revulsion at consuming human flesh can be extended to Pythagoras’ speech, which introduces the idea that upon death, people’s souls can migrate into the bodies of animals.

Thematically, this is not so different from the transformations seen in the previous books, and thus cannot be disregarded as inconceivable. Thus, it is entirely possible that, as Pythagoras states, the animal being consumed could have been a human soul in a previous birth. This interpretation expands the horrors of anthropophagy from just eating people to eating the bodies 1 Met. VI.636-37 2 Ibid.VI.653 3 Ibid. 661-65

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which are inhabited by the souls of people. With this in mind, Pythagoras says: “I warn you, stop expelling kindred souls by deeds abhorrent as cold murder. Let not blood be nourished with its kindred blood!”4 Such an interpretation allows the reader to connect Pythagoras’ seemingly disparate speech with the previous books and adds complexity to Book 15 and the work as a whole.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a compendium of mythology held together by the subject of transformation, the significance of Book 15, especially the speech of Pythagoras, has often come into question. The shift from mythological to philosophical and didactic poetry seems incohesive, and as such, recent scholarship like that of Charles Segal has sought to examine the intertextuality Ovid employs and how he “assimilates, comments on, and rewrites the preceding literary tradition.”5 I argue, however, that ignoring the semantic relevance of Pythagoras’ speech to examine only the structural and philosophical allusions to prior works undermines the complexity of Ovid’s work and diminishes its richness. In this paper, I focus on Pythagoras’ ideas about vegetarianism and metempsychosis, or reincarnation, and how they expand upon the stories of anthropophagy which are told in prior books.6 In doing so, I am not suggesting that Ovid advocated Pythagoreanism, merely that a reading richer than one based only on intertext is available for Pythagoras’ speech.

Before analyzing how Pythagoras’ speech fits into the Metamorphoses, it is necessary to first establish the precedent of the consumption of human flesh, which Pythagoras’ speech then renounces. The most vivid anthropophagic narrative in the Metamorphoses is that of Philomela and Procne in Book VI. When Procne decides to feed her son Itys to Tereus as vengeance for Philomela’s rape, Ovid describes her as a “tigress 4 Met. XV. 174-75 5 Segal, Charles P. 2010. “Intertextuality and Immortality: Ovid, Pythagoras and Lucretius in Metamorphoses 15.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’analisi Dei Testi Classici. https://doi.org/10.2307/40236193.

6 Formally, the transmigration of souls after death

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dragging a weaning fawn into the dark Gangean woods.” Portraying Procne as a tigress attacking a weaning fawn evokes the common image of a predator hunting its prey. This image depicting Itys as a pitiful and innocent creature is strengthened when Ovid describes Itys “extending his hands and now seeing his own fates and crying ‘Mother! Mother!’ and seeking her neck.” On the other hand, Procne “pierces [Itys] with a sword in the side which clings to the heart and her face does not turn.7” Here, Procne is characterized as cold and unfeeling, able to stab her own son in the heart and remain unmoved.

Then, Philomela adds to the brutality of the scene by “opening [Itys’] throat with a knife and both [Philomela and Procne] tear to pieces [Itys’] warm limbs still retaining som ething of life.8” That line (644), “vivaque adhuc animaeque aliquid retinentia membra,” which is almost entirely dactylic and has several elisions, emphasizes the urgency and brutality of the scene. In these ways, Ovid characterizes Procne both as a woman crazed with vengeance and as a mother cruel enough to kill her son without remorse. Both the sisters then deceive Tereus into feasting on his own son. Procne takes great pride in revealing “with cruel delight,” how he has consumed his own son, while Philomela thrusts Itys’ bleeding head at him as proof.9 Tereus is horrified and jumps up to invoke the Furies and proclaims that if he could, “he would open his chest from where he would remove the awful feasts and the half-consumed flesh. Now, he weeps and calls himself the tomb of his poor son.”10 Thus, Ovid’s narrator explicitly describes Tereus’ revulsion when he realized that he had consumed his son’s flesh while still maintaining Procne and Philomela’s characterizations as gruesome, bloodthirsty villains.

