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D E C L A M AT I O N , PAT E R N I T Y, A N D RO M A N I D E N T I T Y
This book explores the much maligned and misunderstood genre of declamation. Instead of a bastard rhetoric, declamation should be seen as a venue within which the rhetoric of the legitimate self is constructed. These fictions of the self are uncannily real, and these stagey dramas are in fact rehearsals for the serious play of Roman identity. Critics of declamation find themselves recapitulating the very logic of the genre they are refusing. When declamation is read in the light of the contemporary theory of the subject a wholly different picture emerges: this is a canny game played within and with the rhetoric of the self. This book makes broad claims for what is often seen as a narrow topic. An appendix includes a new translation and brief discussion of a sample of surviving examples of declamation. e r i k g u n derson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Greek and Latin at the Ohio State University. He is the author of Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World (2000).
DE CL AMA T ION, PATERN IT Y , A N D ROM AN ID EN T IT Y Authority and the Rhetorical Self
ERIK GUNDERSON Ohio State University
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge , United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521820059 © Cambridge University Press 2003 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2003 - isbn-13 978-0-511-07013-6 eBook (EBL) - isbn-10 0-511-07013-6 eBook (EBL) - isbn-13 978-0-521-82005-9 hardback - isbn-10 0-521-82005-7 hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
For Jason
Contents
Preface: Acheron
page ix
Introduction: A praise of folly pa rt i:
1
w h e re e g o was . . .
1 Recalling declamation
29
2 Fathers and sons; bodies and pieces
59
3 Living declamation
90
4 Raving among the insane
115
pa rt ii : l e t i d b e 5 An Cimbrice loquendum sit: speaking and unspeaking the language of homosexual desire
153
6 Paterni nominis religio
191
By way of conclusion
227
Appendix 1: Further reading Appendix 2: Sample declamations List of references Index locorum General index
238 240 265 273 278
vii
Preface Acheron
The learning of the Sophists is thus directly the opposite of ours, which only aspires to acquire information and investigate what is and has been – it is a mass of empirical matter, in which the discovery of a new form, a new worm, or other vermin is held to be a point of great importance. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy1
Not even the most febrile fits of authorial vanity would incline me to believe that the world eagerly awaits the present volume. Relatively few know what declamation is, and of those who know something about it, most are satisfied with their knowledge, and do not care to know more. Perhaps the author of a full-length study on such a topic possesses an admirable dedication to the production of knowledge in its own right, to the documenting of every scrap about the past no matter how tattered and uninteresting. Or perhaps such an author is merely dedicated to the production of verbiage and to wallowing in the mire. General readers can be excused from perusing the first sort of text; sensible ones will avoid the second. Producing knowledge and producing verbiage, though, are themselves – or at least they should be – issues within declamatory criticism. They are not mere metacritical issues. Can seemingly empty speech from antiquity really have been all that empty? Just try to say something and have it mean nothing. Have you come up with a clever bit of non-meaning? Remember, its meaninglessness is still governed by the condition that it be meaningless. It means, then, precisely nothing. And even if you can produce that one meaningless thought, you must also accept that others did the same over the course of centuries. It would be easier just to admit that something might be in such a corpus than to insist doggedly that scores of hands had so successfully managed to speak empty volumes. Worse still, they were 1
Hegel 1974: 352.
ix
x
Preface
not obviously trying to mean nothing. To read declamation should not be considered deigning to calculate a sum that always yields zero as its result. Nor are we condescending to know more about an empty rhetoric. Instead let us call it descending into the rhetorical underworld. Freud’s Die Traumendeutung strikes the eye as follows:2 one sees the title page and upon it in large print and all capitals the words DIE TRAUMENDEUTUNG; turning the page reveals on its obverse a single Latin line in small capitals and set in quotation marks. Specifically one sees: ,,flectere si nequeo superos, acheronta movebo“. The next page is headed “Vorbemerkung.” The Latin thus comes before the remarks that come before the argument. “If I can not sway the gods, I will move Hell.” Who is speaking? Juno, of course (Virgil, Aeneid 7.312). In a famous scene she promises suffering for Aeneas in Italy and thereupon engenders the crises that will propel the second half of the epic’s plot much as her anger structured the first half. The story of finding Italy and founding Rome is always also the story of an angry godhead. The netherworld she set in motion cannot be forgotten when we contemplate the hero and the favor of the Olympians. The refusal of Juno, of Dido, of Carthage, and of the powers below is a necessary and not an adventitious element of the grand tale proper. Who is speaking? Freud, of course. Freud prefaces his epic adventure into the workings of the psyche by insisting that one must visit the underworld. He implicitly argues thereby that we must pass through the ivory gate of false dreams if we are ever to reach our destiny of true self-knowledge. That is, Freud is both the outraged goddess and the architect of a vision that goes beyond the merely subterranean ways of passion. Freud sees the way as including its own detour, Weg is also Umweg. Similarly, the story of Rome is not merely the story of the Roman empire any more than the story of the Aeneid is simply the story of Aeneas, or even of the emperor Augustus. And those who cannot trace the genealogy of the present are condemned merely to puppet the fascistic dictates of the superego as a law willfully blind to its own genesis. In the following study declamation is consistently viewed as the dream state of rhetoric. A fallacious detour from the dream of true, full and authentic speech, it nevertheless reveals truths about “rhetoric proper” that would otherwise remain forever hidden. A journey towards understanding 2
I am looking at Freud 1942: v–vii. It is possible, though, to doubt that v and vi are “properly” numbered pages: vii is the first page to actually bear a number at its foot.
Preface
xi
the discourses of Rome cannot exclude a journey into the world of shadows, monsters, and passions found below. Certainly the ancients themselves almost invariably visited the Acheron of declamation. Some drank of the river of forgetfulness and never left. Others shrugged it off as merely a dream. To still more it was a real hell and one to be scorned in the name of a heavenly sublime. And some few discovered therein the Isles of the Blessed and lingered among the finest company. In the past one had a variety of relations to the genre. Today we seemingly have no relation at all; but that is a mere semblance. Let us no longer silence declamation. A genre that is itself so canny about speech and silence awaits our return. In the land of declamation we will no longer be able to formulate the staid proposition that “I am that I am.” Actually, it were better to avoid such as an impiety. Speech is here never selfpresence, it is always role playing. Nor is rhetoric any longer mere strategy, an instrument of the will deployed to achieve crass ends: Milo must go free! Declamatory rhetoric is never “mere rhetoric,” words both hiding and revealing some governing intention. Declamatory rhetoric never intends to acquit or to convict. It argues, but never to persuade us to act. In so doing, it reveals all of the dimensions so routinely forgotten when we read for the “conscious” intentions of the rhetorical subject at the expense of the literary unconscious of rhetorical discourse. Moreover the discourse on rhetoric is itself a rhetoric. Comically it is also declamatory on the question of declamation without realizing that it is such. If we would know ourselves, we ought first to realize the path we have traveled. If our destiny is truly to be manifested in an empire of reasoned criticism, we would do well to meditate on where such empires come from and what gets lost in the process of their formation. We need to look at the rhetorical force of the Latin inscription that comes before and yet within the dream of sublime political oratory. What do we stand to lose if we hearken to declamation’s specious sophistry and participate in its baroque culture? I would answer that we thereby surrender our own pedantry and penchant for cleaving unto the simple maxim that the things that we see in the canonical texts are, and that they are the only reality.3 This book represents the fruits of a variety of moments where various people were willing to take declamation seriously. The project began life as a seminar in the spring of 1997. Few enrolled. It was nearly canceled. But I thank both my then chair Will Batstone and my three graduate students 3
This is a riff on Hegel’s portrait of the pedant (Hegel 1974: 353).
xii
Preface
for taking a risk. I wrote a significant portion of the manuscript while on leave. Here again my department and chair were extremely generous. While not teaching I was residing as a metic at the Center for Hellenic Studies. I very much enjoyed having access to their excellent Latin resources, even if a study of Roman declamation did at first appear to them to be a bit topon. Thomas Habinek offered a warm welcome to the completed first draft of the manuscript and encouraged me with both his advice and his support. My colleagues Will Batstone and Kirk Freudenburg have been similarly generous with their time and counsel. John Henderson and the anonymous reader at Cambridge University Press offered a wealth of sage and thoughtful criticism in their turn. And my readers owe them a particular debt of gratitude: they rightly advised a less windy and wordy treatment of this all too garrulous genre. Finally, Victoria Wohl has been unfailingly generous with her ideas and patience over the span of several years. That is a long time to spend weeding in rhetoric’s hothouse. Fearing the censor’s mark if I say more, with Cato I will pray instead that Jove should thunder.
in t rod uc tion
A praise of folly
The battle of reason is the struggle to break up the rigidity to which the understanding has reduced everything. Hegel, The Science of Logic 1
One understands all too well what a declamation is, and yet a reasoned account of the genre is perhaps still wanted. A declamation was a rhetorical piece on an invented theme. If one imagined a judicial proceeding, the resulting speech would be known as a controuersia. An exhortation to a fictive interlocutor was called a suasoria. The following proposition might form the foundation for a controuersia and produce accusations and defences: “A married woman gave birth to a black baby. She is charged with adultery.”2 A suasoria might encourage or discourage a historical or mythological figure. One was given a theme such as “Should Cicero beg Antonius to spare his life?”3 Theoretically the same speaker might engage one side and then promptly reverse himself and plead the opposite cause. Though I will argue that we need to take declamation more seriously, clearly one cannot argue that everything said was said “in earnest.” Such word play could be used to train schoolboys who dreamed of one day becoming politicians and public speakers, or these exercises might be pursued by mature men who sought to entertain a circle of friends or even a broader public with a display of verbal dexterity.4 1 2 3 4
Hegel 1975: 54 Matrona Aethiopem peperit. arguitur adulterii. Calpurnius Flaccus, Declamationes 2. Notice that “matron” equals “non-black” for the community of speakers. Deliberat Cicero an Antonium deprecetur. Seneca, Suasoriae 6. Beard does well to emphasize entertainment against the endless focus upon education in other authors: “[T]he world of the Controuersiae is a world not of hack humdrum teenage instruction, but a world of well-known, glamorous rhetoricians, enjoying a sparkling reputation among the Roman elite.” (Beard 1993: 53) For Goldberg declamation is “a spectator sport for engaged and experienced spectators.” (Goldberg 1997: 174) Heath offers a nearly identical assessment (Heath 1995: 18). Sussman offers a similar portrait, but he finds such a zeal for declamation to be “strange.” (Sussman 1994: 4–5) Sussman elsewhere argues that declamation’s raciness is attributable to titillation that panders to the base interests of the audience. See Sussman 1987: ii and v.
1
2
Introduction
Though I am interested in its Roman incarnation, this genre neither begins nor ends at Rome. Russell rightly notes that the association of declamation with Rome is really merely an accident of the preservation of our sources.5 These exercises became prominent in Greek rhetorical education in the third century bce,6 although earlier works such as Antiphon’s Tetralogies and even Plato’s dialogues reveal that fictions of rhetoric are more or less as old as systematic thought about rhetoric itself.7 Scholars have been too eager to confine Roman declamation to the imperial era. Here they follow Seneca the Elder’s assertions that the practice is as old as he is.8 However it is clear that Seneca can only mean a certain version of the practice, since he depicts Cicero as engaged in proto-declamations. Moreover Cicero himself portrays the men of the generation preceding his own playing with fictitious cases.9 As far as the later history of declamation goes, Libanius himself wrote an Apology of Socrates, and he was still producing declamations in the fourth century ce. Libanius was by no means alone in his efforts.10 In fact declamation persisted in both the Greek East and the Latin West into and beyond the Middle Ages. Declamation was hardly an aberrant fad. Declamation was a durable player on the rhetorical scene. If the historical time-frame of declamation is frequently distorted and compressed with an eye to critiquing it as the inconsequential product of a fallen Rome, the age of the participants becomes another occasion for dismissing the case of declamation unheard. Those who would slight the genre stress that it was a school-boy exercise – which it was – while failing to 5 6
7 8
9
10
Russell 1996: 6. For examples of third-century activity one can refer to POxy 2400 which gives a list of declamatory topics, Berl. Pap. P. 9781 which plays with Demosthenes’ Leptines, and PHibeh 15 which is also a historically-minded rhetorical exercise. See Russell 1983 for a detailed account of Greek declamation. On the varieties of proto-declamation see Russell 1996: 5. Controversiae, 1.pr.12. See Sinclair on evaluating Seneca’s claims as programmatic and not documentary (Sinclair 1995a: 102). Winterbottom encourages the identification of declamation with the fall of the Republic (Winterbottom 1974: ix). Compare Clarke 1953: 89 and Leeman 1963: 226. Cicero, De Oratore 1.149. See Winterbottom for other “declamatory” portions of the Ciceronian corpus and the zeal with which later declaimers spotted and reused them (Winterbottom 1982: 60). Winterbottom also offers a concise overview of the early history of declamation from its arrival at Rome up to Seneca’s day (Winterbottom 1974: vii–x). For a more detailed treatment, see Bonner 1949: 1–26. Compare Jenkinson 1955. Quintilian reads the De Oratore similarly at Institutio Oratoria 2.4.42. He also notes that the Greek practice of treating “fictional material in imitation of public and policy debate” (fictas ad imitationem fori consiliorumque materias; 2.4.41) began with Demetrius of Phaleron who was born around 350 bce. For example, a papyrus fragment from the fifth century ce contains a declamation against Alcibiades. See Lewis 1936: 79–87. See Schmitz 1999 and his bibliography for a portrait of the lively interest in declamation during the Second Sophistic.
A praise of folly
3
note that it was not merely a school-boy exercise.11 A contemporary analogue might be to confuse the Hardy Boys series with detective fiction as a whole. Certainly there are many mysteries written with young readers in mind, but not all are intended for an immature audience. Similarly, like declamation, detective fiction is not usually seen as a high-brow form, but nevertheless numerous works are viewed as serious fare for the mature reader. And much as a snide critic eager to establish his own superior taste might deride such fiction as fundamentally puerile in the face of a masterpiece like War and Peace, one notes that The Brothers Karamazov itself is a sort of whodunit. Other than the Minor Declamations it is not clear that any of what remains of the Latin declamatory corpus was part of school practice. And those declamations are composed as models specifically designed to inculcate the habits of mature oratory. The Major Declamations are very long and polished. They appear to be best suited to performance rather than the inculcation of detailed precepts via specific examples.12 Similarly Seneca the Elder in the Controversiae mentions the schoolhouse only infrequently, and he often depicts scenes where it is hard to imagine that classes were being held.13 Moreover, declamatory training was offered to youths roughly as old as contemporary undergraduates: these are not elementary school “Dick and Jane” exercises. Elementary exercises are learning how to read, write and do math with the grammatistes. Then in what we might call “middle school” one was taught grammar while reading literary classics with the grammaticus. Some time well into the teen years – but certainly after the youth is no longer considered a boy (puer) and is now a young man (iuuenis) – students move over to the rhetor who offers specifically rhetorical training. This is itself gradated: first there are communes loci or “rhetorical commonplaces” such as the denunciation of an adulterer; and similarly there are theses or “propositions” such as “Is city or country life better?” Ultimately the well-practiced student moves over to declamation proper where all of the 11
12
13
Bloomer goes perhaps too far in this direction. His arguments as to the fit between youthful psychology and declamatory fantasy invites reduction of the genre to schoolboy antics (Bloomer 1997b: 64). See also the comment that there is a parallel with “the nonsense songs learned by children” (Bloomer 1997b: 70). Sussman assumes that all of the Major Declamations were written by schoolmasters for their students (Sussman 1995: 191–92 ). But compare the position of Sussman 1987: ii, and Sussman 1987: v, “One wonders how md 18 and 19 could find room in a school curriculum.” See Chapter 4 below for prominent Romans speaking and in the audience. Calpurnius Flaccus’ works are so truncated that it is impossible to guess what their full shape would have been and what sort of audience they had in mind.
4
Introduction
elements of forensic oratory can be pursued simultaneously.14 Declamation is not, then, etymologically speaking, puerile literature. Declamation is not much read. Let me refine this bald statement by asking a series of questions. Why do relatively few people read declamation? Why do specialists in Latin studies – people who ought to be eager to study any of what little remains of the glory that was Rome – why do these people tend to ignore declamation? What does it mean for something to be not worth reading? Why was declamation once worth so much trouble to so many, whereas now its stock has fallen so low that we have become used to hearing of the bankruptcy of the genre in more than one sense of the term? We know that almost every man of letters in antiquity had had some truck with declamation at one time in his life and was perhaps even for a long while a devotee of the form.15 Even so, we act as if declamation did not really matter. Or worse, such declamatory indulgences were like so many trips to a brothel – embarrassing episodes despite which one may still admire the remainder of the man.16 Besides, at the time everybody was doing it . . .17 For an example of declamation-hating scholarship on declamation see the remarks of Winterbottom: “The modern will find a good deal of the elder Seneca’s material unreal, unfamiliar and even tedious. He will skip many of the epigrams, and concentrate on the lively prefaces and the incidental anecdote. But anyone, lay or scholar, who wishes to understand the essence of Silver Latin will have to take the rough with the smooth and nerve himself to read at least a fair sample of the whole.”18 The “rough” would appear to be declamation itself, while the “smooth” is everything else. One is little inspired to read on. We do only because we need to take our bitter medicine. And the goal is itself a dreary one: now we can better appreciate why the rest of Silver Latin was not Gold. Indeed Leeman sees in Seneca 14 15
16
17
18
See Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria Books 1 and 2 for a portrait of the ideal course of study. Compare the outline of Greek practice offered by Heath, and see his bibliography (Heath 1995: 17–18). See Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 2.20.4 for a critique of men who have a taste for the outlandish in declamation and who spend all their time and energy on such exercises. Though lampooned by a “proper authority” like Quintilian, nevertheless these speakers may have had their own reasons for lingering in their chosen genre beyond mere folly. Against this compare Suetonius, Nero 10.2. The biographer takes the following as one of his illustrations of the good early reign of Nero: at that time the emperor would practice declamation publicly. See also Suetonius, De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus 25.3 for the declamatory histories of other notable figures. For example, Kraus 1994: 3 n.8 records the heated debate surrounding Livy and declamation wherein the scandal of declamation is repeatedly either denied or excused. Kraus herself describes declamation as being “fashionable” at the time (Kraus 1994: 3–4), and hence she would seem to be a member of the “everyone was doing it” camp. Winterbottom 1974: xxiii.
A praise of folly
5
little beyond a report on “the origins of the Argentea Latinitas.”19 Fantham asserts that the modern reader will be amazed to learn that serious, famous Romans listened to “declamatory performances on hackneyed and fictitious themes by Porcius Latro or Cestius or Haterius.”20 Note, then, the tone of “[Seneca] knows prose writings (surely not declamations!) of Virgil.”21 And see also her characterization of the influence of declamation upon poetry as a “problem.”22 Examples paralleling Winterbottom and Fantham could be multiplied ad infinitum. Why should one have to apologize for declamation? Why is it important that declamation be insignificant? How has declamation with its sound and its fury failed to signify anything? Has it failed? What would it mean to listen to this tale told by an idiot? I ask these questions of both the ancients and the moderns. They each offer roughly the same answer. Or, rather, most of the moderns would agree with some of the ancients: “Declamation is bunk.” And if Henry Ford was too busy making history to believe in it, perhaps declamation’s critics are themselves too busy being declamatory to bother assessing their own rhetoric. Mine is a literary reading of a body of texts that relatively few would grace with the exalted title of “literature.”23 By a literary reading I mean to indicate that I will be looking for themes, for motifs, for allusions, and for what goes unsaid or is left implied amidst so much verbosity. But by literary reading I also mean to indicate that I will be following the play of language itself and not just the purported intentions of a variety of authors and authorities. The result will frequently be less a high-modern praise of Literature than a postmodern meditation on the questions of language and identity. And lest anyone think such contemporary musings have been foisted upon the declaimer, I hope to argue that such issues preoccupied the ancients as well. Rhetoric and identity were closely aligned categories in antiquity, and declamation is no exception to this rule. And finally the declamations also ask the question of what “empty speech” signifies. Thus, rather than offering the empty negation of rhetoric stripped of its functional content, declamation restores to rhetoric a space within which to speak on that which is otherwise refused to rhetoric. I take it then, that declamation is not failed oratory languishing beneath the weight of febrile fantasy, nor does it embody juvenile antics awaiting 19 21 23
20 Fantham 1996: 10. Leeman 1963: 237. 22 Fantham 1996: 94. Fantham 1996: 92. See Walker for a revindication of oratory in general as a literary practice (Walker 2000). And note especially his assertion that a genre like declamation was one of “the chief media for eloquence on culturally resonant questons” and a place where consensus and community could be forged (Walker 2000: 108). See also Webb’s survery of the connections between rhetoric and poetry (Webb 1997).
6
Introduction
the sound judgement of more mature years.24 Such a verdict has contented many. As will be seen below, it is also a meta-declamatory judgement against declamation. Ridiculous and funny, infuriating and trite, declamation is not forensic oratory. And yet every speaker knew that he was not in the forum or in the Senate house, and critics of this rhetoric would do well to remember that the occasion and audience of any speech in antiquity had a profound impact on its form and contents. Declamation needs a new mode of reading that knows how to make a break with critical tools designed for a different kind of speech. Declamation is not “failing” to be Cicero any more than Lucan fails to be Virgil.25 There is a relationship, but it is governed as much by the idea of rivalry as it is by notions of debt. These men are playing with the idea of Ciceronianism, not fumbling to produce their own Pro Milone.26 These often ephemeral speeches not only reveal a great deal about the narrow circle before whom they might have been delivered, but they also offer us insights into the emplotting of Roman identity. By this I mean that we find in declamation a constant engagement with the “rules” of Romanness, an endless tracing of the contours of the licit and the illicit. These speeches are predicated upon a hypothetical transgression against society. The fantastic character of the sin and the often playful treatment of its exculpation nevertheless reveal a zone of intellectual engagement where serious questions are elaborated in a pointedly frivolous context. None of this is ever literally true. Still, the real keeps on intruding: political allegory, individual advancement, and the nature of authority in general return endlessly to the scene of declamation. Sometimes a play is the only thing to catch the conscience of the king. In declamation we will even find that truly disturbing themes otherwise unapproachable can be handled under the aegis of irrelevance, mere play, and idle fantasy. My guiding questions are accordingly rather broad and bold: How are we to read declamation? What will we find there? How deep can this genre get? The foundation for such an investigation has been laid by the work of a number of other scholars. Though it remains a topic of interest today, an earlier generation of scholars was particularly engaged in exploring the 24 25
26
For example, Winterbottom describes Cicero as one who “matured, and grew away from the schools.” (Winterbottom 1982: 60) See Johnson on what it takes to find a technique of reading Lucan that escapes from the orbit of Virgilian studies wherein Lucan transcribes an endless ellipse and his critics drably note his non-progress (Johnson 1987). See Seneca, Controversiae 3.pr.16 for Cestius as the author of an In Milonem.
A praise of folly
7
technical aspects of declamation.27 Thus one examined the relationship between declamatory speeches and the rhetorical theories of Cicero and Quintilian.28 Or one could look into the relationship between the law in declamation and the actual law used in the courts of the Greco-Roman world.29 So too do the declamations offer room for insights into the educational practices of antiquity.30 Frequently declamation is treated as a subsection or a chapter within a larger work, and the bibliographies on rhetoric, law, and education in antiquity often mention declamation in the course of their broader investigations.31 Though these avenues remain important and interesting aspects of the study of declamation and are still pursued, contemporary research has begun to emphasize the sociology of rhetoric and the world of the declaimer. Naturally the social aspect of declamation is hardly a contemporary discovery and earlier scholars have made their contributions, but the work of Martin Bloomer and Patrick Sinclair represents a much more determined effort to go beyond prosopography and relatively familiar portraits of life at Rome as rounded out by declamatory evidence in order to document the specific logic of Roman rhetorical practice.32 While such a logic is of great interest to me, the bulk of my efforts have been directed towards a literary reading of declamation. This reading will focus on tracing the development of individual themes within the corpus of Latin declamations and then evaluating the broader significance of that development. I certainly return to the social, but I do not begin by positing it in its exteriority in order to read declamation via “society.” This means, then, that I try to avoid conjuring a society “out there” as 27 28 29 30 31 32
H˚akanson 1986 and Fairweather 1984 provide invaluable bibliographic resources. See also Whitehorne 1969. See especially Fairweather 1981 and Sussman 1978. See also Dingel 1988, Ritter 1967, Sochatoff 1938/39, and Greer 1925. Bonner 1949 remains the classic study. See also Parks 1945, and Bornecque 1902: 59–74. See, for example, Winterbottom 1982, Jenkinson 1955, and Clark 1949. I am thinking of works such as Bonner 1977, Kennedy 1972, Leeman 1963, Clark 1957, Clarke 1953, Norden 1923, and Cucheval 1893. See Bloomer 1997a, Bloomer 1997b, Bloomer 1992, Sinclair 1995a and Sinclair 1995b. Sinclair’s work is easy to overlook given that his titles nowhere mention declamation, but his work is consistently oriented towards an analysis of the sociology of rhetoric within a milieu that assumed a dominant role for declamation. Dupont 1997 offers valuable insights into the sociology of literary gatherings in general. See also Anderson 1995 for another version of the social life of declamation. Connolly offers brief but welcome comments on the social logic of gender in declamation (Connolly 1998: 145–49). Her account is also valuable as an example how one can read the cases themselves instead of just the commentary on the cases. Schmitz invokes contemporary theories of “performance” when reading society and declamation in the Second Sophistic, and he thereby offers a welcome contribution to declamatory studies generally (Schmitz 1999).
8
Introduction
the cause underlying the declamatory effect. Instead the society is already “in here” when it comes to declamation. The genre exposes society as itself one of the effects of all the pleading. The relationship between art and life is decidedly not one where the former always and only imitates the latter. Hypostatizing the “real” father who generates as his enervated double the declamatory father can only obscure a more vital issue: that real fathers themselves live in the shadow of their discursive representations, that they are simultaneously primary and pictures of a picture. Indeed “real” fathers can only be primary to the extent that they rhetorically efface the dimension of discursivity as a whole. There are precedents for a thematic reading of declamation, but perhaps fewer than one might imagine.33 The more familiar version of a study of literature and declamation involves examining the impact of declamation upon other genres.34 In this context there is something of a tradition of blaming all of a text’s perceived faults upon the baleful influence of declamation.35 Some authors are much more positive in their approach, but there is a quiet consensus that one has to defend the contrarian position of failing to declaim against declamation. In either case declamation tends to be represented as itself relatively unambiguous, and as a known quantity shedding light on an unknown one. Those who are willing to read declamation as literature are relatively few in number.36 Some have just been mentioned above, but there are two particularly interesting examples of the kind of research possible once one approaches declamation not with an eye to faulting it for not being something else, but instead to read it in its own terms.37 Matthew Roller’s examination of the death of Cicero within the declamatory schools reveals that perhaps the lion’s share of what we take to be historical facts of the great orator’s death are nothing but the fancies of this most fanciful of genres.38 In other words, those who cannot read declamation run the risk of losing sight of the very truth that they prefer to these fictions. Helen Morales reads 33 34 35 36 37 38
Sussman 1995, Tabacco 1985, Tabacco 1979, and Tabacco 1978 are thematically-based readings. See Goldberg 1997, Braund 1997, Bonner 1966, Kenney 1963, Deratani 1930, and De Decker 1913. Similarly, Johnson 1987: 38 describes the speeches in Lucan as suasoriae. Webb gathers together many moments from this long tradition (Webb 1997). For example, Whitehorne 1969 has broken up his bibliography on declamation by theme. One finds education, law, and rhetoric, but literary studies are absent. Desbordes 1994 makes a general insistence that declamation delights in hidden meanings that a careless reader is likely to miss. Roller 1997. See also Kaster, Richlin and Dugan on these cases (Kaster 1998; Richlin 1999; Dugan 2001: 72–75). And notice Schmitz’ position: declamation is productive of community and memory in the same gesture (Schmitz 1999: 91–92). Accordingly these “false histories” also have an important cultural truth to them.
A praise of folly
9
a scene of torture from declamation that I too will discuss in the body of this text.39 She is bold enough to claim of declamation that it is engaged with big questions, that this talk of torture and art actually offers a significant contribution to any investigation of Roman aesthetics. Once again the implicit message is, “If you would know the Romans, you must read their declamations.”40 Combining these studies with those of Anderson, Beard, Bloomer, and Sinclair one sees an emerging consensus within scholarship of the past decade that the connection between declamation and Roman society is profound and that it cannot be ignored. r
Important questions remain. What was impeding the literary study of declamation up to this point? And, similarly, how does one go about reading declamation as literature? Antiquity is filled with denunciations of declamation. If we heed these, then of course we cannot hold the genre in much esteem. Yet these denunciations are not infrequently themselves informed by declamation. By failing to appreciate that it is precisely declamation that trains one to decry the decay of eloquence, later critics have failed to appreciate the involuted logic of declamation that permits and indeed revels in such an irony. Furthermore they have also failed to “get the joke” of those satirical passages that express a critique of declamation. Hasty belief in the flatness of the metadiscourse about declamation produces an under-reading not only of the commentary but also of declamation itself. Braund’s revisitation of the topic of “Juvenal the Declaimer” delineates the extent to which declamatory theory and practice pervade Juvenal’s writing.41 This ought to put us on our guard: if Juvenal declaims, what are we to make of his parodies of declamation? Isn’t this part of the joke, a dissonance between his overt message and the mode of its articulation? And even if we should be so brazen as to conflate this or that message of the narrator with the actual beliefs of the author, we still find here a trope: the rhetorical plea of the one who is seemingly beyond declamation and who claims that declamation is nothing but a wastrel son worthy of disinheritance. That is, the scenography remains declamatory. This is but one way of raising questions that will recur throughout this study: Does declamation have an outside? How does declamation remain genealogically a part of even those who would refuse it? This is not an idle question. Key themes in the reception of declamation seem to be most clearly delineated in Petronius. Unfortunately these 39 40 41
See Morales 1996 and Chapter 4 below. Similarly Goldberg sees in declamation a font of “metatheatrical allusion” (Goldberg 1997: 173). Braund 1997. See also Braund 1996: 230–36.
10
Introduction
readings of Petronius on declamation have produced and continue to produce both distortions of his novel and some of the most deceptive commentary on declamation. What remains of the fragmentary Satyricon “opens” with an indictment of declamation delivered by our narrator Encolpius. A litany of offences is trotted out: declamations are outlandish and aesthetically abhorrent; they contribute nothing to real rhetorical education; they actually damage the students who are thus trained; the body of oratory has been enfeebled.42 The speech is a vigorous and compelling one. It even has parallels with many of the ideas expressed by Seneca the Elder, a man who really ought to know about these things. If the logic and the pedigree are good, what’s not to like about Encolpius’ speech? The words of the narrative that follow this outburst ought to complicate our reading of it. “Agamemnon did not allow me to declaim (declamare) any longer in the portico than he had himself sweated in the schoolhouse.”43 These two are playing a game. Encolpius has just delivered a declamation against declamation to a man fresh from himself training youths to declaim. Agamemnon picks up on the sport and answers Encolpius in kind.44 The narrative frame surrounding these two fine-sounding defences of good, oldfashioned rhetoric is unambiguous: we are listening to declamations and declaimers. The speakers are sounding one another out, jockeying for positions, displaying their cleverness, recognizing their mutual education and shared training.45 “ ‘Young man,’ [Agamemnon] said, ‘since your thoughts are of no common stamp, and, what is most rare of all, you love good sense, I will not cheat you of the mysteries of the art. It’s no wonder if the teachers stray in these exercises since they have to rave with the insane.’ ”46 Even as these two deliver phrases that would seem to attack declamation as the root of all evil, the genre provides the syntax and grammar of their 42
43 44 45 46
Compare Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 5.12.17–21 on the decay of declamation from a useful sort of rhetorical training into something disgusting. The images used there involve enfeeblement, castration, and a variety of threats to virility in general. And yet one must not take such a passage too far: Quintilian everywhere assumes that declamation is a good thing for the prospective orator. He is only lamenting that people have strayed from the proper use of it. non est passus Agamemnon me diutius declamare in porticu quam ipse in schola sudauerat. Petronius, Satyricon 3.1. Compare Cassius Severus’ quasi-declamation against declamation as delivered to Seneca at Seneca, Controversiae 3.pr.12–15. See again Goldberg 1997: 174. ‘adulescens’ inquit ‘quoniam sermonem habes non publici saporis et, quod rarissimum est, amas bonam mentem, non fraudabo te arte secreta. nil mirum <si> in his exercitationibus doctores peccant, qui necesse habent cum insanientibus furere . . . Petronius, Satyricon 3.1–2. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 2.10.8 also uses the language of madness (furiosae uociferationi) when reproducing an aspect of the barbed complaints against declamation made by certain unnamed critics. This strengthens the impression, then, that we are seeing in Petronius a commonplace of the rhetoric of the battle over rhetorical education.
A praise of folly
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discourse. The canniest and best speakers know not only how to conceal their art but even how to disown it. This is familiar rhetorical advice from even a reputable authority such as a Cicero. The Satyricon is a funny book, and this satire on declamation is as funny as anything to come from the head of Juvenal.47 Yet this same passage is commonly used to prove the point that after the death of Cicero and under the empire the old rhetoric had died and vile declamation ruled the roost.48 Or, more specifically, that “declamations are outlandish and aesthetically abhorrent; they contribute nothing to real rhetorical education; they actually damage the students who are thus trained; the body of oratory has been enfeebled.” In other words, one reads the Satyricon straight. It requires a fixed resolve first to ignore the give-away word declamare and second to forget that neither Encolpius nor Agamemnon anywhere else in the text behaves in anything but the most ridiculous and ignoble manner. Wilhelm Kroll possessed just such a resolve. Kroll’s entry on rhetoric in the Real-Encyclop¨adie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft summarizes the rhetorical position of Encolpius as if it were a fact of rhetoric.49 Woe betide those who read uncritically speeches about speech. Kroll’s is not necessarily the minority view. He has long found followers either intentional or accidental. For example Braund’s subtle appreciation of Juvenal nevertheless does not prevent her from treating this passage from the Satyricon as if it were an earnest debate about education and one to be taken literally.50 Winterbottom, Fairweather and Bonner do the same.51 The position of Conte is more complex.52 Conte is very sensitive to the games of rhetoric and declamation in the Satyricon and accordingly he sees in Encolpius a mere mask. Nevertheless Conte believes of Petronius himself that he lamented the death of high culture and that the joke of Satyricon 1–4, accordingly, must be an earnest one.53 For Conte declamations offer “narratives of stupefying 47
48 49
50 51 53
Sullivan sees a pointed parody of Seneca the Elder here (Sullivan 1985: 173). But Grimal sees in declamation itself the precondition for a work of art such as the Satyricon (Grimal 1994: 368). And Conte describes declamations as “blatantly” novelistic (Conte 1996: 49). Clearly the relationship between those exercises and this “novel” is a profound and elaborate one. Perhaps we could speak of a Petronius who humorously adopts the stance of the son who beats his own father (compare Seneca, Controversiae 9.4 and Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 358, 362, and 372). Defenders of such a deed would be well advised to appreciate whose side of the causa they have actually adopted. Walker sees that this is all one big and even trite game that the two are playing (Walker 2000: 95). See Kroll 1940: 1121: “Wohl regte sich bei verst¨andigen Leuten die Kritik, die uns (neben Tac. Dial 35. Sen. contr. ix pr. 2–5. Quint. i i 10, 3. 20, 4. v 12, 17 ff. xii 11, 15) am besten Petron. cap. 1f. vertritt, der zusammenfassend sagt: et ideo . . .” Braund 1997: 148–49. 52 Conte 1996. Winterbottom 1982: 63, Fairweather 1981: 144–45 and Bonner 1949: 75–76. This is never explicitly spelled out, but it does follow from the arguments at Conte 1996: 59.
12
Introduction
artificiality,”54 and he sees in the declamatory schoolhouse – ignoring, of course, that not every declamation was delivered in a school – “the outer form of a culture grown utterly spurious.”55 Why should we ourselves be so eager to declare rhetoric to be dead and to mourn the loss of better men from a brighter past?56 This question guides my reading of Seneca the Elder in the next chapter and much of the thought of the remainder of this text. Yes, this is an unkind reading of some rather famous scholars. Indeed they would respond by indicating the number of places where the same ideas as those given by Encolpius can be found uttered in all seriousness by stern and magisterial authorities.57 I wish to privilege the Petronius passage against those other ones, though. For in Petronius we see most clearly the rhetorical nature of truth claims about the nature of rhetoric. So too can we best appreciate through him the specifically declamatory aspect of the critique of declamation; and every critic of declamation can be shown to have had at least a B.A. in declamatory studies. If it were a proper declamation one might even introduce the critique with something like, “A young man violated Rhetoric. His father disowns him.” In Latin one might see Adulescens Rhetoricam rapuit. Pater abdicat. Contradicit. I include the contradicit, “the son opposes him,” in order to point out an interesting phenomenon: the declamation against declamation has attracted few pleaders to the opposite side. rr
Declamation needs rereading. Before we can begin reading declamation as a literary practice participating in the full play of signification, we must attend to the shape of the social field that produced and consumed these pieces. First, declamation’s ironic and self-aware character is underappreciated. Next, the native account of native practice is not itself an objective account whether it is playing with declamation or attempting to comment 54 56
57
55 Conte 1996: 48. Conte 1996: 49. Barton 1993: 62 evokes in passing, as do so many, declamation as an unhealthy symptom of a decadent Rome. But notice the compound errors she makes in the following snippet “[Examples of the frolicking theater of violence include] the hortatory speeches (suasoriae) of the Roman schoolboy, with their pirates in chains, tyrants ordering sons to produce the heads of their fathers, etc.” First, to be pedantic, the pirates come with chains, not in them. More to the point, though, declamation is not just for schoolboys. Next, Barton probably should have said controuersiae, not suasoriae. And, finally, the summary of the contents of declamation comes not from a reading of declamation itself but is instead a translation of Petronius. Indeed pirates and bondage are more noticeably the stock in trade of an ancient novel such as Chaereas and Callirhoe, Leucippe and Clitophon, or even Petronius’ own Satyricon than they are necessarily part of the dominant idiom of declamation itself. For example, see Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 2.10.5 and Tacitus, Dialogus 35. The latter example, though, is itself part of a speech about rhetoric.
A praise of folly
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upon it. Such a break with the common sense of antiquity will allow us to avoid reconstituting as truths for ourselves an alien doxa that ought to form the object of our investigation.58 O tempora, o mores: decadence and decay are tropes, not facts. Those who would cling to the idea of progress and decline will forever be beholden to a teleological vision of culture that accordingly commits them to a not disinterested partisanship with those actors whom they pretend to study objectively. In fact within declamatory discourse the metaphor of the decay of rhetoric is itself mapped onto the metaphor of generations, and the life of the individual. In good declamatory form one might then argue that stern philological fathers would do well at least to listen to the pleadings of the younger generation on behalf of the virtues of declamation. Indeed the declamatory idiom is the proper one to use, for declamation struggles to formulate the rules for a critique of the unassailable sovereignty of the law of the father. The project of a sociology of declamatory rhetoric is, as I have mentioned, already well under way. One today better appreciates who the speakers were, their social trajectories, and the positive possibilities of declamation. Thus it is not enough to see these speakers as silly windbags with nothing better to do. Nor were they men condemned to irrelevance by the “death” of Republican rhetoric under the emperor. When employed, the last line of argument is forced to downplay or ignore the more than one thousand years of declamation’s history in favor of a narrative of recent decline. Instead let us say that Roman culture had a long history of social advancement, of men who arrived in the big city, were sneered at, but nevertheless managed to rise to a prominent and respected position. Declamation can be seen as one of the venues for just such a process of aristocratic recruitment, training, and evaluation.59 The zealous attention paid to these inconsequential speeches reveals that there was something of weight happening here. Seneca the Elder makes it clear that listeners were scrupulously attentive to comportment, taste, and distinction in these speeches about improbable crimes debated by anonymous and imaginary pleaders.60 Seneca becomes a 58
59 60
Bourdieu makes repeatedly this same admonition. See for example Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 135–36, Bourdieu 1990: 26–29, and Bourdieu 1984: 12. Bourdieu 1988: xv offers the same warning and an important converse admonition: neither should the foreign scholar be quick to laugh at the academic foibles of another place and time as being merely of that place and time. See Bloomer 1997a. Sinclair 1995a: 103 notes that “expounding the Roman social code is ultimate proof of the fact that [Seneca] has arrived.” Seneca has also set himself up as the one who will evaluate the legitimacy claims of other men trying to climb the social ladder. See also Bloomer 1997a: 201 on declamation as a venue for evaluation and advancement.
14
Introduction
generic father offering advice to any reader who would accept his authority: we are being taught how to behave at Rome.61 In the competitive linguistic market-place of Rome various trajectories are crossing. Always and everywhere zealous about the state of their symbolic capital, up-and-comers found in declamation a genre where the parvenu might make some claims to his wit in general and his possibilities outside of the pointedly unreal world of his speeches. Moreover the established elite could find light diversion from and a supplement to their practical rhetorical knowledge. That is, the haves could pretend to independence and superiority, and the have-nots could make a case for their own entitlement. The criticism of declamation has been deformed by a reliance upon the metadiscourse of antiquity itself. This last cannot but be as much participant as observer in the social game of declamation. Therefore it objectifies native practice in an incomplete manner; and that objectification must itself be described as calibrated to modify the position of the commentator in a social space where declamation, political oratory, and scholarly criticism are an intertwined set of possibilities. Thus these critics are telling us as much about their own savoir faire as they are offering an objective portrait of declamatory speech.62 The snide or dismissive tone of the commentary offers a good index of the stakes for our authors themselves. They are eager to display themselves as properly appropriating declamation even as they comment upon it.63 To paraphrase Kenney, we run the risk of parroting magpies. Despite the relative scorn shown for Seneca the Elder in scholarly treatments of rhetoric one nevertheless finds a wide-spread reliance upon his critiques of declamation. An uncritical acceptance of ancient rhetorical criticism can lead to the reproduction of their specific biases as truths. To do this turns the ancient critic into the final winner in a game whose give and take was once necessarily fluid. Declamatory criticism participated in the contest for symbolic domination and the imposition of legitimate language of which the declamations themselves were but special instances.64 61 63
64
62 See Bourdieu 1988: 6–14. Bloomer 1997a: 206. Consider the effort expended today on dubious forms of culture such as television or Hollywood movies. For example, the “cultured” are careful not to say that they enjoy teen slasher films unless they are making a bid to score avant-garde points by reappropriating them in an ironic or otherwise unconventional manner. That is, the cultural aristocracy have means of enjoying lower cultural forms that allow them to retain all of their rights and privileges as the class invested with the authority to declare what culture is going to count and how. See Bourdieu 1984: 39–40. Compare Bourdieu 1991: 57–61. See also the portrait of the cruel “gymnastics” of education into literary culture provided by Kaster (Kaster 1988: 15–19).
A praise of folly
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Given the aristocracy of culture that classics itself can represent and given as well the needs of the scholar to appear in some manner to “deserve” to be the keeper of the aesthetic treasures to which he or she has unique and special access, we come to resemble none so much as the despised Seneca himself. That is, we become eager commentators upon who was and was not deserving. By implication our own privileged place at the table is assured. Indeed, as authors of rhetorical criticism, we are fathers, and the readers are our children who learn from us not only what they ought to know, but also how they ought to know it. Notice that I do not say “mothers and fathers”, for to assume Seneca the Elder’s position is always a bid for paternal authority, no matter one’s gender. The perils of introducing a homology are manifold: in particular one risks producing a familiar object from an unfamiliar one as comparand collapses into the comparans. On the other hand there is perhaps something to be gained if one is sensitive to all of the ways in which the two institutions are dissimilar and if one recognizes as well the dissimilarities even at those points of contact here singled out. I would then compare declamation to the so-called “poetry slam.” Typically held in coffee houses or other such venues on a weekly or monthly basis, the poetry slam offers a forum for the informal and periodic gathering of an audience and of a self-selecting set of performers whose degree of outright mutual competition may vary. Does one “slam” one’s opponent by citing him or her and then improving or twisting the original verse?65 Does one win by merely “being better”? To what degree is the competition a zero-sum game, and to what extent does the stock of all the poets rise as the evening progresses? Self-consciously not a scene of high art or of recognized professional production – for that go to a public reading by a “published author” – the poetry slam nevertheless can and does have certain pretensions. And among these pretensions is an awareness that this is not high culture, that this is part of a bohemian alternative to a closed and stuffy establishment. Given this thumbnail sketch we can note that declamation too is marked as relatively informal, though the stakes might ultimately be quite high given the reception of a performance on any given occasion and the durability of the reaction to it: “Yes, that Ovid does have talent.” “Can you believe what an idiot that Cassius was?” Declamation also produces literature, but of an impromptu and transitory sort. Some of its products will be recalled and repeated between the audience members or even mentioned to friends who were not at the original show. Much of it will be forgotten, perhaps 65
For an example of “sampling” and one-upmanship in declamation, see Seneca, Controversiae 2.6.1–2.
16
Introduction
within moments of its utterance. Some speeches will even get written up, copied, and disseminated. There are “regulars” who speak often, and there are participants who are only occasionally moved to speak. For some these performances are the object of careful thought, preparation, and study; these displays constitute the acme of their literary output. Others care, but less: different literary spheres such as poetry, history, or proper forensic oratory occupy their chief concerns. Ovid is principally a poet, Livy a historian, Cassius Severus a pleader proper; but they were each of them declaimers as well. Some declaimers probably hope to use their public performances as a means of advertising their abilities as teachers of rhetoric. Though the evidence is largely lost, the proper questions are not who did and who didn’t declaim – almost everybody did – but instead we should ask when, how, and why people spoke. For the ancients, occasions for praise and blame do not reside in the former considerations, only in the latter. Some will try to pick up upon another’s lines, rework them, improve them, or merely pay them homage. Others will break out in their own direction with a new, bold color. One speaker will show himself a model of careful and precise thought, of literary restraint in a potentially explosive scenario. Another speaker will get carried away and overstep the boundaries of propriety – or at least the boundaries as perceived by some in the audience. One thrills both to walk the tightrope and to watch another teetering on the edge. Nor is it disagreeable to laugh when someone falls.66 The audience itself can be examined variously. Some people come to see specific speakers qua speakers, others to see a friend, others for the event as a whole. The spectators in any case can be assumed to have a highly variable investment in what is actually said: was it great? did I get caught up in it? or did I merely enjoy my time out and about? was I interested in the show itself, or more in being seen chez Gaius? Does one visit for the sake of seeing what a certain set are up to or to be genuinely entertained? to slum it or to be a` la mode? In the case of the emperor, one assumes more the former, with the up-and-coming provincials the latter. Is the institution ridiculous and a waste of time? Is declamation where the hip new art is happening? The analogy could be drawn tighter or extended further. The chief point to note, though, is that the scene of declamation is not necessarily a uniform one: neither performers nor audience can be characterized by a single, unitary disposition. Instead declamation offers the opportunity for a variety of modes of literary consumption and production at a level below that of “high art.” Some people may aspire to travel in that circle; others may be perfectly 66
See Sinclair 1995a: 99.
A praise of folly
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content to leave it to one side; still others may actually believe that the really good art is already right here. It is all a matter of taste, and of tastemaking. rrr
But what of the contents of declamation? Those who defend the genre tend to leave in silence what was said in favor of depicting the important social labor of declamation in general. Critics of declamation look at the title of the speeches and promptly turn away with a sneer of disgust. For example, Clark admits that it was only with difficulty that he was able eventually to lay aside his (published) prejudice against the contents in favor of the practical efficacy of declamation as a teaching tool. Thus he goes over to the position of Quintilian, Insitutio Oratoria 2.10 as against that of the satirists: so long as the material is close to real cases, declamation offers a great opportunity to practice simultaneously all of the elements of proper oratory. There is less a critical advance here than a shifting of allegiances.67 Defenders of the genre routinely fall back on its educational usefulness. One here discusses the relationship between declamation and the formal tenets of proper oratory, but now the declamations look like excuses to play with stasis theory or a practice adapted to those who perhaps could not reach the heights of theory.68 One cannot and should not ignore the technical and theoretical aspects of declamation, but a declamation is no more a function of rhetorical handbooks than Cicero’s Pro Caelio was motivated by a desire to produce an artful exordium. Theory may inform practice, it may even deeply inform it, but theory does not exhaust practice. When declamations are actually read for their contents, there nevertheless remains a tendency to look beyond the garish text and towards the reputable realm of “social reality.”69 This is a project perhaps not unrelated to my own, and everyone who treads this difficult path is quick to remind the reader of the arduousness of deriving any positive statements about Roman reality from these willful fictions and from speeches where the advocate is likely soon to reverse himself and to claim the contrary. Modern critics therefore emphasize patterns that emerge when one looks at declamations in the aggregate. If any given statement is not necessarily earnest, one nevertheless does notice tendencies when related topics, themes, or treatments are collected. 67 68 69
Clark 1949: 283. Winterbottom 1982 offers a parallel defence: declamatory education had more practical value than we usually admit. Similarly, see Bloomer 1997b. Kenney 1982: 39 is needlessly cruel: “[Seneca] is a magpie rather than a critic.” Such a reading of Seneca the Elder is a misappropriation of his text. See Bloomer 1992: 7. See Sussman 1995 and Migliario 1989.
18
Introduction
These patterns of course do not necessarily say anything about reality as such. Still, they do allow one to trace out a field of literary possibilities within declamation. And just as the relationship between father and son in the Aeneid does not necessarily say anything about real fathers and sons, one nevertheless ought to take this field as seriously engaged with the psychic life of the idea of paternity at Rome. The analysis of the psychic life of the Romans allows for the delineation of the field of play for certain key symbols within a given cultural configuration.70 And within such thinking something like the idea of the father becomes the necessary symbolic base upon which the material superstructure of actual paternal authority is built. We accordingly find ourselves not only justified in attending to such inconsequential stuff as declamation but perhaps even encouraged to pay closer attention. Declamation offers us a key venue for the analysis of the production, reproduction, and circulation of the rhetoric of psychic life at Rome specifically as a rhetoric, as the play of signifier and signified, as a set of gambits. Thus declamation does not merely mime “real” rhetoric in the sense of offering an imitation of forensic oratory, but it likewise mimes the very psychic rhetoric by which one’s self-relation is produced and sustained. Therefore even as declamation refuses to be the “authoritative” site for the articulation of the discourse of authority it nevertheless as play and parody reveals the syntax and grammar of Roman identity.71 Thus when I argue for a literary reading of declamation I mean to extend the notion of “literary” beyond a simple question of themes, images, and tropes. By literary I mean to invoke also the notion that literary representations are themselves governed by a logic of representation whose rules are more general. Literary representations are an instance of the imaginary relations and constructs by which the psychic life of actual Romans is lived. But these constructs are not merely exemplary. Declamatory fictions play an active role in formulating and negotiating the idiom and the syntax of Roman subjectivity. They are thus both products and productive. 70
71
My approach therefore could be compared to something like Barton’s Sorrows of the Ancient Romans, a work that describes itself as being about “the emotional life of the ancient Romans” and their “collective psychology” (Barton 1993: 3). While Barton’s work is truly engaging, her real emphasis is on grappling with “the impossible, the intolerable, and the miraculous” (Barton 1993: 7). My own approach, though, consistently seeks the norm and even to reintegrate the seemingly strange back into the norm. A useful but perhaps forced distinction that allows for both our convergences and divergences would be to say that Barton reads for the Roman irrational while I read for the Roman unconscious. Sussman is very interested in the psychology of the father-son relationship as evinced in declamation. Sussman, though, consistently eschews any deep engagement with psychoanalysis, and all of his “psychoanalytic” citations are references to the work of other classicists. See Sussman 1995.
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Declamations, though, are hardly simple pieces that directly transcribe Roman attitudes. Instead they are filled with outlandish topics and with outlandish responses to these topics. Indeed if one wished to study an issue such as rape in Rome, numerically the bulk of the citations would perhaps come from declamation. Declamations do not dwell upon propriety but rather upon transgression against Roman norms. Declamation offers fantasies of transgression and reparation. In declamation we learn not about reality at Rome but rather about how one plays with that reality in order to negotiate or to refigure one’s imaginary relationship to that reality.72 These fictive little dramas are thus also rehearsals of the real drama of Roman subjectivity. One can go even farther and make a still bolder claim. Declamation is detached from reality in the same manner that a zoo is on proud display in the heart of a city. A faux-wilderness is constructed and then fenced in so that one may behold dangerous animals not so much as they are but as we have staged them for ourselves. We make for ourselves a fantasy of wilderness and preserve it within a cultured space. This wilderness within comments upon who we are: it represents an outside that we have turned around, mastered, and made into an inside. It is culture’s portrait of nature.73 The zoo tells us about our own animality even as it proclaims our conquest of it: we are who we are – so we pretend – because we are no longer the sort of thing locked up “in there.” But a zoo is not a Hollywood lot, and a caged tiger’s fangs remain just as deadly as those of a free-ranging beast. Declamation’s crimes are themselves a wilderness fabricated for public consumption, but I take declamation’s portrait of crime ultimately to be an ambiguous one: everything is contained within an elaborate artifice, and yet it is not for that harmless or insignificant. Declamation is playful; declamation is ironic; it is self-aware; it is evocative. Yet the significance of declamation is not exhausted by these properties. Or, put more sententiously, its meaning is not confined to its message. If my first transgression is to believe in the sociology of declamatory rhetoric and my second to think declamation worth reading as literature, these outrages only reiterate and refine the crimes of others.74 72 73
74
Compare Kennedy 1993.1–23 for an insistence upon the need for a specifically rhetorical understanding of the textual production of the reality effect within ancient poetry. Compare also the anthropomorphic commentary in the voice-over on televised nature documentaries: notions such as courtship, playfulness, industry and sloth abound. The lion may not nap as a lion, instead he is an idle head of state, and so forth. For example, as was mentioned above, Bloomer, Beard, and Sinclair have already begun to offer a richer portrait of the social world of declamation, while Morales and Roller read for the plot and go from there.
20
Introduction
But I contemplate making even a third assault whereby I read very much against the grain of the text. I believe such to be the natural extension of the course of the first two tasks, and to be, moreover, a perfectly declamatory trope: to render even more exotic the already outlandish. The social and literary play of declamation produces a circumstance where we find excesses of meaning. The implications of the ideas brought forward in declamation thereupon outstrip the capacities for any intentionality to fully constrain their meaning in advance.75 Moreover the declamatory fragments preserved by Seneca the Elder represent the product of collective labor, and even after we admit that the editorial practice of Seneca is a vital factor in the interpretation of the text, the significance of the case of the father with no hands is not confined to the intentions of any one Roman. The declamatory corpus as it comes down to us is generally fragmentary, polyvocal, anonymous, and undated. These factors impose upon the critic the necessity of engaging the critical vocabulary of the “death of the author.” Foucault suggests that there would be a liberation of critical possibilities if we could only begin by asking “What matter who’s speaking?”76 Foucault wishes us to question author as a locus of security, and as a source of a theodicy of intention. Students of declamation frequently have little choice but to abandon the security of authorship when it is so much in doubt or where nothing is known of the author of a phrase beyond his name. Moreover the “intentions” of declamation are all so strange: some of this is primarily clever and showy; hidden meanings are loved merely for the fact of their secrecy; perhaps there is educational content to some of it; other pieces are flights of fancy that appear heedless of the practical interests of the young. If we look beyond such questions, though, and ask instead about the discourse of declamation and its relationship to the real process of Roman subjectivity qua process, then we can reread declamation with a keener eye for its relationship to the idea of the author. We see in declamation a phenomenon revealing a profound relationship between the speech produced and an author-function. That is, declamation highlights the relationship between language and authority at multiple levels. First we find the fiction of the authorized speaker arguing to the law, the fiction of a man intending to do justice, or at least intending to plead his side effectively. Then we find the reality of the speaker who knows himself to be the author of a fiction. Yet 75 76
Many styles of reading would claim this of any linguistic production and not just of the special case of declamation. Foucault 1977.
A praise of folly
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this “real” author is himself pleading for membership in a rhetorical community whose proprieties he engages, delineates and safeguards by means of his speech. Next there is the voice of the meta-discourse, the critical commentator, the father, and the educator who cites the declamation and makes it into part of his message.77 This author accordingly reauthorizes the declamation, or perhaps he deauthorizes it. Nevertheless his own authority waxes as he cites the declamatory text. In no case does it ever matter what, precisely, is said. Instead the focus remains on the speaker. But the key point here is that the authority of the author remains forever bound up with the production and circulation of these texts. Though potentially insubstantial at a literal level, such texts underwrite an economy of social exchanges. Declamation is very much “about” authority: who is an author? who gets to be an author? how is this authority justified? how is it reproduced? Furthermore the fiction of the author as evinced by the pretended advocate pleading a perhaps insincere speech can itself be used to destabilize any security we feel in reading “real” authors like Seneca the Elder or the variety of pseudo-Quintilians. The message that keeps getting “meant” here is one about authority, propriety, and entitlement. This message is internal to the fiction of declamatory justice, and also leads a life externally as it is used to evaluate the worth of individual examples of declamatory practice. On this reading declamation “produces” authority only by pleading and citing. Thus there is a reiteration of the trope of authorization, but never the fact of authority.78 Of course anyone who falls for the trope thereby transforms what might otherwise be mere fiction into practical fact. Ridiculous as they are, then, the declamations themselves offer a comic version of the very serious stuff from which one produces authority and authenticity at Rome. The aggregate of these various versions of the declamatory “I” has a meaning that transcends anything that one might derive from the analysis of an individual part.79 By way of a facile yet useful analogy one might compare the persona of the speaker in the declamation, the speaker of the declamation, and the commentator upon the declamation to the id, the ego and the superego.80 The first can and will imagine a son who beat his 77 78 79
80
Compare Foucault on the plurality of egos as an effect of the “author-function” (Foucault 1977: 130). See Butler 1990: 12–16. Compare Felman’s commentary on Lacan’s reading of “The Purloined Letter.” We read for positions in a structure and a series of substitutions. Repetition and displacement produce differences that allow for the analysis of the meaning of the structure as a whole (Felman 1987: 40–45). The danger in the analogy does not lie in the comparison of the network of declamatory discourse to the psyche and its mechanisms. What one must take care to avoid is reducing the text to the individual subject and losing sight of the textuality of the text and so too of the textuality of the subject. See Felman 1987: 48.
22
Introduction
father; the second disowns that he himself really desires any such thing; and the third is there to make sure that the second does in fact deny that desire. Seneca himself is quick to invoke Cato, that most famous of all censors, and his own function within his text is manifestly censorious: proper declaimers are praised, improper ones scorned, silenced, or even repressed entirely from the text’s canon of declamatory memory. Mary Beard has described declamation as what Rome had in place of myth.81 For Beard declamation allows the Romans to exercise certain mythic functions without possessing the category of myth proper. In declamation the idea of the law frames debates about the nature of Roman identity, but this law is not engaged at the level of a closed and monolithic voice of authority. Instead declamatory law churns up paradoxes wherein obedience to one principle conflicts with acceding to another.82 Beard’s declamation as myth offers a site where we can see a L´evi-Straussian bricoleur romain: in declamation the Romans construct and reconstruct for themselves questions of their Romanness from the rough and ready conceptual tools they find to hand. This is a compelling account. I would wish to round it out by shifting the comparandum. Much as one has seen in myth a cousin of the dream, so too would I argue that declamation serves as a repository for the sort of stuff frequently reserved for the dream proper. Though censored and filtered through multiple versions of the voice of the law, the contents of declamation allow us to examine not just Roman praxis but also Roman parapraxis. Rather than dismissing declamations as idle fantasy we can insist with Freud that “a phantasy of this kind must have some meaning, in the same way as any other psychical creation: a dream, a vision, or a delirium.”83 Declamation might also be compared to the joke: again we find that there is a profound relationship to a latent logic. But explaining a joke hardly exposes why it is funny. Instead one has to read carefully in order to discover that the logic of humor reveals something about how psychic life is itself governed.84 Declamations are filled with the very stuff that proper Roman society cannot allow: lust, transgression, violence, and implacable strife. Despite the endless soundings of the voice of the law, of the disapproval of the father, and the denunciations of the centuries of declamation’s critics, if we wish to 81 82 84
Beard 1993. One could carp and insist that Greeks declaimed as well, but the objection would sacrifice her insights on the altar of pedantry. 83 Freud 1990b: 176. Beard 1993: 60–61. On interpreting Witz, see Freud 1993. See also Lacan: “L’inconscient, justement, ne s’´eclaire et ne se livre que quand on regarde un peu a` cˆot´e.” (Lacan 1998: 22)
A praise of folly
23
learn more about such forbidden topics we have to turn to declamation. On the one hand they are quantitatively frequently our “best” source. At the same time they are manifestly useless as evidence: everything is disowned in advance. Yet we should no more dismiss these declamations than we ought to dismiss a dream wherein we slew our own father and slept with our own mother. It is not enough to say with Jocasta that such is the stuff of which everyone’s dreams are spun.85 What better example than hers that repression is the prelude to an inevitable return? Despite its ironic and self-aware stance, declamation itself is not going to provide us ready-made the answer to the meaning of its own phantasies. Thus we cannot merely break with our own prejudices against the genre – these are also the prejudices of the Romans against declamation, in any case – and return to declamation’s version of the meaning of declamation. While a move towards such return is a necessary preliminary project, declamation’s delirious products also contain in them a knowledge that is not fully in possession of itself.86 To the extent that the persona of the speaker in a declamation is like the id, one can say of a declamation that ¸ca parle. That is, we do not have the speech by someone Roman but instead a speech by something Roman. And the meaning of this anonymous, repetitive, and deceptive speech requires a different reading than can be excavated by merely asking the question, “What did Haterius mean when he said that?” My return to declamation seeks to take declamation on its own terms and to read it as it comes to us. The first portion of the readings are designed to show in declamation the difficult boundary between text and commentary. These fictive selves thereby expose the “real” self as itself participating in the same logic as those literary constructs. The first chapter begins with the opening of Seneca the Elder’s reminiscences of declamation. The literary scenography of the text’s frame needs to be read both as literature and as declamatory literature. Seneca the father thereupon becomes the first and most prominent version of the declamatory father. And he allows us to appreciate who preserves rhetoric and why. As any good Roman orator would ask, “Who stood to gain?” The next three chapters explore the themes of mutilation, art, and madness. If Seneca complained of his failing memory, then the theme of mutilation compliments that first portrait of loss and its efforts at reparation. Disfigurement in declamation is not only a favorite topic and filled with a variety of possibilities for the exercise of epigram, but so too does dismemberment engage the commentators upon declamation. Rhetorical educators 85
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex 981–83.
86
See Felman 1987: 69–97. See especially Felman 1987: 92.
24
Introduction
are worried about the disfigurement of rhetoric itself, and the mutilation of Cicero’s corpse therefore is a point around which all parties can converge. Thus Encolpius was not the only one to consider the answer to the question of how we are to keep sound the body of rhetoric. In fact, his declamation against declamation as debilitating rhetoric chooses to ignore the constant labors of declamation to do just the opposite. Agamemnon complained that declamations forced teachers to rave with the insane: students were interested only in folly. Yet the declamations that engage the theme of madness are by no means delirious, and they do not spiral out of control. If one were to look for Rome’s own Wolf Man or the Latin Schreber, he is not to be found here. Madness instead is used as a tool in a carefully orchestrated social game. Indeed the theme of madness contributes to nothing so much as the psychic health of the ego who delivers the discourse on madness. Thus this talk of insanity acts as a cure, not as a diagnosis. Once again, we see in the genre a conservative tendency, and not the hotbed of transgression that one might have at first imagined. These two chapters have a certain “allegorical” bent to them. I would, though, resist considering these readings as mere allegory or reductions of declamation to life or life to declamation. The third chapter will examine directly those places in declamation where the question of representations is broached. First there are the accounts of the arts and the limits of art, and next the places where the biography of the speakers invites an allegorical reading. In short the speakers were not only interested in the problem of representation, but they were aware as well of the possibilities of the extended significances of their inconsequential and purely imaginary productions when juxtaposed with their own lives. The difficulty in keeping separate these dimensions becomes an opportunity for reading in declamation a project where “real” subjects are at stake even as we see an endless array of fictive selves speaking. The last two readings engage three of the so-called Major Declamations preserved under Quintilian’s name, the one speech on the raped soldier of Marius and the two speeches on the son accused of incest. Both cases involve the speaking of the unspeakable. In each instance we find that there is a crisis of language that breaks out in relation to a crisis of sexuality. These speeches are aware of and indulge in the protean possibilities of the situation. But it is important not just to observe what could be said about these taboo subjects but also those ideas that remain ultimately inarticulable even after one has rung the changes in the bell-tower of irony. The case of the raped soldier questions the relationship between Roman identity and homosexual desire. Though the two are profoundly implicated, this
A praise of folly
25
declamation allows for the rhetorical enactment of the normative position by way of the endlessly iterated refusal of such desire. The incest speeches are manifestly about the Oedipal triangle. Their elaboration hinges on the question of silence. Not only is the desire itself unspeakable, but so too is there a profound secret that is being re-hidden in the name of the salvation of the family. These two cases reveal the radical possibilities of declamation. They are not themselves directly revelatory of “what the Romans thought about incest and rape.” They do, though, show that declamation is an ideal medium for the exploration of these topics about which there neither was nor could be a clear, authoritative position. For much as declamation itself is implicated in the rhetoric of the self so too are these sexualized scenarios elements of the process by which selves come to be who they are. These themes “work” as declamations because they allow for the disavowing of the contents of a rhetorical elaboration of topics whose contents require repudiation and disavowal. If we are to know the Romans then we must read their declamations. This is the case I wish to plead. I hope that by the peroration you will be at least partially convinced. But do not expect that the Romans thus revealed will be simple folk, stern men, virtuous fathers, and good soldiers. Nor expect madmen, wastrels, or perverts. Such cursorily improvised constructs have long been used to characterize the declaimer, but they are instead only the headings under which one begins to people a declamation. The Romans who played with these figures and expressed themselves through their elaborate and contradictory interactions are a far more subtle and complex breed. In their declamation we will see Romans coming to be, and not a dying rhetoric passing away.87 87
Walker attempts to dismantle facile narratives of rhetorical “decline” and “decay” in general. See, for example Walker 2000: 94–109.
pa rt i
Where ego was...
c hapte r 1
Recalling declamation
He who appeals to authority when there is a difference of opinion works with his memory rather than with his reason. Leonardo da Vinci1
The Elder Seneca opens his collection of reminiscences of declamation with a preface dedicated in large measure to the theme of memory itself. The prominence of memory in Seneca’s preface has attracted a variety of commentary. Some marvel at the miracle (miraculum)2 but then grow swiftly suspect. Others admire and defend. Most agree that Seneca is not to be taken literally at his word.3 Rather than seeing in memory the tool that excavates the trove of citations that Seneca shall shortly offer, let us take it instead as a theme of the text. If memory is a tool, it works as a trope, not as a simple mechanism for retrieving information. Seneca works with his memory and in so doing he makes an appeal to an authority now lost, but one that he hopes to recover. Seneca’s text is thus not a necessarily a “reasonable” one, as Leonardo might have it, but it remains nevertheless a purposeful one: both the memory of rhetoric and the rhetoric of memory conspire to reproduce masculine authority. Accordingly I wish to examine what is at stake in writing down Seneca’s memories. We will not find a mere collection of random scraps, but instead an argument as to the proper economy of rhetoric. And this argument is specifically a declamatory argument. Seneca’s appeals to memory are appeals to authority, and these rhetorical appeals to authority cannot be dissociated from the putative reasonableness of categories such as fatherhood and friendship. We need, then, to read Seneca’s account of rhetoric as 1 2 3
Quoted in Freud 1990b: 215. For the sentiment, compare Cicero, De Natura Deorum 1.10. 1.pr.2. Sussman summarizes the scholarship on the question and sides with the sceptics (Sussman 1978: 76 n.135). Fairweather revisits the question, offers roughly the same summary of scholarship, but defends the possibilities of memory even while acknowledging that one will never really know the answer to the “fact” of Seneca’s memory (Fairweather 1981: 37–42).
29
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Where ego was...
itself a rhetorical construct. Specifically, how does this rhetoric of memory argue its case?4 Despite the consensus that memory is a theme of the text, it is not clear that Seneca has been given sufficient credit.5 Seneca’s recollections of declamation and declaimers need to be explored via the ambiguities of the Latin word memoria itself: this word entails both simple recollection and also the object recalled. Memory is a process that produces its own product, which is again called memory; and memory as a thing or possession implies not just facts, but also collective memory, tradition, and memorialization.6 Thus as a possession or property memory always also looks towards the broader community, not just towards some lone owner. Moreover, the possessor of memory should never be radically segregated from the producer of memory. Such, at least, is the lesson one learns from reading Seneca, though the lesson is one more broadly applicable to Roman letters. Memory, then, involves not just an individual, but also an entire social world. Memory implies a community even as it is involved in producing a community. And so to answer a question of the variety, “What sort of man was he?” one does not merely appeal to acts, deeds and sayings, but one also refers to the world that man lived in, and, significantly, this is a world inhabited by the one who himself does the remembering. Memory is thus always the act of an interested party. One of the specific points of modulation that will concern us here is the relationship between sexual, linguistic, and social economies as they relate to the project of recollection as a productive social activity engaged with the Roman present. As a tool or an instrument memory reveals a great deal about the economy of signs within which it is put to use. Rhetoric in general and declamation in particular offer ideal sites for both the invocation and the deployment of memory. At the most basic level, of course, memory had long been one of the five technical aspects of oratory. One must recall in order to perform. But the expanding interest in the sociology of rhetoric ought to allow for a truly generalized reading of this last statement. The performance is never simply the text of the speech; it is always also a performance of an orator 4
5 6
Habinek has argued that memory and monuments, inscriptions and literary texts are all bound together in a complex web of mutual dependence (Habinek 1998: 109–14). The same play of saving the past while (re)producing the authorial persona in the present can be found in Seneca’s “monumental” work. Sussman offers a first sketch of a portrait I hope to round out more fully here (Sussman 1978: 67–69). Hence one can compare to Latin’s ambiguous semantic overlap the dispersion of the problem in the French lexicon: un m´emoire, a memorial or even just a report, une m´emoire, a recollection, and des m´emoires, memoirs as we understand them in English. See the play between the senses of the terms in Derrida 1989.
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within a specific milieu. A speaker recalls and records himself within and for this world. His speech does not merely make use of memory; ideally his speech makes him memorable, and it marks him out as a man worth remembering: a speaker seeks to produce the very sort of reminiscences that a Seneca will later recall and record. Seneca himself, though, reminds us that rhetoric is the task allotted to the “good man experienced at speaking.”7 Significantly, this phrase is itself a recollection of a phrase of Cato the Elder. We should accordingly appreciate that this history of rhetoric also aspires to become a history of virtuous masculinity, remembrances of good men past. And, most importantly, such a history gives to these men the memories and memorials that they themselves sought to produce. Thus, recalling speech is a means of (re)producing an entire linguistic legacy that at every stage both uses and produces memory for past, present, and future ends. Seneca recalls Cato in order that a certain kind of man be invoked and then reproduced both in his own person and in the persons of his children, his ostensible addressees. But how does declamation fit into this scheme? Declamation is traditionally marked out as a quintessentially hollow exercise, a form without content. Or, where the contents are specified, they are notoriously not “good.” The fantasy-land of declamation is filled with raped maidens and cruel tyrants. Thus it would appear to offer no “real” objects worth recording, nothing truly memorable. A history of declamation then runs the risk of itself being as insubstantial as the memory of a dream or else merely the recollection of men behaving badly. Put briefly, how can one make time for Seneca’s memories? The world of declamation should not be so swiftly dismissed: in it one finds not just ravished damsels but also good men acting and speaking memorably. Declamation’s very dissociation from reality will prove to be one of its claims to being the most useful format for allowing memory to act in its productive capacity. The constitution of the recalled world of good men proceeds admirably in declamation’s “hot-house atmosphere.”8 Perhaps Seneca even reveals best the labor that subtends the sociology of rhetoric by depicting a rhetoric whose truth-contents matter least. Seneca works with his memory to crystallize, to distribute and to redistribute the goods of the memorable world of rhetoric. r
Seneca’s text opens with a greeting addressed to his sons. This work, apparently, is the product of their requests (exigitis). They wish to hear about 7
1.pr.9.
8
For the “Triebhausluft” metaphor, see Kroll 1940: 1120.
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Where ego was...
those speakers who lived before them. Seneca is going to gather such sayings of these men as have not yet slipped from his memory, and he intends to offer the resulting collection to his children so that their knowledge of these departed orators shall not be a matter of mere belief (credatis). Instead they will be able to judge each case for themselves (iudicetis). The premise seems simple indeed: three young men wish to know more about a time that they cannot have seen from a father who was an eye witness. Yet this image of the motivation of the text and of its addressees cannot see us to the end of Seneca’s preface. Ultimately this text will no longer be sent just to them, but it will be offered to Romans in general. Sussman argues that we are to take the text at its word: Seneca’s sons really did ask for this work, and they are its first audience.9 While I do not feel that we can or even need to answer the question of the intention of this address – a father writing for sons is also a trope10 – it is useful to bear in mind that all of Seneca’s readers become in some measure his sons. Moreover we are sons who want to pass judgement on the world of our father. Seneca speaks of the pleasure of removing the injury of time from men who either are already or might soon be forgotten.11 Seneca intends to right a wrong. He will be like an aduocatus or perhaps even a uir fortis who champions the cause of his dead peers. Likewise his sons will become the judges of the cases of these dead orators.12 In other words, this first sentence of the second paragraph hints at a Seneca who is already enfolding himself in the thematics of rhetoric and perhaps more specifically in the thematics of declamation. We should not then see the prefaces as dissociated from the snippets from declamations: instead they are active participants in the very rhetoric they purport to relate. Why should Seneca wish it otherwise, though? For herein he performs the very task that he sets himself: the living author reenacts the lost world he promises he is about to recover both in the body of the text and the prefatory passages that introduce the text’s divisions. Seneca’s fight against the injuries of time has just been described as being like a forensic advocacy. Nothing is quite so definite yet. However the blending of Seneca the author into Seneca the character of his own text continues in the next lines. The injury of time has not only been done to the men he will recall, but time has also ravaged Seneca himself. His eyes are going; his hearing is bad; his strength is failing. And, in particular, old age 9 10 11
Sussman 1978: 53–54. See Kaster for a long list of works of literary scholarship addressed by fathers to sons in late antiquity (Kaster 1988: 67 n.142). 12 This was already implied in iudicetis above. detrahere temporum iniuriam. 1.pr.2.
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assaults his memory (incurrit), the most delicate and fragile of the spirit’s faculties.13 Once Seneca’s memory was prodigious, now it lies fallow: “For some time I have asked nothing of it.”14 Seneca shortly tells of how he has difficulty recalling more recent affairs even though items from his youth are readily remembered. I suppose one must concede that this state of affairs does largely correspond to what one believes of memory today, namely that with age one loses the ability to form new memories as readily. Yet neither commonplaces nor biology ought to blind us to the literary deployment of these notions here. Seneca said that he has asked nothing of his memory for a while. Clearly the ravages of time are one problem, but there is already another: he has given up on the present. As Seneca himself concludes, he can offer his sons nothing that they already know, only that which they cannot know. The father is of another era than his children; their days do not overlap. Seneca appears to have put up a formidable gulf between the generations, but he at once proceeds to play with just such a notion. Rather than simply refusing the present in the name of the past, we will find that Seneca lives his own present in the name of the past. In other words, Seneca’s life today consists of memories of yesterday. Most importantly, however, this “living in the past” constitutes the best and truest way of living as a rhetorician. Seneca offers a technique whereby both he and rhetoric can be healed today by way of an appeal made to yesterday. Similarly, the conjoint project of memory and memorialization upon which Seneca has embarked offers to his sons a technique whereby any and all orators might seek for themselves the honorable, good, and lasting name that they desire to win today and wish to last until tomorrow.15 Seneca’s professed mode of exposition, though, is not always quite so grand and serious as the above might lead one to believe. He can often be playful and ironic rather than formal and severe. As he puts it, “Have it your way: let an old man be sent to school.”16 Proceeding on from such a note, Seneca next says that he will not order his text methodically but rather that he will relate things as they occur to him.17 Or, to use his metaphors, 13 15
16 17
14 diu ab illa nihil repetiui. 1.pr.3. 1.pr.2. Sussman summarizes Seneca’s tone as follows: “[T]here is no mistaking the impression throughout the works of a paterfamilias deeply concerned about the moral enlightenment of his sons, their education, and their future careers.” (Sussman 1978: 27) Fiat quod uultis: mittatur senex in scholas. 1.pr.4. Compare the snide remarks of Quintilian when he criticizes showy declaimers who reject the need for an ars rhetorica such as his own text provides. Such impassioned yet “artless” speech, he says, “is like the notebooks of schoolboys into which kids heap up things that were praised when others declaimed them (similisque sit commentariis puerorum in quos ea quae aliis declamantibus laudata sunt regerunt;
34
Where ego was...
he will “wander” (errem) through his studies, and as he recalls things it will be in accordance with the pleasure of his own capricious memory.18 Such diction recalls more the scandalous outlook of a senex amans than the tones of a reputable old man: Seneca is letting himself be led by the nose wherever his beloved memories of an equally beloved oratory shall take him. Is Seneca a wastrel, a man not unlike the sort of fellow he is soon to complain of in his own age? Does Seneca’s shady memory, a memory dedicated to pleasure and incapable of properly memorializing reveal a man more of this generation of Romans than the last one? Perhaps it does: Seneca’s memory should be questioned from every angle, even from this rather cynical and disruptive approach. On the other hand, Seneca does not intend that we read him quite so seriously at the moment. We will have to put such suspicions provisionally under the heading of the ambiguities of memory and return to the flow of Seneca’s thinking. After his affable outburst about being an old schoolboy Seneca next launches into a tirade against the decline and fall of Roman intelligence, oratory, and morality. One needs models to imitate; today oratory is going to hell in a handbasket; the Ciceronian period saw the acme of Roman rhetoric; luxury has helped to ruin Roman wits since then; people now apply themselves to a variety of profitable but sordid ends.19 The outline of the complaint is familiar enough. There is nothing wrong with reading this more or less as it stands. And the general portrait has provoked sufficient comment.20 The details, though, merit rereading: Seneca’s position is once again more complex and ambiguous than it may appear at first glance. Seneca tells his sons that they confront a problem of mimesis if they would improve themselves and their oratory: Non est unus, quamuis praecipuus sit, imitandus, quia numquam par fit imitator auctori. haec rei natura est: semper citra ueritatem est similitudo.
18 19
20
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 2.11.7).” Ironically this portrait of failed rhetoric resembles Seneca’s own text: a compendium of great sound-bites (See sententiis grandibus as the reason the auditorium is packed in Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 2.11.3). But Seneca intends for his own notebooks to be an aged father’s gift to his grown sons. It is difficult, then, to see his text either as incoherent and dissolute, as Quintilian might have it, or as fundamentally juvenile. Necesse est ergo me ad delicias conponam memoriae meae quae mihi iam olim precario paret. 1.pr.5. Compare Seneca, Historiae fr. 4 where Seneca compares the history of Rome to the ages of man. Its infancy was passed under king Romulus, and so on. See Johnson for age and decadence as two metaphors each using the plausibility of the other to promise its own truth (Johnson 1987: 124–27). Compare the remarks of Williams 1978: 7–9. See Sussman 1978: 67–69 and, for a fuller account, Fairweather 1981: 132–48. Johnson is right to spot a topos here (Johnson 1987: 11 n.13). And Sussman recognizes in this preface a thematic connection between memory’s decay and the decay of eloquence.
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One must not imitate a single individual, no matter how distinguished he should be, because the imitator never becomes the equal of the original (auctor). Such is the nature of the matter: the likeness ever falls short of the truth. (Seneca, Controversiae 1.pr.6)
The sentiment is both trite and profound, brilliant and naive. The commonplace gives way to the more intriguing so soon as one moves away from the banal message that the sons should find many good speakers to copy and considers instead the case of Seneca’s text itself. This text consists of nothing but imitations by way of re-presentations of the words of a variety of speakers. The imitation of these words is not the same thing as their original utterance. The likeness of these declamations captured in Seneca’s text is not the same thing as the truth of those same speeches. The dimensions of their truthfulness, though, are manifold: the original speeches showed genius, wit, charm, and they participated in the vibrant social world of speech in which they were embedded and for which they were destined. Seneca’s repetitions of them for us dislodge them from that world and set them off to poorer effect against the far different backdrop of the word on the page. If we the children are supposed to choose for ourselves from these portraits a model or models to imitate, what are we to think of a project where we make ourselves a likeness unto a textual likeness? Seneca the father imitates all rather than one: he tries to imitate endlessly in order to recapture one vital lost object: the good man experienced at speaking. Seneca seeks to recapture oratory as a whole, oratory as noble, oratory as the efflorescence of genius, and the social world that supported such a pursuit before luxury, gain, and perverse honors overwhelmed it. Seneca imitates in order to get back a world of which he was a part. Yet the means by which he will sustain this imitation is a memory that cannot be trusted. Specifically this memory is one to whose luxurious tastes (deliciae) Seneca must cater. In other words, the vehicle of the semblances Seneca offers is itself one suffering from the very defects of character that the likenesses are summoned to overcome. This may already seem to be an over-reading, but I should like to go one step further. Seneca’s imitations are themselves imitations of an imitation. Declamatory speeches are not “real” speeches. Instead declamations are speeches that merely pretend to be forensic speeches. Perhaps then it is fitting that Seneca should luxuriantly “fail” to recall declamation: there is no “truth” of declamation there to be recovered. This is only in keeping with what Cassius Severus will say of the genre as a whole: “What in declamation is not superfluous, when it is itself superfluous? (in scholastica quid non
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superuacuum est, cum ipsa superuacua sit? 3.pr.12).” The word superuacuum is an evocative one: a somewhat fanciful translation for it might be, “empty, and then some.” As a vehicle for superabundant emptiness declamation is pregnant with (non)meaning. To the extent that there is a substance to declamation, it is in the rehearsal of commonplaces, in the performance before peers, in the reproduction of the spirit of the declamatory venue itself. Thus Seneca may very well succeed in recovering declamation even as he seems to have lost both the declaimers and his memories of them: if he can reproduce their reproduction of commonplaces and if he can reinvoke the spirit of that community, then perhaps Seneca succeeds. Seneca’s imitations thus help him to become not just an author (auctor) but also the author of himself. They help him to recall himself for himself, for his sons, and for the broader community of his readers. Seneca follows up his complaints about luxury by refining his reproaches: men’s wits have become dulled owing to sensualism. Torpent ecce ingenia desidiosae iuuentutis nec in unius honestae rei labore uigilatur; somnus languorque ac somno et languore turpior malarum rerum industria inuasit animos: cantandi saltandique obscena studia effeminatos tenent, [et] capillum frangere et ad muliebres blanditias extenuare uocem, mollitia corporis certare cum feminis et inmundissimis se excolere munditiis nostrorum adulescentium specimen est. quis aequalium uestrorum quid dicam satis ingeniosus, satis studiosus, immo quis satis uir est? emolliti eneruesque quod nati sunt in uita manent, expugnatores alienae pudicitiae, neglegentes suae. Look how the wits of an idle youth lie fallow, nor do they apply themselves to any honorable pursuit. Sleep, sloth, and a criminal resolve more foul than both have invaded their hearts: the vile study of singing and dancing preoccupies the pansies. Our model youth today curls his locks, thins his voice to the point of feminine charm, rivals women with the softness of his body, and cultivates his person with refinements most foul. Who of your generation can I say is clever enough, studious enough, – no, who is man enough? Gone soft and slack, they only live on because they happened to be born; they attack others’ chastity, they care nothing for their own.21 (Seneca, Controversiae, 1.pr.8–9) 21
The reading in uita is an emendation of either inuiti or muti in the manuscripts. H˚akanson 1989 prints inuiti while Winterbottom 1974 accepts the emendation. Winterbottom translates as if the sense were, “Born soft, they remain soft.” This interpretation encounters two difficulties. First, in uita manere, is elsewhere used only of mere existence. See Cicero, De Finibus 3.60–61 and [Cicero], Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.51. That is, one does not qualify it and say “sluggardly existence” uel sim. Next, quod nati sunt can readily mean a terse, simple “because they were born” without any adjectival modification of the nati. See the younger Seneca, De Beneficiis 1.1.11 and also Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 330.5. The one citation is personally associated with our author, and the other is associated by genre. Let us then break the sentence into three insults: they are soft, they merely exist, they are sexually scandalous.