These characterizations can be generalized and extended to Pythagoras’ speech in Book XV, in which he, in the voice of Pythagoras, vilifies those who eat meat and advocates for vegetarianism. Current scholarship on Ovid’s Pythagoras, such as John Miller’s work, argues that Ovid is mainly using intertextuality in the section, following the literary tradition of deriding Pythagoreanism, in order to join the ranks of Horace, Juvenal, and other ancient authors.11 Philip Hardie claims that Ovid is employing a double allusion by imitating Empedocles and Empedocles’ imitator Lucretius, which cycles back to the beginning of the Metamorphoses, where he used the same device.12 Hardie’s arguments mostly analyze the structure and form of the Metamorphoses to show the parallels between the works of more ancient authors like Lucretius, Empedocles, and Ennius. Segal even directly states “it would be mistaken to view the speech as a statement of Ovid’s personal religious convictions or as a deep metaphysical grounding for his po7 Met. VI. 639-45 (see Passage 1 in the Appendix) 8 Ibid.

9 Met. VI. 653 (see Passage 2) 10 Ibid.

11 Miller, John F. 2008. “The Memories of Ovid’s Pythagoras.” Mnemosyne. https://doi.org/10.1163/156852594x00230.

12 Hardie, Philip. 1995. “The Speech of Pythagoras in Ovid Metamorphoses 15: Empedoclean Epos.” The Classical Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S000983880004180X.

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em.”13 I am not trying to argue against these interpretations, nor am I trying to ascribe the views of Ovid’s Pythagoras to Ovid himself, but Ovid’s incipit “in nova” suggests that he is not interested in merely imitating previous authors and following literary tradition, but instead hopes to fashion something new from it.14 Following this logic, I build a more complex reading of the speech, which takes up half of Book XV, by examining Ovid’s use of intratextuality and integrating previous stories into Pythagoras’ arguments instead of using only intertextuality.

Pythagoras’ speech begins with “Refrain yourselves from desecrating your bodies, mortals, with abominable feasts!”15 It is important to note that the word used for “feasts” here is “daps,” the same word Tereus uses to describe the consumption of his son’s flesh.16 Pythagoras then continues to state that it is not necessary to consume meat for sustenance and that the practice is reminiscent of wild beasts and of the Cyclops.17 He proclaims that the original pig and goat were slaughtered as punishment for ruining crops and says that those specific animals paid for their crimes; the animals alive today are innocent.18 In this way, Pythagoras is condemning how humans are punishing an entire race of innocents for the crimes of one animal. This can be related to how Procne uses Itys, an innocent child to punish her husband Tereus. In that situation, Procne was vilified and depicted as a bloodthirsty savage, and Pythagoras is invoking the same characterization for those who eat meat. Pythagoras describes oxen as “without deceit and artifice, innocent [and] guileless.” He then continues to berate the custom of animal sacrifice and describes how the poor animal is ignorant of its fate until the last moment, much like Itys was when his mother stabbed him. Furthermore, just like cattle today are paying for the crimes of their ancestors, the original pig and goat, Itys is paying for the sins of his father, despite his complete lack of involvement in the crimes against his aunt.

Thus, Ovid’s Pythagoras is cognizant of the horror that the story of Philomela and Procne induces and capitalizes on that emotion and pathos to strengthen his argument about the evils of vegetarianism.

Later on in the story, Pythagoras explicitly brings another mythological story into the picture when he says, “may we allow those bodies, which are able to hold the souls of our parents or our brothers or of those joined to us by any bond to live, safe and respected lest we fill our stomachs with Thyeste13 Segal, Charles P. 2010. “Intertextuality and Immortality: Ovid, Pythagoras and Lucretius in Metamorphoses 15.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’analisi Dei Testi Classici. https://doi.org/10.2307/40236193.