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The elaborate play of words for sleep and wakefulness culminates in a portrait of a most scandalous boudoir: the rhetorical crisis is readily interpreted as a crisis wherein one now aspires both to indulge in passive homosexuality and to launch sexual assaults upon others. All of the words for good, hard work and study have become inverted: the only diligence to be found presently is one that strives after vice. Significantly Seneca has converted effeminacy and study into antonyms. The good speaker is hardworking and manly; the bad is idle, soft, and effeminate. Luxury and pleasure spell an end to oratory and to masculinity: one needs to recall and recover diligently the manly men of bygone days.22 So says a man whose memory was once prodigious but is now itself idle. Are we in the presence of a stern father or instead confronted with a nostalgia for virility voiced from a position that is itself “soft”? How manly is Seneca? First, recall that Seneca begins his text by confessing to the pleasures of recollection: Est, fateor, iucundum mihi redire in antiqua studia melioresque ad annos respicere, . . . (1.pr.1). Seneca enjoys himself by recalling a time when the pleasures of oratory were not so wanton. His pleasure comes in recovering an economy of rhetoric that was not so sensual.23 Clearly the critique of sensualism can never itself go uncritiqued, for pleasure keeps returning to the very scene where it is branded a crime. Next, it is important to note that the phrasing of the complaint is highly “declamatory.” That is, Seneca’s preface to his oral history of declamation is already itself declaiming. By describing this preface as declamatory I mean only to highlight the rhetorical artifices of a phrase such as somnus languorque ac somno et languore turpior malarum rerum industria. This phrase thunderously reiterates two of its terms of opprobrium in its third member as it verges towards its final and ironic noun “industry.” One notes as well the asyndeton that allows for the piling up of emphatic clauses in the next portion of the same sentence. Once again, that clause ends with a sort of surprise with the word “model” (specimen). A similar sarcastic flair is indulged in the phrase quod nati sunt in uita manent and its terse insistence that these lazy folk live only because they happen to have been born: they exist by mere force of inertia. Likewise notice the anaphora of satis with the dramatic reversal of flow and correction provided by immo. No trope is alien to any branch of oratory, but the choice of figures and the way in which they are piled up bespeak a man who did not merely attend declamations but also formed some of his own habits at the performances. 22 23
One can compare the sentiments of the elder Seneca’s son, Seneca the younger. See Epistulae Morales 114.9–11. Compare Freud on the pleasure of recollection (Freud 1993: 185).
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Furthermore the standpoint from which these sentiments are uttered is itself one not unfamiliar from declamation. Something outrageous has happened: speak against it. Given the law, plead your case. What, though, is the implied law? The implied law states that oratory is a matter of manly authority in general, and of sexual continence in particular. Indeed the scenario of Seneca’s whole preface is not wholly unlike that of a case presented in Book 5: Im p vd i c vs co n t ion e p roh ibeatv r. Adulescens speciosus sponsionem fecit, muliebri ueste se exiturum in publicum. processit; raptus est ab adulescentibus decem. accusauit illos de ui et damnauit. contione prohibitus a magistratu reum facit magistratum iniuriarum. A pe rve rt s h a l l n ot be allowed at a p u b lic meet ing. A good looking young man made a bet that he would go out in public dressed as a woman. He did it, and he was raped by ten youths. He prosecuted them on a charge of violence and won. He was kept from a meeting by a magistrate, and he brings a charge of wrongdoing against the latter. (Seneca, Controuersiae, 5.6)
Seneca’s own voice emerges from the position of a defender of the declamatory law: he doesn’t want to admit the sleazy youth of today to his rhetorical gathering. Notice, though, that declamatory laws need not be real laws, they only have to be laws that the community of speakers has agreed to treat as if they might be real.24 Obviously in both the declamatory fiction and in the prefatory remarks everything hinges on how one interprets the term “pervert.”25 The stakes for the state of public speech are high. Does acting a bit effeminate make a man a fairy? What if he were only flirting with the notion and not really intending to “go all the way”? And what if he did: is passive homosexuality really grounds for social and linguistic disqualification? Such a policy could significantly thin the ranks of oratory if one were to pry too closely. And, most provocatively: what about those ten rapists? First, the youth really was good looking (speciosus), so it was easy to be attracted to him, even if under false pretexts. Similarly, I doubt that by the end of the event all ten rapists remained “fooled” by the costume. Obviously one can only imagine that the full course of the sexual assault does not include the notion of attacking a woman – the habitual object of random rapes in declamation – but instead a man dressed as a 24
25
See Bonner on declamatory laws (Bonner 1949: 84–132). See Bonner 1949: 105 for this particular case. There is no exact match for this law. See, then, the remarks of Winterbottom 1982: 65: the fictive character of these laws was seen as an asset, not a liability. impudicus often alludes specifically to homosexuality. Most generally it means any sort of shameless unchastity. It is a somewhat vague but decidedly harsh word.
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woman; and he is assaulted precisely as a man. The young man’s behavior may have been suspicious, but his attackers themselves showed a rather violent interest in him as a sex object.26 The magistrate then himself seeks to inscribe as a permanent fact of the youth’s character a transitory moment of costume and a consequent violent reaction to that costume. Seneca himself occupies a homologous position. He does not wish to read rhetorical “transvestism” as one pose among many. Instead it is a truth of the man: he assaults anyone he sees so tricked out, he launches his own “manly” attack against him, and then Seneca seeks to ban him from ever participating in public speech again. Moreover the assault Seneca launches on rhetorical perversion is itself a sort of rape, a piece of sexual violence aroused at the sight of men in metaphorical drag. Does he too get turned on only to hate the very object that aroused him? If we brought a charge of uis against him, could we win the case? Seneca makes his attack as a preliminary move on his way to describing the ideal manly speaker. The sole legitimate agent or auctor when it comes to speech is the “good man” or uir bonus. Elsewhere I have discussed the broad scope of this seemingly simple formulation as it pertains to the rhetorical tradition.27 Seneca’s own thinking, though, can stand on its own as an exemplary instance of the valorization of this figure who is a figure of speech in more than one sense of the phrase. As Seneca makes clear, the good man is the only legitimate orator; and, as I will shortly argue, he is also the object of the whole elaborate edifice of speech that Seneca has been constructing out of his memory. Erratis, optimi iuuenes, nisi illam uocem non M. Catonis sed oraculi creditis. quid enim est oraculum? nempe uoluntas diuina hominis ore enuntiata; et quem tandem antistitem sanctiorem sibi inuenire diuinitas potuit quam M. Catonem per quem humano generi non praeciperet sed conuicium faceret? ille ergo uir quid ait? ‘Orator est, Marce fili, uir bonus dicendi peritus.’ ite nunc et in istis uulsis atque expolitis et nusquam nisi in libidine uiris quaerite oratores. My fine young men, it is a mistake to think that utterance of Cato’s to be anything but oracular. And what is an oracle? It is most assuredly the will of a god spoken from a human mouth; and, after all, what more holy champion could divinity find for itself than Cato in order not to instruct the human race, but rather to level a reproach at it? So what did that man say? “An orator is, Marcus my son, a good man experienced at speaking.” Now go and look for orators in those 26
27
Roman thinking is actually far more interested in the problem of passive homosexuality than it is in the active partner. Thus the youths might hope to escape being themselves slurred as a consequence of their act. See the remarks of Walters 1997b and Parker 1997. See Gunderson 2000.
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plucked and polished fellows, men who are men nowhere but in their lusts. (Seneca, Controuersiae, 1.pr.9–10)
Cato’s maxim had been used to browbeat aspiring orators for centuries and it still had centuries to go before it would be forgotten. Though not manifestly censorious, this phrase is nevertheless used to deliver yet another lashing from Cato the Censor. Seneca’s version of Cato lays its emphasis on the term “man” and upon a sexualized notion of masculinity. By way of contrast one might note that technical rhetorical treatises tend to emphasize “skilled” and hence simultaneously to justify their own existence. Similarly the question of the “good” man preoccupies Quintilian in his twelfth and concluding book of the Institutio.28 While a sexual subtext is everywhere to be found in rhetorical writings, Seneca has moved the assumption of virility to the foreground. For Seneca, Cato and Cato’s oratory are not merely “good” versions of rhetoric, they are also sublime, divine even. When Cato lays down the law for oratory, he speaks as a man but a divine sanction lies behind his utterance: it is heaven’s will that rhetoric be manly. There is also one last theme that should be noted: Cato’s utterance is directed towards his son; and Seneca’s text is addressed to his children. Seneca becomes a Cato speaking as a father to a son, as a god through a man, and as one man to all men. The model of authority follows a chain of associations that runs from god, to father, to virile manhood. This is a potent collocation in any number of senses: we find in it a virtual monopoly over titles that might make a claim to authority. Seneca’s recollections are more than mere antiquarianism: they comprise, enact, and likewise seek to reproduce the most basic fundamental building blocks of public life. Seneca routinely highlights the word man, and he is not content to merely cite a snippet of Cato containing the word. When describing Cato himself and not just his maxim, Seneca says ille uir, which translates as “that man.” Yet just ille itself would produce the same English rendering. By adding the term uir Seneca insists upon the manliness of the author of this lesson on virility: a real man knows how to talk about real men. Yes, the 28
Cato himself was perfectly capable of forging other associations for the good man on other occasions. See the opening of the De Agricultura: “When our ancestors praised a good man, they praised him by calling him a good farmer and a good settler. This was reckoned as the highest sort of praise.” ([maiores nostri] uirum bonum quom laudabant, ita laudabant: bonum agricolam bonumque colonum; amplissime laudari existimabatur qui ita laudabatur. pref . 1.2.) Habinek 1998: 46–50 sees less a reflection of tradition here than a use of the notion of tradition to underwrite novel economic practices on the part of the elite. The only thing truly traditional about Roman goodness is the long-standing fight over its definition.
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logic is circular; but so too is Seneca’s whole project of making rhetoric a virile pursuit. Such a project is actually the product of a series of rhetorical claims of manliness rather than expressive of a virile ontology.29 How does one know that others are poor speakers? The claim is that they are poor men: they depilate; their manliness extends no further than their abuse of their sexual organ. As goes the phallus, so goes oratory. In selecting declamation as his preferred rhetoric Seneca becomes even more implicated in this citational model of masculinity where the actual presence of the thing itself is inferred from the endless iteration of citations as to its existence. The declaimers only perform representations of authority: they do not speak in a real, authorized context such as in the senate or the forum. Nevertheless we are meant to learn of the manliness of oratory and orators by way of the “proper” practice of this oratory that merely pretends to be judicial oratory. Yet even in the case of “real oratory” we must not allow this manliness to establish itself as a real substance: as students of speech we should learn from our rhetorical masters how to read critically all rhetorical claims that legitimate rhetoric. There is less an ontology of authority than a series of citations of an authority presumed to actually exist but in fact sustained only by the network of its iterated citations. This stance by no means implies a denial of power or its effects, only a critique of authority’s self-authorizing rhetoric.30 Declamation’s supposed weakness once again becomes its strength: the explicit fictiveness of the declamatory venue allows us to watch the process by which non-existent originals are recalled and manly originals are fetishized in a process that is generative of the very object that one might believe to have been “merely” cited. Put epigrammatically, the ancient orator becomes the self he performs.31 Declamation’s recollections and its techniques of rhetorical authority are no different from that of so-called legitimate oratory. Think, for example, of the number of orators who affected archaism in their public speeches: they cited and recalled the authority of a departed past in order to sway the present. Accordingly Seneca’s remembrances of orators past parallels an aspect of actual rhetorical practice. It is not itself merely a comment on rhetoric so much as it performs an ethics of rhetoric within the context of a description of rhetoric. Seneca’s tirade next turns away from sexual morality and back towards his original theme: memory. Or, rather, it unites the two as part of a larger crisis of rhetoric. 29 31
30 See again Butler 1993: 12–16 and her Derridean take on power. See Butler 1993: 12–16. Compare Gunderson 2000: 116–17 and 2000: 139.
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Quis est qui memoriae studeat? quis est qui non dico magnis uirtutibus sed suis placeat? sententias a disertissimis uiris iactas facile in tanta hominum desidia pro suis dicunt, et sic sacerrimam eloquentiam, quam praestare non possunt, uiolare non desinunt. Who cares (studeat) about memory? Who pleases not so much with great virtues but even with his own? Amidst the general idleness32 they speak as their own the bons mots (sententiae) uttered by the most eloquent. In this fashion they never cease violating a most sacred eloquence that they cannot themselves furnish. (Seneca, Controversiae, 1.pr.10)
The study of memory and a zeal for memory have been forgotten. Times have changed, and his contemporaries no longer care about this faculty central to Seneca’s project. Seneca claims that he remembers when memory used to mean something, and his recollections are designed to make those memories meaningful again. Presently ignorance and idleness – and the latter is evocative of luxury and hence also of effeminacy – allow people to steal the clever sayings from days gone by and to fob them off as their own. To the extent that anyone recalls anything, then, it is only with an eye towards dispossession and with the hope of stealing one man’s private property in a bid to make it his own. Men today are not eloquent; their eloquence has been pilfered; they are temple-robbers outraging the sanctuary of oratory. And the sanctity of oratory is a specifically virile sanctity. Thus the “violation” that the contemporary speakers commit should also be read as a sort of sexual violation. These passive perverts rape the good men who ought to be on top and doing the penetrating. These inverts have inverted the proper linguistic and sexual order. And whatever samples of vigorous oratory one might hear are instead so many specimens of perverse plunder: all of the real men today are fakes. Seneca will be pleased, then, to offer that which he still possesses in his memory to the public. By making his personal property public, he intends to restore confidence in rhetorical currency in general. The counterfeiters are soon to be exposed. Accordingly he continues as follows: Eo libentius quod exigitis faciam, et quaecumque a celeberrimis uiris facunde dicta teneo, ne ad quemquam priuatim pertineant, populo dedicabo. ipsis quoque multum praestaturus uideor, quibus obliuio inminet nisi aliquid quo memoria eorum producatur posteris tradetur. fere enim aut nulli commentarii maximorum declamatorum extant aut, quod peius est, falsi. itaque ne aut ignoti sint aut aliter quam debent noti, summa cum fide suum cuique reddam. 32
Usener’s emendation of omnium for hominum is tempting, and my translation verges towards this suggestion.
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Thus I am all the more glad to do what you ask: whatever eloquent sayings of celebrated speakers I still retain in my memory I will dedicate to the public, lest they be anyone’s private property. I believe that I will also make a significant offering to those men who are threatened with oblivion if something is not handed down by which their memory (memoria) might be extended into posterity. For there are either no extant notebooks by the greatest declaimers, or, what is worse, false ones. And so that they should neither go unknown nor be known other than as they should, I will faithfully restore to each his own. (Seneca, Controuersiae, 1.pr.10–11)
Seneca recalls the place of each dead speaker in the house of rhetoric. And in giving to each his due Seneca both learns and transmits the importance of memory, place, and of the place of memory within a community. Seneca’s position also becomes one of unique privilege. Private and public are confused in his person. We all have rhetoric back now, but it is still his. His words used to belong to scores of others, but now they are his alone. He leaves other’s property as a legacy to his sons and then to everyone else. He offers oratory to this age that has no oratory to offer ( praestare); and in so doing he also makes an offering ( praestaturus) to the men whose words he recalls. In remembering their words he produces a memory of them for others as recollection verges into memorialization. Words are recalled; possessions are restored; and good faith (fides) becomes the order of the day and the means by which that order is obtained and sustained. If one reads some other book filled with declamations, it may very well be false. But how “true” is Seneca’s text? First and foremost, it is not a text by a declaimer, but only one that purports to contain the sort of items that might be found scattered in a number of individual works.33 Seneca offers a sort of collection of items that might be found in a variety of such collections. More importantly, though, he includes portraits of the speakers themselves and also an illusion of a community of speech.34 Similarly he offers commentary and criticism on individual points as he sees fit. Still, one may justly ask the question as to the falsity of Seneca when thinking again of the thematics of memory. Seneca has to indulge his memory’s wanton whims (deliciae). Old age has assaulted (incurrit) his memory and dispossessed it of its stores much as an industry for wickedness invaded (inuasit) the wanton speakers today, these speakers who themselves 33 34
commentarii presumably represent relatively informal presentations but not ones that are mere collections thrown together randomly and disseminated just to get something out. As Bloomer notes, though, Seneca is clearly reporting under the same case snippets from a variety of occasions on which that same issue was handled (Bloomer 1997a: 204–05). That is, he is not offering a simple transcript of a single sitting. Bloomer also sees the pretense of a failing memory as useful for a man who wishes to avoid some sources and to compile his own selective version of declamatory history.
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have plundered the shrine of rhetoric. Idleness (desidia) has sapped Seneca’s memory; but so too has idleness provided the necessary condition for the pilfering of others’ words. One takes the fine sayings of others and makes them one’s own. But this act is on the one hand a crime of the effeminate youth and on the other the method by which Seneca’s failing memory hopes to recover the virile world of rhetoric past. Is Seneca himself the hero of this drama or is he just an impotent old man? Or, worst of all, is Seneca yet another thief, but this time one seeking different sexual ends? rr
The ostensible message of Seneca’s text is clear. Yet underneath this text there lies a subtext whose key question is the very possibility of articulating a sentiment of the form taken by the main thrust of his preface. This subtext engages memory not as a solution, but as both problem and solution. Memory does not merely present or represent, instead it represents presentation and presents representation and opens up a whole host of questions regarding mimesis. Memory does not just solve a sexual crisis in oratory, it instead reposes the terms of that crisis anew. The contradictions of Seneca’s preface reach a fitting crescendo in the section on Latro, a man who preoccupies Seneca’s own memories.35 Seneca has just recounted how the history of declamation is virtually coincidental with his own personal interest in the genre. He has seen everyone but Cicero, a point of eternal return for the Latin rhetorical tradition and, as will be discussed in the next chapter, a figure firmly lodged within the declamatory tradition itself. Much as Seneca claims to know almost the whole of declamation, then, so too does he declare that he knew Latro throughout his life.36 The life of Latro, Seneca’s life, and Seneca’s account of declamation in general are three tightly bound notions within this text. In fact the key theme of the section on Latro is once again memoria. Thus this is not simply a character sketch that opens the first book of the text and marks the boundary between the preface to the whole and a preface to a part. Instead this is a character sketch that rounds out the discussion of memory and that shows the extent to which its paradoxes inform Seneca’s relationship both to the genre and to its practitioners, speech’s good and experienced men. Seneca’s manifold uses of memory a` propos Latro begin with the statement that Seneca can hardly help but remember the man. However fitful Seneca’s 35 36
Compare Leach 1993 on remembering lost friends in Cicero. a prima pueritia usque ad ultimum eius diem; Seneca, Controversiae 1.pr.13.
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memory may have seemed, this is one possession that has not fallen from its grasp, and he still retains the man he repeatedly calls “my Latro.” Seneca will even go on to remember what a great memory Latro had. In other words, Seneca recalls in his friend a man with numerous parallels to himself, parallels that extend well beyond a shared Spanish origin. Seneca introduces Latro thus: In aliis autem an beneficium uobis daturus sim nescio, in uno accipio: Latronis enim Porcii, carissimi mihi sodalis, memoriam saepius cogar retractare, et a prima pueritia usque ad ultimum eius diem perductam familiarem amicitiam cum uoluptate maxima repetam. I do not know how much of a favor I am doing you in the case of the rest, but in one instance I actually am receiving one. For I will be frequently compelled to go back over my memories of my dear friend Porcius Latro, and I will recall with keen pleasure an intimate friendship that extended from an early age all the way to his dying day. (Seneca, Controuersiae, 1.pr. 13)
With Latro’s story we at once embark upon a compounded version of memory. Seneca handles anew his memories and he seeks again a friendship now departed. One notes the repetition of the iterative prefix re- in the two verbs that close each of his clauses, retractare and repetam. Seneca is glad to be compelled to repeat;37 he looks forward to the pleasure that running through the course of another’s life will give him. This pleasure is not dissimilar to that felt at relating the whole of declamation. One might even characterize this pleasure as rather sensual, depending on what weight is given to uoluptas. In the case of Latro, Seneca expresses no hesitation over the question of memory. Instead he is confident that memory grounds the principle of his pleasure in the particular instance as contrasted to the universal case wherein his memory is perhaps wanting. Latro the man embodies and overcomes many of the contradictions of declamation and of memory. In remembering Latro Seneca recovers an answer to the problems that beset both Seneca’s own memory and the shiftless rhetorical scene of the present day. First, Seneca recalls Latro’s relationship to idleness (desidia) as one that inverts the crisis of Seneca’s own memory. Latro used to throw himself into his pleasures. When Latro played, he played hard. But, Seneca notes, “when he would check himself and steal himself away from the blandishments of ease, he would so apply himself to his studies that he seemed not only to have lost nothing but 37
That is, gloss cogar retractare with Wiederholenzwang.
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even to have gained much from his idleness.”38 Above an idle youth had become effeminate and had ruined oratory. Indeed the general idleness of men had resulted in the disappropriation of words from their authors. Similarly memory itself, or rather Seneca’s memory, had gone slack. Seneca was no longer the possessor of what was once his. Conversely Latro adds by subtracting, and he becomes more himself, more memorable, and a better man by withdrawing from the earnestness of oratory. Thus we should ask ourselves similar questions of Seneca as well: to what extent has he gained by the idleness of his memory? Does he profit from violating any simple, direct tenets of oratory in favor of a broader project designed to cultivate manly authority in general? Does the “transgressive” quality of declamation itself instruct us as to the modes whereby even the violation of the norm may redound to the credit of the man skilled at speaking should he know how to plead his case properly? These questions open out onto two new vistas: the fertility of memory and the relationship between self and memory when the latter is viewed as a productive rather than as a reproductive faculty. Seneca’s discussion of Latro at this point engages the issue of Latro’s own memory. Latro too had a prodigious memory; moreover, it was a good memory aided by training in memnotechniques.39 Latro’s memory renders his relationship to written language unusual: he does not reread his own work. And, when he writes his speeches, he writes at virtually the pace at which he delivers them. That is, texts are figured more as an accompaniment than as a supplement to Latro’s efforts. Seneca relates that “he had rendered books superfluous to himself: as he put it, he wrote in his heart.”40 There is an art of memory and it is accompanied by the existence of the text or codex both in a literal and in a metaphorical sense. Memory’s apotheosis is to write the text as an indelible possession in the soul. Latro’s memory finds as its counterpart the text of Seneca itself. Seneca inscribes pages whose contents are to be laid up in the hearts of his readers as a store upon which they may draw not just as a personal possession but also as a collective, public offering and one that will allow the community of good men a sort of recuperative self-possession where each again has his own and good men give, receive, and maintain their due. It is an amusing 38 39 40
At cum sibi iniecerat manum et se blandienti otio abduxerat, tantis uiribus incumbebat in studium ut non tantum nihil perdidisse sed multum adquisisse desidia uideretur. Seneca, Controversiae 1.pr.14. Seneca, Controversiae 1.pr.17. Itaque superuacuos sibi fecerat codices; aiebat se in animo scribere. Seneca, Controversiae 1.pr.18. Compare, of course, Derrida on the “dangerous supplement” of writing (Derrida 1976: 141–64). Latro is not so much a counter-case as he is an example of the privileging of speech over writing even as writing comes to be a metaphor for speech.
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irony that Latro, a man whose name means “mercenary” or “brigand”, should be the focus of Seneca’s efforts towards the legitimate distribution of cultural capital. Let us note, then, that Seneca pauses in his account of Latro’s memory. Just before this break Seneca first gives as an example of Latro’s ability the fact that he knew Roman history superlatively. Thus memory is already becoming a question of the possession of others’ deeds as well as one’s own. In the interruption proper, though, Seneca asserts that perhaps his sons doubt that anyone could have such a good memory.41 On the contrary, Seneca avers, the art of memory is a simple one and can be mastered in a matter of days.42 Though Seneca defers transmitting the secret of the art of memory for now – one wonders too at the relationship between the art of memory and the quasi-biologism of memory’s decay earlier in the preface – his examples of some of the applications to which a good memory has been put are themselves highly illustrative. Just following Latro’s memory for history we find three more men with good memories. First a Greek on an embassy to Rome named Cineas learns in a day the names of all the senators and their clients. Cineas uses his knowledge to greet each by name on his second day in the city.43 Next an unnamed man hears a poet deliver a new poem. This man then claims that, no, the poem is his, not the poet’s. By way of proof he at once rattles off the verses himself. The poem’s author could not do the same. Lastly, challenged to prove his memory, Hortensius attends an auction, and at the end of the day he lists all of the purchases and their buyers. The objects of memory are by now familiar: memory is once again engaged in the repetition of the names of good men and so also in the assignation of ownership. In the case of the hapless poet his example recalls one of the problems of memory that has already haunted Seneca’s preface: does one really own what one remembers? Obviously this misrepresents the letter and perhaps even the spirit of the example. On the other hand such a question nevertheless brings us back to the question of the idle, luxurious, and effeminate speakers of contemporary Rome: using their memories they lay to heart the sententiae of other speakers and attempt to pass them off as their own. The study of memory has not wholly died out; the science 41
42 43
One should compare Seneca’s own claims for his youthful memory at the opening preface. And, amusingly, students of Seneca themselves today ask the very question that he imagines as preoccupying his sons: Can anyone’s memory really be that good? Seneca, Controversiae 1.pr.19. One assumes, then, that Cineas has learned at least hundreds of names in a single day. It all depends on how many people were attending the senators: and this number could itself be enormous.
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lingers on as a tool of the trade with which bad men may dispossess their betters of what was once properly theirs. Seneca has arrived with his memory to offer some weight in the contrary direction. Though he is but a new man like Cineas,44 Seneca is going to greet each speaker by his name. More importantly, like a Hortensius, Seneca will watch over the traffic in speech and duly record whose was what, and for what price it was gotten. Seneca will even participate in the assigning of the values. After recounting this latest anecdote of the prodigies of memory, Seneca draws himself up and remarks that perhaps he has been going on rather too long about Latro. In the course of his explanation, though, Seneca offers two more instances of the word memory. Seneca returns to speaking of memory as the thing recalled, not as an active capacity for remembering. Yet in this return Seneca also blurs the lines between the two as he reveals once again the means by which memory actively appropriates: memory concerns possessions, and these possessions affect the self. Plura fortasse de Latrone meo uideor uobis quam audire desiderastis exposuisse; ipse quoque hoc futurum prouideram, ut memoriae eius quotiens occasio fuisset difficulter auellerer. nec his tamen ero contentus; sed quotiens me inuitauerit memoria, libentissime faciam ut illum totum et uos cognoscatis et ego recognoscam. I think I may have said more about my Latro than you wanted to hear. I knew it would happen: as often as I would have a chance to remember him I could only with difficulty be torn away from my reminiscences. But I will not be satisfied with just as much as I have said; instead as often as memory invites me, I will gladly see to it that you get to know the whole man and I get to know him anew. (Seneca, Controuersiae, 1.pr. 13)
Now Seneca is not yielding to a fickle memory. Memory invites Seneca to recall, and Seneca accepts its invitation. Seneca concludes with a bit of word play: he contrasts cognoscere with recognoscere. The one means “to get to know,” the other is traditionally translated as “to recall” though here I have translated it as “to get to know anew.” Seneca seeks in the same moment to both recover and transmit a knowledge of his friend. Moreover Seneca asserts that this is a knowledge of the “whole man” (illum totum): nothing will escape us; we will be in a position to know. Though fragmentary, Seneca’s memory – or for that matter the extant text of Seneca’s work – nevertheless aspires to offer a comprehensive account of a genre, of the 44
Note, then, the surprising phrase nouus homo used of Cineas in Seneca, Controversiae 1.pr.19. Here it means “new to the city”, though the phrase far more readily implies “new to elite Roman politics” as opposed to membership in the traditional aristocracy.
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speakers from that genre, of good men and their good rhetoric, and, lastly of the author himself. Seneca justly concludes his preface with a complaint that others did not appreciate Latro’s subtlety. They saw in him only manliness and vigor. The same might be said for our author: he too has traditionally been read as simple, as the exponent of a crusty and familiar message about oratory and aristocracy. Despite these fine sentiments, one nevertheless laments that Seneca was so foolish as to believe declamation to be worthy of the effort. Moreover Seneca’s own prose style is itself rather tainted by his favorite genre. Such a reading of Seneca fails to appreciate that the whole preface has been elaborately woven. The question of memory saturates every paragraph, and one soon comes to recognize that subject and object, act of recollection and thing recalled are protean questions whose subtlety Seneca does not so much depict as he performs. And, as Seneca himself says, “Perhaps the greatest failing of subtlety would be to show itself too much: a hidden ambush does more damage. The most useful is the most hidden subtlety. Its effects are clear, its character obscure.”45 Seneca seeks also to make whole both himself and his own memory in the act of remembering his friends and their memories. Seneca has chosen subtle means to pursue his end. The effects, though, are meant to be clear: one ought to recognize and to get to know all over again manly oratory, a manly orator, and a rhetorical father who offers both to us. I wish to examine another set of friends for a moment in order both to highlight the structural properties of amicable recollections and to explore the sociology of such a structure. Derrida’s comments on Paul de Man obey a logic that will be familiar to readers of Seneca. The closeness of this parallel itself provokes questions about the discourse of memory as a peculiar subset of the question of the proper, of propriety, of possession, and of a community of men. Questions of absence, presence, and re-presentation preoccupy both Seneca and Derrida. And much as the deconstructive turns of Derrida help to expose the operations of Seneca’s text, the explicit sociality of Seneca reveals an important moment of blindness amidst Derrida’s insights. Derrida published a series of recollections of his then recently deceased friend Paul de Man that addressed the question of memory and did so 45
Et nescio an maximum uitium subtilitatis sit nimis se ostendere. magis nocent insidiae quae latent: utilissima est dissimulata subtilitas, quae effectu apparet, habitu latet. Seneca, Controversiae 1.pr.21. “Subtlety” is not a preferred translation for subtilitas. Usually one renders it as “fineness” or in rhetorical contexts “precision”. In this paragraph, though, the lurking quality of the word is highlighted.
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specifically within the context of the loss of a friend.46 Thus the Derridean text invites comparison with the Senecan as to both theme and occasion. Derrida’s commentary on memory in the course of his memorial offered to a friend speaks of what it means to remember, what it means to be a friend, and, lastly, the significance of both to the problems of literary criticism. Furthermore the Derridean practice, despite being filled with the usual self-conscious tokens, also enacts without commentary several aspects of Seneca’s own text. First Derrida inscribes the theme of the friend as double in what is initially an uncritical fashion: the friendship was profound; they never disagreed.47 On the other hand, de Man and Derrida never spoke of music, and hence Derrida never knew of his friend’s deep interest in music. Nevertheless Derrida does learn one evening of the “soul” of the violin from de Man. The aˆ me is a piece of wood allowing the proper communication between the sounding boards of a violin.48 Later Derrida finishes his first lecture at Irvine by conflating under the heading of allegory the names of Psyche, Mnemosyne, and de Man.49 The allegory of the musical soul, though, allows one to reread Derrida: memory becomes the medium of communication; the proper name disappears as something proprietary; and instead the psyche is something external, an aˆ me, a piece of joint property allowing for intercommunication between two objects. And these objects do not so much provide an original meaning as they re-sound when the shared soul trembles with recollection. Latro works as if he were Seneca’s aˆ me. Latro provides the privileged psyche within Seneca’s text. Latro also acts as an object of memory, the subject of Seneca’s memorialization, and as one who himself remembers. He is the model of memory that stands young and untarnished within the text as the reliable double for a narrator who earlier discredited himself. Thus just as Derrida becomes a necessary fourth term if one is to read his list of three allegorical equivalents,50 so too must one think of Seneca in order to read of memory, the soul, and the friend. And, lastly, the image of the soundpost or aˆ me allows one to reread Seneca’s preface in terms of a communication addressed to his sons about the state of communication: declamation allows for the sharing of speech amongst a community of men. It is not the actual contents of the declamations that matter – everything is a fiction after all – so much as it is the very act of sharing the speech that counts. Declamation thus becomes the community’s aˆ me. And much 46 48 50
47 Derrida 1989: xvi. See Derrida 1989. 49 Derrida 1989: 39. Derrida 1989: xx. Although Derrida takes pains to show that allegory is not about equivalence, but rather about non-identity and non-closure.
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as Derrida highlights the sense of futurity in memory, so too does Seneca strive to recover in the present and to future effect the world of good men for his sons by going back to remember them.51 In his practical treatment of de Man Derrida offers extended quotations from him, letting de Man “speak for himself ” as it were.52 Or, as Derrida at one point declares, he is “letting [his] own memory speak here.”53 Derrida supplements his friend’s written commentaries, superadding his own text to de Man’s and simultaneously displacing de Man’s readings. Such, at least, is the “orthodox” deconstructive reading of the process of supplementation as it would relate to Derrida’s practice. One might see the same at work vis a` vis Seneca and Latro: Seneca cites in order to recall and to recover; he also cites in order to demonstrate Latro’s subtlety even as he promises that this faculty cannot be apprehended. The readers of Latro fail to understand him: Seneca rewrites Latro in order to remedy the situation. But this is itself a project of great subtlety. These other speakers are not merely “speaking for themselves.” Senecan subtlety thus comes to embrace both Latro and the whole of the preface on memory as Seneca produces an idealized union of speech, memory, and text. Seneca’s recollections of declamation turn around who said what. That is, the text is principally concerned with the proper attribution of words to their speakers, a proper naming of proper names when it comes to declamation. Nevertheless, despite the demands made of memory, it remains the “defective cornerstone of the entire system”54 which, as defective, reveals that there is no entire system and that the whole is not totalized.55 Memory is an art, not a science. Moreover we can describe the art of memory as a creative one and not a question of simple reproductions. Further, the community both produced and reproduced is not itself a totalized whole, but it is instead an always provisional act of citations and references to the idea of a community of good men and not to the fact of such a community. While Derrida’s specific comments on memory deserve reading in themselves, I have focused on the ways in which his text performs its own thesis in order to highlight the convergences with Seneca. Thus while Derrida 51
52 53 54 55
On memory and the future, see for example Derrida 1989: 57. Notice, though, that Derrida, unlike Seneca, does not explicitly speak to his audience, nor does he address the question of a possible threat to the institution of deconstruction posed by the loss of one of its members. “I wanted only to bear witness as would befit the sort of admiring observer I have also been . . .” (Derrida 1989: xviii [original emphasis]). Derrida 1989: 8. The moment and the phrase, while not careless slips, nevertheless are never resumed within any direct account of the problem of citation as it relates to memory. This is Derrida quoting de Man on allegory in Hegel (Derrida 1989: 76). See Derrida further quoting and glossing de Man at Derrida 1989: 78.
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comments on and performs “Deconstruction in America”, so too does Seneca record and enact “Rhetoric in Rome.” In particular it is this performative aspect of the text and its relationship to the notion of the community that is the least well elaborated aspect of Derrida’s text while also being one of the most obvious keys to the proper reading of Seneca.56 Derrida does not make enough of the fact that the “life” of the sign is lived by humans. That is, Derrida fails to indicate either that there are more dimensions than those of the auto-affectation of the allegorical imperative, or that the instability of signification and the immanence of deconstruction are at best autonomous processes limited by a necessarily contingent predicate, the living individual. Indeed a deconstructive reading of Derrida remembering de Man both reaffirms Derrida’s own key themes and reveals that the community of the letter is a vital element structuring the play of its repetition and dissemination. And this is a community prone to (re) forge itself by staging wakes and producing texts that both recall and make present the thing recalled by way of the double-logic of memoria. This is a community of the dearly departed, a community of texts remembering living men and their vital speech, a community mourning over the letter as dead as opposed to the lived presence of speech. In short, Derrida’s practice parallels Seneca’s as the commentary and the practice become hopelessly blurred. That Derrida should become enmeshed in a set of issues that run athwart so much of Derrida’s own deconstructive philosophy testifies to the worldliness of the world of criticism.57 And yet such an objectification of the social sphere on my part should in no wise serve as a reductivist last word on such matters: the community of the letter is not so monolithic as to be condemned only to speak its own name over and over again. Indeed the question asked by deconstruction as well as declamation, and the question asked keenly by memorials of both, is what is the status of repetition and reproduction? What makes for a community of letters where the human members of such a community are transient yet their words and particularly the writing of their words partake of the eternal? rrr
What, exactly, does memory offer? What sort of possession is it? These questions are left open by Seneca: he tantalizes more than he answers. The 56
57
Derrida, for example, is uncomfortable with the notion that deconstruction might be explicable in terms of its own institutional incarnation. Instead he wishes to preserve for it an unboundedness and irreducibility that allows it to act as a moment of non-being or as a trace. For Derrida the movement of deconstruction is autonomous and necessary, a force immanent within the very order it destabilizes. See, for example, Derrida 1989: 72–73. See Bourdieu for an attempt to objectify the French intellectual milieu – Derrida included – for his English readers (Bourdieu 1988: xi–xxvi).
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subtle fabric of his text is woven in such a way that, paradoxically, one is ready to forget that the main body of the work is nothing but the product of an old man’s memories, a memoir on memory. Seneca’s work is readily taken for a catalog of speech instead of a repository of memories.58 On such a reading the preface becomes merely an unwelcome and literal hors d’oeuvre on the way to the main fare. Instead one should see the preface as an appetizer that foregrounds an ingredient rendering the entire text possible. Memory acts as a poetic force, then. For Seneca memory reproduces not just words, but also the lived consequence of those words, the society of language. The actual path traversed by Seneca’s reminiscences, though, is not one of direct production or reproduction. Seneca promises that his memory can only wander, associate, and deliver unexpected thoughts out of place or requisite ones later than they ought to have been furnished. Thus instead of recording after the manner of a stenographer Seneca recalls in the fashion of a poet or even of a dreamer. Memory should be explored as a protean and profound attribute of the text. Indeed, in as much as it is a psychic process, memory produces a dimension of meaning that outstrips what is found by looking merely to the surface of Seneca’s prose. Thus one must not only take Seneca up on his subtle allusion to subtlety, but one should also ask questions of memory that exceed the compass of Seneca’s own formulation. For example, Seneca’s text is enriched by reference to the purposes of memory. These motives of memory are both expressed and implied. Memory recalls and reproduces. And yet one is also entitled to ask about those things that are forgotten. What goes permanently unsaid? What is the chain of associations? What of false or misleading recollections? Clearly one cannot possibly answer every such query. As a “case history” the text must remain forever incomplete.59 On the other hand, by attending to some of the operations of memory, its tropes, as it were, one can nevertheless develop a style of reading memories. First, Freud understands memories as points of affective attachment:60 the significance of the moment recalled is the chief variable in its accessibility. On the other hand, 58
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Note, though, that the first case recounted is introduced as a particularly important reminiscence: it is the first declamation Latro ever spoke: “I will begin with the controuersia that I remember was the first my Latro ever declaimed . . .” (Ab ea controuersia incipiam quam primam Latronem meum declamasse memini . . . Seneca, Controversiae 1.pr.24) Note, though, that Freud himself made an effort towards interpreting written records of the memories of Leonardo da Vinci and Goethe. See Freud 1990b and Freud 1990a. In each case, though, Freud relies on biographical and other information that would be unavailable in a study of Seneca. See Freud 1990b: 175.
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such memories need not be “accurate” even though they are significant. So-called “screen memories” readily supplant recollections of certain facts.61 That is, one memory imposes itself between the subject and another memory. A purposeful amnesia displaces the original memory in a process wholly analogous to neurotic symptom formation.62 One wonders, then, at the extent to which Seneca’s failures to remember, the chain of his memories, and the mistakes in his memory – the last being more or less impossible to identify – are mutually related. But rather than pursue the impossible by way of numerous appeals to the improbable, let us look not so much to the man as revealed by the preface as to the declamations themselves. Though these will be handled in detail in later chapters of this study, I would like to propose that the declamations are for Seneca as fairy tales are for children. Freud claims that one can justly argue “that fairy tales can be made use of as screen memories in the same kind of way that empty shells are used as a home by the hermit crab. These fairy tales then become favorites, without the reason being known.”63 Thus Seneca may be evoking more than just the specific declamations themselves when he remembers for us what was said, for instance, about the war hero with no hands. For both Seneca and, in all likelihood, the various declaimers, the predilection for certain topics indicates a site of investment even though the specific subject may seem fanciful in the extreme. Declamations routinely explore crises within the family setting: one finds an impotent or castrating father, supposititious children, and a variety of illicit sexual unions. Brooding upon any of these involves working out and working through real questions of a related stamp without necessarily avowing such, or, more to the point, without ever coming to any final conclusions. One repeats these cases again and again; and Seneca himself repeats their repetitions. The text on declamations becomes on this reading declamatory in the extreme. And to recall declamations means also to reinvoke the psychic world of these fairy tales as a world whose topography of affect is to be reproduced in another generation. Similarly the tropes of declamation become like the mechanisms of dream-work where the former are no more empty and mechanical than the latter. 61 62
63
See Freud 1965: 62–73. Freud 1965: 66. Lacan, describing neurotic memory, makes the following aside: “Vous remarquez ici un remarquable concours avec la structure de ce que l’on peut appeler le souvenir-´ecran, c’est-`a-dire le moment o`u la chaˆıne de la m´emoire s’arrˆete.” (Lacan 1994: 119) Freud 1965: 70 n.10. As has been mentioned memory readily attaches itself to a sense of place and possession: hence the hermit crab in this regard too serves as a useful image.
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Much as the declaimer in his imagined speech seeks to talk his audience into a sense of the community’s values as against the deeds of one of the fictive parties of the case, so too does Seneca himself hope to record and assign to their place the communal values of rhetoric. His project is to defend the community of speech against the indignities it has suffered. In this sense, then, one justly compares Seneca to one of the characters of a declamation, to a war hero seeking redress against the violation of his house and bed: declamation’s fantastic scenarios offer both the training ground and the point of retreat when it comes time to defend oneself against an imaginary threat. In fact, the rhetoric of the actual forum is a tool far less suited to repelling such an assault than are the devices of declamation. Declamation need never depart from the affective crisis in order to deal with more worldly questions of evidence, politics, and practical consequences. The good man that Seneca hopes to recall is hence already present in the declamations themselves. He speaks out there against the very transgressions that Seneca now needs him to smash down underneath a barrage of words: it is thus precisely the empty contents of declamations that make them worth recalling. This homology between author and subject, though, contains yet another fold further complicating the structure of the text. The lost objects of rhetoric, of memory, and of declamation are actually meant to be lost. That is, the cry of outrage and the demand for reparation is itself tropological: there is no golden age, no moment before the crime, and no thing itself to which we may return. Hence the lost community of good men and lost virile authority were, in a sense, never there. To begin with, their real power resides in their persistence as objects of nostalgia in the present. Thus it is more the appeal to these objects than their actual existence that constitutes the engine of the text’s psychic life.64 And what genre describes better than declamation both the way we never were and the way we wish to be? Seneca’s recherche du temps perdu becomes both a remembrance of things past and a recovery of lost time. Rome needs, though, more than a renaissance of good rhetorical taste. In fact, Roman thinking on rhetoric expresses a nearly permanent dissatisfaction with the present in the name of a superior and more virile past. And yet the nostalgia for lost men is clearly a special sort of “getting to know all over again.” 64
See Lacan 1994: 6–69 for the child’s appeal, its frustration, and the emergence of the symbol in the wake of the dialectic of presence and absence that ensues.