14 There is much scholarship on this section of the Metamorphoses, and some older works do support a more literal reading of the text, but today, scholarship in general examines this text as a vehicle for Ovid to demonstrate his skill in imitation and allusion. I could not spend much time discussing the older interpretations due to their number, but Segal mentions several other perspectives in his eleventh footnote; Met. I. 1 (see Passage 3) 15 see Passage 4 16 see Passages 2 and 4 in bold 17 Met. XV. 86-93 18 see Passage 5

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an tables.”19 In this line, Ovid’s Pythagoras refers to Thyestes, the son of Pelops, who committed adultery with his brother Atreus’ wife. In retaliation, Atreus killed the sons of Thyestes and served them to his brother. He then proceeded to provoke Thyestes with their heads, much like Philomela did to Tereus.

This entire course of events is the result of a curse placed on Pelops’ lineage by Myrtilus, who was cheated of his reward and instead killed by Pelops. Although Ovid does not share the story of Thyestes, Ovid’s reader would be well aware of the backstory invoked with Thyestes’ name. Thus, they would know that this act of anthropophagy was the result of a curse, and as such, should be treated as unnatural and not befitting of civilized people. While this conclusion might seem obvious today, there exist several cultures throughout human history which ritually consumed human flesh for a variety of reasons.

As such, it is worth noting that in Greek and Roman mythology, the consumption of human flesh was not held in high regard and often punished by the gods themselves. In this way, the mythological background which Ovid’s Pythagoras invokes would then support the point he is trying to make, that eating human flesh is horrific and unnatural.

Subsequently, Pythagoras begins to explain metempsychosis, otherwise known as the transmigration of souls or reincarnation. This is the section that is most noticeably tied to the theme of metamorphosis, especially in its claim that “everything changes, nothing dies. The spirit wanders and…changes from beasts into human bodies, and from our body into beasts, and does not perish with time…. I teach that [the soul] migrates into different forms.”20 Pythagoras’ claim echoes the beginning of the Metamorphoses, when the narrator declares that “my mind bears me to speak of forms changed into new bodies.”21 This establishes that the main purpose of the Metamorphoses is to narrate various stories of humans transforming into animals, building a foundation for Pythagoras’ theory of metempsychosis, which claims that souls can migrate from a human body to an animal one, “transforming” that individual from human to animal. However, Pythagoras extends this theory and ties it back to his previous statement about vegetarianism by claiming that since souls are able to move from body to body, the animals people eat might have once been human, and humans might soon turn into animals. Thus, he warns: “cease to drive out kindred spirits with heinous slaughter, and do not let blood be nourished with kindred blood!”22 In this way, the logic of Pythagoras’ argument makes sense, despite the fact that he was not held in high regard by Ovid’s literary predecessors. As is typical for him, Ovid’s Pythagoras treads the line of literary homage and authenticity, while simultaneously inviting complexity into the conventional beliefs about Pythagoreanism.

In viewing the speech of Pythagoras through this lens and by examining how his beliefs about vegetarianism might be a result of the horrific nature of anthropophagy, it is possible to read Pythagoras’ speech as a cohesive and coherent part of the Metamorphoses rather than simply looking at the intertextual-

ity of the speech. Such a perspective allows readers to connect Pythagoras’ points back to earlier stories in the Metamorphoses and offers a stronger link than just superficially viewing metempsychosis as another turn of the metamorphoses Ovid sets out to describe. By investigating the stories of Philomela and Procne and of Thyestes, it is possible to contextualize Pythagoras’ speech as a part of the Metamorphoses, rather than viewing it as an inexplicable addition to the work, related only through structure rather than content. However, it must be made clear that I am not arguing about Ovid’s stance on vegetarianism, nor am I stating that previous readings of Pythagoras’ speech which study its intertextuality are wrong. I am offering another interpretation which complicates the reading of the Metamorphoses, as is typical with any work of Ovid.