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Freud argues that the finding of an object is actually the refinding of it.65 The formulation is paradoxical and somewhat cryptic. Lacan’s explication of the point helps to unpack its profound implications while also explaining memory’s role in the process: there is a fundamental discord between the object that is refound and the object that was sought. One never recalls just what one remembered.66 For psychoanalysis, the relationship to the first object, the mother and her breast, is not the same for a subject once it has become aware of its own body, of the process of frustration and lack, and of the mechanism of signification that is entailed by the play of presence and absence. Moreover, the term that structures this imaginary relationship between infant and mother is the phallus:67 each represents phallic presence and power to the other partner, but neither actually possesses such authority. The image of potency and power remains always just that, an image: one never actually has that authority upon which the notion of the relationship of meaning subsisting between self and object depends. Senecan memories obey this same logic, a logic that is fundamental to the relationship to the object as such. Or, rather than speaking of the object relation, Lacan reminds us that what is fundamental for psychic life is the lack (manque) of an object.68 The action of memory proceeds by way of refinding an object that one has lost and that one seeks to recover. This object is one whose absence, though, is a fundamental aspect of one’s psychic life. One compulsively repeats items from memory by way of summoning endlessly back into the present objects that one claims as one’s own without at the same time finishing the process of recollection. The desire to remember is thus never satisfied. One can therefore describe memory as a screen behind which the relationship between the object and nothingness is played out for the subject.69 Hence all memory, and especially rhetorical memory, does not participate in a relationship to the object so much as it mediates the relationship between the subject and the presence/absence of objects. The impossibility of satisfaction is not merely a property of memory: one could no more be satisfied by the living presence of good men and good orators. For one does not actually desire them as such, instead the 65 66 67 68 69
Freud 1962: 88. Lacan 1994: 53. Note as well Seneca’s statements about the inadequation between imitation and original at Seneca, Controversiae 1.pr.6. Lacan 1994: 70–75. The whole of the fourth seminar concerns this problem, but a clear introduction to it can be found at Lacan 1994: 35–37. See Lacan 1994: 156 for le sch´ema du voile.
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point of orientation is a presumed phallic authority that they represent. And as representatives they are also “mere” representatives, mere images of authority rather than authority itself. One seeks access to the question of authority per se by way of these men: there is something, the phallus, beyond or behind them to which one seeks access.70 Behind the speech, the man. Behind the man, the phallus. And this last is only apprehended indirectly, by way of appeals to and claims of legitimacy. In the case of memory, though, the appeal’s indirection is highlighted. The orators are manifestly no longer there; they need refinding. Once Seneca has recalled them he will also have brought back into play the circuit of desire within which they play a pivotal role. Indeed, one might even say of these objects of memory that they must be lost as a prerequisite to the full significance of their refinding.71 We must look to the structure as a whole: virile authority, mastery, and presence neither “are” nor are they anywhere. Instead there is a process whereby the phallus is sought, cited, and reproduced rather than found, presented and produced. The declamations themselves obey this same logic: they forever cite an authority that is only hypothetical; they defend a law that has been conjured for the occasion; and they champion the values of an imagined community. These fanciful performances are consumed, though, with great relish by a worldly audience of men whose own lived relationship to authority can be mediated by way of these fictions. On this reading Seneca labors under the curse neither of a failing memory nor of a wicked age. Instead his very protestations about each underscore the manner in which the psychic life of rhetoric must be the object of constant solicitude. By citing the declaimer Seneca also cites the masculine authority of speech; he performs fundamental operations of authority by using his memory to refind and reapportion language and authority.72 He also explicitly hopes to use his memories to ensure the reproduction of this particular economy of desire for his sons’ and subsequent generations. Thus he refuses to identify with passive male sexuality and in so doing claims to strike a blow simultaneously against ignorance, idleness, and dispossession. 70
71
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Compare Lacan 1994: 95–147 on the indirect route taken by such desires. See especially Lacan 1994: 88 and 110 for the discussion of courtly love as a means of aspiring to the phallus that resides au del`a de l’objet aim´e. See as well the phallus as veiled/screened in Lacan 1983. As Lacan notes, “La retour est par Freud affirm´e comme fondamental concernant l’objet. Ce n’est jamais, souligne-t-il, que sous sa forme retrouv´e quel l’objet trouve a` se constituer dans le d´eveloppement du sujet. L’´eloignement de l’objet y est n´ecessaire. Cette n´ecessit´e est a` proprement parler corr´elative de la dimension symbolique. Mais si l’objet s’´eloigne, c’est pour que le sujet le retrouve.” (Lacan 1994: 321) Once again one could compare Butler’s model of performativity.
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The active knowledge of Seneca ensures a vigorous circuit of proper desire that will ever and properly allot to each his own. Opinions may differ as to what the proper economy of language ought to be at Rome, but Seneca’s memories work to achieve the reproduction of a certain version of this authority, and the reasonableness of the whole social world is made to depend upon his success.
c hapte r 2
Fathers and sons; bodies and pieces
Mutilation and debilitation: these are vital declamatory themes. By vital I mean not only that there are numerous declamatory cases where bodily trauma plays a significant role, but the question of bodily integrity also occupies a significant position on the theoretical plane. The theory of declamation is itself informed by a thematic investment in a conception of soundness; and this soundness is a metaphor whose primary reference is to the body. Moreover, sound bodies are posited as the product of the proper relationship between father and son. Thus a good student of oratory knows both how to look after his own body and how to ensure that his relationship to his rhetorical sire is a healthy one.1 The scenography of rhetoric and rhetorical training thereby becomes a venue for the satisfactory playing out of a “family romance” whose d´enouement involves recognizing the salutary quality of the maxim that father knows best. Furthermore rhetoric becomes the ideal tool with which to cure an ailing father and to lend linguistic authority to a languishing paternal authority. Rhetoric, which itself derives so much of its own authority from the idea of the father, thereby ever plays the good son by offering back this patrimony of linguistic authority to a maimed father who no longer seems in possession of his full faculties. Within this context, subversion takes a special form: we see a promise of revolution and of freedom in the prospect of “out-fathering” the father and assuming his role when he can no longer live up to his own authority. Seneca’s memory is mutilated; it is faulty; it offers now broken, random pieces where once it was hale, hearty, whole. If we treat Seneca’s words as simple autobiography or a record of facts we neglect key themes of his project as a whole. Good men and good bodies were vital objects for Seneca, things one had to recall properly. Let us look next at bodily integrity as a 1
See Bloomer on the profound sense of “becoming a paterfamilias” that is enfolded into the genre itself (Bloomer 1997b). Compare Sussman 1995.
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theme within individual declamations and so too as a theme of and for declamation itself. Like memory, bodily mutilation forms part of both the text and the context of declamation. And so too does the bodily discourse within declamation parallel the commentary on the body from declamatory criticism. Bodily integrity and paternal authority each act as a metaphor for the other. These cases offer a specific model whereby one grows into the sound and solid “good man” that Seneca was so concerned about in the last chapter. Here we will find that not only does mutilation within declamatory cases inform our understanding of Seneca, but that a bodily economy also shapes the reading of the substantially different text of the Declamationes Minores. We will explore this latter economy first. Then we will go back to Seneca in order to complement the discussion of the Declamationes Minores. Next we will move on from this broad portrait of mutilation in declamation and rejoin these bodily themes with the question of memory as treated in the previous chapter. In the end we will find that the question of the rhetoric of mutilation is one and the same as the fear that rhetoric has been mutilated. Of the many bodily violations in declamation, loss of the hands is, relatively speaking, a not uncommon affliction. Women are raped; men lose their hands. This formulation smacks of the sexual, and perhaps rightly. Having one’s hands cut off has two main associations in declamation: impotence and the father. Manus, the word for hand, itself means “authority” in Latin. One seizes possession by laying a hand on an item (manum inicere). If a father renounces his claims on his daughter, he gives her into her husband’s manus.2 And a son or a slave can be released from a father’s or a master’s authority if he is “released from the hand” (manu mittere). Thus the loss of hands is always ready to be confused with a loss of authority. Similarly outrages against authority will entail violence done both by and to the hand.3 “The man who strikes his father will lose his hands.”4 This law governs Seneca, Controversiae 9.4 and Minor Declamations 358, 362, and 372. Bonner notes that, as far as we know, a son’s hands were not cut off under Roman law.5 Striking one’s father was always actionable, but this particular penalty was not an element of the legal system. Declamation, though, is content to live under the Code of Hammurabi. The cases in this text are rather more direct and simple than any of the mutilations in Seneca. They are not, though, for that reason any less profound in the implications of their elaboration. 2 3 4
Compare Crook 1967: 103–04: this sort of marriage was legally like an adoption. Compare Fitzgerald on similar fantasies as they relate to the master-slave dyad (Fitzgerald 2000: 49). 5 Bonner 1949: 96–97. Qui patrem pulsauerit, manus ei praecidantur.
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Cases 358 and 372 are virtually identical.6 They are differently elaborated: one gives more room to the son, the other less.7 The premise of Minor Declamation 358 reads: “One may sue for punishment in kind. The man who strikes his father will lose his hands. A man who took an abandoned child as his own son was struck by him. He cut his hands off. The true father acknowledges his son and is taken on as his advocate. The son seeks punishment in kind.” (Talionis sit actio. Qui patrem pulsauerit, manus perdat. Quidam
exposito quem in locum filii sustulerat pulsatus tamquam pater manus incidit. Agnitus ille aduocato naturali patre talionem petit.) Minor Declamation 372 is governed by the following: “One may sue for punishment in kind. The man who strikes his father will lose his hands. A man took in an abandoned child. He reared him as his son. He was struck by him. As if he were his father, he cut off the son’s hands. The youth is acknowledged by his real father. With the help of his father he sues the man who raised him for punishment in kind.” (Qui patrem pulsauerit, manus ei incidantur. Talionis sit actio. Quidam expositum sustulit, pro filio educauit. Pulsatus ab eo, tamquam pater manus incidit. Agnitus est adulescens. Aduocato naturali patre cum educatore agit talionis.) The second case is set up in a staccato style that emphasizes each individual feature of the scenario in its own clause. The Master’s comments on 358 begin with the remark that the youth is on weak ground here (iure infirmus).8 Why not sue the executioner who actually cut off his hands? Though he does not explicitly say so, the Master then effectively advises taking refuge in a color – a supplement pleading extenuating circumstances – in order to massage the material into a more pliant shape: the adoptive father had always been cruel; the youth suspected the truth; the false father had virtually driven the lad to strike him; the man then abused his false status to force the adopted son’s mutilation. While the declamation itself is not given, the Master hangs most of his theoretical advice (sermo) off a single verb, dicat: “Let him say x, y, and z.” That is, the sermo offers in indirect discourse an adumbrated version of a much fuller treatment. 6
7 8
Minor Declamation 362 exists only as a case and a set of comments from the Master (a sermo). Each of two youths strikes the other’s father. Someone sues to have their hands cut off. Their fathers defend them. Interest in this case consists mainly in the extent to which the Master has to insert material into the situation in order to render intelligible the state of affairs from which one begins speaking. Put in technical terms, the sermo in this instance is largely occupied by a color. For a translation of Declamatio Minor 372 in its entirety, see the second appendix. See Dingel 1988: 14–15 for his discussion of another set of paired speeches, 287 and 375. These concern disowning a son. I will follow Winterbottom 1984 in designating the author of the Declamationes Minores as the Master and not as Quintilian. Nevertheless, this text is clearly related to the teachings of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. A systematic study of this question can be found in Ritter 1967: 219–56.
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If the son’s case is infirm, the father’s is hale and hearty. For Minor Declamation 372 the Master offers no sermo, but instead provides a speech (declamatio).9 As Winterbottom notes, “the speech has a proem (1–4), narration (5–7), argument from the law (8–10) and a father’s rights (11–12), and the briefest of epilogues.”10 The Master does not instruct, he models. In the earlier case he would only speak indirectly. Here he has no trouble in assuming a voice. That is, one finds it easier to talk of the son’s position, but not from it. Meanwhile the persona of the father is readily adopted. Obviously one could object that the Minor Declamations frequently omit either the sermo or the declamatio, but here the pattern is more significant. The teacher has a number of reasons for preferring to instruct his students on the stronger side of the theme while leaving them to muddle through on the other side of the material. The teacher is himself not unlike an adoptive father. Notice that the second version of the premise is much punchier, far more explicit, and hence even more outrageous. If the son’s side was rhetorically difficult in 358, it becomes all the more arduous in 372. In 372 one finds not “he took him on as his son” (in locum filii sustulerat), but instead a more pointed “he reared him as his son” (pro filio educauit). Instead of “he was struck” (pulsatus) being separated from the word naming the agent by the flow of a sprawling sentence, we get a fresh sentence beginning “he was struck by him” (pulsatus ab eo). And, finally, in the last sentence we read not the more general “he seeks punishment in kind” (talionem petit) but “he sues the man who reared him for punishment in kind” (cum educatore agit talionis). Thus in the second version educator stands out. The titles of the two cases also contain a significant variation. The first case is called “The amputated hands of an abandoned batterer” (Exposito pulsatori amputatae manus). The second is entitled “The abandoned batterer of his foster-father” (Pulsator educatoris expositus). While it is perhaps unlikely that the author of our text is also the author of these titles to the cases,11 nevertheless the titles do make explicit the implicit differences in the tenor of the cases. Everything turns around the question of the educator. The changes in the formulation between the two cases highlight the verbal stem, educ–. This is the root from which our own “education” is 9
10 11
Dingel 1988: 11–13 notes that the sermo and the declamatio share what is effectively a supplementary relationship: either one can complement or even displace the other. Indeed an editor will often have trouble deciding where one begins and the other ends. Winterbottom 1984: 572. Winterbottom 1984: xi takes this notion as so obvious that he mentions it in passing without further comment. Dingel 1988: 18 summarizes the scholarship on the question and notes that not all share the scepticism of Winterbottom.
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derived. Hence one is tempted to see in this second formulation of the case an aggressive rallying around the flag of the educator performed by an author who is himself instructing other young men. Then one would say that the Master is teaching his students how to listen to the speech of a justified surrogate father who himself “educated” an ungrateful son. So too does the Master avoid giving advice to his charges on how to slip out from under their obligations to a man who is for them in loco parentis.12 The argument from etymology is enticing, but it is also insufficient. Educare and its derivatives primarily indicate nurturing in an alimentary and infantile sense. They mean “fostering.”13 These words do not immediately suggest abstract intellectual cultivation as offered to a more mature youth. Educare indicates the process that sees the boy (puer) through his childhood and up to the point where he becomes a youth (adulescens): “I wanted children and so took a wife. I recognized her child as my own. I reared him. I turned him into a young man.”14 As a general process, then, such rearing may well imply far more than the mere care and feeding of an infant and so also include the lessons of childhood. But such an implication involves an extension of the primary meaning of educare. Only by way of special pleading, then, do forms of educare mean “educating.” That is, I take the reference to an “educator” in this declamation as more an allusion or a hint than sure sign of partisanship.15 It will be useful then to try to draw the Master out more fully by reading the speech that the foster-father offers us. 12
13 14
15
Compare Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 2.9.1–2 on the proper relationship of students to teachers: “I say that [students] should love their teachers no less than their very studies, and that they should believe them to be the sires not so much of their bodies but of their minds. This filial reverence (pietas) will contribute greatly to their enthusiasm: for they accordingly will gladly listen, and believe what is said, and truly long to be similar [to their teachers] (moneo ut praeceptores suos non minus quam ipsa studia ament et parentes esse non quidem corporum, sed mentium credant. Multum haec pietas conferet studio; nam ita et libenter audient et dictis credent et esse similes concupiscent).” See also Kaster 1988: 68 on the grammarian as father. Note, then, the purely corporeal force of Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 1.1.21 where educatio is specifically not intellectual cultivation. cupidus ego liberorum uxorem duxi, natum filium sustuli, educaui, in adulescentiam perduxi. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 4.2.42. Quintilian is illustrating superfluous verbiage: saying “I have a young son” should not involve trotting out his biography. Hence this passage details a process that is considered to be everywhere implied. It should also be noted that while the Roman category of boyhood largely overlaps with our own, the Roman designation “youth” can indicate people who are in their teens, twenties, or indeed people who are even older. Compare, though, Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 9.2.81 where rearing, educating, and declamation are all bundled together: “And since we have come to this topic, let us spend some more time on the rhetoric schools (scholis): for even here the orator is cultivated (educatur) and how one pleads as an orator (agere) is entailed in the question of how one declaims (et quatenus huc incidimus, paulo plus scholis demus: nam et in his educatur orator, et in eo quo modo declametur positum est etiam quo modo agatur).”
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Sceleratissimus omnium, iudices, iuuenis, ingratus uel quia lucem beneficio meo accepit uel quia [in] patrem, bis parricida est, semel domi, iterum in foro. quam merito cruentas perdiderit manus si quis adhuc dubitabit, aspiciat: iterum me in conspectu uestro pulsat, etiam truncus ac debilis, sola rabie integer, in miserum senem incurrit. quid si haberet manus? ac ne quis illum coercitum poena putet, etiam audacior factus est: debilitatem meam concupiscit, et ei praecipue corporis parti irascitur per quam uiuit. fateor, iudices, fateor praecidendas fuisse has manus, sed cum istum tollerent. He is the most criminal youth, judges. He is thankless as he owes to my kindness either his life or his father. He is doubly a parricide, once at home, now again in the forum. If anyone will still doubt how he deserved to lose his blood-stained hands, let him look at him: again before your very eyes he beats me, and now, weak and mutilated, whole only in his savagery, he attacks a poor old man. What if he had his hands? And lest anyone think him checked by his punishment, he has been made even bolder: he lusts to cripple me, and his anger is most directed at that part of my body to which he owes his life. I confess, judges, I confess that these hands of mine should have been cut off back then when they took up this scoundrel. (Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 372.1–3)
The foster-father insists that the case itself recapitulates several of the crises that led to its introduction into the court. The son’s past wickedness is readily noted by his present course of conduct. Legal blows have been exchanged for physical ones. The son’s murderousness has only refined itself: now he attacks his foster-father’s hands. These hands gave the son life; now the son wants to assault the very instruments of his own salvation. Moreover these hands stand in a metonymic relationship not just to the son’s salvation, but so also to the question of paternity itself: in taking up the boy, the foster-father gave the youth a life and a father in the same gesture. The old man’s pleas are laden with ironies in a manner typical of this genre that revels in painful contradictions and unhappy paradoxes. Though he is not truly a father, his hands made him one: they took up the son. The hands become metonymic as well with the phallic authority of any father. They give life; they make sons. Conversely the son hated his father; he struck him; his hands were cut off. This series of actions plays out in only slightly mitigated form the classic Oedipal struggle wherein a son loathes his father but fears castration should he challenge him. Nevertheless, the foster-father is also never the true father even though the drama has him performing as one: his functional fatherhood remains at a pointed distance from the question of “real” fatherhood. He is only in the place of a father. Self and other become a major theme of the remaining speech. The biological father cast out his son to die, and he only takes him up again
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when he is now harmless and no longer fully a son. The true father is thus related to his son only by way of absence and lack. Conversely, as an other and outsider (alienus), the foster-father took up a child cast out by the real pater (372.5). He thought that this son would champion his cause against others (alienos, 372.6). Instead this son has treated his foster-father as an outsider, and the son attacks the man whom he ought to have defended. The speech of the foster-father or educator offers a defence of the authority of one who occupies the place of a father, even if he is not literally a father. One can draw parallels to the Master himself. He takes up and fosters young speakers. He tells them right and wrong, and they are to accept his authority as being valid. Those who disagree with him are allowed, in extreme cases, to quit his school; but one ought never to take advantage of the training he has offered to his students in order to attack that authority itself.16 The Master counters the unbridled possibilities of ungrateful and wicked rhetoric with a combination of insults and silencings. In Minor Declamation 372 the Master offers a speech about ingratitude and criminality to his pupils. The Master thus himself plays an outraged foster-father. He only offers a brief sermo to his pupils as it relates to the son’s side. Furthermore, in Minor Declamation 358 when he discusses the treatment of the case on behalf of the youth the Master does not even offer a “proper” defence to the son. The account is given indirectly, the stem educ- never appears, and the attack itself is described with the word incidisse, “he came upon.” Winterbottom describes this use of a verb for an encounter in the place of something more violent as “astonishing.”17 The violence directed against the foster-father has been repressed both by the Master and even in the premise of the case itself. The sermo on the son’s side is unambiguous: the son’s case is feeble, the law is not on his side. Indeed the explanation of this sentiment contains a notion that will return in the direct speech of the foster-father in 372: “For what is done according to law is not usually avenged by means of the law.”18 The theoretical overview of the son’s position thus converges with the explicit attack upon that position as represented in the foster-father’s case. The son’s case is not so much weak, as it is effectively hamstrung by 16
17 18
Such a narrative is in fact part of rhetoric’s own origins: Corax, the first teacher, and Tisias, the first student fought in just this manner: a bad egg from a bad crow was the verdict of society at large. Compare also the structure of Aristophanes’ Clouds. Winterbottom 1984: 562. nam quod lege agitur non solet uindicari lege. 358.1. Compare 372.9: Quidquid lege factum est uindicari lege non solet.
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the authority of the Master qua commentator and by the rhetorical tactics deployed in the course of his explication of the rhetorical possibilities of the case. The position of the son is fully territorialized by the Master’s voice: one cannot see clearly through to the son’s side. Conversely the Master is prolix when it comes to donning the persona of the outraged father as he performs before his students. This speech is then a model one in manifold means: the educator educates by way of it; but so too does he offer it to the students as something that they themselves might wish to take on and adopt. Thus the master offers to his students the mask of the father as if it were their own – but only if they themselves are good sons. These students have ready access to the voice of the injured father and to the fiction of the forum wherein the impotent father regains his power over his attacker. Meanwhile the vengeful son’s voice remains difficult and remote. In this fashion, then, the Master transmits to his own foster-children a specific patrimony of rhetoric. He empowers his student precisely as this student is willing to accept him and his voice as truly that of the father. Even though the Master is not the “real” (naturalis) father, he ought to be treated as one. The Master offers a voice to the student who identifies with the father and his authority and who identifies with the father’s claims to reparations in the case where it is circumvented. Here the arguments from the declamation take on an added resonance: “He says, ‘You were not the natural father.’ Then I deserved so much the more.”19 One owes to the Master the power of thinking through these cases and of speaking well within them. Striking against this father results only in silence and dismemberment. And don’t object that the Master is not really a father, for then he’ll take you to court all over again. And yours will not be the stronger case. All fathers, even surrogate ones, retain the right to disown, and even to kill their sons.20 We should linger over the characterization of the son as “maimed and feeble” (truncus ac debilis; 372.1). So far as I can tell, this collocation occurs four times in Latin literature, and every reference comes from roughly this era. Truncus, of course, comes from truncare, “to maim, to mutilate, to cut off.” It can be used of chopping off the limb of a tree or of a person. It is a natural word to use of someone whose hands have been amputated. Debilis means weak or feeble. It is properly used of a physical state or condition. By extension one may use it more abstractly to speak of the mind or spirit. 19 20
‘Non eras’ inquit ‘naturalis.’ Tanto igitur plus merueram; 372.12. Compare 372.11: Abdicare itaque potui, occidere potui, omnem potestatem tamquam in filio exercere.
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Thus in this declamatory citation we have what might be seen as a very literal use of language in the phrase. An account from a battle as depicted by Q. Curtius Rufus uses the same concrete sense of the terms: though they have lost limbs, maimed and feeble, most still fight on until they drop dead from lack of blood.21 Conversely it is possible to find this phrase used metaphorically. In Celsus there is a passing reference to a belief in some quarters that the art of medicine would be maimed and feeble were it not supplemented by a broader study of nature.22 One might argue that the metaphorical extension of this phrase is apt as well when it comes to describing not just the son’s body in the declamatio but also the son’s case in the sermo. It is maimed and debilitated by the Master: its representation is fragmentary, incomplete, and indirect. It has no force of law lying behind it. This father has already punished that son before he can even begin speaking. There remains one more incidence of the phrase “maimed and feeble” to be accounted for. This last example comes from Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. That is, this example comes from the “real” Quintilian, and not from a text that is only possibly his. The relationship of Quintilian to the author of the Declamationes Minores has not surprisingly afforded much room for speculation: is Quintilian the “natural” father of this text?23 Consensus would have it that the Master is somehow a student of Quintilian. Quintilian, then, would be the Master’s rhetorical foster-father, and the Master is his good and dutiful son. Indeed this son has so taken on the mask and voice of this father that he has invited us to mistake the two. This ambiguity of the paternity of the text itself reproduces the fertile confusion of masks and voices present in these specific declamations: the real and the surrogate become fluid categories. Even if the Master is a false father of the text, one owes a debt of filial piety to him and to his arguments from the place of a father when he makes a demand upon a student’s duty. Trunca ac debilis occurs in Quintilian’s Institutio during a discussion of the hands. When it comes to the performance of oratory, the hands have marvelous capacities: “The hands – without them delivery is maimed and feeble – one can hardly do their movements justice as they nearly match the very richness of rhetorical expression” (manus uero, sine quibus trunca esset 21 22 23
Q. Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni, 4.15.17. This text dates from the mid first century ce. See Fugmann 1995 on dating this text. Celsus, De Medicina, 1.pr.9. Celsus was born around 25 ce. See Jones 1935: vii–viii. Winterbottom 1984: xiv declines to decide the case: a good student of declamation, he can imagine the arguments on either side.
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actio ac debilis, uix dici potest quot motus habeant, cum paene ipsam uerborum copiam persequantur).24 One needs hands to perform well, otherwise the body’s movements are crippled and weak. The good man experienced at speaking becomes like some impotent old veteran floundering about in search of unwieldable weapons if he cannot make use of his hands to drive home his points.25 One wonders about the relationship of the Master to Quintilian. Is this Quintilian cribbing from himself? Has the Master merely produced a phrase that is readily available to anyone who would write vivid Latin in this era? Certainly he is closer to Quintilian than he is to Celsus or Curtius: they connect the adjectives with et while Quintilian and the Master choose ac.26 Is the Master recalling Quintilian as Seneca recalls Latro? The Master’s version of the phrase “maimed and feeble” is not just a literal rendering of the terms, though. His phrase appears to describe a “real” body even as there is in fact no such body. But the Master’s version offers a moment pregnant with metaphorical possibilities when one reads it with and against the pronouncement from the Institutio. Since the Master is offering a text on declamation, he is offering a representation of a fictional performance. To the extent that what one reads today actually formed part of a lesson wherein the Master himself performed to his students, then he also offers the script for a play. The Master and his students would perform. They would gesture. They would make rich use of their hands. These performances of the case of the son who lost his hands therefore also performed the truth of the teachings from Quintilian’s Institutio. The literal truth of the hands in the latter case becomes the metaphorical truth of them in the former. Bad rhetoric as mutilated rhetoric in the Institutio becomes the mutilated body of a bad foster-son in the Minor Declamations. The Master’s text consists of a script for an imaginary father performing an argument wherein he critiques his son’s performances: “My son is maimed and crippled; nevertheless, he strikes me here in the forum. I am striking back at him.” The wealth of words (uerborum copia) offered by father and Master consists of a fugue on the power of hands, their relationship to questions of possession and alienation, and the circumstances in which they are to be lopped off. The Master’s declamation offers itself as a manifold model for performance. The good student will “adopt” this text; he will take it up; he will deliver it; he will make it and its rules his own. The student will 24 25 26
On Quintilian and delivery see Gunderson 2000 and its bibliography. The simile is not casually chosen, see below for the discussion of Seneca, Controversiae 1.4. See Winterbottom 1984: xiv for a list of verbal tics that are highly reminiscent of Quintilian. Winterbottom also points his readers to the documentation provided in his commentary.
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be whole and hale; he will follow up upon (persequi) the Master’s richness of expression by re-delivering (agere) the declamation. The rhetorical student qua foster-son gains legitimate use of his own hands so soon as he receives the sanctioned language of his Master and comes to see things from his position. The Master’s utterances are, then, “performative” ones for his student in a great many fashions. Most importantly, though, the performance of student and Master is enabled by a prior erasure of the notion of the bad son. The Master, our good surrogate father, meets up with his virtuous adoptive son in a forum both textual and metaphorical within which the Master assaults the fictive bad son. The Master invites his real student to become a metaphorical good son by speaking the case from the position of the foster-father. It is no surprise, then, that the Master prefers to expand on the treatment of the foster-father’s side and to maim the son’s position. The Master’s good student learns the message “Don’t strike your father, and don’t lose your hands, for when you strike and when you lose your hands you will lose your power of speech as well.” Rhetorical fathers – whether “natural” or not – always retain the right to debilitate both bad sons and bad oratory. There is, then, a certain bodily politics of the Minor Declamations. These bodies are by no means “real” ones. On the contrary, the metaphorical weight of the notion of the body is most fully felt precisely where the body is least present. This irreality of the bodily dimension within the text makes the image of the body all the more mobile as a metaphor. When the Institutio says “mutilated,” this is but a metaphor. In the declamations the metaphor can be treated as a reality of the case. Freed from any real referent, the idea of the body and the propriety of bodies can insinuate itself into a variety of situations within the text. The body makes the text legible as a bodily text even as one knows from the outset that there is no body there: these speeches do not even represent the transcripts of a “real” case like Cicero’s First Catilinarian.27 Instead they are quick sketches, outlines, or even caricatures, that only remind one of a real and substantial oratory by recalling without ever reproducing the specific gravity of those works. Cicero was real; he really had a body; he really did something, if only we knew what it was. The declamatory corpus provides images of bodies, mobile specters that remind one that oratory is a question of bodies even as we never forget that there are no bodies here. 27
Of course, even the texts of Cicero’s speeches need not be literal transcripts of what he said on any given occasion. For a review of this long-standing issue, see Riggsby 1999.178–84.
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As I have just indicated, though, the text itself is bodily. First, it is a corpus or body as a whole even as this textual whole is itself a fragmentary representation of the “body” of the Master’s teaching. So too is this text bodily in its parts: the individual declamations are so many members, and these are articulated by their subdivision into sermo and declamatio. And, lastly, the Master’s teaching is not infrequently bodily in its subject matter as well. I am not imposing these images: the Master himself relies upon the bodily metaphor. Let us examine the sermo to Minor Declamation 270. The case is a racy one: a young man rapes a twin; she then hangs herself. The girl’s father takes the other twin before the magistrates where she demands and secures the death of the rapist as if she were herself the victim. The father is charged with murder. The Master begins his discussion by noting that the father’s case is a strong one in two of three particulars. Equity and emotion are on his side. He will, though, have trouble with the law. Thus one ought to take pains over the legal question here, even if in a declamation one often does leave the law somewhat to the side. The Master next makes an analogy: “The logical apportionment of the subject matter (diuisio) has the following character: it reveals the bones and the sinews of the controuersia, and, at least in my view, the declamation ought to provide the same.”28 The diuisio distinguishes lines of argumentation. For example, “Is it ever just to do this act?” “Was it proper for this person to do it?” The Master himself offers the diuisio; then the model declamation and, presumably, the good students’ declamations follow the same lines of thought and argumentation. The diuisio, then, ideally offers the structure of the whole, or, as the Master would have it, the division provides the skeleton and the ligaments of the case. “Without these bones I have spoken of, one sees what the condition of the flesh itself is. But in a declamation these things need to be dressed up so the speech will have [beauty on the surface, and] strength from within.”29 28
29
diuisio paene hoc proprium habet, ostendere ossa et neruos controuersiae, et, secundum meum quidem iudicium, idem praestare declamatio debet. 270.2. For the relationship between this phrase and the educational theory as practiced by the Minor Declamations, see Winterbottom 1982: 65–68. Nam sine his de quibus locutus sum caro ipsa per se quid sit intellegitis. Sed in declamatione uestienda sunt haec, ut ex illis <externis decorem, ex his> interiores uires habeat. 270.2. The supplement comes from Shackleton Bailey 1989b. It solves many problems. Of course one has to be wary of too eagerly greeting this welcome solution. Winterbottom 1984 prints the transmitted text. Nevertheless, as is clear from his commentary, serious difficulties remain in determining the antecedents of haec and illis. Repunctuating to read . . . sunt, haec ut . . . would allow haec to indicate declamatio and not ossa. A nice solution, but this requires that the Master have used a recherch´e and highly poetic word order whereas he is generally clear in his instructions to his pupils.
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It is a shame that the text is difficult at this point. Nevertheless the metaphor itself remains clear. The speech is like a body, a whole body. This body has a surface and a substructure. The logic of the division, the very logic imparted by the Master’s own sermo, provides that substructure. Meanwhile the rhetorical development and ornamentation laid over this logic is the flesh. It might even be described as “mere” flesh. Certainly the Master’s phrasing makes one suspicious: it seems that one needs to make sure that the bones are solid lest one be left only with the spectacle of how unimportant the skin is of itself.30 Winterbottom notes that this bodily imagery strongly recalls a number of passages from Quintilian’s Institutio. In every instance Quintilian argues that oratory is like a body, and that rhetorical training is in a sense a lesson in anatomy. Nevertheless, good oratory cannot be reduced to mere knowledge of this body. Instead good oratory is itself living, as it were, in this body. One studies so as to acquire this hale and whole body for oneself. Thus stripping away the flesh to get at the bones of rhetoric is not a project to be pursued:31 the good and healthy sort of oratory is necessarily a combination of flesh and bones. No audience would listen to the clatter of an animated skeleton. Flesh cannot stand of its own, it needs bones. The body of itself is an insufficient and illegitimate rhetorical principle. It needs to be conjoined with some supporting structure. This is rhetorical training. But it is also more than rhetorical training. The bones of oratory are not just rules of oratory, but they are also specifically the rules of a given master. Moreover, in the case of the Declamationes Minores, these rules emerge within the context of the sermo. The Master’s instructions to his students offer them a logic that they may use to “flesh out” their speeches. The Master provides the strength and vigor – uires occurs routinely in Quintilian’s Institutio just as it can be found in the sermo to this declamation – and the student offers the body to be animated and held together by this potency. If we stretch the metaphorical registers of declamation we find an important second dimension to the mastery of the Master. The Master takes the causa and makes a diuisio. Specifically he takes something like the “Case of the Raped Twin” and he apportions the logical elements of a sound approach to the material. But so too can one say that he takes the causa as a principle of origin more generally, as a “cause.” From this cause he produces a bodily effect. He sires a declamation from it. And this declamation 30 31
Winterbottom 1984: 367 glosses his as follows: “his: the bones, without which one sees the flesh for the flabbiness that it is.” This is a particularly strong take on the question. See Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 1.pr.24.
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is itself a sort of body. As a performance it is bodily, of course. But it is also flesh laid over an underlying principle of organization, the diuisio. As we have the text of the Minor Declamations today, even the “body” of the declamation is itself wholly the Master’s. This body is offered as a model to the students. They are to copy both the bones and the flesh from him. The Master here becomes a particular sort of father: he is a potent father, he has uires and nerui, “strength and balls,” if we wish to put things colloquially.32 He is the father without whom the son cannot stand: the son would truly be spineless without the diuisio. So too would he be mere specious fleshiness without the logic of the Master to back him up and to animate him within. Thus declamation is not mere showiness, or idle blather for its own sake. Rather, declamation ought to represent a sort of process for the legitimate reproduction of proper rhetoric. That the subject matter itself is frivolous or debilis does nothing to trivialize the authority of the Master. Perhaps he is the more masterful for it: the inconsequential nature of the material means that the rules governing its development can be better appreciated in and of themselves. The case of the outraged foster-father thus stands in an even starker light. The educator is also the educator. The Master himself and his standing as master are at stake in those passages. As a foster-father he took us in hand and gave us our own bodies and hands. Our ability and facility is everywhere supported by the strength and bones imparted by him. Even as he describes the possible development of the bad son’s case, the Master nevertheless animates even that performance with a strength derived from his own teaching. Thus not even the worst scoundrel can ever escape the fact of his paternity even as he outrages it. The Master always retains for himself the right to punish, to silence, and to lop off any piece of his student’s anatomy. Declamation here reproduces good sons even as it speaks of bad ones, and every rhetoric student is the legitimate heir of a good father. The body of the student’s rhetoric is, flesh and bone, sprung from that of his foster-father, the Master. The surrogate is in its way realer than the real. r
Mutilation provides a fertile ground for irony and metaphor in Seneca as well. Seneca’s Controversiae and Suasoriae each offer accounts of crises of bodily integrity. Against the unified voice of the Master in the Minor Declamations, though, these are all treated by various hands. The case may be one and the same, but Seneca’s recollection of the many things said on various occasions has chopped up the speeches of the speakers and 32
The obscene meaning of neruus is literally “penis.”
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recomposed them as a new sort of unity within his own text. Thus the question of the integrity of causa, sermo, diuisio, and declamatio as we have seen it in the Minor Declamations has to shift. Now these elements must also be examined in the light of the overarching presence of Seneca, and, naturally, his memory, for it is this faculty that claims to have embraced these many speeches for us. If the Minor Declamations are the sort of solid fare that is designed to foster the health and soundness of youth, then the bons mots recorded by Seneca are a far richer repast designed to please the palates of more mature pleaders. The cases themselves are frequently more elaborate, filled with even more complex circumstances than those from the Master. The language of Seneca’s declaimers is more ostentatious, terse, bizarre, striking, and pointedly ironic. Nevertheless, the strong association of the themes of fatherhood and bodily integrity can also be found in the treatments of the Controversiae. Thus while one might have argued that the Master was well served qua master by inculcating the association, it remains the case that a variety of mature speakers saw fit to make the same claims: the father’s body is a sacrosanct thing, and it is rhetoric’s duty to defend it. Moreover in defending the father, rhetoric effectively defends its own authority. When a son risks losing his hands for striking his father in Seneca, we find that the premise of the case is much more exotic, and the relationship of father to son profoundly altered. The father is actually the son’s defender here. Qv i pat re m p vlsaverit, m an v s ei p raecidant vr. Tyrannus patrem in arcem cum duobus filiis accersit; inperauit adulescentibus ut patrem caederent. alter ex his praecipitauit se, alter cecidit. postea in amicitiam tyranni receptus est. occiso tyranno praemium accepit. petuntur manus eius; pater defendit. Th e m a n w h o strikes h is fath er will los e his hand s. A tyrant summoned a father and his two sons up into his palace. He ordered the youths to beat their father. One of them hurled himself down to his death. The other beat his father. Subsequently he is accepted as the tyrant’s friend. He kills the tyrant and receives the attendant reward. Someone sues to have his hands cut off. His father defends him. (Seneca, Controversiae 9.4)
The various versions of the defence offered by the father insist that the son beat him with his consent. There was no other course of action if the tyrant were ultimately to be slain. The one brother failed the father by killing himself, the other served him by striking him. The son did not strike the father hard; the father only pretended to be hurt. Conversely,
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the accusers’ approach to the case insists that striking a father is always bad under any circumstances. The brother who killed himself becomes the model of proper action. Each side is relatively well represented in Seneca’s account. I suspect that most modern readers would find it hard to sympathize with any but the son’s position. “Who really cares if he struck his father? He did not really hate him; he was ordered; the father does not object.” But the declaimers are sufficiently troubled by the horror of a father being beaten to find both sides of this case interesting. Although the first representation of the side of the accuser is rather tortuous, nevertheless subsequent revisitations of his position are much clearer. Similarly, even though the diuisio offered by Latro seems implicitly to favor the son’s case, it is by no means strongly partisan. As far as the ancients are concerned, then, one does not automatically side with the father and son against the accuser. Moreover the speakers on the accuser’s side seem little tempted to fudge the facts in order to simplify their task. Specifically they appear to avoid the color that the son was actually happy to beat his father, fully enjoyed his intimacy with the tyrant, subsequently fell out with the tyrant, then killed him, and next feigned an unbroken affection when he returned to his father. Such a blameworthy course of action is only entertained deep inside the diuisio made by Latro. It is easy enough to take either side because the father’s case always comes out on top. On the one side the father is the actual defender. He defends his rights and claims in his own voice. His body can be outraged and his son’s left intact so long as a higher purpose is obeyed. The thinking is that the public good and the father’s will commanded the beating. “On the [son’s] side everybody declaimed using this color: he acted at his father’s behest.”33 One notes that the public good is not sufficient in itself. Everyone has to add in the idea that the father too recognized this higher purpose and was, moreover, the very sponsor of this course of action. Indeed one of the problems with tyrants is that their political power is not inherited: tyrants illegitimately claim to be the father of their own authority. The son’s hands that struck acted as the father’s agents against such self-siring authority. Cutting the son’s hands off now would mean questioning the father’s paternal authority. Conversely the accuser defends the general idea of a father’s body against the erroneous calculation of this particular father. The accuser becomes a 33
ab altera parte hoc colore omnes declamauerunt, tamquam patre iubente fecisset. Seneca, Controversiae 9.4.16.
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sort of foster-father who must replace the defective real father. And as a foster-father he pleads along familiar lines: “Even as a paternal substitute I may legitimately claim the hands of this son.” The other son got it right when he killed himself. On this reading a father cannot be allowed to abrogate his rights without damaging the rights of all fathers in general. The father’s body is so sacrosanct that it must always and ever be defended. The son must lose his hands for they have damaged paternal authority. The tyranny of the tyrant is far less worthy of our dread than the tyranny of the idea of paternity. We cannot get beyond the sovereignty of the paternal principle here: either we use a specific father’s command to justify an act injurious to that father or we appeal to paternity in the abstract, and we declare that no father is ever to be injured. In this case there is a clear connection between paternal authority and the question of who best “represents” the law. The law is the law of the father, and the real issue is what son best approaches to the spirit of that law. This question of the son as surrogate for the father and his authority is further developed in a second declamation where bodily integrity and the question of authority converge once again. This time the father’s hands have been lost. The father is impotent. He needs his son’s hands to work for him. The case makes all too explicit the crises of sexuality and authority attendant upon the declamatory treatment of lost hands. A dvlt e rvm c vm adv ltera qv i dep reh en derit, dvm vt rvmqve co r p vs i n t e r f i c iat, sin e fravde sit. L i c e at a dv lt e riv m in m atre et filio v indicare. Vir fortis in bello manus perdidit. deprendit adulterum cum uxore, ex qua filium adulescentem habebat. imperauit filio ut occideret; non occidit; adulter effugit. abdicat filium. H e w h o c atc h es an adu lterer an d adult e re s s in f l agrant e may k i l l w i t h im p u n it y so lon g as h e kills t he m b ot h. A s o n i s a l lowed to aven ge a m oth er’s ad ult e ry. A hero lost his hands in war. He caught an adulterer with his wife, the mother of his son. He commanded the son to kill. The son didn’t do it. The adulterer fled. The man disowns his son. (Seneca, Controuersiae, 1.4.pr34 )
This case arises from a situation that perverts the already topsy-turvy world of declamation. Instead of the prospect of the son’s mutilation we find a father already mutilated. Notice as well that this scenario can be read in parallel to the sexual crisis of oratory Seneca ascribes to his own day. That is, it metaphorically glosses Seneca’s own preface wherein a failing father calls 34
For a translation of this case in its entirety, see the second appendix.
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upon his sons to cast out a sexually depraved rhetoric. This declamatory father, once a great soldier, now finds himself triply impotent: his wife has taken a lover; he cannot draw his sword; and his son will not take up arms for him. The hero’s misery is hyperbolic. The situation of the case has set everything against him. All he has remaining to him is the vigor of his oratory with which he will brandish the scourge of the law in order to strike out at the youth. In the case of the debilitated father we discover that declamation is not only an allegory of paternal mastery. This declamation underscores a notion present to a lesser degree throughout the mutilation cases: declamation revels in the theme of dismemberment itself. The helplessness of the father actually attracts speakers. They wish to identify with the father in his plight, to talk up his sorrows, and to lament loudly in his own voice. Thus the power of language applies itself to this helpless man in order suddenly to render him full of all sorts of rhetorical possibilities and potentialities. In so choosing the declaimers also indicate the ways in which the very emptiness and folly of declamation itself is attractive. The genre as a whole could be as well described by this case as it was by the others: declamation is not only a genre where a foster-father engages a potentially thankless son, but it is also an institution wherein grown men indulge in fantasies of passivity and of overcoming passivity by means of rhetorical efficacy. The pleasure taken in this case indicates the manner in which one can overcome father by defending him. By first imagining his impotence and then lamenting it, the speakers can themselves become the war hero’s heroic champions. Their supplementary addition of rhetorical force to the lost fortitude of the uir fortis also thereby substitutes even as it adds. The speaker can displace and replace the father while never himself owning up to the will to power implicit in assuming the role of champion’s champion. There does not seem to be much enthusiasm for taking the son’s side of the case. In his initial set of citations Seneca gives only a handful of lines relating to the sons’ defence (1.4.5). The father’s outrage covers more than a page (1.4.1–4). After discussing the logical divisions of the case according to Latro, Seneca insists that defenders of the son chose to apply themselves to one particular approach: “On behalf of the young man a single color was introduced by all of the declaimers: ‘I could not kill.’”35 This approach is derived from no lesser an authority, Seneca says, than Cicero himself. 35
color pro adulescente unus ab omnibus qui declamauerunt introductus est: non potui occidere . . . Seneca, Controversiae 1.4.7. Notice, though, that Seneca shortly does mention other approaches: “I did not think I was allowed to” (non putaui mihi licere; 1.4.8) and there are a couple of versions wherein the mother acts to prevent the son from obeying the father (1.4.9).
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He used a similar notion in another case where a son was supposed to kill his mother. Unfortunately the quote from Cicero has been lost in the transmission of Seneca’s text, as have the words of some other speakers. Nevertheless, it is clear that the son’s defence essentially turns upon making him parallel his father: he too was impotent. He too was unable to lift a sword against his mother. Negated forms of posse abound: etymologically both father and son are found powerless when the time comes to perform a decisive act affirming the father’s authority within and over his family. The son’s favorite recourse, then, is to affirm that he really is his father’s son by declaring himself to be both as harmless and as prolix as his sire. The father’s speech appeals more. Not only is it quantitatively better represented, but it also enjoys a qualitative advantage. “On the [father’s] side many fabulous things were said.”36 “Everybody said something elegant in that part where the adulterers are caught and let go.”37 “P. Vinicius offered a beautiful and novel version of a sentiment well-spoken by all . . .”38 “Nicetes spoke a fantastic sententia with which he perhaps bested the Roman declaimers . . .”39 The question is not how to offer something good on this side but how to shine among so many other stars. The father’s darkest hour provides the choicest moment. The father’s helplessness is exploited anew by the speakers who wish to depict most affectingly his feebleness in the face of the two lovers. Seneca’s very first quote from this case reads, “All I did was awaken the adulterers: woe is me, how long they lay there after I caught them!”40 The lovers mock at the father, and he shoots back, “‘Why are you laughing?’ I said, ‘I have hands!’ I called my son.”41 This is Latro’s version. The lovers laugh at the father again in Sparsus’ account (1.4.3) and so too in Argentarius’ (1.4.3). More than one speaker represents the father attempting to use his crippled body. In fact, four of the seven occurrences of the adjective truncus in Seneca occur in this case. He tries to block their flight with his mutilated body (truncum corpus; 1.4.1). The hero runs to his sword as if he had hands to 36 37 38
39 40
41
ex altera parte multa sunt pulcherrime dicta; Seneca, Controversiae 1.4.10. omnes aliquid belli dixerunt illo loco quo deprensi sunt adulteri <et> dimissi; Seneca, Controversiae 1.4.10. P. Uinicius et pulchre dixit et noue <sen>sum etsi ab omnibus bene dictum . . . Seneca, Controversiae 1.4.11. The text is rather heavily edited here, but the adverbs are not in question, nor, for that matter, is the sense itself. Nicetes illam sententiam pulcherrimam, qua nescio an nostros antecesserit . . . Seneca, Controversiae 1.4.12. adulteros meos tantum excitaui. me miserum, quamdiu iacuerunt, postquam deprehenderam! Seneca, Controversiae 1.4.1. Note the bitter quality lent by the possessive adjective meos. They are “my” adulterers, “mine” even as I discover that my wife is no longer mine. ‘Quid ridetis?’ inquam, ‘habeo manus!’ uocaui filium. Seneca, Controversiae 1.4.1.
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draw it (1.4.2 and also 1.4.3). The lovers leave spattered with blood – the hero’s (1.4.1). Both father and son are “debilitated” (debilis, 1.4.5; debilitat, 1.4.8). The father is weak and mutilated; he is truncus ac debilis. The two words never appear as part of a phrase in this case as they did in Quintilian and the Master. Nevertheless not only are the terms vital to the portrait of the veteran, but they offer a sort of thematic continuity with those cases discussed above. We routinely find that something or someone is incomplete and incapable. One party stands in need of the other; one has the will and the purpose, the other the ability. For Quintilian oratory needs performance, and performance requires the hands. They are virtually a material incarnation of the words of a speech. In the Master the father/son relationship and the sermo/declamatio relationship are both allegorized as a tale of bodily capacity and integrity where one partner serves (or ought to serve) the other. Latro’s representation of the hero puts the ideal version succinctly: “I had hands; I called my son.” The speakers of this case are eager to heed the father’s call. They relish speaking for the father. They savor playing his part. That is, they assume the very role relative to him that the fictional son himself ought to have taken up. The hero disowns one son only to refind filial piety on the side of the orators who speak for and as him. Yet these surrogate sons are not necessarily unambiguously good sons. Even as they take in hand the cause of the father without hands, their favorite moment is the scene of his greatest weakness. They delight in depicting the son whose hands lay idle, the wife lolling in bed with her lover, the hero fumbling to reach for what he cannot grasp. Here the palm seems not to go to that speaker who best justifies the disowning of the son but rather to the one who best depicts the father’s incapacity and shame. Thus these people who play the father (agere), who act on behalf of the father (agere), and who plead his case (agere) are not simple surrogates. Their own choices reveal an implicit sympathy with some of the ambiguity of the case. The spectacle of the father’s shame obviously serves to invoke ill-will towards the ineffective son. But so too does this choice reveal a sort of sympathy with that son, and a sympathy that does not necessarily arise out of tenderness for the mother.42 The declaimers gravitate to the thematic center of the case, paternal impotence, and not to the legal issue: is this a justified disowning of the 42
Sussman 1995 also sees in declamation an opportunity for a psychological working through of intergenerational conflict. His model, though, stresses direct critiques of a father by a son and not the circuitous routes I have been highlighting. See Freud 1950: 37–40 on the ambivalence that surrounds prohibitions. Freud 1950: 87 also reminds us that, “[A]fter all, there is no need to prohibit something that no one desires to do, and a thing that is forbidden with the greatest emphasis must be a thing that is desired.”
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son? Roller has well summarized the general stance towards questions of law against questions of equity in declamation: “[I]n declamation a moral understanding of events is the primary mode of understanding; ethical appeals are more authoritative and persuasive than appeals on any other grounds.”43 In addition to the ethical appeal exerted by the father’s case, there is a secondary and unexpected enticement. Here we find a sort of inversion of standard practice. Roller notes that descriptions of torture and violence are so much a part of the stock in trade of declamation that Seneca sometimes feels he needs only declare that there was a description without bothering to give any of the details.44 In the case of the hero without hands, though, the description lies very much at the heart of the perverse pleasure of performing the case at all. The therapy of declamatory oratory – that is, the fiction of fictive speeches curing some sort of criminal ill by way of pleading in an imaginary court – thus routinely exacerbates and recapitulates the very ills one laments in the course of a speech whose resonances do not all necessarily tend towards the notion of a final reparation. We should not be surprised. As fantasies, yes, declamations appeal to the standards of the community, but so also do they engage questions whose resolution in the psyche cannot be the matter of a simple reparation made by way of the law. A vote in favor of the father will not be enough to conjure away these cases. For we can say with Freud that it is the very law itself that renders the subject ambivalent. Declamation thus allows for the rhetorical staging of inner impulses and emotions that have been turned into evil deeds. And one now appeals to the law in order to annul these psychic entities that have become the realities of declamatory fiction even as the ultimate repression of their forbidden content requires a perverse moment of prior return.45 And this content can return all over again the next time one chooses to plead this case. rr
Cicero provides our last noteworthy example of a man who lost his hands. Cicero, the father of rhetoric for later Romans, had his hands and head cut off and put on display at Rome after his assassination. He could neither act nor speak any longer; and these pieces of his body were set up as testimonials to his impotence.46 When we examine Cicero as represented by the declaimers, we will find in him yet another version of the rhetorical 43 45 46
44 Roller 1997: 122. Roller 1997: 113. For the idiom and logic of these ideas, compare Freud 1950: 197–98. The work of Roller on Cicero in declamation offers a vital point from which to begin (Roller 1997). Roller has put into question our understanding of Cicero’s death in general. That is, when one looks at the history of Cicero’s end, it may ultimately be impossible to separate historical fact from declamatory fiction. See also Richlin 1999.
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father/foster-father. He is, though, the father Seneca and so many of the others never knew even though they all defend the idea that Cicero’s was the good, old oratory. In Controversiae 7.2 Popillius is hauled into court on a morals charge (accusatur de moribus) because he obeyed Antonius and killed his former advocate Cicero. Popillius’ act is shocking and typically ironic. He killed the man who if alive might now be able to speak for him and to win his acquittal. Cicero saved him in a case where he was accused of parricide, but by killing his patronus, he really has acted as a parricide.47 Much as in the case of the hero’s hands, the speakers again have a favorite side. Speaking on behalf of Popillius offers few good opportunities. Everyone is reduced to a single approach: necessity made him do it. The real excitement for the defence lies in imagining Antonius imposing the cruel commandment. Much energy is expended here. Conversely, “on the accuser’s side everyone wanted to say something novel in that passage where Popillius comes to Cicero.”48 Quantitatively Seneca too spends a great deal of his time where the speakers preferred to invest their energies. Seneca himself is not convinced that such a bias is justified: “The declaimers accuse him as if his defence were impossible even though he could be so thoroughly absolved that one could not even bring a charge against him.”49 Perhaps this looks like a gesture towards real Roman law and an indictment of declamation’s insular and idiosyncratic approach. Maybe an appeal to reality is in here, but this comment is not itself unrhetorical: Seneca’s editorial voice comes across as more declamatory than the declaimers. He has trotted out a verbal flourish in order to indicate the shortcomings of their own behavior relative to the case. Though many fought for the title, the best declaimer on the case of Cicero is Seneca himself. He gets to evaluate the others, to edit their comments, and in every instance to have the last and wittiest sententia.50 Popillius is a parricide. Parricide consists of maiming one’s patron. Cicero the father-figure loses his hands to this foster-child. Though one might think that it was Popillius himself who ought to have been maimed for striking his patronus, instead Cicero has suffered. The declaimers come in 47
48 49 50
Parricida is one of the more prominent words in everyone’s version of the case. See also Roller 1997: 15. Kaster points out that other than the fact that somebody named Popillius killed Cicero, everything else, including the parricide and the defence is “imaginary” (Kaster 1998: 251). A parte accusatoris illo loco quo Popillius uenit nemo non aliquid uoluit noui dicere. Seneca, Controversiae 7.2.14. sic autem eum accusant tamquam defendi non possit, cum adeo possit absolui ut ne accusari quidem potuerit. Seneca, Controversiae 7.2.8. On Seneca the rhetorical impresario, see Sinclair 1995a.
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to help their handless father against his attacker. Albucius Silus directly links mutilation and parricide: “He struck the neck of such a man and cut off his head at the shoulder: now go and deny that you are a parricide.”51 The speakers invoke Cicero himself against Popillius. They remind him of the Catilinarians and the case against Verres (7.2.4). They cite Pro Roscio Amerino 72 (7.2.3), which was itself a passage describing a parricide’s suffering. “He knows that death is not untimely for a man who has been consul, nor is it sad for one who is wise.” H˚akanson advises us to compare Cicero, In Catilinam 4.3 and Philippicae 2.199 as well as Seneca, Suasoriae 6.12.52 Winterbottom’s notes on this passage in his translation indicate still more allusions.53 The declaimers remind Popillius of Cicero’s literary corpus. They use his patron against him. These dutiful sons mouth the words of the father. Of course, these citations are themselves a cutting up of that corpus, but the goal of the pastiche is to reforge a vision of the whole man even as he is forever gone and disfigured.54 The father is already mutilated and impotent. We defend the right only in the wake of the undeniable fact of the wrong. Our own chance at championing the virtues of whole and hale paternity comes only so long as our hero’s hands have already been lost in battle. The declaimers are attempting to recall Cicero. Seneca recalls their recollections. Two more portraits of Cicero remain in Seneca’s own corpus. In them Cicero has yet to die. Cicero weighs his options. The declaimers are there to give Cicero advice. Suasoriae 6 and 7 are closely related. The title of the first is “Cicero deliberates: Should he beg for Antonius’ pardon?” (Deliberat Cicero an Antonium deprecetur). The second comes under the heading “Cicero deliberates: Should he burn his own writings if Antonius promises him safety in return?” (Deliberat Cicero an scripta sua conburat, promittente Antonio incolumitatem si fecisset). Much of the advice Cicero is given arises from quotes from his own writings. As was the case in the controuersia above, so too in the suasoriae do Cicero’s sons rush to advise him by way of recalling him to himself. As with Seneca in the preface to his first book, here again declamation is fundamentally tied to the recollection of good men experienced at speaking. The speakers address Cicero in the second person. They quote his most famous lines to him. They treat him less as a real man than as one who ought to adhere to the greatness of his own literary legacy. The main lines of 51 52
caedit ceruices tanti uiri et umero tenus recisum amputat caput: i nunc et nega te parricidam. Seneca, Controversiae 7.2.2. 53 Winterbottom 1974. 54 Compare Dugan 2001: 72–75. H˚akanson 1989: 186.
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thought are, according to Latro’s divisio:55 even if you could win Antonius over, it is not worth it. Pleading would be vile for any Roman, and especially for Cicero. The life you gained would not be worth living. You will only be winning a stay of execution until you fall out with Antonius again. Other speakers analyze the situation similarly. “Few people spoke on the other side.”56 As orators and as heirs to the fantasy of oratory bequeathed by Cicero, these faithful foster-sons cannot bring themselves to take the wrong side. “Almost nobody dared to urge Cicero to plead with Antonius. Their judgement of Cicero’s spirit was sound.”57 Geminius Varus, the one man whom Seneca does list as speaking on the other side, does so largely out of nastiness. He advises Cicero that he already has a neck well-calloused by the yoke. Seneca intervenes: “And he said many other scurrilous things as was his wont.”58 Subsequently Seneca lists less obnoxious arguments, but it is too late: we already know full well what it means to tell Cicero to live for himself rather than die and lose his hands for us. The spectacle of those amputated hands affords a perfect opportunity for extended description on the part of Roman men of letters. Livy, Cremutius Cordus, Bruttedius Niger, and Cornelius Severus all mention this sad sight. None of this is meant to say, though, that later Romans are unambivalent about the death of Cicero. Indeed a dead Cicero is needed if they are to chop up his teachings and retool them to suit their own interests. But even as they thus mutilate Cicero they pretend to be saving him. The hatred of Asinius Pollio for Cicero gave rise to a second suasoria. Suasoria 7 is a sort of sequel to the sixth inspired by a crude fiction fabricated by that hostile critic.59 Subsequent generations of speakers were virtually all content to see Cicero die and have his hands cut off. All that they wished was for his literary corpus to remain both figuratively and literally intact. The prior suasoria ensures the former, this one the latter. Seneca declares 55 56
57
58 59
See Seneca, Suasoriae 6.8. alteram partem pauci declamauerunt; Seneca, Suasoriae 6.12. See, though, Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 3.8.46 for an analysis of how one should plead with Cicero to beg Antony for his life: Cicero should be exhorted to save himself for the sake of the state. nemo ausus est Ciceronem ad deprecandum Antonium hortari; bene de Ciceronis animo iudicauerunt. Seneca, Suasoriae 6.12. Notice that fere is the editor’s addition. The manuscripts only say “Nobody dared . . .” not “Almost nobody dared . . .” H˚akanson 1989 justifies the addition by appealing to the fact the Seneca is just about to mention people who actually did take the other side. It is, then, a reasonable emendation. et complura alia dixit scurrilia, ut illi mos erat. Seneca, Suasoriae 6.12. Seneca, Suasoriae 6.14. Quintilian seems to know of a further refinement: all Cicero has to do is burn his Philippics (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 3.8.46).
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that there is not even a Varus for this case: “I do not know of anyone who spoke [on behalf of entreating Antonius]. Everybody was worried about Cicero’s books, nobody about the man himself.”60 In addition to the arguments familiar from the prior case new ones are adduced. Literature is an eternal possession. It is the common property of all Romans.61 Antonius seeks to assault Cicero’s immortality in exchange for a few more mortal days. In fact, Cicero needs to die. The Ciceronian age has ended, and it is time for Cicero to leave his memory and his writing to the posterity that now urges death and physical dismemberment upon him. “Cicero, I don’t know whether you would want to live in this age. There is nobody with whom you would wish to live.”62 In Seneca’s excursus on historiography, he offers more treatments of Cicero’s death. Once Cicero has died historians pronounce a funeral oration on his behalf (laudatio funebris, pitfion; Suasoriae 6.21). Seneca makes clear that this practice is part of a longstanding tradition within historical writing that can trace its lineage back to Thucydides. Yet one should recall that the Roman funeral oration was traditionally spoken by a young man on behalf of a dead ancestor.63 That is, the notion of such a eulogy has embedded within itself the idea of filiation, of championing one’s lineage and its achievements. The historian who praises also indirectly gestures to his own rhetorical accomplishments. Or perhaps he does so explicitly. Livy’s laudatio ends, “Nevertheless, if one weighed his virtues against his vices, he was a great and noteworthy man, and it would take a Cicero to enumerate his praises.”64 With their praise of dying, the students of declamation use these two suasoriae as opportunities for providing their own version of a laudatio funebris. “Die, and I will praise.” The real Cicero is strategically transformed into a historical Cicero and a rhetorical Cicero. Cicero finds himself installed in the declamatory salon and made an absent father to a very specific set of sons. Thus they at times assimilate his age to their own, describing the rule of Julius Caesar in terms appropriate to a Tiberius by 60
61 62 63 64
huius suasoriae alteram partem neminem scio declamasse; omnes pro libris Ciceronis solliciti fuerunt, nemo pro ipso. Seneca, Suasoriae 7.10. Seneca himself believes that Cicero might have actually considered such a proposition. He does not, though, indicate that he believes Cicero would have accepted it. Recall that Seneca himself is a distributor of the common property of rhetoric. nescio an hoc tempore uiuere uelis, Cicero; nemo est cum quo uelis. Seneca, Suasoriae 7.1. Compare the ideas of Asprenas at 7.4. See Polybius 6.123. Compare Habinek 1998: 53 and see too his bibliography. Si quis tamen uirtutibus uitia pensarit, uir magnus ac memorabilis fuit et in cuius laudes exequendas Cicerone laudatore opus fuerit. Seneca, Suasoriae 6.22.
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adducing the term princeps (7.1). They quote Ciceronian oratory only to top it and to trump it with declamatory flourishes that are wholly unciceronian: “To these outrages it is not enough to say ‘worthless man!’”65 Cicero’s literary corpus is routinely chopped into little pieces and reassembled for the sake of quick irony and tightly wound paradoxes. Even if one recognizes that yes, Cicero too declaimed, his style in the texts being cited was most unlike that of these speakers. This generation of Latin speakers has an awkward relationship with Cicero. Even as they praise his oratory, they are focusing on a form that was for him only a peripheral and never a central pursuit. These declaimers compose phrases addressed to the great orator that he himself never would have uttered: word choice and arrangement have changed between the generations. And lastly they are exhorting the champion of Republican libertas to stand true to his beliefs even as these men have attained their own standing by mastering the rules of the new imperial game. It is easy to imagine a sort of veiled political critique of the principate emerging from within such speeches, and the sensitivity of the ear of power to any such allusions will be noted in the next chapter. But it is by no means necessary to conclude that such critiques were the real force behind this theme. It is easier to praise antiquity than actually to desire to give up the comforts gotten specifically in and of one’s own age. And those whose consciences ought to be heaviest on such a score perhaps plead loudest the conservative case. These inheritors need their foster-father to lose his hands if they are to be able to save his legacy not for Cicero, but for themselves. Cestius delights in rebutting Cicero’s speeches (3.pr.15). In so doing he canonizes a new version of Cicero, one who engages in cases designed not for the original Republican courthouse but for the new imperial salon. Latro complains that some will no longer even read Cicero’s works except as a preliminary to enjoying the efforts of Cestius.66 These bad sons like rhetoric’s new lover Cestius, and they will not heed the cries of handless Cicero who needs a son and champion to avenge him. Cestius’ usurpation, though, provokes in reaction a response in kind wherein the real and the fictive collide.67 Latro’s indignation at Cestius’ slight to Cicero leads him to haul Cestius into court: 65 66 67
iam ad ista non satis est dicere: ‘hominem nequam!’ Seneca, Suasoriae 6.7. Argentarius is riffing on Cicero, Philippicae 2.77. Kaster notes that the reading list we can derive for the declaimers within the Ciceronian corpus is fairly narrow (Kaster 1998: 253–54). This passage offers a foretaste of the sort of blurring that will be discussed at more length in the third chapter.
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deinde libuit Ciceroni de Cestio in foro satisfacere. subinde nanctus eum in ius ad praetorem uoco et, cum quantum uolebam iocorum conuiciorumque effudissem, postulaui ut praetor nomen eius reciperet lege inscripti maleficii. tanta illius perturbatio fuit ut aduocationem peteret. deinde ad alterum praetorem eduxi et ingrati postulaui. iam apud praetorem urbanum curatorem ei petebam; interuenientibus amicis, qui ad hoc spectaculum concurrerant, et rogantibus dixi molestum me amplius non futurum si iurasset disertiorem esse Ciceronem quam se. nec hoc ut faceret uel ioco uel serio effici potuit. Next I decided to get satisfaction for Cicero from Cestius in the forum. Thereupon I met up with him and brought a suit against him before the praetor. Once I had heaped him with as much sarcasm and scorn as I wished, I demanded that the praetor bring him up on a charge of “Unspecified offences.” Cestius got so upset that he called in an advocate. Then I hauled him to the other praetor and demanded a charge of “Ingratitude.” Next I was seeking to have a guardian assigned to him in the court of the urban praetor. His friends rushed to the spectacle, and they begged and pleaded on his behalf. I told them that I would not cause any more trouble if he would swear that Cicero was more eloquent than himself. Neither my jokes nor my serious arguments could induce him to do it. (Seneca, Controversiae 3.pr.17)
Latro brings declamatory charges against Cestius in real courts on behalf of Cicero’s literary reputation. Cestius is asked to defend himself on charges familiar from declamation, but this time one is neither in the schoolhouse nor in the salon.68 The real praetor is asked to hear a case of “Unspecified offences” spoken by a practiced student of declamation. Cestius disappoints: he calls in an advocate to help his case. The real courts are too much for him. Latro, though, cannot get enough of his mean joke. He keeps on dragging Cestius before court after court. Each time the threat made to Cestius is real, but it is formulated in terms derived from the stuff of declamation. The goal of all of this is to extract an oath from Cestius that never arrives. Still, owing to his helplessness, Cestius has effectively confessed that he is no real orator, that he was impotent in the courts, and that the declaimer Latro was his better both in the schoolhouse and in the courthouse. The question of Cicero’s legacy, his heirs, and the need to defend him against assault is a matter both trivial and grave (et ioco et serio). Strike that fosterfather and you can expect to wind up with a causa on your hands. One of rhetoric’s legitimate heirs will avenge his Master. The relations subsisting between the various parts of declamation recur time and again within these speeches. Moreover these same relations structure the world within which this rhetoric is lived. 68
See the note of Winterbottom 1974 on the relationship of declamatory law and actual Roman law in this passage.
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Cestius suffers a second time for his low opinion of Cicero. Another anecdote about him closes the text of the Suasoriae. Cicero’s son, a man also named M. Tullius Cicero, was the governor of Asia. Seneca describes the younger Cicero as wholly unlike his father but for the name and his urbane wit. Though this Cicero comes across as somewhat thick, one ultimately realizes that the son enacts the very mythology of rhetoric and paternity that we have hitherto seen enfolded within the literature of declamation. M. Tullio et natura memoriam ademerat, et ebrietas si quid ex ea supererat subducebat; subinde interrogabat quid ille uocaretur qui in imo recumberet, et cum saepe subiectum illi nomen Cestii excidisset, nouissime seruus, ut aliqua nota memoriam eius faceret certiorem, interroganti domino quis ille esset qui in imo recumberet ait: ‘hic est Cestius, qui patrem tuum negabat litteras scisse’; adferri ocius flagra iussit, et Ciceroni, ut oportuit, de corio Cestii satisfecit. Nature had stolen Marcus Tullius’ memory from him, and drunkenness was pilfering the remainder. He kept on asking who was that sitting on the bottom couch. Since he forgot time and again Cestius’ name a slave finally found a way to mark the name more firmly in his memory. When his master asked him who was that sitting on the bottom couch he said, “This is Cestius, the man who denies that your father knew his letters.” Marcus ordered that whips be brought at once and, as was fitting, he got satisfaction for Cicero from Cestius’ hide. (Seneca, Suasoriae 7.13)
The scene is striking not just for its violence. Actually, in that regard Seneca seems quite unconcerned: the act was a fitting one (oportuit). And he begins the next paragraph by remarking, “Even where filial piety did not demand it he was a pugnacious fellow.”69 No, Seneca believes that Cicero’s son was in the right: his father deserved satisfaction, and a beating was just the thing for it. He physically performs the very metaphorical assault and humiliation that Latro directed at this same man. In fact the vocabulary of the two scenes is nearly identical. Latro says Ciceroni de Cestio in foro satisfacere, while Seneca’s narrative uses the phrase Ciceroni de corio Cestii satisfecit. The verbal parallel offers a grammatical zeugma that oddly yokes the two notions of flesh and forum, of abstract and concrete. The first is satisfaction gotten “from Cestius” in the forum, the second is satisfaction gotten “from the flesh of Cestius.”70 Latro uses the courts, Cicero Jr. the body. Each gets his satisfaction from Cestius, but one does so literally from 69 70
erat autem etiam ubi pietas non exigeret scordalus. Seneca, Suasoriae 7.14. de corio also marks this beating as being like a flogging one would give to a slave. See Fitzgerald 2000: 100.
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the hide of the man. Each son does right by a dead father’s literary legacy. And both show how rhetoric is both real and bodily: Latro makes fictive cases into real ones while the younger Cicero answers metaphorical assaults with physical ones. Kaster cleverly argues for Cicero’s transformation into “CICERO, the upper-case icon.”71 Kaster, though sees little beyond kitsch in declamation, and he depicts the practitioners as so many epigonoi. That is, they are hopelessly debased offspring where they are not outright spurious children. Doesn’t the modern Cicero scholar also run the risk of turning into yet another Latro who hauls the schoolmen into the court of good taste? the risk, that is, of himself believing in a CICERO, albeit a more complex and authoritative version of the same?72 Can we ourselves escape declamation’s paradoxes, or are we condemned to argue a case that forever falls back within them? Certainly when it comes to taste, propriety, and a sense of proper communal boundaries, it will be hard to avoid offering a quasideclamatory account: these are the genre’s beloved topics, and there is no “fact” of Ciceronian rhetorical truth that we could ourselves lay before the praetor for his judgement. Literary questions often seem far removed from practical matters. In the case of the body and mutilation, though, the pain and suffering of which the declaimers speak so luridly is not mere talk. Instead they are ready to enact the spirit of those texts if the need and occasion should arise. More than merely speaking of the role of fathers and sons, they instead perform those roles. Moreover these performances saturate the theoretical scene of declamation itself. The question of literary paternity and the duties of the younger generation to the older are issues that embrace not only the text of these speeches but also their theoretical context.73 How is one to satisfy the Master? How does one satisfy Cicero? It is possible to debate these questions from a variety of angles. The soundness of father and son is at stake. But the best and strongest case lies on the side of the father. The independent claims of the son are ever weaker. Let us take a last look at Seneca himself. He is a father speaking to his sons. He offers them declamations for their edification. He is a very 71 72
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Kaster 1998: 258. Kaster notes the threat: “Probably not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, the classic takes on the properties of a mirror: the celebrant casts his gaze upon the icon reverently, and sees himself.” (Kaster 1998: 262) For a paternalistic criticism of my trope see Seneca, Suasoriae 7.11: dixit enim sententiam cacozeliae genere humillimo et sordidissimo, quod detractu aut adiectione syllabae facit sensum: ‘pro facinus indignum! peribit ergo quod Cicero scripsit, manebit quod Antonius proscripsit?’
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specific version of the Master relative to them. Like the younger Cicero, his memory is failing. Unlike the younger Cicero, though, his cleverness extends beyond mere urbanity. Thus he champions Ciceronian rhetoric by flogging bad speakers and even at times the genre of declamation itself. Like his good friend and double Latro, he has no time for a Cestius. Seneca’s failing memory leaves his recollections frail and truncated, mutilated and weak. Indeed the transmission of Seneca’s text has added still more gaps to the fabric of these memories. Nevertheless the process of recalling declamation allows Seneca to make his mind whole once again. He attacks the corrupt youthful bodies of the day. He upbraids them as a father and in the name of a father like Cicero. Old and failing he seeks to get his sons to champion his causes as well. Oratory has been found lolling about the trophies of Ciceronian rhetoric in the company of an adulterer.74 It is important to find and to train surrogates who will avenge the outrage. Those who fail to do so will perhaps be disowned. But that will be a case for the courts. The dividing line between the idiom and metaphors of declamation and the commentary on declamation again proves to be vague and permeable. One cannot directly map the truth onto these fictions. Declamation and the commentary on declamation do not share a one-to-one correspondence. Instead we find a collection of set pieces: a father, a son, an assault in the past, a defence and a prosecution in the present, a question of potency or efficacy, a problem of the hands. These elements may be variously combined. Patterns and preferences emerge. Certain opportunities attract, others repel. But there is a profound investment in the terms themselves. Declamation and “reality” both participate in a larger discursive structure from which these elements have been abstracted. These key elements of the Roman psychic life can then be played with and arranged within declamation. The frivolous art thus provides an empty field upon which men may play with the vocabulary, grammar, and rhetoric that informs their own selfrelation. The rhetoric of these cases and the rhetorical structure of psychic life and of Roman identity converge in these forensic games. Moreover this play is not mere play. It is also a rehearsal or a training under the tutelage of a Master. One brings back from declamation not simply a set of elements and a collection of cases, but a mode of apprehension and a set of power relations governing the arrangement of life’s themes more generally. 74
Compare Seneca, Controversiae 1.4.3.
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The play then is not free play: one never exists outside the rules of the game. One always speaks within the context of the law, and the father’s dictates are its model and mirror. Within the mirror of the law one learns to coordinate a self-image such that from the body’s pieces one ultimately forms a whole and complete self-image legible within its terms.75 75
Compare Lacan 1977c: 2–3. See Silverman 1992: 15–29 for an elaboration of Lacanian theory in terms of social identity.
c h a pt e r 3
Living declamation
What would it mean to take declamation seriously? In a certain sense, this is the question guiding the whole of this book. Taking declamation seriously would entail reading a despised genre as if it were worthy of our attention, or, worse, of our admiration. Declamation makes a claim upon our interest precisely because it acts to dissolve the distinction between the real and the imagined. Declamation can thus imagine reality or add substance to its imaginings. Declamation allows Romans to allegorize reality, to play with it, and to comment upon it.1 Similarly reality becomes fodder for declamatory fictions. Thus the allegories are not mere allegories or simple one-to-one mappings of the actual onto the fictive. Instead the whole question of truth and representation becomes complicated within the declamatory setting. In the end declamation invites us to reflect upon the fictive qualities of Roman identity and the usefulness of this imagined rhetoric as a vehicle for articulating the discourse of the self. This reading of declamation requires us to part from the usual interpretive rubrics to which the genre is subjected. One usually reads declamation within the terms set out by rhetorical handbooks.2 While such an approach can usefully distinguish certain technical aspects of declamation, it remains unable to account for the contents of the speeches themselves. Moreover this approach also asks of declamation that it fit within a certain tradition of rhetorical training from which the genre has consciously departed. In other words, one is condemned to see declamation as a perversion of political or judicial oratory rather than as a performative art, a social event, and as a mode of self-presentation within the confines of fiction. As I have argued elsewhere, one of the distinguishing features of high-brow oratory is its claims to offer a staging of an authentic self.3 In 1 2 3
Compare Migliario 1989. For example, see her discussion of the relationship between Augustan adultery legislation and declamatory adultery (Migliario 1989: 538–43). See also Rayment 1948/49. See, for example Dingel 1988, Fairweather 1981, Sussman 1978, and Ritter 1967. Gunderson 2000.
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declamation we find instead selves that are ostentatiously marked as untrue. But a fiction is not without its significance relative to the question of reality. In fact, the declaimers are acutely aware of the ironies of such a formulation, and they explore these ironies by turning the theme of true fictions into the subject of declamation.4 We have seen one version of this kind of play in the story of Latro’s declamatory prosecution of Cestius in the second chapter. Latro’s joke, though, is only one variation on a major theme. In order to begin our own extended exploration of the elaborate entanglements of truth, fiction, and the self, let us begin with a case that revolves around a crisis of representations. A Greek artist has been accused of injuring the state in the course of producing one of his works.5 L ae s a e re i p vb licae sit ac tio . Parrhasius, pictor Atheniensis, cum Philippus captiuos Olynthios uenderet, emit unum ex iis senem; perduxit Athenas; torsit et ad exemplar eius pinxit Promethea. Olynthius in tormentis perit. ille tabulam in templo Mineruae posuit. accusatur rei publicae laesae. In j u r i e s d o n e to th e state are action able.6 Parrhasius, an Athenian painter, bought an old man from among the Olynthian captives when Philip was selling them as slaves. He brought the man to Athens. He tortured him, and he painted Prometheus with the man as his model. The Olynthian died under the torture. Parrhasius set up his painting in the temple of Minerva. He is accused of injuring the state. (Seneca, Controversiae 10.5)
The setting is Athens and the date 348 b c.7 The Greek venue should not lead one automatically to assume mere inheritance from Greek declamation as the prime motivation for the case. Certainly there must have been “Greek” declamations that Roman speakers felt little inclined to pursue. Instead we might inquire as to the usefulness of a foreign setting for certain questions. Homosexual rape and tyranny are two issues that explore significant themes within Roman thinking, but they are usefully assigned to an elsewhere and/or a specific, distant point in the past. It is not immediately clear that 4 5 6
7
See also Suetonius, De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus 25.5 on the frequent conversion of real events into the stuff of declamation. Morales offers valuable insights into theories of representation by way of this case (Morales 1996). My own treatment focuses more on this case’s relationship to the art of declamation. On the law and related cases, see Bonner 1949: 97–98. Bonner suspects the genuineness of this law in either Greek or Roman jurisprudence. On the other hand there is no doubt as to its usefulness as an umbrella term within the declamatory setting, for declamation thrives upon ambiguous or vague points of law. It should be noted that the Olynthians provide the occasion for two other declamatory scandals at Seneca, Controversiae 3.8 and Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 292. The two cases are very similar and both involve homosexual rape. On this topic, see the fifth chapter.
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a question of artistic representation might fall into the same category. The question this case asks, though, is a vital one. At the same time it is a question that is usefully posited as removed from the present day lest one come right out and collapse declamation into allegory, a move that would nullify key features of the genre. For this case makes inquiries that will reverberate throughout my discussion of life and art in declamation: what is the status of representation? What is the accountability of the speaker for his representations? What is the relationship of artist to reality? As usual, declamation asks and answers its questions in hyperbolic form. As far as Parrhasius himself is concerned, his cruel painting seems to be known only to the declaimers. That is, despite a wealth of references to him in other Latin authors, he is remembered only as an exemplary painter, and not as a sadist.8 And when he is noted for the verisimilitude of his art, the anecdote offered is one concerning his fooling the eye of the great Zeuxis who had himself painted some grapes so realistically that birds tried to eat them.9 This fictional scene of torture thus becomes interesting precisely as a fiction: why imagine this moment and with these actors? As a moment of controversial artistic creation the Parrhasius incident allows the speakers to negotiate a number of ironies of their own practice. Similarly this case allows Seneca to play art critic when he reviews their efforts. The examples Seneca cites from the speeches against the painter are filled with expressions of outrage and horror.10 Most of the accusations draw a parallel between the painter cruel to his slave and Jupiter tormenting Prometheus. This mortal painter has shown himself crueler than Philip and worse even than the savage god: “He is tortured; this didn’t happen under Philip. He dies; this not even under Jove.”11 Argentarius’ sententia explicitly invokes the themes that we are pursuing here: “Did Parrhasius just torture the Olynthian? Well, didn’t he torture our eyes as well? He put the picture where perhaps we set the text of the 8
9
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See, for example, Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes 1.4; Columella, De Re Rustica, 1.pr.31; Fronto, De Eloquentia 1.1; Horace, Carmina 4.8.6; Juvenal, Saturae 8.102; and Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 12.10.4. Note especially how for the several rhetorical authors Parrhasius does not evoke any unfavorable associations. Morales 1996 indicates other negative versions of this artist, but the question of torture is confined to the declamatory courts. Pliny, Naturalis Historia 35.64. Conversely, in his retooling of historical anecdotes within this declamation Spyridion recalls only the grapes of Zeuxis, and he neglects to mention any scene where both Parrhasius and Zeuxis are involved (10.5.27). See also Morales 1996: 207. Morales treats the variety of reactions in careful detail (Morales 1996). Torquetur: hoc nec sub Philippo factum est. Moritur: hoc nec sub Ioue; 10.5.2. H˚akanson prints indicatives where most editors offer (jussive) subjunctives. The textual basis for the others’ choice lies in the excerpted manuscript tradition. H˚akanson points out, though, that the painter did not order the man to die: he just happened to die in the course of his tortures.
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treaty. This is making a Prometheus, not painting one.”12 Declamation itself, though, also forms a sort of torturous artistic display. It routinely stages horrors for the public eye: rape, torture, and murder are paraded before us. Even as the case laments staging a torture to produce art, the case is itself an artful staging of a staging of torture. There was never any real Olynthian to begin with. The fiction of the reality of the Olynthian evokes the comment that true horrors should not be put on public display.13 The torturer uses whips, the painter his palette,14 the speaker his words: with each step in the chain of association the distance between reality and representation increases, and the link between the thing and its likeness grows more attenuated. The defence of Parrhasius allows art its privileges. First Seneca himself insists that it is very bad form to refuse to take the other side.15 That is, the art of rhetoric should never blush at attempting artfully to defend the cruel and hideous. Next, Gallio points out a number of obvious opportunities for defence even if they are rather inelegant when compared to the fulminations of the prosecution:16 the state was not harmed; the man was a slave and had no special claims to better; the law punishes what is not allowed, not what is allowed.17 Later Latro offers a generic statement on behalf of knowledge itself. He talks of “how much had ever been allowed to the arts: doctors have cut open men’s entrails so that they can discover the unknown effect of a disease. Today the limbs of cadavers are cut open so that the dispositions of the sinews and joints can be learned.”18 Not only does the artist partake of these privileges, then, but so also does the orator. He too is allowed to 12
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16
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Tantum [porro] Olynthium torsit Parrhasius? Quid <porro>? non et oculos nostros torquet? Ibi ponit tabulam ubi fortasse nos tabulam foederis posuimus. Hoc Promethea facere est, non pingere (10.5.2). Note the untranslatable play between the painting as a tabula and the material text of the treaty as a tabula. Though I emphasize the torture as a “fiction of fiction”, Morales is right to note that there are parallels to this case, and she evokes the murders in the Roman arena and notes that the logic of this case could accordingly be readily redeployed relative to “real” Roman questions (Morales 1996: 198–99). Seneca is not amused, though, when one speaker suggests that Parrhasius used his victim’s blood for paint (10.5.23). 10.5.12. In addition to instances where one would prefer to avoid one side of a case, here Seneca recognizes as well cases where it is “impossible” to speak on the other side. See also Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 5.13.36 for the same notion. By saying fulminations I mean to allude to the ways in which the speakers against the painter allow themselves to occupy the position of outrage that corresponds to aspects of the original crime: an injury was done by the ur-artist Prometheus for which he must be punished by Jupiter the thunderer. 10.5.13–15. In argumentis dixit quantum semper artibus licuisset: medicos, ut uim ignotam morbi cognoscerent, uiscera rescidisse; hodie cadauerum artus rescindi ut neruorum articulorumque positio cognosci possit. 10.5.17.