22 Met XV. 174-75 (see Passage 6)

1 All translations are my own

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Appendix1 Philomela and Procne: Philomela and Procne are the two daughters of Pandion, the king of Athens.

Tereus, the king of Thrace, is Procne’s husband. After marriage, when Procne confesses how much she misses her sister, Tereus offers to bring her to Thrace for a visit. However, he is overcome with lust for Philomela, and instead rapes her and leaves her in a cottage in the middle of the forest. He also cuts out her tongue so that she would not be able to communicate his crimes to anyone. Despite this, Philomela weaves a tapestry detailing Tereus’ misdeeds and sends it to her sister. Infuriated by the actions of her husband, Procne saves Philomela and plots to avenge her. When Itys, her son by Tereus, comes into the room, she is suddenly struck with rage and stabs him. Both Philomela and Procne then chop him up and cook him into a meal. Procne then serves her husband with the flesh of their son, delighting in Tereus’ horror as he realizes the truth. He calls upon the Furies to serve justice for his innocent son’s slaughter, but Philomela and Procne transform into a nightingale and a swallow and escape.

Passage 1: Metamorphoses VI. 636-646 nec mora, traxit Ityn, veluti Gangetica cervae lactentem fetum per silvas tigris opacas, utque domus altae partem tenuere remotam, tendentemque manus et iam sua fata videntem et ‘mater! mater!’ clamantem et colla petentem ense ferit Procne, lateri qua pectus adhaeret, nec vultum vertit. satis illi ad fata vel unum vulnus erat: iugulum ferro Philomela resolvit, vīvăque ădhūc ănĭmāēque ălĭquīd rĕtĭnēntĭă mēmbrā dilaniant. pars inde cavis exsultat aenis, pars veribus stridunt; manant penetralia tabo.

And without delay, she dragged Itys, just as a Ganges tigress drags a suckling fawn through the shadowy woods, and they held a remote part of the large house, and Procne pierces [Itys] stretching his hand and now seeing his own fates and shouting ‘Mother! Mother!’ and seeking her neck, with a sword with which she sticks his chest, and she does not turn her face. Even though that one was enough for his fate: Philomela opened his throat with a knife, and they both tear to pieces the warm limbs still retaining something of life.

Then a part bubbles in bronze cauldrons, a part hisses on the spit, the innermost chambers flow with gore.

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Passage 2: Metamorphoses VI. 653-665 dissimulare nequit crudelia gaudia Procne iamque suae cupiens exsistere nuntia cladis ‘intus habes, quem poscis’ ait: circumspicit ille atque, ubi sit, quaerit; quaerenti iterumque vocanti, sicut erat sparsis furiali caede capillis, prosiluit Ityosque caput Philomela cruentum misit in ora patris nec tempore maluit ullo posse loqui et meritis testari gaudia dictis.

Thracius ingenti mensas clamore repellit vipereasque ciet Stygia de valle sorores et modo, si posset, reserato pectore diras egerere inde dapes semesaque viscera gestit, flet modo seque vocat bustum miserabile nati.

Passage 6: Metamorphoses XV. 165-175 omnia mutantur, nihil interit: errat et illinc huc venit, hinc illuc, et quoslibet occupat artus spiritus eque feris humana in corpora transit inque feras noster, nec tempore deperit ullo, utque novis facilis signatur cera figuris nec manet ut fuerat nec formam servat eandem, sed tamen ipsa eadem est, animam sic semper eandem esse, sed in varias doceo migrare figuras. ergo, ne pietas sit victa cupidine ventris, parcite, vaticinor, cognatas caede nefanda exturbare animas, nec sanguine sanguis alatur!