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analyze and to anatomize. In fact, he is encouraged to delve into the painful and the distasteful in order to derive either some knowledge or some bit of verbal craft from the exercise. As was discussed above, in the master’s instructive sermo prefixed to Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 270 the student of declamation is actually invited to see the process of rhetorical analysis as a species of anatomy. In this particular case, though, we discover an art that is both horrible and instructive. The Greeks show themselves to be unequal to the task. Seneca claims that the Greeks thought it an outrage to defend the painter, and that everyone accused him.19 Unfortunately in accusing the man who punished a slave so that he would seem like the mythical thief Prometheus, they themselves prove to be petty larcenists. “[The Greeks] rushed to offer identical sentiments. Glycon said: ‘Fire and man, Prometheus, your gifts torment you.’ ”20 There are many variations on this theme, and Cassius Severus archly remarks that “people who do this seem like thieves who swap out the handles on other people’s cups. There are many who think that by taking away, changing or adding a word they have turned a profit on someone else’s maxims (sententiae).”21 Thus not only do these speakers fail to properly engage both sides of the question of art’s ambiguity, but so also do they fail even to offer much art at all: their sparks of wit have all been filched from another. And yet they have not escaped the divine eye of criticism and its own cutting punitive remarks.22 However there is one Greek whose story provokes an excursus from Seneca. And though the incident at first blush appears to be somewhat unrelated to its surroundings, as is often the case in Seneca, there is an important link to the theme of the declamation itself. Seneca speaks of a certain Timagenes who was famous for squabbling with Craton over things rhetorical in the emperor’s presence.23 Seneca’s characterization of him is itself written with a certain rhetorical flair: 19 20 21 22
23
10.5.19. in eosdem sensus incurrerunt. Glycon dixit: pÓr kaª nqrwpov, romhqeÓ, t s se dära basan©zei 10.5.20. Hos aiebat Seuerus Cassius qui hoc facerent similes sibi uideri furibus alienis poculis ansas mutantibus. Multi sunt qui detracto uerbo aut mutato aut adiecto putent se alienas sententias lucri fecisse. 10.5.20. Note, though, that Triarius seems to offer a sufficiently novel and artful version: “However Triarius changed it around thus: you have corrupted the two greatest gifts of Prometheus, fire and man.” (Triarius autem sic uertit: corrupisti duo maxima Promethei munera, ignem et hominem. 10.5.20.) Here the word autem would indicate disjunction and hence approval. The distinctions between the ridiculous and the sublime are closely adjudicated by Seneca even if one has difficulty today in seeing the disparity between certain specimens. And, despite his manifest distaste for the Greeks, Seneca does make sure to award the crown for folly to a Roman (10.5.28). On Timagenes, see RE 2.6,1063,29.
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Saepe solebat apud Caesarem cum Timagene confligere, homine acidae linguae et qui nimis liber erat: puto quia diu non fuerat. ex captiuo cocus, ex coco lecticarius, ex lecticario usque in amicitiam Caesaris euect<us>,24 usque eo utramfortunam contempsit, et in qua erat et in qua fuerat, ut, cum illi multis de causis iratus Caesar interdixisset domo, combureret historias rerum ab illo gestarum, quasi et ipse illi ingenio suo interdiceret: disertus homo et dicax, a quo multa inprobe sed uenuste dicta. [Craton] often used to fight with Timagenes at the emperor’s house. Timagenes was a man of acid tongue and who took excessive liberties – I suppose because he hadn’t had his own for long. He went from captive to cook, from cook to litter-bearer, and from there he was carried as far as the emperor’s friendship. He so scorned each of his fortunes, both that in which he was and that in which he had been, that when Caesar got angry at him for a variety of reasons and prohibited Timagenes from coming to his house, the latter burnt his histories of the emperor’s accomplishments as if he too would debar the emperor from his genius. He was an eloquent and a biting fellow, one who authored many roguish but charming quotes. (Seneca, Controversiae 10.5.22)
Timagenes lives the Parrhasius case to the fullest, and once again we would do well to read Seneca subtly. Timagenes occupies multiple positions within the imagined scenario. Like the Olynthian, Timagenes is himself both free and unfree. Timagenes, though, lives his antithetical conditions in the reverse order. And like the Olynthian Timagenes participates in producing art for a man who might be described as his quasi-owner: Timagenes’ sufferings are deposited in the temple of rhetorical memory by a Seneca who paints his portrait. Or, if we take Timagenes as the artist and not just the model, one could describe his histories as so many paintings laid up to the honor of the emperor: doubtless a certain amount of real suffering was required that the history be worth writing. Timagenes’ fight with the emperor is also conducted in a mythological idiom. The emperor is like some angry Jupiter, angry, no doubt, at the cleverness of this Promethean figure. Sympathetic from a mortal’s perspective, Prometheus challenges the rule of the divine tyrant on mankind’s behalf. And his gift is that of fire, a gift by means of which the road to other arts is opened up.25 Timagenes, though, plays with the myth and adds a twist to the plot: he takes the products of the arts that follow upon the discovery of fire and consigns them to the fire. Timagenes creates and he destroys. He offers to a tyrant, and he steals from the tyrant that same offering. The liberty 24 25
MS †felix†. euect<us> is among H˚akanson’s suggestions. Compare Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 7, and see Griffith 1983 ad loc. for related passages. Notice as well Griffith’s discussion of “sophistic elements” in the play as a whole: Prometheus’ tale was long felt to be related to the history of rhetoric.
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Timagenes shows even in his dependence recalls not just Prometheus, but also an idealized vision of oratory as being essentially bound to free speech. Further Timagenes exemplifies a sort of social progress that would have resonances for most of the declaimers, men who sought to rise by way of their genius for rhetoric and who constantly imagine themselves falling by the same means. Declamation here serves both as the medium for advancement and also as the tool with which one thinks through the consequences of this relationship to authority. The connection between life and art in general, and between art and public life in particular is the stuff of which declamations are made. The lives of the declaimers are similarly constituted as public works of rhetorical artistry: Seneca has embedded his account of Timagenes within a specific declamatory context, and within this context the life of the orator becomes more intelligible precisely as something implicated in declamatory fictions. Seneca paints a suffering Timagenes, and we his readers must ask ourselves if such a portrait is merely a representation, or if it points to a serious game of reality and representations. If life can take on a declamatory quality, so too can declamation furnish opportunities for engaging with worldly problems. Seneca singles out two men whose declamations revealed their true characters when their own sons had died. First, Asinius Pollio was so self-possessed as to offer a declamation within three days of his son’s death. Seneca interprets this act as being “the proclamation of a great spirit mocking its own ills.”26 Seneca recalls how the declamation itself revealed the noble circumstances of its own production: “he spoke to us, but so much more forcefully then ever before that it was clear that the man, defiant by nature, was struggling against his own fortune.”27 But the speech was more than merely excellent. That Pollio spoke a declamation rather than mourn offers him a precedent that he will use to defend himself before Augustus. The emperor complains that his friend had attended a big party even though Augustus was himself in mourning over the death of his adopted son Gaius. Pollio replies that he had dined on the very day of his own son’s death. Seneca uses this opportunity to produce a declamatory sententia by way of conclusion: “Who would demand more sorrow from a friend than from a father?”28 Thus Pollio shows who he is by declaiming. So too does Seneca encapsulate the truth of Pollio by 26 27 28
praeconium illud ingentis animi fuit malis suis insultantis. Seneca, Controversiae, 4.pr.6. Memini . . . declamare eum nobis, sed tanto uehementius quam umquam ut appareret hominem natura contumacem cum fortuna sua rixari. 4.pr.4. Quis exigeret maiorem ab amico dolorem quam a patre? 4.pr.5.
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summarizing the man’s character with a maxim of a declamatory cast.29 If declamation offers a rehearsal for or even an allegory of life, the life for which declamations prepare a speaker itself comes to resemble a declamation. Not only is it stocked with the same characters, but one reads and comments upon it in the same manner. The declamatory aesthetic thus extends beyond the boundaries of the genre and it comes to suffuse life itself. Seneca contrasts Pollio with another man whose life becomes declamatory. While Pollio endured with fortitude his son’s death, Quintus Haterius did nothing of the sort: At contra Q. Haterium scio tam inbecillo animo mortem Sexti fili tulisse ut non tantum recenti dolori cederet, sed ueteris quoque et oblitterati memoriam sustinere non posset. memini, cum diceret controuersiam de illo qui a sepulchris trium filiorum abstractus iniuriarum agit, mediam dictionem fletu eius interrumpi; deinde tanto maiore impetu dixit, tanto miserabilius, ut appareret quam magna interim pars esset ingenii dolor. On the other hand I know that Haterius bore the death of his son Sextus with such a frail spirit that he did not just give way to a fresh sorrow, but he was incapable of enduring the memory of an old and faded one. I recall how when he was speaking the controuersia about the man who was taken from the tomb of his three sons and sues for damages Haterius’ tears cut him off in mid-speech. Afterwards he spoke with so much more insistence and so much more piteously that it became clear how great a measure of genius can sometimes be owed to sorrow. (Seneca, Controversiae 4.pr.6.)
Haterius believes what he says. He speaks from his heart. His declamation offers him the opportunity to work through real, personal sorrows. On the other hand, this sorrow remains firmly embedded within a context of public performance before an audience of one’s peers. Given the iterability of the elements of the declamatory genre, Haterius can even expect to “relive” his own sorrow again and again throughout the years. Even if his tears are authentic, they become staged and stagey: Seneca reads them as a critic, finds them advantageous to the task at hand, and commends authenticity as a contributing factor toward a sound performance.30 The man performing a father in tears is himself a father in tears. The imagined father is pleading a case, the real Haterius is himself performing 29 30
On Pollio, Haterius and Seneca, see also Sinclair 1995a: 100–101. Compare Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 6.5.1–8: during a play the character Electra bears an urn supposedly containing her brother’s ashes; the actor playing Electra, though, brings on stage an urn containing his own son’s ashes. I have discussed this passage and its relationship to rhetorical training at Gunderson 2000: 140–41.
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as a speaker, and, indirectly, pleading the case for his own reputation as a speaker. Seneca sees here a salutary lack of affectation: yes, it is undignified to carry on so about one’s son; on the other hand, this sorrow has produced some worthy fruits, for Haterius spoke well and convincingly on this occasion. Thus, in a certain sense, it is to Haterius’ advantage to fail to “get over” the death of his son. While Pollio can forever use his own stoic reaction to his son’s death to score points with others, Haterius can use his weakness as its own justification: Haterius’ relations to his peers are structured by this quality, and the fact of his sorrow forms an element of the ensemble of his public rhetorical persona. Seneca continues his discussion of Haterius by describing the man as being brilliant but undisciplined in a number of aspects of his speech. His rhetoric is routinely marked by excesses in a genre given to excess. Thus while Pollio appears to have enjoyed declamation precisely as a place where he could be a bit freer than his usual stern self,31 Haterius is so much a slave to the flow of his genius that he needs to be governed by the admonitions of a freedman kept on hand for the purpose. Seneca seems to savor the ironies of mastery and slavery that Haterius brought upon himself.32 The case of the dead son thus becomes exemplary: Haterius cannot control his passions, but his genius profits from being left to its own devices and then reined in to fit within the confines of a variety of rhetorical scenes and structures. Seneca concludes of him, “Nevertheless he repaid his vices with his virtues, and there was more to him to praise than to pardon, just as in that declamation during which he wept.”33 The declamation during which Haterius cried, though, contains a number of parallels not just to Haterius, but even to the whole of Seneca’s preface to his fourth book, for the positions of both Pollio and Augustus are represented as well: Amissis quidam tribus liberis cum adsideret sepulchro, a luxurioso adulescente in uicinos hortos abductus est et detonsus coactus conuiuio ueste mutata interesse. dimissus iniuriarum agit. A certain man had lost his three sons. As he sat at their tomb he was hauled off into some neighboring gardens by a dissipated youth (luxuriosus adulescens). He was given a haircut and a change of clothes and forced to attend a party. After he is allowed to leave he sues for damages. (Seneca, Controversiae 4.1) 31 33
32 4.pr.8. See 4.pr.2–4. Redimebat tamen uitia uirtutibus et plus habebat quod laudares quam cui ignosceres, sicuti in ea in qua fleuit declamatione. 4.pr.11.
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The father had been performing his grief: his hair was long and disheveled; his clothes were dark. A young wastrel arrives and forces the man to don a wholly other appearance and to enact another sort of social role. If the premise of the first case of the fourth book parallels that of the preface, then Pollio is a father who dines willingly, Haterius one who does so unwillingly, and Augustus would prefer to linger over the tomb. The lines preserved from the speeches on this theme play out these various positions. Unfortunately this portion of Seneca’s work survives only in the excerpted manuscript tradition. This means that not only has the bulk of the text been lost, but so also have the attributions of speakers. Thus we cannot know for sure which lines, if any, were spoken by Haterius. Nevertheless, it is possible first to guess which ones might be his, and next to observe that the salient point is not what he himself specifically said, but more generally what the genre of declamation produces relative to such a case. It is probable that the first few sentences of this case represent in whole or in part statements made by Haterius. If one looks to the intact books of Seneca a pattern of exposition emerges. For example, in Book 1 the preface centers on Porcius Latro. Latro is the first speaker in every case of that book. Furthermore, if one compares the intact version to the excerpted version, in each instance the first excerpt from any given case was taken from Latro’s words.34 In Book 7, the preface concentrates on Albucius Silus. Albucius is the first speaker of the first case. He is also the first speaker of the fifth, seventh, and eighth cases. One might also note that the first set of remarks of the first case of a new book tends to be rather long.35 Keeping these trends in mind, we can return to the first words of the first case of the excerpted fourth book. Since the first case of the fourth book is the very case that the preface mentioned, it would be surprising if Haterius was not the first speaker and if he had not been quoted at some length. Thus the excerpter 34 35
It should be noted that the excerpted version not only cuts out whole sentences but even can abbreviate those sentences that it does include. Contrary examples to the tendencies outlined are as follows: Fabianus is the subject of the second preface, but he nowhere speaks first or even abundantly in the second book. Yet Fabianus is a philosopher and only a some-time speaker. He is elicited as a model for Seneca’s philosophical son Mela (Seneca, Controversiae 2.pr.3). Seneca’s own favorite Latro tends to have pride of place in the second book. Seneca focuses on Montanus for the preface of the ninth book, but he does not speak first in any of the six cases of that book. Yet Montanus was suggested to Seneca by his sons (9.pr.1); Seneca did not choose him himself. Also, the real focus of that preface – or, rather, of what remains of that preface – is the difference between declamation as an imaginary rhetorical exercise and the pleading of actual cases. Thus we should not be too surprised if Montanus is not prominent in the declamations that follow. The tenth book opens with a grab-bag of remaining lesser speakers and is not too useful in establishing a citational pattern.
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in all likelihood would have grabbed a piece of Haterius in his first sample of this case. Obviously, though, nothing can be said for certain. The opening three excerpts of the case, whether or not they are by Haterius, encapsulate a number of the most important ironies of both the declamation and the world of the declaimers: Numquam lacrimae supprimuntur imperio, immo etiam inritantur. nulla flendi maior est causa quam flere non posse. rapuit me, qualem in conuiuium puderet uenire, dimisit qualem redire ad sepulchrum puderet. Tears are never checked by an order; no, they are provoked. There is no greater reason for weeping than to be unable to weep. He stole me away in a state where it would be shameful to go to a party; he sent me off in a state where it would be shameful to return to a tomb. (Seneca, Controversiae 4.1)
The preface to the fourth book revolves around these same questions of propriety and commandment. If Haterius were a more manly man, he would not need to cry. Haterius lives in a world where his peers wish him to live it up, and to play at the sport of declamation. But the prohibition against tears only produces tears for Haterius. More than this, though, these promptly become a hybrid sort of tear, rhetorical and declamatory tears. They are harnessed in such a way that Haterius can be a good man by being an excessively tearful father. And it is as Haterius plays at being the declamatory father that Seneca interprets the truth of the man from the tenor of his fiction. Against Haterius’ unmanly and long-lasting tears one finds Pollio, a man who goes from grave-side to fˆete in a matter of moments. Pollio toughs it out and puts on a good face for his friends. Rather than ostentatiously breaking into a rhetorically effective fit of tears, Pollio showily refuses to weep and derives his renown from this act. Pollio would obviously be an advocate on the other side ( pars altera) of the case: a man has duties to others; festivities help us to bring our grief to a welcome close. Pollio even goes so far as to violate the premise of the first statement on the father’s behalf, and to do so relative to the most important person in the land. That is, against the notion that “tears are never checked by an order,” Pollio himself gives an order to the emperor himself, saying, effectively, “Don’t tell me when to mourn.” Of course the one thing we can never stop Haterius, Pollio, or even Seneca himself from doing is declaiming. In declamation each of the three finds a tool whereby the various constituent themes of their social world can be narrativized and then even redeployed within that world. The product of such a labor, though, is a world that has been sublated by the dialectical
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overcoming of the opposition between life and art into a new synthesis of the two. r
Even where the scenario of the declamation does not obviously dovetail with the social circumstances of the speakers and audience, the Roman ear appears to have been greedy for allegory. As in the case of theatrical performances where the crowd would read additional meaning into the text of a play and could even halt a performance to hear key lines again,36 so too with declamation can the speakers’ words be given an extra and political spin if one wishes. Thus in Seneca, Controversiae 2.4, one of the many cases of disinheritance and adoption to be found in the genre, the question of adoption suddenly is made to bear an unwanted political force. The premise of 2.4 is as follows: “A man disinherited his son. The son moved in with a prostitute. He had a child with her. He falls ill and sends for his father. When his father arrives he entrusts his own son to him and dies. The father adopts the boy. The father is accused of insanity by his other son.”37 Seneca’s good friend Latro gets himself in hot water during his treatment of the case. Seneca records the incident as follows, marking its opening with a pointed phrase itself honed with a declamatory flair: In hac controuersia Latro contrariam rem <non>controuersiae dixit sed sibi. declamabat illam Caesare Augusto audiente et M. Agrippa, cuius filios, nepotes suos, Caesar [Lucium et Gaium] adoptaturus diebus illis uidebatur. erat M. Agrippa inter eos qui non nati sunt nobiles sed facti. cum diceret partem adulescentis Latro et tractaret adoptionis locum, dixit: iam iste38 ex imo per adoptionem nobilitati serit[in hanc] alia in hanc summam. Maecenas innuit Latrofestinare Caesarem; finiret iam declamationem. quidam putabant hanc malignitatem Maecenatis esse; effecisse enim illum non ne audiret quae dicta erant Caesar, sed ut notaret. In this controuersia Latro said something contrary (contrariam) not to the controuersia but to himself. Latro was speaking this case in the presence of Augustus 36
37
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On allegory intended and otherwise, see, for example Suetonius Julius 84, Augustus 53, Augustus 68, Tiberius 45, and Nero 46. Moreover in Augustus 99 the emperor cites standard lines from the closing of a play by way of announcing the end of his own life. Abdicauit quidam filium; abdicatus se contulit ad meretricem; ex illa sustulit filium. Aeger ad patrem misit; cum uenisset, commendauit ei filium suum et decessit. Adoptauit puerum <pater>; ab altero [pater] filio accusatur dementiae. On insanity cases in general, see the next chapter. non asciti is H˚akanson’s emendation. This strikes me as perhaps a bit too clever, even if it is fairly clear that something has to be done here. The manuscripts have either nam isti or iam isti which is traditionally emended to iam iste. The force of iste provokes reservations of its own, though. One should note that this whole sentence requires heavy emendation before the text of the manuscripts can be gotten to mean anything. Even the key verb inseritur is not in the MSS which read instead ferunt. One must be content, then, to understand more or less what Latro must have been about rather than to know just what he said.
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Caesar and Marcus Agrippa. Augustus at the time appeared to be on the verge of adopting Agrippa’s sons who were his own grandsons. Agrippa was one of those men who was not born an aristocrat but made one. Latro was speaking on the side of the young man, and when he got to the bit about adoption he said: “Now adoption grafts this [child] from the lowest station upon the nobility.” And Latro made other remarks to this effect. Maecenas nodded to Latro that Caesar was in a hurry: he ought to wrap up his declamation already. Some thought that this was a bit of malice on Maecenas’ part; for he had seen to it not that Augustus would not hear what had been said but rather that he would take notice of it. (Seneca, Controversiae 2.4.12–13.)
Latro is not the first declaimer to get carried away and to forget himself. Haterius had been noted for his excesses; and Seneca is routinely chastising a variety of speakers for going too far. Latro was taking a risk in using the word nobility (nobilitas)39 given his audience: the case requires only the social gap between respectable citizen and prostitute, not the gulf between the highest and the lowest. Declamation’s pursuit of the extremes in conjunction with its focus on questions that are vital to any number of members of society produces a moment where a surfeit of meaning arises. Maecenas seizes an opportunity, and he scores a point against Latro. Or at least that’s how some people read the situation. Maecenas’ motives rather than his results seem to be the real question. Latro recognizes that he has made a misstep. “Latro was in a pitiful situation: he could not even excuse his own error. Nothing is more cruel that to offend in such a manner that you will give even further offence if you try to make up for it.”40 Latro finds that he has unexpectedly made a piece of social commentary. He has just implied that Agrippa’s kids are like the sons of a whore. It is possible to excuse and to cover over their birth, but there will always remain a controversy over the nature of status that reminds one of a controuersia. There will always be two sides to an issue that one would be wise to treat as unambiguous: “They were not grafted on the nobility. They were noble all along . . .” The declaimers are readily accused of being a pack of parvenus and social climbers. This characterization is at least in part justified, but one might just as well note that Cicero too tried to get ahead in Rome by becoming a master of the oratory of another era. Moreover this slur should not prevent us from noting the variety of people present at a declamation. One observes, then, that in addition to obscure provincials Seneca also includes 39 40
This is one of the few words of this sentence that is solidly attested in the manuscripts. Latro dignus fuit miseratione, qui ne excusare quidem errorem suum potuit. Nihil est autem crudelius quam sic offendere ut magis sis offensurus si satis feceris. Seneca, Controversiae, 2.4.13. Compare Seneca’s authorial sentiment to the sententia of Haterius from above: nulla flendi maior est causa quam flere non posse (4.1).
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references to prominent literary figures such as the critic Asinius Pollio and the poet Ovid. Moreover the emperor Augustus appears a number of times. The many declamations about the transformations of the family and corresponding alterations in social station thus lend themselves to ineluctable allegorization: “How many of us have been exposed or disowned, adopted, or refound?” Even the established members of society take an active interest: as a father adopting from below, what will people say? What should they say? Augustus himself has already been described as a declamatory father in the Haterius episode. Recall also that he is the one before whom Craton and Timogenes used to wrangle, and that his relationship to the latter partook of the characteristics of the Prometheus case. In this instance as well Augustus is invited to choose a role: will he adopt or will he refuse? Seneca pays Augustus the high compliment of insisting that Augustus did not preclude freedom of speech. That is, for our purposes, Augustus is a sound enough critic of declamation to know that there is more than one side to every case.41 It is by no means inappropriate to speak of Augustus as a declamatory critic in a position similar to Seneca himself. Certainly Seneca’s own position is made more attractive the more closely the two roles can be seen to converge. Seneca’s literary deployment in a declamatory context of the historical figure Augustus listening to declamations produces a situation wherein the authority of Seneca the narrator partakes of the real authority of the emperor. It is, though, unlikely that Seneca is baldly inventing his anecdotes rather than skillfully deploying them to best effect. Repeatedly when one sees the emperor in Seneca’s pages he is making a bit of literary criticism that reveals him as an engaged and intelligent critic.42 Yet it is Varius Geminus who reveals the emperor can never be just a critic of declamation, but he will always also be a critic of the declaimers and the meanings that they produce in a practical, social sense: “Caesar, those who dare to speak before you are ignorant of your greatness; those who don’t, of your kindness (humanitatem).”43 If declamation was really so pointless and empty, why would anyone be afraid to deliver one in front of the emperor? 41 42 43
See Seneca’s praise for the emperor in 2.4.13: Agrippa’s intimacy with Augustus does not preclude people from sniping at him. See Seneca, Controversiae, 2.5.20, 4.pr.7, and 10.pr.14. Caesar, qui apud te audent dicere, magnitudinem tuam ignorant, qui non audent, humanitatem. Seneca, Controversiae, 6.8. The context for this phrase is uncertain. It is a piece taken from an excerpted book. It comes after the pars altera and is labeled extra. It would seem to be, then, a reminiscence of something said on the occasion of the case of the Versifying Vestal outside of (extra) the speeches proper.
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In an irony that would itself be well-placed in a declamation, Latro was silenced by his own speech. Though he erred, Latro could not apologize. Geminus’ artful maxim instructs both emperor and orators of the proper outlook to take: “Yes, everything said is important; but, no, none of it matters, this is all excusable as mere talk.” If the emperor knows himself, he will recognize that his humanitas embraces his condition as a man, his kindness, and his literary culture, for these three elements are each part of the semantic field covered by humanitas. Humanitas dictates that one kindly receive art as art even while appreciating that life and art converge. A man who cannot embrace these contradictions cannot listen to a declamation. In fact, if the emperor is going to be just another man or a “first among equals” instead of embodying the illegitimate power of a declamatory tyrant, he must listen to declamation and endure its double meanings without growing enraged and exercising the power that comes with his greatness. Geminus’ verbal artistry thereby constrains the emperor in a real sense even as it appears to be a mere piece of rhetorical fluff. It performs its own content so long as Augustus decides to receive it graciously. rr
By way of rounding out the means in which one can “live” a declamation, I would like to go back to a beloved figure who is usually thought to embody the antithesis of the declamatory, namely Cicero. In 50 bce Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his army and Rome found itself embroiled in a civil war. Caesar’s unconstitutional act produced terror at Rome and a general flight of his aristocratic opposition. Caesar was now in charge. The question occupying men like Cicero was “What next?” In March of 49 bce Cicero writes to Atticus that he has run out of material for writing: the political situation is too gloomy for mere friendly patter; and his political ruminations have all been done to death.44 Lest he should be nothing but a sad-sack and lay-about, though, Cicero has engaged himself with a number of “propositions” (qseiv), hypothetical topics upon which one speaks extemporaneously. Cicero describes the themes as “political” (politika©) and “timely” (temporum horum). His purpose is to withdraw his attention from worldly complaints and to practice himself in the business at hand.45 44 45
Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum, 9.4.1. sed tamen, ne me totum aegritudini dedam, sumpsi mihi quasdam tamquam qseiv, quae et politikaª sunt et temporum horum, ut et abducam animum a querelis et in eo ipso de quo agitur exercear. Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum, 9.4.1.
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Bonner begins his own book on declamation with an examination of the nature of the qsiv and its relationship to declamation.46 For Aristotle the qsiv is a philosophical assertion that one would be expected to support and develop rhetorically: for example, “all existence is One.” The qsiv need not be a fixed tenet, though, and it could instead represent an issue for debate. Bonner concludes that the dominant rhetorical meaning of the term is derived from Hermogenes and that one might define the qsiv within this tradition as “the consideration of a subject without reference to specific circumstances.”47 Seen in such a light the qsiv is usually called a quaestio in Latin, and it differs from a “case” (causa, Ëp»qesiv) in that the latter concerns something specific rather than something general: “should Cato marry” as opposed to “should one marry.”48 Bonner attempts to show the many ways in which the qsiv evolved into what we would recognize as declamation and, specifically, into the imagined court cases of the controuersiae and the fanciful exhortations of the suasoriae. Bonner wishes to know just where we stand in the history of declamation when it comes to this letter from Cicero to Atticus. Bonner’s reading thereby seeks to pin down the truth of a moment within a genre whose separation from life and art has been called into question throughout the present study. Let us reread Cicero a little more carefully and see in him an active negotiation of the distance between the general and the specific, the imagined and the real, philosophy and rhetoric, art and life. The gulf between political oratory and full-blown declamation is not so wide as it might usually seem. All of the literary activity of Cicero within this letter is itself bracketed by the question of the letter as itself literary. Cicero invites Atticus to reflect upon the problematic or “failed” quality of this very letter in which he tells his friend, “I am having trouble writing letters to you.” Specifically Cicero says he can not find a “plot” (argumentum) for a good letter. Instead he offers a letter whose drama turns around the question of occasion, the timeliness of friendship, and political circumstances. Within this frame Cicero then emplots himself as having performed speeches on a variety of dramatic topics. Cicero withdraws from the disputes of the day by imagining new disputes. And here he practices a fictitious case that it may help him act and 46 47 48
Bonner 1949: 1–11. The present paragraph is largely a summary of Bonner’s findings. Bonner 1949: 3. Compare Cicero, Orator 46. See Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 3.5.5–11 for the same divisions and examples. Quintilian is uninterested in history when drawing the difference between qsiv and Ëp»qesiv. He sees the matter as merely a logical distinction: “An unbounded [question] is ‘Should one marry’, a circumscribed one is ‘Should Cato marry’. For that reason the latter can be a suasoria. (infinita [quaestio] est: ‘an uxor ducenda’, finita: ‘an Catoni ducenda’ ideoque esse suasoria potest. Institutio Oratoria 3.5.8).”
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perform when it comes to real life (ut et abducam animum a querelis et in eo ipso de quo agitur exercear). An aggressive reading would even force the theatrical metaphor into agitur: “I practice for the play of life by practicing the dramatic.” Everything that is suited to the occasion has already been said except, apparently, for those things that get said in the qseiv.49 The subjects upon which Cicero spoke and speculated were manifold. Cicero’s list is long, longer, in fact, than is necessary for a reader to understand the tenor of his reflections. Instead the propositions are recorded in detail, and one can note in them a certain very practical train of thought. E« meneton n t¦ patr©di turannoumnhv aÉt¦v. e« pantª tr»pw turann©dov katlusin pragmateuton, kn mllh
di toÓto perª tän Âlwn ¡ p»liv kinduneÅsein. e« eÉlabhton t¼n katalÅonta m aÉt¼v arhtai. e« peiraton rgein t¦ patr©di turannoumnh
kairä kaª l»gw mllon £ polmw. e« politik¼n t¼ ¡suczein nacwrsant poi t¦v patr©dov turannoumnhv £ di pant¼v «ton kindÅnou t¦v leuqer©av pri. e« p»lemon pakton t¦ cÛra
kaª poliorkhton aÉtn turannoumnhn. e« kaª m dokimzonta tn di polmou katlusin t¦v turann©dov sunapograpton Âmwv to±v r©stoiv. e« to±v eÉergtaiv kaª f©loiv sugkinduneuton n to±v politiko±v kn m dokäsin eÔ bebouleÓsqai perª tän Âlwn. e« ¾ megla tn patr©da eÉergetsav dié aÉt» te toÓto nkesta paqÜn kaª fqonhqeªv kinduneÅseien n qelontv Ëpr t¦v patr©dov £ feton aÉtä autoÓ pote kaª tän o«keiottwn poie±sqai pr»noian femnw tv pr¼v toÆv «scÅontav diapolite©av. Should one remain in his fatherland if it is subject to a tyrant? Should one undertake to destroy a tyranny by every means, even if it will put the state in utmost danger? Should the revolutionary take care for his own safety? Should one help one’s country as it suffers under a tyranny by means of opportunity and oratory or by waging a war? Is it the mark of a good citizen to keep quiet and withdraw somewhere when the state is under a tyrant, or should one run every risk in the name of freedom? Should one bring war into the land and besiege it when it is under a tyrant? If one does not think it right to end a tyranny with war, should he nevertheless subscribe to the aristocratic course? Should one share the dangers of friends and benefactors even if they do not seem to have deliberated well concerning the whole? If a man has done great things for his country and for this same reason he has suffered unbearably and been resented, should he willingly endanger himself on its behalf, or should he apply himself to looking out for himself and his nearest and dearest leaving political dissent to those who are in power? (Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum, 9.4.2.) 49
One might also note that Cicero plays with the (Greek) technical vocabulary of oratory in a letter to Atticus from February of 61 (Epistulae ad Atticum, 1.14.4). In this passage it is more than possible to see Ëp»qesiv as declamatory provided that one is allowed to believe in the existence of the genre at this time. Certainly Cicero’s tone is much more ironic if we see him describing not “real” oratory but instead “fake” oratory that nevertheless actually gets delivered in the senate. And such irony is entirely appropriate to the cool and calculating tone of the letter.
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Cicero’s public and Latin discourse has given way to an alternation between tongues (tum Graece tum Latine) and to a setting that is private yet very much concerned with the public.50 The same can be said of this letter itself and of the relationship to Atticus in general. In this letter Cicero says that he tried on for size a variety of ideas that were very much the order of the day: what to do about a tyranny and a tyrant? The exercise offers a sort of spiritual relief (abduco parumper animum a molestiis), and it also allows Cicero to deliberate on questions whose relevance is very much to hand (tän proÎrgou ti delibero).51 This is a significant sort of “recreational activity” in which to be engaged. The specific has been made strategically generic. Rather than offering the Ëp»qesiv “Should I help kill Caesar?” Cicero instead engages the qsiv “Should a tyrant be slain?” The un-Roman tyrant found in so many later declamations here cannot but allude to a very specific Roman ruler. But the flow of generalities verges ever closer to the ineluctably specific. Cicero’s final proposition is long, complicated, and undisguisedly autobiographical. The first clause summarizes his own frequent complaint: “I was a great consul; I saved the state; I was exiled for this very service.” Given this, what does Cicero owe Rome now? One might balk and declare that “declamation does not yet exist” in the time of Cicero. The very passages just adduced are traditionally used to confirm the verdict. But it is rather forced to pretend that declamation is just a couple of years off. Worse still, such a claim ignores the wealth of contrary evidence that Roman declamation has already begun, and it ignores as well that the Greeks have effectively been declaiming for centuries.52 Perhaps in declamation’s institutional incarnation there had yet to exist a number of distinctive features familiar from later generations. On the other hand, the declamatory exercises – whether explicitly labeled as such or no – were already common. And, more to the point, the “declamatory function” has 50
51 52
Compare Epistulae ad Familiares 16.21.5 (to Tiro in 44 bce) where Cicero’s son Marcus depicts himself declaiming in both Greek and Latin. Furthermore Marcus is in Athens, and he is keeping the declamatory company of one Gorgias. Best of all, Tiro is questioning whether or not Marcus should have sent Gorgias away. Marcus defends himself by saying he had to yield to Gorgias’ father’s will. That is, the “case of Gorgias” is a semi-declamation about a declamatory partner: “Should Cicero Jr. yield to a father’s will?” Marcus takes the side in favor of the proposition. Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum, 9.4.3. Compare Bonner 1949: 10. If we go back and look at Epistulae ad Familiares 7.33.1 (to Voluminius in 46 bce), Epistulae ad Familiares 9.16.7 (to Paetus in 46 bce), Epistulae ad Atticum, 14.12.2 (in 44 bce) and Epistulae ad Quintum fratrem 3.3.4 (in 54 bce) we find a steady stream of more or less casual references to declamation as a leisured pastime of the rhetorical set. Nevertheless this same “recreational” declamation consistently has a sort of political flavor to it. Similarly the letter to his brother shows Cicero thinking about the educational possibilities of the genre for a young man.
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already emerged whereby the distinction between rhetorical fictions and the life of the speaker blurs. The self-relationship of the performer is profoundly mediated by his rhetorical training. Cicero’s reflections straddle the boundaries of several different literary forms. He has here the material for a controuersia; so too does he seem to offer himself suasoriae. Ironically, one day declaimers will themselves offer advice to Cicero. Cicero sends off this letter to his friend with an implicit invitation that Atticus respond by himself taking up these several propositions, that he too speculate pro and contra. This is the “friendly” thing to do, where friendship and the relaxation of a good literary exchange must be taken both seriously and with the ease and pleasure one often expects of such an exchange. One thinks again of humanitas. In both the practice speeches and the letter the serious is necessarily alleviated by the social and the sociable. Ideas are tried on; courses of action are imagined; but no deeds are done. The genre allows for the negotiation of the quality and quantity of allegory that one will read into the products of declamation itself. Will these little practice speeches of Cicero’s “count” for anything, or will they be “mere words”? This letter raises the practical question of the merely literary quality of literature. The proper response is a letter in reply that participates in Cicero’s declamations about tyrannicide. Roughly five years later in May of 44 bce Cicero resumes the declamatory mode. In another letter to Atticus Cicero once again speaks of friends and politics, and again he thinks his way through history, his own actions, and his relationship to contemporary events by way of the rhetoric of declamatory fictions. Julius Caesar is, of course, dead. Several of the “theses” of Cicero’s letter from 49 have been enacted: the shadow no longer falls between the idea and the reality. Now one must adopt a different orientation to the material of the rhetorical exercise, and qsiv becomes Ëp»qesiv : cupio enim ante quam Romam uenio odorari diligentius quid futurum sit. quamquam uereor ne nihil coniectura aberrem; minime enim obscurum est quid isti moliantur. meus uero discipulus qui hodie apud me cenat ualde amat illum quem Brutus noster sauciauit. et si quaeris (perspexi enim plane), timent otium; Ëp»qesin autem hanc habent eamque prae se ferunt, clarissimum interfectum, totam rem publicam illius interitu perturbatam, irrita fore quae ille egisset simul ac desistemus timere, clementiam illi malo fuisse, qua si usus non esset, nihil ei tale accidere potuisse. Before I come to Rome I want to sniff out carefully what is to come. I’m afraid, though, that my guess will be all too accurate: it’s clear enough what those fellows are up to. But my student who today dines with me is quite a fan of the man our
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Brutus wounded. And if you ask me – for I have studied the question closely – they fear quiet. They have the following Ëp»qesiv, though, and they bandy it about: “A most distinguished citizen has been slain. The whole state has been thrown into confusion by his death. His actions will be null and void so soon as we stop fearing. His clemency hurt him: if he had not offered it, nothing like this could have happened to him.” (Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum, 14.22.1)
In the wake of Caesar’s assassination, everyone is imagining a variety of propositions. They argue within themselves and before one another on this side and that of the crises that have followed the tyrannicide. Cicero plays the schoolmaster: he too is an old hand at declamation, but his judgement is needed when it comes to evaluating the arguments of the younger generation. His treatment of the case will have a claim to being more authoritative, more polished, and better reasoned than the others’. At the same time, his verdict is not conclusive, and Cicero can only offer one speech among many. The end of Caesar has by no means provoked a more forthright relationship to the world. Instead there is even more need for the techniques of rhetoric, an even greater need to ask the questions of propriety and possibility that inhere within the declamatory mode of deliberation and exposition. Forms of licet abound. Now that Caesar is dead, what is allowed? A declamatory tyrannicide has been committed; it is time to deliberate in the declamatory mode on the proper sequel to this actual event. Cicero makes a new proposition that he merges into the idiom of the letter from 49 even as he mixes Greek and Latin: “So must one head off to the army and put in an appearance?” (fainoproswphton ergo et «ton in castra?).53 Cicero has complained about the histrionic quality of current politics, and now he proceeds to coin a Greek word that does not mean simply “to show one’s face,” but can also suggest showing one’s face as if it were a theatrical mask. That is, to what extent is Cicero now consigned to forever play a role, to fancy himself a politician of a certain sort, and to engage in a semi-permanent exercise of proswpopoi©a, a skill for which he was so noted? Much as some later declaimer will imagine himself as an outraged father, so now does Cicero imagine himself as a man who lives a life wherein he plays a rhetorical role. The declamatory idiom forms both the means by which Cicero explores political possibilities and the medium within which one lives political life at Rome. The varieties of self-emplotment for the statesman in his civic life are found to be rhetorical, and this rhetoric has as its occasion the idle hours of 53
Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum, 14.22.2.
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declamation. This is an earnest sort of leisure in which one studies how best to be oneself. The rhetoric of the self has as its training ground this world of fictional opportunities beyond which beckon virtual, potential selves. The many declamatory cases act as so many occasions for the constitutive call of interpellation, occasions that are multiplied within themselves as they split into pro and contra. The answers are not simple, nor is the genre reducible to allegory. Nor may one freely take up and set down whatever mask one pleases. The masks constrain even as they enable. The techniques of the self herein practiced produce a more elaborate self-relation than that presupposed by a simple discourse of authenticity. Style, comportment, and flair enter into the game. One should not readily heed the complaint that declamation is a marker of political impotence or that the genre is somehow fundamentally tied to incapacity. Declamation embraces its powerlessness. It even uses this incapacity as one of its own strengths. For a man who might actually one day do some deed declamation provides a discourse within which he may articulate the rhetorical possibilities of his worldly action. Conversely a declamatory fiction might just as well provoke an emperor or one of the emperor’s intimates to a real act by way of a mere allusion. Despite what the speaker may intend, other Romans are already reading declamation as if it might be true, as if it might matter. And just because declamation might matter, it does matter. rrr
The question of the relationship of art to life is decidedly undecidable. Declamation offers a rhetoric that embraces some of the most vertiginous possibilities of rhetoricity. In order to appreciate the scope of the ironies and ambiguities of this situation a more contemporary comparison will be useful. The paintings of Ren´e Magritte and the commentary of Michel Foucault upon them furnish an example of the difficulties posed by an artistic project that puts into question the relationship between art and life, truth and representation.54 Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe depicts a pipe under which is written the message, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”55 Forty years later Magritte paints a sequel, Les Deux myst`eres, in which the original painting is represented on an easel and a pipe floats in the air as if it were the artist’s model.56 Foucault says of this latter scene: There are two pipes. Or rather must we not say, two drawings of the same pipe? Or yet a pipe and the drawing of that pipe, or yet again two drawings each representing a different pipe? Or two drawings, one representing a pipe and the 54
See Foucault 1983.
55
Foucault 1983: plate 3.
56
Foucault 1983: plate 4.
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other not . . . Or yet again, a drawing representing not a pipe at all but another drawing, itself representing a pipe so well that I must ask myself: To what does the sentence written on the painting relate? . . . Yet perhaps the sentence refers precisely to the disproportionate, floating, ideal pipe – simple notion or fantasy of a pipe. Then we should have to read, “Do not look overhead for a true pipe. That is a pipe dream. It is the drawing within the painting, firmly and rigorously outlined, that must be accepted as a manifest truth.”57
The declamatory confusion between the original and the allegorical and between the original and its representation subsists in a similar situation of which one may not simply declare the reality of the real, congratulate it on its authenticity, and have done with the simulacrum. Instead the fiction qua fiction is deployed with a knowing eye to the real. The declaimer phrases his utterance as if it were sincere – the pipe on the canvas indeed looks very much like a pipe – but so too does he disavow that he engages in anything but an exercise: the subscription reads, “This is not a pipe.” One enjoys a performance if the speaker speaks well, if he plays the role of the advocate ably, if he dons a convincing mask. It may not be a pipe, but it must look like one in order for the artist to win his praise. One must put on a mask, put in an appearance, and head into the rhetorical fray.58 Yet obviously the declaimers do not merely represent any old person or situation. Instead the orators frequently choose issues from which they themselves cannot be dissociated. Thus the situation becomes much more intimate than that of Magritte’s world of objects. The statement made takes the form “This is (not) me.” What is the relationship of this ego that has been formally disowned to the self that does the abdication? The artistic project that broaches such questions also renders them unanswerable in any simple sense. Foucault remarks of the text on Magritte’s canvas that the painting has produced “[an] impossibility of defining a perspective that would let us say that the assertion is true, false, or contradictory.”59 One loses the ability to hierarchize the original over the derivative because the copy forces the consideration that the thing itself might well be something of a “pipe dream.” Declamation’s likenesses thus expose “the penetration of discourse into the form of things” and “discourse’s ambiguous power to deny and to redouble.”60 The speaker ostentatiously reveals himself to be a mere similarity, a mere similarity that refers to nothing real, nothing concrete.61 On the other hand this dalliance 57 59 61
58 Compare Cicero’s fainoproswphton ergo et «ton in castra. Foucault 1983: 16–17. 60 Foucault 1983: 37. Foucault is again commenting on Magritte’s pipes. Foucault 1983: 20. Compare Foucault 1983: 49.
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with semblances foregrounds questions of signification and representation as such. That is, if the words “this is not a pipe” are always both true and false, what can one ever make of ontological questions when put in discursive form? Does not the word itself precisely as word and not thing undermine the capacity for anyone to ever claim self-identity? Only to God can it be allowed to say, “I am that I am”62 and have that utterance perform the truth of its own statement. Cicero and the other declaimers live and perform this problem. Where Foucault sees in Magritte’s painted words a challenge to the fullness of language and the endless possibilities of rhetoric,63 declamation requires of living bodies that they enact fictive texts. Hence, in a certain sense, it is the actual pipe itself that declares that it is not a pipe, not some painted pipe disowning its pipeliness. Declamation’s protean relationship to questions of truth and representation allows it to penetrate into the form of things even as it empties things of their self-sufficiency. Tyranny, paternity, art, and murder converge as questions around which rhetoric can never rally to a single, real, and true answer. But even as the play of words is consigned to both mobility and playfulness, real political possibilities arise as well. The notion arises that politics itself is something of a rhetorical game, a question of appearances, and of arguments, of rehearsals and of performances. The school house and the retreat to one’s villa both offer a sort of sham with which to approach asymptotically a reality that is not actually there. Declamation often strikes the contemporary reader as a rhetorical form in which men are forever going on about nothing. What one needs to realize is that the nothingness and its iterations are themselves key themes of the practice. And yet the materiality of matter is itself a function of a process of citation and iteration, of compulsory performances whose accumulated constative claims form the stuff of the world.64 So far as declamation is concerned, the radical possibilities of the genre are forestalled by a fundamental adherence to certain categories as presupposed constants that declamation at best questions without radically putting in question. In the technical idiom of the genre, “hypothetically” a father may have strayed, but the “thesis” of paternal authority remains intact.65 Thus on the one hand declamation thematizes the performative 62 63 64 65
Exodus 3:14. Even this moment, though, is spoken to an audience: it is a message said unto Moses, and not a moment of auto-affectation or self-constatation. Foucault 1983: 21. See Butler on the convergence between materiality and intelligibility (Butler 1993: 32–36). The final chapters of this study will explore cases that are, in my opinion, the most genuinely disruptive ones to have been preserved. But even there the threat to the status quo must be read out of the implications of these texts; they do not present themselves as “radical”.
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and rhetorical quality of identity. Declamation underscores that the selfrelation is one mediated by a rhetoric of the law that orients the structure of the licit and the illicit. Declamation stages a rhetoric of the law that furnishes a sort of grammar and syntax within which specific tropes can and will be deployed. Hence on the other hand we find that, despite the destabilizing possibilities of declamatory representations, we nevertheless find a ritualized and repeated introjection of the law as legal, valid, binding, and authoritative. The declamatory self never questions its naming and self-subjection to dictates compelled from without. While in the specific instance (Ëp»qesiv) a certain father may be bad, paternal authority as such remains an unquestioned proposition subtending the world. This authority is itself closely aligned with the belief in the legitimacy of law itself, for this law prescribes the terms under which the case is discussed at all. The difficulty in segregating declamation from life arises from this legalistic aspect shared by both. In each instance we find a relationship wherein a self cites a law, and where this self is recognized as a self by this law thus cited. The declamatory self thus is already a sort of allegory for the “real” self even before one begins reading those episodes where declamation and the world seem to intersect. At such moments something more significant arises than the possibilities for deniable political allegories. It does not matter whether or not Latro means to insult Maecenas, he can hardly avoid doing so given the superabundance of meaning that this moment of convergence produces. And, as Latro fully appreciates, it will do no good to say, “That was not a pipe,” for to do so will only argue that indeed it was, and that the offence was rightly taken. Still, even in that circumstance, the political “reality” of the message emerges precisely from the premise that all declamatory messages are both true and false. Conversely the truth of one’s lived experience, of one’s intention, of one’s will is itself a truth that is experienced as a fiction. “What should I do? What should I say? How should I relate to the law?” These are rhetorical questions in more than one sense of the term. And these rhetorical questions inevitably receive equally rhetorical answers. Among Magritte’s works are two entitled La Condition humaine.66 On both canvases one finds a painting of a painting that becomes confused with the vista before which the representation of an easel and canvas stands. On Magritte’s canvas the picture of a canvas upon which we find a painting of a seascape merges with the seascape painted onto the canvas as a whole. 66
See Foucault 1983: plate 2 and plate 27. The former was painted in 1935, the latter in 1933. One can imagine of the later painting that it says of the earlier, “That was not the human condition, this is . . .”
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To its critics, declamation may be a case of tedious cleverness, a canvas upon which is ostentatiously written, “This is not a pipe.” But at the same time, the world that produces declamation is itself a sort of canvas, and one painted according to the same rules of color and perspective as those that govern declamation. Declamation offers to the condition romaine a venue that is usefully neither here nor there. One needs to give credit to the genre: it is engaged in a titanic task for which it has been punished by an angry Jove jealous to guard his own law. Yet men made Jupiter and his law, not he the law and them. The tortuous tropes of the declamatory artist help to throw this truth of the human condition into ironic relief.
c h a pt e r 4
Raving among the insane
Qui vit sans folie n’est pas si sage qu’il croit. La Rochefoucauld1
Declamation offers insights into the Roman unconscious. That is, this genre reveals lines of thought otherwise hidden, it speaks words otherwise left unsaid, and the mask of legitimate culture briefly slips revealing a churning confusion of suppressed themes. Such, I believe, is an important and accurate characterization of one of the most engaging aspects of declamation. However, the declamatory cases that deal with madness are by no means a ready inroad into the problem of the unconscious. Rather, the question of insanity as it is formally treated in declamation furnishes an example of the sort of social dramas in which the genre revels. One is little tempted to see here “real” insanity. The topic of insanity within declamation embraces a more worldly and practical set of problems. And the elaboration of these problems offers us insights into the logic of Roman social practice. Yet this practice is itself ultimately one experienced as part of Roman psychic life. Thus insanity in declamation offers us indirect views of the construction of the social order as well as the healthy, normal self. Once again declamation offers the paternal role as the site where the salutary either does or should reside. Where the question of madness comes explicitly to the fore the often turbulent waters of declamation suddenly take on an unwonted calm. The accused are not psychotics; they do not see visions and hear voices; they do not even suffer from nervous tics or slips of the tongue. Instead the men accused of madness are fathers. They have upset their sons. The sons respond by bringing a case before the court. A charge of madness is an act of retaliation.2 If we are about to learn something 1 2
R´eflexions morales 209. See Sussman 1995 on declamation as being a place where sons can take out their revenge on their fathers.
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of the Roman psyche here, it will center on the relationship between father and son. Why would a son choose to accuse his father of madness when the two have a dispute about some other matter? The answer is relatively simple: the son has no other recourse. Beyond claiming that his father was incapable of wielding any authority, a son had no other legal claims he could make against him. Minor Declamation 346 states that a charge of insanity is the only one a son may bring against his father.3 Paternal authority and the law are closely aligned. Not only is the latter modeled after the former, but structurally it favors the interests of the enfranchised father against the dependent son. Fathers retain absolute rights over their sons. Until his father’s death – or a declaration of his father’s incompetence – a son never emerges as a full legal individual in his own right.4 Sons cannot counter this preeminent privilege without attacking it in its entirety. That is, a son claims that this particular father is not at all entitled to any of the authority regularly a father’s due. The father is insane: he should lose his rights. The declamatory law of insanity is not the Roman law of insanity. Bonner’s account of the legal status of these cases makes the details clear.5 The Roman discussion of insanity proper turns around those instances where someone has lost his comprehension of the world around him: there is a problem with a person’s intellectus, and in the context of discussions of madness, non intellegere or “he doesn’t understand” also means, “he’s lost his understanding of what things mean” or simply, “he’s mad.”6 Quintilian tells us that declamation speaks of dementia, but in the real courts one argued that the father should be assigned a curator, a legal guardian.7 A guardian could be assigned on two pretexts, if a father was deranged (curatio furiosi) or if he had squandered the family property (curatio prodigi).8 Declamatory 3
4 5 6
7
Compare Paul, Sententiae 1.B.1. Notice that Calpurnius Flaccus 38 implies that sons who brought an unsuccessful suit would be punished with death. Sussman 1994: 203 says that such a penalty is unparalleled in law or declamation. On a madness charge as the son’s only recourse, see Sussman 1994: 108 and his bibliography. There is a parallel claim in [Quintilian], Declamationes Maiores 18.5: a wife can bring no other charge than “maltreatment” (mala tractatio) against her husband, and accordingly this category has to be a catch-all for every sort of accusation. See Crook 1967: 107–13. Crook notes that even distinguished senior politicians whose fathers were still alive had to grapple with the problem of his authority over them. Bonner 1949: 93–94. Compare the ironic Stoic proposition that only the philosopher is sane and that “the common man is mad because he does not understand either himself or his affairs, and this is madness. pnta faÓlon ma©nesqai, gnoian conta aËtoÓ kaª tän kaq ì aËt»n, Àper sti man©a (Stobaeus 2.68.18–19).” Here one snidely extends the sense of gnoia from mere ignorance to pathological failure of comprehension and hence man©a. 8 Paul, Sententiae 3.4A.7. See also Hershkowitz 1998: 12. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 7.4.11.
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insanity is thus highly reminiscent of the actual law of insanity, but it remains usefully vague and broad. It offers more room for debate. Any case where a son would wish to prosecute his father for whatever reason will fall under the heading of an “insanity” charge. In fact, Seneca handles arguments that a father was actually insane as if they were uncommon and worthy of special notice.9 What might to us seem to be a narrow category – mental competence – finds its practical application in a much wider range of inter-familial crises. Naturally, sons will labor under the weight of a category that does not exactly match their objections, and their burden of proof requires them to expend their energy arguing insanity when their real complaint lies elsewhere.10 Moreover such an oblique attack on a father will always be liable to criticism because of its very indirection. “Fabianus raised this question and lingered over it: madness cannot be charged except with one whose insanity arises from illness. For the law was passed in order that a father should be cured by his son, not ruled by him.”11 Nevertheless, we as readers profit from the son’s plight by recognizing that these cases both explicitly and implicitly turn upon the question of paternal authority. The situation is complicated by a further consideration: just as the son may be accusing the father of insanity for reasons that fall outside the scope of mental capacity, so too may the father have acted out of dissimulated motives of his own. In a certain sense, then, a sort of madness does cling to these cases: nobody necessarily means what they say. But the difficulty of the meanings here is more a question of canny misdirection than of unreason. Or, more properly, we learn to read for the significant subtext beneath a deceptive text. I wish, then, to examine the insanity declamations as belonging to two major families. We will look at the cases where a father has acted in a manner that is perhaps outrageous. A son seeks then to critique and to overcome such a father’s authority. We will also examine cases where the 9 10
11
See, for example, Controversiae 7.6.16: “Buteo wanted it to appear that the father had really suffered a mental lapse . . . (Buteo uoluit uideri re uera mente lapsum patrem . . .)” Winterbottom 1984: 552–53 provides a list of mad behaviors. So long as the acts can be traced back to an inability to comprehend, a loss of intellectus, then most declaimers would agree that this is “genuine” madness. Fabianus hanc quaestionem fecit et in ea multum moratus est: dementiae non posse agi nisi cum eo qui morbo fureret; in hoc enim latam esse legem, ut pater a filio sanari deberet, non ut regi. Seneca, Controversiae 2.3.12. Latro disagrees (2.3.12): madness cases do not just embrace furor owing to illness, but they also investigate failures in regard to a father’s duties (de officio patris). Asinius Pollio (2.3.13) sides with Fabianus and thinks that Latro has been too long at declamation and has lost touch with what happens in the courts. To Fabianus’ sentiment compare the son’s arguments in Minor Declamation 295.4.
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father’s “insane” act is defended as being part of good fathering.12 It is a critique of the son and a means of manifesting paternal authority. This taxonomy is somewhat ad hoc, and the two sets should not be seen as radically disjoint. Nevertheless, orienting our investigation by means of these two perspectives will give us a better understanding of the logic of the paternal and the legal as the two converge and sometimes collide in these cases where a father’s reason and reasoning have come into doubt.13 After this discussion we will be in a position to survey the broader significance of the setting in parallel of questions of authority and of mental health. Taking the second set of cases first we find instead of mad fathers sage ones. Only a foolish son could mistake such a father’s act for folly. For example, the controuersia about the insanity charge brought by the rapist son is particularly well represented in our sources. From it we learn time and again not of a father’s madness but of a youth’s obligations towards him. We discover that the son was himself a bit crazy to bring these charges. He seeks from the courts something that only proper filial piety could have offered him. R ap to r, n i s i et sv v m et rap tae patrem int ra die s t riginta e xo r ave r i t, pe reat. Raptor raptae patrem exorauit, suum non exorat. accusat dementiae. A r a p i s t i s to die u n less h e win s over b ot h his own fat he r a n d t h e fat h e r of h is v ictim with in thirt y days . A rapist prevailed upon the father of his victim. He does not win over his own father. He accuses him of madness. (Seneca, Controversiae 2.3)
The premise of Minor Declamation 349 is virtually identical to this case, and the controuersia discussed at Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 9.2.90–91 differs by only an insignificant change in the phrasing.14 Although one often claims of declamation that it allowed for the imagining and the elaboration of two balanced halves of an ambiguous case, we find a marked preference in our sources. There is no enthusiasm for arguing the son’s side: Quintilian addresses the father’s case; the sermo of Minor Declamation 349 is useful only to one who will defend the father, and indeed the declamatio 12
13
14
Dingel 1988: 120 summarizes the tactics taken by the father in the Minor Declamations as follows: “Die Anweisung der Institutio (vii 4,31), der beklagte Vater m¨usse bei seinem Pl¨adoyer den Verdact des furor vermeiden und deshalb seinen Zorn m¨aßigen, ist in allen drei F¨allen eingehalten.” Tantalizing though they may be, I will omit discussion of Calpurnius Flaccus 8 and 38. Calpurnius’ text has been so whittled away that one can no longer generalize about his treatment of a topic like madness. Similarly I will not discuss Minor Declamation 295: a son claims that a father already convicted of madness remains insane despite evidence to the contrary. The fact of the prior conviction has reversed the question. One now asks, “Is he sane?” and not, “Is he mad?” See Dingel 1988: 25–26 for a discussion of the relationships among these three passages.
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of that same case is spoken in the father’s voice; and, finally, among the citations in Seneca, a scant few engage the son’s side while most expend the preponderance of their energy on behalf of the father. All three passages emphasize the notion that the father will likely relent in the end: the son is not going to die. By refusing to be won over the father punishes his son with uncertainty. The fear of death is the father’s weapon. A speaker’s artistry is to be judged by the extent to which he strikes a balance between appearing unrelenting and nevertheless indicating that there is hope for the son in the end. Should the son plead constantly and with contrition, on the final day he will at last win his life back. Our three texts each make the same point. “If the father promises, there is no case. If he offers no hope, he won’t seem mad, but he surely will appear cruel, and he will alienate the judge.”15 “There is no doubt but that the father wishes to be satisfied by his son’s anxiety and that he considers the delay of thirty days to be his retribution. But if he indicates this openly, he will ruin his artistry.”16 “In this controuersia Triarius said, ‘You will not know whether or not you win me over until that final day comes, and even then I will hold out as long as I can.’ ”17 The case offers the father a chance to shine as a father. There is no ambiguity about the son: he is wicked, a rapist. Nor, apparently, is there much doubt about the father himself: he will relent. The “point” of the declamation thus becomes not a demonstration of a father’s folly but instead a performance of his wisdom. Speaking as the father, one punishes the son. The rights of a father over a son are reaffirmed, and the skillful handling of this authority allows the performer to demonstrate his own tact and skill as a father figure. The speech in Minor Declamation 349 even opens with an ironic inversion: the son is the madman. The father asks, “Son, do you want to know what madness is?”18 The son risked his life for lust; he doesn’t understand what peace is; he can’t understand the laws; he is foolish enough to accuse the man he ought to be pleading with.19 The rhetorical father plays off the definition of madness offered in the Master’s sermo by offering a definition of his own.20 The Master says that one routinely defines 15 16 17 18 19 20
nam si promittat hic pater, lis tollitur: si nullam spem faciat, ut non demens, crudelis certe uideatur et a se iudicem auertat. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 9.2.91. non dubie pater hic intellegi uult se filii sollicitudine esse contentum et hanc triginta dierum moram pro ultione habere. Sed hoc si palam indicauerit, perdet artem. Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 349.1. In hac controuersia Triarius dixerat: non scies an exores nisi ultimus dies uenerit; et tum quamdiu licebit perseuerabo. Seneca, Controversiae 2.3.19. uis scire, fili, quid sit dementia? Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 349.4. Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 349.4. See Dingel 1988: 107–108 on the technical question of the status finitiuus as it relates to the madness declamations.
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madness as an utter loss of comprehension (dementiam esse ablatum rerum omnium intellectum),21 and the father’s use of “he does not understand” (non intellegere) forms an integral part of a claim that the son has acted as a madman. In the analysis of the logical divisions of the case, the infirmity of the son’s position becomes abundantly clear. In Seneca’s version, the lines of thought traced out by Latro, Fabianus, Gallio, and Silo question the points at which one could critique the son. Can he bring a charge? Should he? Can he say the father is mad even though this madness consists not of a sickness but of obstinacy? Is he mad if he still has the power to forgive at some future time? Will the son die anyway even if he wins his case? The Master’s sermo in Minor Declamation 349 is similarly biased: skillful use of definitions will make it clear that even if the father were somehow in error here, a mistake is not madness. Meanwhile the father is in complete control: the logic of the case favors his part, and he also maintains a practical control over the fate of his son and of the declamation itself. The father’s control is indeed so complete that the whole question of paternal affect becomes one not of genuine emotion but of the careful deployment of the appearance of that emotion. Were it otherwise, the father would “ruin his artistry.” That is, this father is specifically a rhetorical father: his virtue can be measured in proportion to his mastery of tropes. The son was mad to bring such a case. He reveals himself a fool, and his father is offered a venue to perform his masterful paternity as and in rhetoric. One should not wonder at the lack of enthusiasm shown for the son’s side of the controuersia. In fact, much of what is offered on the son’s side concerns apologizing for a seeming impropriety: the son asked the girl’s father for forgiveness first. The son asks his own father to forgive the slight and relent from his own implacable stance. Thus the son’s energies have been further diverted. Now the case is entirely about etiquette and has nothing to do with madness. The son does not accuse his father, instead he defends and justifies his own tactlessness. At every turn we find the same guiding thoughts: father knows everything (omnia intellegere), and his son hardly knows anything at all (non intellegere). This is the strongest of the cases wherein one argues that the father was not erring but instead instructing his son. One finds more ambiguity among the remaining treatments. The cases involving the luxurious son who accuses his father provide a more treacherous footing for the father’s 21
Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 349.2. Compare the remarks at Winterbottom 1984: 552–53.
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side. The treatment is more difficult, though, depending on the wording of the case itself. We find two versions: “The luxurious father and son” and “The weeping father of the luxurious son.” Seneca, Controversiae 2.6 operates according to the following premise: “A certain man began to live a lavish life-style when his son was doing the same. The son accuses the father of madness” (quidam luxuriante filio luxuriari coepit. filius accusat patrem dementiae). Minor Declamation 316 contains an important variation: “A father used to weep and follow his luxurious son around in public. He is charged with madness” (flens pater per publicum filium luxuriosum sequebatur. dementiae reus est). The latter case is in some respects simpler than the former. The father’s transgression is slight; it is not the same as the son’s. The Master himself notes that the treatment of this case is or ought to be simple: “This type of controuersia scarcely requires a diuisio. The following line of inquiry is common to almost every controuersia that hangs upon the law of madness: ‘What is madness?’ And, ‘Is this madness?’ ”22 The key feature of this particular controuersia is for the Master the handling of the persona of the father. While it would be possible for this father to speak harshly to his son, the Master is not comfortable with such an approach: “I understand (intellego) that this father can even express outrage because he is made into a defendant on a charge of madness by a wastrel, and I know that he has many a grave and harsh word that he could level against his son. The persona of an adversary admits such a course, but let’s make sure that our persona admits the same. For just as I recently instructed you to reflect upon your audience, so too will I now advise you to consider the persona we assume for ourselves.”23 This father has been a kind and gentle one. He did not disown his son. In fact, his efforts to correct his son were done indirectly: he kept silent his real complaint. In keeping with the father’s own practice, then, we too are supposed to criticize the son indirectly. Rather than upbraiding the son, the father defends himself. “Everything he says on his own behalf he will be saying against his son.”24 22
23
24
hoc genus controuersiarum paene diuisionem non exigit. illa communis fere omnibus ex lege dementiae pendentibus controuersiis quaestio est, quid dementia sit; et an haec dementia sit. Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 316.1. intellego et indignari posse hunc patrem quod reus dementiae a luxurioso fiat et eum multa grauiter et aspere dicere contra filium posse: recipit aduersarii persona; sed uideamus an recipiat nostra. nam sicut paulo ante praecipiebam uobis ut personam intueremini eius apud quem dicenda esset sententia, sic nunc quoque admoneam necesse est ut intueamur personam quam nobis induimus. Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 316.2. omnia enim quae pro se dixerit in filium dicet. Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 316.4.
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This mad father thus pursues a course of extreme subtlety. Not only does he argue that his is not madness, but his clever management of the case as a whole also acts as a renewed proof of his wisdom. He has not lost his understanding – where non intellegere is the undisputed definition of madness – either of the meaning of madness or of his own principles of indirect admonition. It is clear that the cure for his madness and his weeping would be one and the same: his son should reform. Nevertheless, the father persists to the end in his refusal to give the real reason for his tears. First he says he won’t yet (nondum) explain. And then when he finishes his speech he offers a strange and unconvincing account of his sorrow. The father insists, then, that his son finally comprehend (intellegere) what he has been trying to tell him all along. The case is only a continuance of the original lesson, and we measure not the father’s want of intellectus but instead the son’s. The last paragraph of the father’s declamatio is sufficiently obscure to require not just commentary but also textual criticism. The father closes his penultimate paragraph with the plaint that, “You had it in you to cure me (sanare me poteras).” That is, if the son reformed, the father would alter his own behavior as well. Then the father formally ends his speech thus: exigis tamen causas lacrimarum mearum. non me pecunia mouet (diuites aliquando fuimus), non illos late quondam patentes agros desidero, non faenus nec ingens pondus argenti. nuper (sine modo) desideraui uernulam meum. Nevertheless, you demand to know the reason for my tears. It is not money that stirs me – once we were rich. I don’t long for those fields that once spread far and wide. It is not the interest nor that huge mass of silver. I lately – allow me this – longed for my slave. (Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 316.1225 )
Shackleton Bailey apparently finds the paragraph to be sufficiently obscure that he feels compelled to offer an explanation for it in the apparatus criticus of his Teubner edition: “He could not give the real reason without provoking ill-will towards the son.”26 That is, the father is following the Master’s advice closely, and he will not malign his son. A case that refuses to mention the son’s luxury fittingly ends with the trope of praeteritio. The father both 25
26
The reading sine modo is not attested in the manuscripts. Instead it was proposed by early editors of the text who sought to overcome the problems presented by the manuscript reading in domo. Winterbottom 1984: 475 says, “in domo would be superfluous beside uernulam.” The meaning of the emendation itself, though, has been a cause of ambiguity: Winterbottom believes that it means “uncontrollably,” “without measure” and he compares Apuleius, Metamorphoses 4.24. Shackleton Bailey’s punctuation and accompanying note indicate that he sees the sine as an imperative instead of a preposition and that modo is the adverbial modo of an idiom like age modo and not a noun in the ablative case (Shackleton Bailey 1989b: 220). Winterbottom’s version seems forced at best. Shackleton Bailey 1989b: 220: “veram causam sine filii invidia dicere non potuit.”
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is and is not weeping for his lost property. The son’s debts have cost the father much. He indicates this by saying that this is not what he means: “It is not money that stirs me . . .” The father effectively challenges his son and his listeners to understand the meaning beneath his meaning, to change their own non intellegere for a state of knowledge and reason. Both father and the Master effectively say, “I understand and am sane (intellego). Do you? Are you? (intellegisne?)” Indeed the textual crux itself provides a sort of intelligence test: the good philological son needs to see behind the compounded obscurity in order to recover the message of the father/Master. One cannot just idly read declamation, for the genre keeps on hailing its audience into one of its constituent roles. After the several negations, one positive statement is made. “I longed for my slave.”27 This slave is a special sort of slave. He is a uernula, a slave born into one’s family and not purchased from without. The father laments the loss of someone who was both property and a person. Additionally this person/property was connected to him with particular intimacy.28 One can therefore read in the term uernula an oblique reference to the son himself: “I lamented losing someone intimately connected to me, someone who was bound to obey me, someone who was once ‘mine’.” It is not so much the money that pains the father as the human consequences of the son’s waste. The son will hopefully be recovered to his senses if he can be made to understand the riddle of the last paragraph and the hidden message of the case as a whole. As soon as the son recognizes the repressed content of the father’s symptoms, it is not the father who will be cured but instead the son. The therapeutic movement thus does recapitulate the Freudian Wo Es war, soll Ich werden, but the process is done by proxy. The father’s mad acts are intended to heal the son. And the father offers to this son his Ich as the voice of reason. The court case and the psychiatric case are both closed so soon as the son identifies with the paternal “I”. The son’s cure will result in a restoration of the rights and privileges of the father. Rather than stripping him of his authority, the son ought to bow to it the more completely. This is a question of recognition and understanding, of accepting hierarchy and authority as legitimate and deserved. The son who can learn to hear the subtle messages of this father 27
28
Winterbottom 1984: 475 signals a moment of confusion: “ ‘lately I felt immoderately the loss of a home-bred slave’ (dead, or sold as a result of the financial difficulties?).” The father has just argued that finances are not the source of his complaints. Does he close by reversing himself? Why was the slave lost? See Fitzgerald on the slave as a resource for a variety of metaphorical slippages (Fitzgerald 2000).
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will also automatically recognize the propriety and justice of his commands. Our mental health resides in learning to understand (intellegere) the father. Understanding the father works at a broader level in this case. As was argued in the second chapter, the Master himself subsists in loco parentis relative to his pupils. We need to recognize the Master’s mastery, but so also to see it as a sane, reasonable, and subtle sovereignty. We are being educated both in the art of understanding the father’s sovereign voice and in the techniques of adopting it as our own. “What manner of persona will we assume for ourselves?” asks the Master. The answer is that of a kind father; and a good son hopes to grow into his own father. The Master is an indulgent father. He is not hard (durus).29 He permits a certain amount of extravagance, but he does not much approve of it. He is content to provoke a gentle ill-will (mollis inuidia).30 The Master offers himself as a restrained model in the hope that “everything he says on his own behalf he will be saying against his (luxurious) son.” The father’s defence thus consists of a staging of himself as himself. The son’s case languishes in the face of this spectacle of paternal authority and goodwill. In short, the advice the Master was giving about the father’s speech is also advice that affects the way one reads the Master himself. And thus when the Master interrupts the father’s declamatio to offer a sermo from himself qua Master, we can read this too as part of the case as a whole: Nolo quisquam me reprehendat tamquam uobis locos non dem. si ampliare declamationem uoletis et ingenium exercere, dicetis quod ad causam huius nullo modo, ad delectationem aurium fortasse pertineat. I don’t want anyone to reproach me as if I don’t give you opportunities to expatiate (loci). If you wish to enlarge the declamation and to exercise your wit, you will say things that have nothing to do with the case of this man but that perhaps offer pleasure to the ears. (Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 316.731 )
The indulgent Master tells his foster-sons that they are free to indulge in a bit of sensualism and luxury. He is not going to be harsh and hard. If his students wish to enjoy themselves, he will not stand in their way so long as one is not always and forever being extravagant. Moreover this case 29 30
31
Compare Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 316.3: “What kind of father is this? . . . He is not a harsh one . . . (Pater hic qualis est? . . . Non durus . . .).” Compare Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 316.3: “And so we ought to take our plan for the whole case from what was noted above. What else was this but a gentle ill-will? (Consilium itaque totius actionis ex iis capere debemus quae praecesserunt. Quid aliud praecessit mollis inuidia?)” Compare Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 2.10.5.
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is a particularly safe location for indulgence, a harmless locus for loci, in that one will enjoy and offer pleasure whilst wearing the persona of a good and moderate father indirectly reproaching his luxurious son. Hyperbolic sympathy for the father’s plight poses little risk to the soundness of these sons. If any of his pupils should wax too wanton, we also know just the sort of tears with which the Master will follow them about. If they wish to be sane themselves, they would do well to avoid saying of the Master’s behavior, “I do not understand it” (non intellego). The case of the luxuriant son as it is recorded in Seneca offers similar opportunities for instruction and commentary not just on the material of the case but so also on the social relationships between declaimers. Indeed Seneca’s own sons are to a certain extent already in the position of the students of the Master: they too love the pointed and extravagant aspects of the genre. And they too must be indulged from time to time even at the expense of the father’s own interests. Thus Seneca gently chides his sons for their excessive interest in sententiae. He will have to shape his account of declamation so as to indulge their taste; and he will have to set aside some of his recollections in order to keep fast to the version of declamation that they most desire to hear recounted.32 Let us look, though, at what the declaimers themselves say about luxury and madness. “A certain man began to live a lavish life-style when his son was doing the same. The son accuses the father of madness.” The speakers do not have a marked preference in their choice of sides. Speaking as the father one claims that his luxury was merely a performance of vice designed to reveal to the son the folly of his own ways: it is all just an act. The father will be “cured” so soon as the son is recalled to his own senses. This line of thought is familiar from the declamations discussed above. The father insists that he is imitating his son. Ideally the son ought to imitate the father. Declamation routinely implies that the relationship between the sound and the unsound is a matter of the proper identification with an appropriate external image. In this case, though, we find a much more explicit play with the logic of identification. In whom will the son find himself? What self will he find? The frugal policy of a sensible old man is as follows: the son ought to sail, to serve in the army, to travel in order to find his fortune as a youth and then spend it in his eld.33 Fabianus speaks in the persona of a father who alludes to Epicurean sensualism as he 32 33
Seneca, Controversiae 1.pr.22. nauiga, milita, peregrinare, quaere adulescens, senex utere. Seneca, Controversiae 2.6.1.
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pretends to find himself in the son: “Some have declared the greatest good to be pleasure and they measured everything by the body. I don’t need any instructors: I have a model. I have resolved to do whatever you do. I will sail if you sail. I will enlist if you enlist.”34 By inverting their proper relationship so that he imitates the son, the father actually forces the son to become a wise father himself. Thus the son is educated by the father into assuming here and now his proper destiny. If the son is to cure his father, he must first himself turn into a good man. The son cannot claim his right to rule his father under the law of madness if he does not himself cease from the mad act of being a spendthrift. The son can only take on the legitimate persona of an accuser if he also dons that of a good and stern father. The father can’t lose this game: “Bind me, so long as you watch over yourself.”35 Nevertheless, the son’s case is not hopeless. The son argues, in effect, that a father may never set aside his own persona and that any time he acts out of character he is actually mad. This is no performance, it is the real thing, says the son. The son then offers to the court the revolting spectacle of a drunk, libidinous old man: what kind of teacher imitates vice in order to castigate it? What general flies from battle in order to get his army to fight well?36 Everyone agrees, then, on what are the rules of propriety. The son claims for himself only the indulgence owed to youth. When he gets older, he will be as moderate as any old man ought to be. He knows better; he already identifies with the paternal position; he has just not yet actually assumed it. In fact, some speakers argue that the son has already corrected his ways. Though these pleaders are technically speaking on the son’s behalf, they have effectively conceded the major contention of the father’s side: wastrels must reform; Epicurean sensualism is wrong. They attack the father only after they have been cured of their own errors and have themselves become like unto fathers. Once again, one can only speak authoritatively from the position of a father. Quaeritis quae res mihi remedio fuerit? aetas: illa quae faciebam iam putabam me non decere. hunc sensum ipse Cestius sano genere dixit; Flauum Alfium, auditorem suum, qui eandem rem lasciuius dixerat, obiurgauit. Flauus hoc modo dixit: †cum desiderio scripsisse† eripuisset, paulatim se ad frugalitatem redisse et odio se uitiorum captum. hoc fuit, inquit, quare desinerem: sentiebam, inquit, me senem fieri. 34
35
quidam summum bonum dixerunt uoluptatem et omnia ad corpus rettulerunt. Nihil est mihi opus praecipientibus: habeo exemplum, proposui quidquid tu feceris facere; nauigabo si nauigaris, militabo si militaris. Seneca, Controversiae 2.6.2. 36 See Seneca, Controversiae 2.6.4. adliga me, dum te custodias. Seneca, Controversiae 2.6.3.
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“Do you want to know what cured me? Age. I thought that what I was doing was no longer appropriate.” Cestius himself spoke this idea sensibly. He rebuked his follower Flavus Alfius who said the same thing more wantonly. Flavus spoke in this manner: “[Textual crux], he had gradually returned to economy, and he became an enemy of vice.” He said, “This was the reason I stopped: I felt that I had become an old man.” (Seneca, Controversiae 2.6.7–8)
Cestius plays the role of father to Flavus the son, or, at a minimum, he is the Master to Flavus the pupil. Of the two Cestius has the sound mind. This is a sane father (sano genere dixit). The son is extravagant, luxurious: he speaks too “lustily” (lasciuius). Indulgent, but sensible, Cestius needs to check the excess of Flavus. And so when Flavus tries to run with a locus, Cestius has to rebuke him (obiurgauit). The rebuke itself reminds one of the controuersia. For we find repeated references in it to the notion of chastisement. In fact, of the twelve occurrences of the verbal stem obiurg- in Seneca, five of them can be found in this case. The first two are of the declamatory father rebuking his wastrel son (2.6.3 and 2.6.5); the next describes Cestius’s treatment of Flavus; and the last two are ironic reversals: the son casts the term back in his father’s teeth claiming that his rebukes were really those of a depraved old man and not of a sage father (2.6.10). The case then has as one of its favorite motifs a father’s right to reproach. Seneca picks up on this thread himself and shows how the speakers’ own practice is legible in terms of the case. The pleasure of making paternal reproaches is not confined to Cestius. Seneca too exercises a father’s right to rebuke. Certainly Seneca has taken the side of Cestius as the latter rebukes his own disciple/wastrel son Flavus in this passage. But there are more wastrels to be upbraided. And Seneca speaks against these declaimers in the idiom of this specific declamation. Throughout the text of the Controversiae Seneca is liberal with his criticisms of a number of speakers. Furthermore Seneca has little patience for the Greeks: some are to be praised, most blamed. In the case of the wastrel father Seneca finds another opportunity to himself offer a fatherly reproach, this time one directed against most of the Greek speakers. A certain Agroitas, though, got things right. Yet his virtue itself is only legible in terms of the sanity of a father opposed to the luxury of a son. Agroitas Massiliensis longe uiuidiorem sententiam dixit quam ceteri Graeci declamatores, qui in hac controuersia tamquam riuales rixati sunt. dicebat autem Agroitas arte inculta, ut scires illum inter Graecos non fuisse, sententiis fortibus, ut scires illum inter Romanos fuisse. sententia quae laudabatur haec fuit: pª t¦v
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swt©av toÓto diapefwnkamen· sÆ mn dapanv ¡d»menov, gÜ d lupoÅmenov. Agroitas of Marseille spoke a far more lively sententia than the rest of the Greek declaimers who brawled in this controuersia like so many rivals for some girl. However Agroitas used to speak artlessly – and here you can see that he was not one of the Greeks; but he spoke with bold ideas – and thus you can tell that he was one of the Romans. This was the sententia that was praised: “Our wastefulness has this difference: you spend with pleasure, I with sorrow.” (Seneca, Controversiae 2.6.12)
Most Greeks are debauched brawlers, lustful, squabbling, and contemptuous. Seneca’s image of the Greek speakers as riuales rixati actually has a very specific resonance. It recalls a snippet from Arellius Fuscus where the latter is speaking to the case itself. “In his narratio he used this color: the father’s mind had given way in a sudden fit of madness. ‘I saw a prostitute hanging off the old man’s neck, a flock of hangers-on thronging my father, the vile brawling of rivals and the night’s drunkenness lasting well into the next day.’ ”37 Bringing these two passages together, we can say that the Greeks play at declamation, but their wantonness is not mere sport: they really are as depraved as they may at times seem. Speakers ought themselves to be serious even if at times they pretend otherwise. Greek extravagance is often no act. They are gauche. They cannot be invited into polite society. A few warming sips of declamatory rhetoric swiftly lead to drunken fisticuffs. Moreover these clods are fighting in a rivalry over the best indictment of excess. Seneca rebukes them. Agroitas is different. His name is an ironic one, and it is a misleading one: Agroitas is not clownish, boorish, or a rube; Agroitas is neither groikov nor an gr»thv. His rustic wit is uncultivated (inculta arte), but because of that more bold and authoritative (fortis). Agroitas thus is like a good Roman man and orator, a uir bonus peritus dicendi. His experience is practical and hardy, and it keeps him from extravagance in this case of luxury. Agroitas allows us to catch sight of the urbane boundaries of propriety drawn around the genre of declamation itself.38 Seneca the father indicates clearly the shape of the social space of declamation and those men who are invited. Seneca admits good sons who know how to heed either a good father or else a more generic notion of paternal authority when the individual father himself errs. 37
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in narratione hunc colorem habuit: subito furore conlapsam patri mentem. meretricem uidi pendentem collo senis et parasitorum circumfusum patri gregem, turpes cum riualibus rixas et ebrietati nocturnae additum diem. Seneca, Controversiae 2.6.9. Compare Gunderson 2000: 83–84.
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Bold, strong, manly adults are also welcome. They are vigorous and direct, not effete and cloying. Seneca said in his preface, “nothing is so deadly for men’s intellect as is luxury.”39 Seneca also complained, “Behold how the minds of an idle youth lie idle.”40 Then he launched into his indictment of effeminacy and the sexually outrageous economy of oratory of the day. Next came his call for a restoration of Cato’s good man experienced at speaking. All of this should be familiar from the first chapter of this book. We find here in this declamation, though, the resumption of that earlier line of thought. The declamation about luxury evokes the imagery of the perils of luxurious oratory. The declamatory father who would educate his sons in the enjoyment of such rich fare must avoid legitimating excess and thereby rearing pampered fools. Additionally one can compare the praise of Latro’s subtlety in Seneca’s preface to the comment that “Hermagoras seldom offered sententiae, but they were eloquent and such as would deeply affect an observant listener while they would pass by a carefree and negligent one.”41 As with Latro and Hermagoras, so with Seneca himself: the diligent reader ought to take pains to ensure that his author’s sentiments not slip past him. Instead they ought to sink deep into his heart like vital lessons offered from a father to his sons. His words are wasted on debauchees. The reader who understands understands as well the authority and good sense of a father. r
While it tends to be invariably the case that Seneca and the Master know best, the same cannot be said for every declamatory father. In the preceding case it was possible to mount an effective critique of the father’s behavior. I would now like to look at those cases where there appears to be a consensus that the father’s half of the declamation is the weaker part. What does it take for a father to appear genuinely “demented”? The answer is relatively simple: any father who in his capacity as father has acted so as to damage the structure of the family is thereby exposed to a charge of madness that he will perhaps evade only with difficulty. Our earlier fathers were all dealing with difficult sons. When the father’s independent acts are at issue the cases do not necessarily favor him. And when a father has acted to destroy the very institution over which he presides, this man is no longer a father. Where there is no kingdom, there is no king, only a madman wearing a 39 40 41
nihil enim tam mortiferum ingeniis quam luxuria est. Seneca, Controversiae 1.pr.7. torpent ecce ingenia desidiosae iuuentutis; Seneca, Controversiae 1.pr.8. Hermagoras raras sententias dicebat, sed argutas et quae auditorem diligentem penitus adficerent, securum et neglegentem transcurrerent. Seneca, Controversiae 2.6.13.