Procne was not able to disguise her cruel delight and now desiring to emerge as the messenger of destruction, she says ‘you have him [Itys] within you, whom you demand.’ He [Tereus] looks around and questions where his son is; and Philomela jumps out to the one calling and asking again and sent the bleeding head of Itys into the face of his father, and there was no other time in which she wished more strongly that she were able to speak and declare her delight with deserved words.

Everything is changed, nothing perishes: the spirit wanders and arrives here and there, and occupies whatever limbs and crosses from beasts into human bodies and from our bodies into beasts, and does not die in any time, and just as pliable wax is marked with new shapes and does not remain as it had been and does not keep the same form, but nevertheless it itself is the same, thus, I teach that the soul is always the same but migrates into different forms.

Therefore, lest piety is conquered by the desire of our stomach, I warn, cease to expel kindred lives with unspeakable slaughter, let not blood be nourished with [kindred] blood.

Passage 3: Metamorphoses I. 1-4 In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illa) adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen!

Passage 7: Metamorphoses XV. 459-462 quae possint animas habuisse parentum aut fratrum aut aliquo iunctorum foedere nobis aut hominum certe, tuta esse et honesta sinamus neve Thyesteis cumulemus viscera mensis!

My mind bears me to speak of forms changed into new bodies; gods, favour my works (for you also change them) and spin out an eternal song from the first beginning of the world to my times.

May we allow those bodies, which are able to hold the souls of our parents or our brothers or of those joined to us by any bond to live, safe and respected lest we fill our stomachs with Thyestean tables.

Pythagoras: Pythagoras of Samos was an Ionian philosopher born in mid-6th century BCE. He founded the Pythagorean sect in Croton circa 530 BCE. He is credited as the first philosopher and founder of Pythagoreanism as well as the inventor of the Pythagorean formula and other scientific discoveries.

Passage 4: Metamorphoses XV. 75 ‘Parcite, mortales, dapibus temerare nefandis corpora!

Refrain yourselves from desecrating your bodies, mortals, with abominable feasts!

Works Cited

Hardie, Philip. 1995. “The Speech of Pythagoras in Ovid Metamorphoses 15: Empedoclean Epos.” The Classical Quarterly. https://doi. org/10.1017/S000983880004180X. Miller, John F. 2008. “The Memories of Ovid’s Pythagoras.” Mnemosyne. https://doi.org/10.1163/156852594x00230.

Ovid, Metamorphoses Books I, VI, XV Segal, Charles P. 2010. “Intertextuality and Immortality: Ovid, Pythagoras and Lucretius in Metamorphoses 15.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’analisi Dei Testi Classici. https://doi.org/10.2307/40236193.

Passage 5: Metamorphoses XV. 111-121 Longius inde nefas abiit, et prima putatur hostia sus meruisse mori, quia semina pando eruerit rostro spemque interceperit anni; vite caper morsa Bacchi mactandus ad aras ducitur ultoris: nocuit sua culpa duobus! quid meruistis oves, placidum pecus inque tuendos natum homines, pleno quae fertis in ubere nectar, mollia quae nobis vestras velamina lanas praebetis vitaque magis quam morte iuvatis? quid meruere boves, animal sine fraude dolisque, innocuum, simplex, natum tolerare labores?

From there, the evil spread further and the sow was first thought to have deserved sacrifice because it rooted out seeds with a wide snout and robbed the hope of the year; the goat to be slaughtered for consuming the vines of Bacchus was led to the altars of the avenger: its own crime harmed two!

What did you sheep deserve, gentle herd, born to support men, [you sheep] who bear nectar in your udder, who supply us your wool for soft clothes and benefit us more in life than in death? What did the cows deserve, an animal without deceit and trickery, innocent, simple, born to bear labors?

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gratias

The Haley Classical Journal is an academic journal affiliated with the Hamilton College Classics Department. The Haley nonetheless publishes articles written by undergraduates across the world, and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, religion, creed, socioeconomic background, or any other identifying factors. The Haley is peer reviewed by students at Hamilton College, and is operated through the Hamilton College Classics Club.

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