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crown. The ideal notion of “Father” is replaced by a man merely claiming to be a father. Nevertheless, the structure of the world, of the family, and, indeed, of declamation itself requires that someone or something occupy that vacated place of the sovereign Father. Take for example Seneca, Controversiae 6.7: A father who had two sons married a new wife. One of the sons falls deathly ill. The doctors say that the source of the problem is mental. At sword point the father demands to know what is wrong. The son confesses his love for his stepmother. The father gives her to him. His other son accuses the father of madness.42 Since this case exists only in excerpted form, it is difficult to analyze it in the same detail as the other insanity declamations. It is clear, though, that the father thinks that he can elude the charge by playing up the insignificance of a wife relative to a son. That is, the woman is hardly a part of the family, while saving one’s son will always take precedence. Conversely the angered son insists upon the sleaziness of the case. His brother and his stepmother concocted the sickness; this was a trick to gratify their lust; the father is both a cuckold and his wife’s pimp. The whole episode was a disgusting farce (mimo turpissimo). This father argues that he has harmed the family in order to save it. In his accuser’s eyes he has merely harmed it. The son may have a point. But we will get further in our studies if we examine some better preserved cases. “A certain man disowned his son. The son moved in with a prostitute. He had a son by her. The disowned son gets sick and sends for his father. When he gets there the son entrusts his own son to his father and dies. The father adopts the child. He is accused of madness by his other son.”43 The family circumstances are confused. His surviving son holds the father liable for the confusion. The father defends the clemency of his act. Neither side is necessarily at a decided advantage. Each party, though, seems very anxious about the prostitute. The father knows that she is the weak point in his case, and the son presses his advantage. It may very well be mad, then, to adopt the son of a prostitute. The father may have actually ruined the family rather than restored it. The father defends himself by insisting that the prostitute acted like a good and dutiful wife. Latro says, “What a woman! She was taking 42
43
The Latin of the case reads as follows: Dementiae sit actio. Qui habebat duos filios, duxit uxorem. alter ex adulescentibus cum aegrotaret et in ultimis esset, medici dixerunt animi uitium esse. intrauit ad filium stricto gladio pater; rogauit, ut indicaret sibi causam. ait amari a se nouercam. cessit illi uxore sua pater. ab altero accusatur dementiae. Seneca, Controversiae 6.7. Abdicauit quidam filium; abdicatus se contulit ad meretricem; ex illa sustulit filium. aeger ad patrem misit: cum uenisset, commendauit ei filium suum et decessit. pater post mortem illius adoptauit puerum <pater>; ab altero [pater] filio accusatur dementiae. Seneca, Controversiae 2.4.
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care of things herself. Diligent about his sickbed she bustled about in her ministrations. Her hair was not so much dishevelled as clearly torn in grief. ‘Where,’ I said, ‘is the prostitute?’ ”44 Latro continues on with a vivid and affecting portrait of the scene with the sick son. Cestius Pius throws in an ironic remark playing off the standard definition of insanity: “I am accused of a new sort of madness: I was sane if I did not recognize my own.”45 And Seneca himself comments that “since the boy’s only disadvantage was that he was the child of a prostitute, everybody applied themselves to attend to this problem as far as one could within the bounds of the controuersia, and they made it seem as if she was a prostitute in name alone.”46 As usual, the expressions Seneca chooses in his editorial comments are evocative. The speakers “heal” (mederentur) the boy’s defect. They themselves arrive as doctors at the dying son’s bed. The one they heal though is neither son nor grandson but instead the mother herself. If they can save her reputation, then they have also ministered to the father’s own madness. To the extent that she is proven to be a good wife and mother, then the father’s act is perfectly fitting within Roman social logic. But if the boy is just the son of a whore, the father’s case becomes much more difficult. Not surprisingly the surviving son maligns the prostitute. The favored approach is to insist that the child’s true father is unknown.47 Hispo is snide: “nuptials fit for a farce: a rival enters the bedroom before the husband.”48 Latro, Albucius Silus, and Cestius Pius all make similar attacks. The father has irremediably damaged the family, for he has introduced into it a spurious son. Now one does not know (non intellegere) who is really one of us and who isn’t. This is a sort of madness that cannot be healed. The harsh and severe son upbraids luxury and lust in his brother, castigates a father for himself being soft, indulgent, and sadly mistaken, and, as is his place in a madness case, the son insists that the new father of the family should be himself. He is the only one who can really speak in the tones of a father. But one has to be careful not to lose one’s head when speaking on the son’s side. The rules of paternity in Rome were not so clear cut, and it is risky to criticize adoptions. Latro got himself into trouble in this way. He made 44 45 46
47 48
Qualem uidi! ipsa fungebatur officiis, sedula circa aegrotantis lectum in omnia discurrebat ministeria, non incultis tantum sed laniatis capillis. ‘ubi est,’ inquam, ‘meretrix?’ Seneca, Controversiae 2.4.1. in me noui generis dementia arguitur: sanus eram si non agnoscerem meos. Seneca, Controversiae 2.4.2. cum hoc unum puero noceat, quod ex meretrice natus est, omnes operam dederunt ut, quantum controuersia <salua> licebat, huic uitio mederentur, efficerentque ne quicquam in illa uideretur meretricis fuisse nisi nomen. Seneca, Controversiae 2.4.7. See Seneca, Controversiae 2.4.5 and 2.4.10. uere mimicae nuptiae quibus ante in cubiculum riualis uenit quam maritus. Seneca, Controversiae 2.4.5.
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the mistake of speaking the part of the son and insulting adoptions in the emperor’s presence when the latter seemed likely to make an adoption not too dissimilar to the one in this case.49 Such was the line of argumentation in the preceding chapter where the problems of sorting truth from fiction in declamation were addressed directly. However for present purposes it will perhaps suffice to say that it was a sort of madness to speak this case before that all-powerful father. A declaimer who cannot be permissive, subtle, or even silent when the need arises proves himself more a rash youth than a trusty authority. However harsh and severe he may seem, he only comes off as someone playing at paternal authority and the more in need of a pardon from true authority. Adoption, then, is a difficult matter for the son against the father. Only where the father has made a clear mistake will the son find hope of prevailing. Otherwise the presumption in favor of the father’s wisdom remains difficult to overcome. Yet there are other cases and other family crises that offer the son a better strategic position from which to assail a father. Let us look, then, at the case where a father has damaged the family by causing the death of one of its members rather than perhaps mistakenly adding to its number. D e m e n t i a e s i t ac tio . Bello ciuili quaedam uirum secuta est, cum in diuersa parte haberet patrem et fratrem. uictis partibus suis et occiso marito uenit ad patrem. non recepta in domum dixit: ‘quemadmodum tibi uis satis faciam?’ ille respondit: ‘morere!’ suspendit se ante ianuam eius. accusatur pater a filio dementiae. On e m ay b r i n g a ch arge of m adn ess. During civil war a certain woman stood by her husband though her father and brother were on the other side. When her party lost and her husband was killed she returned to her father. When she was not taken into his house she said, “How do you want me to satisfy you?” He answered, “Die!” She hung herself before his door. The father is accused by his son of madness. (Seneca, Controversiae 10.3)
Seneca puts the son’s side first in his excerpts from this case. Other than the final case to be discussed below this is the only example of this practice among our madness cases, and this structural detail offers an indication of the stronger half of the case. There is an additional break in Seneca’s practice that one might also note: the sentiments from the “other side” (pars altera) are not given before the diuisio. Usually Seneca will provide purple passages from both parties before proceeding into the logical arrangement of the treatment of the case. Seneca only moves over to discuss the father’s 49
Seneca, Controversiae 2.4.12–13.
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side in the last half of his account. In other words, the father’s case can only be made in the course of offering colores: it is not really possible to offer a straightforward defence. It may also have been true that the father defended himself in an oblique manner in the cases of the luxuriant son – viz., “I was not insane, I was teaching him a lesson” – but here there is a sort of reluctance to foreground the special pleadings. Well, structural arguments only shed a sort of half-light on the problems posed by this case. We need to look to the text itself for further indications. The arguments of the various speakers are clear: the father should not have sought his daughter’s death. Thus even though a Roman father has life and death power over his children (patria potestas), this was by no means a proper use of such authority. The speakers on the son’s side expand upon the horror and cruelty of the father’s commandment. Any father who uses his power to destroy the family is mad and does not deserve to have his power at all. Those who speak as the father have recourse to lines of thought that are by now familiar: “I may have been cruel, but I was not mad.” And, “There has been a misunderstanding.” Seneca seems to find the recourse to the question of the definition of madness to be a bit gauche in this instance, as he describes it as calcata (10.3.7). We can translate calcata as “well-worn” or “trite.” Yes, the technical defence might work here, but the father’s act is horrible, and it must be excused as well. In order to defend the father one has to pretend that he was somehow being a good father despite all appearances to the contrary. Thus the father did not really mean for her to kill herself. Instead he was trying to get her to entreat him repeatedly, more humbly, or with the help of her brother. Various speakers offer various versions of this notion. The main line of thought is clear enough: there was a mistake over the niceties of submission; the daughter misinterpreted the father. This is a much more arduous version of the “good father” defence from the cases of luxury given that the daughter’s error was not necessarily an error, nor was the father’s attempt at correction necessarily a wise one. The irreducible problem is that the family has lost a daughter. Women’s obligations are necessarily complicated as they owe a profound allegiance to both their husbands and their fathers. The son will play upon the obligation a wife has to heed her husband. The father’s act has left him vulnerable to the deployment of exemplary models (exempla) against himself. A clever speaker will even show that these lessons are part of a father’s own instruction to his daughter. Clodius Turrinus said, “ ‘Why did you follow your husband?’ Have you so forgotten those ancient models of good wives whom you used to exhort your daughter to follow back when you were sane? ‘One
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purchased her husband’s life with her own; another threw herself on her burning husband’s pyre.’ The girl would have given her life for her husband if she had not saved it for her father.”50 Clodius is shrewd to present this line of thought as a commonplace, for, in a certain sense, it is. One finds the same idea of a wife’s self-sacrifice and her fiery end twice more in the Controversiae: Arellius Fuscus uses it at 2.2.1 and Triarius at 2.5.8. Furthermore, Ovid, who himself can periodically be found among Seneca’s reminiscences, mentions the same loyal acts at Ars Amatoria 3.15–22 where he attaches mythological persons to them. Mary Beard has argued that declamation substitutes for mythologizing in Roman life.51 Between Ovid and the declaimers we find a blurring of the categories of myth and oratory. The myth of the wife is pitted against the rhetoric of the father; and, conversely, the rhetoric of wifeliness combats the myth of paternal authority. In either case we find that as these two orders are set against one another a higher-level principle emerges: the one who best advocates the mythical principles of family hierarchy will win his case. As usual, the son can best the father only where he mouths a more authoritative version of the paternal law than the father himself. The civil war wherein citizen slew citizen has had as one of its consequences the death of a child at the hands of her father. The parallels between these two versions of slaying those to whom one is related provide an irresistible analogy for those who speak as the son. Many repeat the sentiment that the father has proved himself more cruel than the victorious party in the civil war: they spared the defeated; he killed. Comparisons between statesmanship and fathering do not favor this father. This controuersia contains an unusually large number of examples drawn from history. Often such names are found in the interstices of the text, residing either in Seneca’s prefaces or in his asides. Here, though, the speakers themselves use historical figures to further their own speeches. The theme of civil war is not left abstract; the examples are concrete. Moschus said, “Caesar wept over Pompey’s head when it was brought to him. He offered this to his daughter.”52 It was a time of civil war. Pompey was Caesar’s son-in-law. Caesar wept for his daughter’s sake. Musa plays with the same scene (10.3.5). Albucius Silus mentions Cicero’s defence of Ligarius before Caesar even though Ligarius had sided against Caesar (10.3.3). Labienus evokes Cato Uticensis even though the parallel is tenuous at best (10.3.5). 50
51 52
‘Quare secuta es uirum?’ adeo tibi uetera exempla exciderunt bonarum coniugum, in quae filiam tuam solebas sanus hortari: ‘aliqua spiritum uiri redemit suo, aliqua se super ardentis rogum misit’? impendisset se puella uiro, nisi seruasset patri. Seneca, Controversiae 10.3.2. Beard 1993. adlatum ad se Caesar Pompei caput fleuit. hoc ille propter filiam praestitit. Seneca, Controversiae 10.3.1.
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Civil war is of itself a sort of insanity. It violates the social structure; it sets brother against brother; it dissolves vital bonds. The father who perpetuates or recapitulates the logic of civil war is himself mad. Labienus’ maxim stands out: “The best defence against civil war is forgetting.”53 Of course the civil wars from which these examples are drawn are unforgettable. They profoundly influenced the emergence of the political structure within which these speeches are produced. They furnished the material for the Cicero suasoriae, and they inspired a wealth of later Latin literature of which the epic poem by Seneca’s grandson Lucan is perhaps the most notable example. Moreover civil war is unforgettable because the declaimers themselves keep mentioning it. Even though one can draw political inferences from certain controuersiae and their treatment, usually specific references are omitted. In this instance, though, and for this generation of Romans, mentioning these examples is tantamount to saying, “Our fathers were temporarily mad.” These speakers are effectively the children of those men who killed one another, conquered, were subdued, and then came together again as a society. It would be madness to obey the unreason of one’s father in such circumstances. Instead these sons must advocate the higher principle that one forgive and forget. The ideals of paternal authority and social order are taken up by the inheritors of the state left them after civil war. They use these ideals to overcome the war’s unreason and to forgive its real participants in the course of condemning this fictive father who lived during an imaginary war: so long as one does not lose intellectus of the family, they say, society will ultimately be able to come together again. At the same time, their study of imaginary advocacy will periodically touch upon the old madness and the old wound that forms a part of their Roman past. The declaimers will reactivate the insane question of their fathers’ war. Then they will have a difficult time offering the side of the father the presumption of rightness that had hitherto adhered to it. Among our declamations the father that is least able to defend himself on a charge of madness is the one who has done the most damage to social and family structures. There is a general agreement among the declaimers that one of our fathers might actually be mad, or, at a minimum, that one would be hard pressed to defend him against a charge of madness. Though the father’s sin may not strike us as terrible, a hue and cry is aroused by the following: 53
optima ciuilis belli defensio obliuio est. Seneca, Controversiae 10.3.5. Compare Hershkowitz 1998: 198–218 on civil war as madness in Lucan. And see also Richlin 1999 on civil war as filtered through declamation.
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Tyrannus [thema] permisit seruis dominis interemptis dominas suas rapere. profugerunt principes ciuitatis; inter eos qui filium et filiam habebat profectus est peregre. cum omnes serui dominas suas uitiassent, seruos eius uirginem seruauit. occiso tyranno reuersi sunt principes; in crucem seruos sustulerunt. ille manu misit et filiam conlocauit. accusatur a filio dementiae. A tyrant allowed slaves to kill their masters and to rape their mistresses.54 The city’s leading citizens fled. Among them a man who had a son and a daughter set off abroad. Though all the slaves violated their mistresses, his slave preserved his daughter intact. When the tyrant was slain the elites returned. They crucified their slaves. This man freed his slave and married him to his daughter. His son accuses him of madness. (Seneca, Controversiae 7.6)
As with the preceding case, here also the excerpts begin with speeches on the son’s side and in his voice. The father’s side is not represented among the sententiae but for a single two-line snippet from Albucius Silus. In the diuisio we find lines of thought sympathetic to the father’s side, but Latro begins the analysis of the topic from the reflection that, “Even if he ought not have thus married off his daughter . . .”55 And in the discussion of the proper tack to take relative to the case “Latro used to say that the father’s side stood more in need of a defence than a color.”56 There is no easy way to put a good face on these hideous facts. And, if you are a Roman, the facts are hideous indeed. The father’s case is a difficult one to make. Seneca perhaps indicates that Geminus was exceptional in his approach when he says “Varius Geminus defended the deed itself.”57 Geminus elicits the example of the elder Cato who late in life married the daughter of his own farmer. Differences in social station allow the more elite spouse to act with relative freedom within the marriage. Thus the father has made his daughter’s marriage a light one for her to bear. Moreover the father will get to keep his daughter with himself at home. The argument is forced. It concedes that there is a problem with the marriage, and it attempts to argue the virtues of this scandalous state of affairs. Other speakers have to make their own labored appeals. Silo Pompeius claims that after the tyranny the father was too poor to afford a dowry any longer (7.6.18). Gavius Sabinus downplays the father’s status and makes it seem as if this was the best son that could be found (7.6.19). Obviously these 54 55 56 57
The premise is neither wholly fantastic nor merely “Greek” as the word tyrannus might seem to indicate. Compare the same incidents during Marius’ reign of terror in Plutarch, Marius 44. Latro in has quaestiones diuisit: an, etiamsi non debuit filiam sic collocare, . . . Seneca, Controversiae 7.6.13. A parte patris magis defensione opus esse dicebat Latro quam colore. Seneca, Controversiae 7.6.17. Uarius Geminus factum ipsum defendit. Seneca, Controversiae 7.6.17.
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two have to fight awkwardly against – if not outright ignore – the notion in the premise of the case that the father was one of the state’s “leading citizens” (principes). Argentarius deprecates the father’s transgression by blaming the daughter: she wanted the slave as her husband (7.6.18). Accaus Postumius claims that the father wanted to mitigate the envy and ill-will (inuidia) of his fellow citizens: everybody else’s daughter had been humiliated; he was just making his fortune equal to the public fortune (7.6.20). There is one last labored defence to consider, even if it does not at first blush appear to be a problem. Albucius makes an appeal to philosophy and declares that nobody is born free, and he reminds his audience of Rome’s own king Servius (7.6.18). While our own prejudices favor anyone who might show himself philosophical, particularly when it comes to the question of universal equality, such philosophizing is not necessarily a good sign. Philosophy is frequently gauche within declamation, and Albucius’ use of philosophy is particularly out of place. In order to appreciate this, one needs first to compare Albucius’ forced argument at Controversiae 1.7.17 where he excuses a father’s harsh act as a sign of a man driven to madness by misfortune. This approach is described as a “philosophical topos” (philosophumenum locum).58 Very well, but Cestius also chides Albucius at 1.3.8 for treating an issue in a philosophical rather than a forensic manner. And finally Seneca himself in the preface to the seventh book describes Albucius’ declamatory style thus: “That philosophy of his was out of season in declamations, and then it would wander without measure or boundary.”59 Clearly, philosophy in general and Albucius’ in particular is frequently considered rhetorically weak. It disrupts the self-imposed boundaries of the rhetorical community. The above constitutes an exhaustive list of the arguments in the father’s favor. Albucius may perhaps represent a reasonable defence of the father, but none of the others have much appeal. Moreover if the other speakers had liked Albucius’ line of thought, they would themselves have employed it in their own speeches, given that we frequently see speakers reusing and refining arguments they liked from other speeches. In sum we can say that it is almost impossible to speak as this father. Everyone grapples with the son-in-law’s slavery awkwardly: it is an advantage; it is a necessity; it is a self-inflicted punishment; the distinction between slave and free is purely a matter of accident. 58 59
See Fitzgerald and his bibliography on slavery as a philosophical topos (Fitzgerald 2000: 70). illa intempestiua in declamationibus eius philosophia sine modo tunc et sine fine euagabatur. Seneca, Controversiae 7.pr.1.
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The slave’s noble restraint counts for little. Seneca seems fond of Saturninus Furius’ epigram that “the father has become worse than the tyrant, the slave worse than himself.”60 The son routinely compares the father to the tyrant. Hardly a speaker fails to compare this marriage to those rapes. Arellius Fuscus Senior said, “A slave is made into a son-in-law, a mistress into a wife, a master into a father-in-law: who would not think these to be a tyrant’s nuptials?”61 That is, who would not think that we still lived under a tyranny? Who would not think that we were commanded to such horror? This passage contains one of the longest unbroken extracts from a single speaker in the text of the Controversiae. For a full page Fuscus thunders against the father in an endless litany of social inversions. His speech is as vitriolic as it is typical. “To his slave he gave freedom, to his daughter slavery.”62 Each of these short, sharp statements begins with an emphatic “slave” (seruo). Not content with one jingling phrase, Fuscus follows it with another: “To a slave he gave his daughter, from his daughter he stole her innocence.”63 The details of slave life provide ample room for dilation: “My sister is a serving girl’s rival, and a fellow slave was tossed out of her chamber so that the mistress can wed.”64 Though Fuscus is not mentioned, Seneca notes later that almost every speaker attempted to make some clever play upon the diction of manumission (7.6.22). This marriage to a slave is no marriage, it is the very rape that the tyrant once commanded: “Woe to you, sister, that you did not suffer this under the tyrant: for by now you would have ceased suffering. Do you think this is a reward: because he did not rape his mistress he shall rape her to his heart’s content?”65 This is ugly stuff, but it nevertheless remains the strong and appealing side of the case so far as the speakers are concerned. Any father who causes such to happen within his family is wholly illegitimate: he is a tyrant in need of a tyrannicide to set things aright. The father must be deprived of his authority in order to preserve the family. In the mean time, it would be best if Cestius Pius’ prayer came true: “Sister, I pray that you will be forever barren.”66 Seneca later remarks that this line from Cestius was a favorite among other speakers, referring to it as “that elegant notion that everybody 60 61 62 63 64 65 66
¾ mn patr ce©rwn ggonen turnnou, ¾ d doÓlov autoÓ. Seneca, Controversiae 7.6.22. Ex seruo gener, [et] ex domina uxor, ex domino socer factus est. quis has nuptias non tyranni putet? Seneca, Controversiae 7.6.7. seruo libertatem dedit, filiae seruitutem. Seneca, Controversiae 7.6.7. seruo filiam dedit, innocentiam abstulit. Seneca, Controversiae 7.6.7. soror mea ancillulae paelex est, et, ut domina nuberet, conserua de cellula est eiecta. Seneca, Controversiae 7.6.8. Notice the scorn implicit in the use of the diminutives. O te, soror, miseram, quod ista non sub tyranno passa es! iam enim pati desisses. hoc tu putas praemium esse: quia dominam non uiolauit, uiolet quantum uolet? Seneca, Controversiae 7.6.8. Soror, opto tibi perpetuam sterilitatem. Seneca, Controversiae 7.6.2.
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bandied about ‘sister, I pray for your sterility’ . . .”67 The family as such cannot exist if this marriage is allowed. Things only get worse if children are born: “She will give birth to your own slaves’ brothers.”68 One must put an end to the father’s illegitimate reign. The father must be declared mad and so lose his power to effect his tyrannical will. As was mentioned above, this case contains the remark that one of the speakers pretended that the father really had gone mad (7.6.16). Despite this exception, though, everyone else seems content to merely rail at the horror of the match. The father of course will be expected to trot out the standard idea that “this may have been bad, but it was not insane” (7.6.13). However we see little fear of this argument on the part of those who speak as the son. They are confident in the justice of their side: he may not have been mad, but he was so far wrong that he has lost claim to a father’s privileges. Conversely the father’s case is virtually abandoned. Other than the unappealing legalism of championing his vile sanity, the pickings are meager indeed. Though they are a group of men frequently described as social climbers, the declaimers are nevertheless unambiguously opposed to this kind of social advancement. Seneca himself chooses to close this case with an ironic tale of madness. “I suppose that you are amazed that all of the declaimers remained in their right mind during this controuersia. They didn’t.”69 Though set in the idiom of insanity, Seneca’s comments are aesthetic criticisms. Even so, the insane errors that his two speakers make are in keeping with the logic of declamatory insanity. First it should be noted that both men bear ironic names: Mamilius Nepos and Licinius Nepos. These two “grandsons” (nepotes) each trespass the boundaries of good taste. They stray over invisible lines of tact and decency and thereby disturb the decorous order of the good rhetorical family. Their folly lay in not perceiving their own lapses; and Seneca’s case against them is designed to deprive them of their right to a serious hearing. Mamilius’ error is more obvious: “When Mamilius Nepos was exhorting the freedman to divorce the sister he said, ‘Repay us: you free my sister.’ ”70 Nepos is mad enough to invert the already troubled relations of the case. Nepos further sullies the very family whom he ought to be saving. The sister is no longer a rape victim, she has become a slave. The sister, then, has already crossed over that impassable line between master 67 68 69 70
illum sensum elegantem et ab omnibus iactatum subripuisset: ‘soror, opto tibi sterilitatem’ . . . Seneca, Controversiae 7.6.24. seruis tuis paritura fratres <est>. Seneca, Controversiae 7.6.10. Mirari uos puto quod in hac controuersia omnes declamatores mentis suae fuerint. non fuerunt. Seneca, Controversiae 7.6.24. Nepos Mamilius, cum hortaretur libertum ad repudium sororis, dixit: refer nobis gratiam; et tu sororem meam manu mitte. Seneca, Controversiae 7.6.24.
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and slave, only this time she has moved forever away from the very notion of family that the son ought to champion. It is a rhetorical folly to turn a sister into a slave and then to seek her back: taking slaves into the house is the very core of the problem to begin with. Rhetorically repeating the mad crime of the father is no way to prove the sagacity of the son’s position. “Licinius Nepos didn’t take a back seat to Mamilius. He said, ‘Slaves, cross over to those benches, cross freedmen, kinship has been purchased.’ And when he pilfered that elegant notion that everybody bandied about ‘sister, I pray for your sterility,’ he added: ‘There’s no reason to marvel that I fear your offspring: I am sure that this is where tyrants come from.’ ”71 Now the metaphoric question of the boundaries between the social classes has been made literal: Licinius wishes to stage the blurring of lines. He choreographs transgression. In so doing he is grossly literal and d´eclass´e. Certainly Seneca has no time for his rhetorical fancy. Moreover his reuse of a favorite phrase is characterized not as the use of the family property of the declaimers, but instead as a theft, an illegitimate misuse. The vile rhetorical offspring of his base union of a good sentiment and his own folly is an epigram about the problems of the physical version of such unions. Seneca’s retelling of Licinius’ rereading of a favored sententia makes Licinius into a gross victim of his own portrait of social inversion. Seneca keeps a close and constant watch on the propriety of declamation. He is harsh and cruel. Seneca draws the lines, and he banishes those who step outside of them.72 Even as these speakers may think their phrases clever, Seneca reveals their madness: they are not part of our family of rhetoric. Here again, the idiom may be that of sanity, health, or soundness, but the practice is wholly one where the truth of taste has been made indisputable. The indecorous has no place among this community of good men experienced at speaking, and Seneca will bring seemingly unrelated charges of mental competence in order to secure a conviction on this account. Once again, the critique of declamation is itself declamatory. rr
What is madness? This question is a difficult one. The modern reader in all likelihood comes to the question with no clearer a definition than 71
72
Nepos Licinius illi non cessit; dixit enim: in illa subsellia transite serui, transite liberti, empta cognatio. et cum illum sensum elegantem et ab omnibus iactatum subripuisset: ‘soror, opto tibi sterilitatem,’ adiecit: nec est quod mireris me timere partum tuum: habeo sic nasci tyrannos. Seneca, Controversiae 7.6.24. Compare Bourdieu 1984: 56: “Tastes (i.e., manifested preferences) are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other tastes. In matters of taste, more than anywhere else, all determination is negation.” Sinclair 1995a and Bloomer 1997a both offer excellent portraits of Seneca the tastemaker and of the elaborate proprieties involved in the social practice of declamation.
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that provided by declamation itself: madness is a loss of understanding.73 Naturally one today has available various technical discourses on madness to which appeal could be made. So too can one turn to Foucault’s Madness and Civilization to read an account of the genealogy of the madman in the modern age:74 he is less a mental case than a social one. Such a line of thought offers a valuable caveat against the ready acceptance of the label “insane.” It also demands that we look to the discourse on insanity more than into the psyche of the madman in order to understand the mechanics of dementia as a social construct. My own reading of this discourse here, though, will not in the final analysis be a Foucauldian reading. I do not even intend to ask about madmen, but rather about the sane. Nevertheless, let us begin with a quick sketch of the Roman lunatic. A madman is cast into chains. He remains a raving prisoner at home. The shameful spectacle of his illness is hidden away. He loses his rights as a man. He has a guard set over him. His son, if he has one, assumes his legal rights and privileges. This is a fascinating system, and it is worthy of analysis in its own right. In our texts the situation is more complex still. We find a constant debate over madness. In fact, it is axiomatic that there will be a debate. Further, there is little sense that anyone is genuinely mad. The discourse of madness is first and foremost a discourse of fathers and sons. Whose speech ought to be authoritative? What makes for legitimate authority? I wish to explore these questions as both social and psychological ones. A revised version of our initial query, then, would be, “What does declamation tell us about psychic life?” This question assumes that there is such a thing as psychic life, that there is a need for an account of it, and lastly, that declamation is a good place to look for its workings. These are tall orders. Declamation stages what Butler has described as subjectivation’s trope of turning. The law calls out to a subject. It calls out to a subject who will be asked to turn back to the law and discover himself in a question of guilt or innocence. This turning back to meet the law, though, is more than a mere turn, it is also “a reflexivity – which constitutes the condition of possibility for the subject to form. Reflexivity is constituted through this moment of conscience, this turning back upon oneself, which is simultaneous with a turning toward the law.”75 Yet there is no subject anterior to this moment 73
74 75
See Hershkowitz 1998: 1–16 for an appraisal of both the modern and the ancient accounts of madness. See especially her critique of both modernist and historicist absolutism relative to reading ancient madness (Hershkowitz 1988: 14–16). Foucault 1988. Butler 1997b: 115. Her analysis is, among other things, a revisitation of Althusser 1971.
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of turning. That is, there is no subject temporally before the law. Instead a subject comes into being in an encounter spatially before the law. Obviously this “place” of the encounter with the law is no real space. Instead it is both everywhere and nowhere. So too are the scenes in the theater of subjection before the law not part of some past, a moment of origin, but they are part of man as a creature forever in progress. As Nietzsche said of man’s existence, it is “an imperfect tense that can never become a perfect one.”76 Butler’s account of the law’s role in this project insists upon this same incompleteness, only for her the notion emphasized is iteration. “To become a ‘subject’ is thus to have been presumed guilty, then tried and declared innocent. Because this declaration is not a single act but a status incessantly reproduced, to become a ‘subject’ is to be continuously in the process of acquitting oneself of the accusation of guilt.”77 Declamation is itself a continuous process of accusation and acquittal. This is true both for the fictive personae who deliver these speeches as well as for the people who don these masks. The trials of the subject before the law are forever staged and restaged. The moment of self-recognition before and in terms of the law is in declamation ritualized as a fundamental part of the institutional practice. Declamation stages, then, the “imperfection” of man’s psychic life. A speaker is forever offering proofs after the fact of the fundamental justice and soundness of his acts. Or perhaps he accuses the acts of others as falling short of some ideal that he the speaker has already assumed. The accuser thus “represents” the law in a double sense: he advocates it while also revealing his own prior accession to it and his own anterior acquittal. Thus despite the endless wrangling in declamation, one party invariably wins: the law itself. Moreover the name of the father acts as the fulcrum of the subjects’ turn. Each speaker strives to speak best for and as a father. Yet this law forever in triumph is also always shown as in need of a protector. Abstract and good, it nevertheless needs a concrete defender, a worldly representative to champion its claims. Perhaps the law has been violated. Speakers rush to its aid. In so doing they turn to the law like good children defending a parent threatened with mutilation. They play the role of good sons taking up the sword that the hero without hands cannot himself wield. This is the law’s terrible secret: it is impotent of itself. It recruits defenders from among the ranks of speakers. The trope of turning and its relationship to subjection and the law, then, is keenly rhetorical in the instance of declamation. Declamations are 76
Nietzsche 1997: 61.
77
Butler 1997b: 118 [original emphasis].
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speeches performed in the idiom of the self; they use the rhetoric and tropes of identity. This feature of declamation goes a long way to explaining the inevitable surplus of significance that declamation provides. Despite the patent fiction of the cases, their manner and subject invites comparison and allegorization. Any given case readily reminds one of some worldly event, or, more generally, of the very institution of declamation itself or even of life’s broadest questions. Lacan’s essay on “The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis”78 offers tools with which to approach the function of declamation within psychic life. As Felman has remarked of Lacan’s work in general, it begins with a renewed project of reading where reading is a process, a performance, and a practice.79 What is one reading for, though? Lacan characterizes the scene of analysis thus, “In order to know how to reply to the subject in analysis, the procedure is to recognize first of all the place where his ego is, the ego that Freud himself defined as an ego formed on a verbal nucleus; in other words, to know through whom and for whom the subject poses his question.”80 Let us here focus on the insistence that one is reading for a question; and this question is somehow uniquely bound to the analysand. It is peculiarly “his.” In the declamations on madness, the ostensible legal question is, “Is the father mad?” Yet the queries that routinely arise behind this first question are instead, “What is the nature of paternal authority?” and, “What is a properly ‘paternal’ discourse?” where the propriety and ownership of this discourse are hotly contested: both father and son wish to prove that they are its sole proper possessor. If we are looking for declamation’s ego, we need to keep close to the strict definitions of Lacan himself and to recognize that an ego is not necessarily what it might seem to be if appeal were made to more casual and less technical parlance. “It is therefore always in the relation between the subject’s ego (moi) and the ‘I’ (je) of his discourse that you must understand the meaning of the discourse if you are to achieve the dealienation of the subject. But you cannot possibly achieve this if you cling to the idea that the ego of the subject is identical with the presence that is speaking to you.”81 We do not read, then, for the “I” that is speaking to us. The analytic process is not primarily interested in depicting this character, a character who, by the way, is himself something of a literary construct, a creature constructed according to the tropes of the grammar of the first person. Instead analysis 78 81
79 Felman 1987: 19–25. 80 Lacan 1977a: 89 [original emphasis]. Lacan 1977a. Lacan 1977a: 90. See also Lacan 1998 for a more elaborate discussion of the circuits of discourse.
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reads for the moi, an ego in an indirect case, a self approached by way of language but not to be identified with a self-constating “I am that I am.” Instead the ego is provisional and propositional. This ego emerges retroactively, and it is constructed out of a fiction of wholeness seen without and brought within.82 The process of identification paradoxically involves alienation. Language offers a medium for identification. It offers the tools for making statements of the form, “I . . .” Nevertheless one does not “own” language. Its meaning exceeds individual intentions. And so too is it a matter of a collective possession assumed by the individual in order to produce a fiction of the self that is always both something more and something less than a true and truly owned self. For the speakers in declamation selves are assumed and borrowed. One speaks wearing a persona. But one is also very careful about these personae. They are not to be donned lightly, and the “self” that speaks as a character in a declamation never diverges too far from the self that is instructed to take up this mask and to make good use of it. The role of the Master in the Minor Declamations makes this clear. The homology between the position of the Master as instructor, the voice of the sermo, and the actual speech of a father in his declamatio provides a chain of association whereby the “I” of each of these is offered as an orthopedic double for the ego of the young speaker who accepts them as his own. The trope of turning to this set of structural relationships holding together the discourse of the Master, and, to a lesser extent, that of Seneca, offers the means whereby the hollow speech of declamation nevertheless participates in the richer resonances of the rhetoric of subjectivation. Thus not only do we see the sort of drama legible within the terms of Butler, but it also becomes clear how declamation offers a case study wherein one can see that “the unconscious of the subject is the discourse of the other.”83 Furthermore, declamation offers to the subject a rich moment of “historicization” where Lacan sees an identity between the subject’s history and his unconscious.84 History and the unconscious here represent a pattern where a constellation of censorship and recognition has emerged. Declamation provides a ritualized repetition of the fashion in which a discourse of and on madness and paternity is reiterated precisely as a patterned and structured discourse replete with censorship and recognition. The voice of Seneca intervenes to fix the meaning of these declamations, to see to it that where the moi was, there should the je of the father be. 82 83
Lacan’s celebrated “mirror stage” essay is the locus classicus for the depiction of this process (Lacan 1977c). 84 Lacan 1977a: 52. This is an oft-repeated maxim of Lacan. See, for example, Lacan 1977a: 55.
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“As a witness called to account for the sincerity of the subject, depositary of the minutes of his discourse, reference as to his exactitude, guarantor of his uprightness, custodian of his testament, scrivener of his codicils, the analyst has something of the scribe about him. But above all he remains the master of the truth of which this discourse is the process.”85 The Lacanian portrait of the analyst dovetails with the role of our two authors. Seneca, like the analyst, fixes meaning by inserting punctuation: he disambiguates the speeches he witnessed and recorded by marking them with his own commentary.86 It is our task to offer a critical reappraisal of both the discourse of declamation and the position of the analyst. We need to develop a critical capacity to comment upon the tropology of subjectivation without conspiring with it because of our own higher-level mastery of the minutes of the case. That is, the contemporary critic of declamation should avoid blindly recapitulating the ethics of the ancient analysis: thereby we would reinstate the voice of critical authority as paternal authority. By declaring those speakers mad disruptors of the house of rhetoric, we only seek to install ourselves into the paternal position. In the place of Lacan’s Discourse of the Master we risk substituting our Discourse of the Academic, a Discourse of the Schoolmaster who is never in fact radically distinct from the Master of the Declamationes Minores. “The psychoanalytic experience has rediscovered in man the imperative of the Word as the law that has formed him in its image.”87 We could very well substitute “declamatory” for “psychoanalytic.” Declamation manipulates the poetic function of language in order to express and mediate the symbolic structures that subtend the rhetoric of identity at Rome. Not only is language in general a system of symbols exchanged between individuals, but in the institution of declamation we observe a refined version of the same. The overarching presence of certain vital discursive constructs shapes the flow and movement of those symbols, their grammar and their vocabulary. Speakers offer to their peers gifts of speech designed to be taken up, appreciated, and returned with other gifts in kind. Speeches are analyzed, circulated, quoted, modified, and repeated. Resting in the backdrop behind this community of men who speak, and a community who speak as fathers and sons, lies the law as the Word guaranteeing the idea of paternal authority and the order of the world. The declamations discussed up to this point have time and again asked the same question, “Has something happened to father?” The genre stages a crisis in the system of meaning around the very figure who ought to 85
Lacan 1977a: 98.
86
Compare Lacan 1977a: 99.
87
Lacan 1977a: 106.
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guarantee meaning. The speakers orient themselves towards this schism by adopting either the persona of the healthy father or that of the son who makes good the father’s defects, a father by proxy. The relation to the law is made good in this moment of crisis by way of a reaffirmation of the terms of that law at a higher level. Even as one recognizes in the law and in the father the possibility of its “senseless, blind character, of pure imperativeness and simple tyranny,”88 the speakers simultaneously spin for themselves tales designed to reveal the ultimate justice of the system wherein paternal authority presides absolutely. Yet these accommodations to the tyranny of a paternal superego are always only provisional constructs. Or, more boldly, perhaps these accommodations are mere moments excerpted from one side of a declamation. For the law as such does not actually care about the individual: it is the individual’s place to make his or her peace with it even as this law in its quality of pure imperative produces impossible contradictions that will forever bedevil the subject attempting to live within it. Declamation produces a space for meditation upon those contradictions. In the legal discourse of Rome as well as in the quasi-legal idiom of declamation, the name of the father mobilizes and orients all discussions. The question of mental health is thus appropriately rephrased as an inquiry into legal adequacy. The lack of emphasis on madness in the declamations on madness not only points to the practical exigencies of a son’s feeble legal tools against his father, but it also indicates the extent to which the psychic health of the community is bound up with the question of the justice of the name of the father where either the real father or the son will claim for himself the right to derive his own authority from this source. Seneca writes as a father to his sons. He thus assumes for himself a position within the very declamatory play upon which he comments. Even though he initially described himself as a potentially failing father, the drama of his mental capacity plays itself out as a protracted demonstration of his mastery and competence. Not only is he not himself mad, but he can also diagnose with perfection the wits of others. He offers to his own sons tales of madness and mutilation as a means of instructing them in the sublime authority of paternity in general and of the paternal function of the authorial voice. Thus at both the symbolic and the practical, imaginary level Seneca proves himself father to his own sons. He even offers to his readers from without this family circle a more compelling version of his 88
Lacan 1988a: 102 speaking of the superego and the law.
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authority as paternity by saturating his discourse at every turn with these indications that the law abides in the voice of a father. The role the Master plays relative to his pupils is much like that enacted by Seneca. The Master too occupies all positions: he is the author, he is the practical voice of instruction, he is the voice of the speaker, and his pupils will parrot his words as they learn to become legally competent and authoritative individuals in their own right. That there should be clear patterns indicating a preference of approach to the material ought not to surprise us. Not only are the embedded speakers, both real and imagined, pleading their cases in the name of paternal authority, but our authors are themselves partisan advocates. The rhetorical quality of psychic life has found in declamation an institution well suited to fit with its contours. The trope of subjectivation, the name of the father, and the ego as a persona and mask discovered from without are cornerstones of a contemporary psychoanalytic understanding of how one becomes a person and the durable processes by which the coherence of a subject is maintained. These processes meet in declamation an institution forever reiterating and manipulating a rhetoric whose own shape is homologous to that of the self. The institution and the genre of declamation endlessly question and play with scenarios that, though fantastic, have their appeal precisely because the structure of that fantasy permits the playing with and working through (durcharbeiten) of the very sort of vital fantasies that animate psychic life. Declamation thus remains both utterly superfluous and thoroughly necessary.89 Moreover the practice is hardly one where in order to get a hearing one is forced to rave among the insane.90 Rather, the delirium is one shared by all Romans who would think through the problems of paternal authority. Declamation’s may be among the most garish of treatments, but it might also be the treatment that comes closest to the quick. Declamation encourages the following through of the fullest implications of the master discourses of Rome. One is even encouraged to explore the contradictions of the law and to seek to cope with the impossibility of enacting all of its dictates. Even though the declaimers are so often advocating such conservative positions, they nevertheless have to confront the law as something that keeps on producing crisis and confusion, as a site where competing interests clash, and where there is not necessarily one clear answer that emerges from the conflict. The participation and even the 89
Compare Cassius Severus at Seneca, Controversiae 3.pr.12.
90
See Petronius, Satyricon 3.
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complicity of the subject is necessary: only those who know how to play comfortably within the contradictions of the law will be entitled to speak authoritatively. Declamation may be a hot-house filled with any variety of odd flowers, but they grow from the same soil as the rest of the garden of psychic life. Indeed the artificiality of the declamatory climate allows for the testing of a variety of limits. To the extent that declamation seems to become more prominent and more important to Romans of the imperial period – and again one must remember that the genre was important to Greeks of all generations and Romans of earlier ages as well – we can perhaps see an institution that gains prominence precisely as the opportunities for the articulation of identity in the official rhetoric of public life have begun to fade. If all Roman oratory constantly entailed the question “What kind of man am I?”, then Ciceronian oratory had available to it a richer version of “manliness” when it came to the sub-heading “man of affairs, political actor.” In the generations following Cicero the opportunities for delivering that kind of oratory largely wither and die as the relationship between leading citizens is no longer one that allows for a top tier of equals battling one another to establish their own prestige and that of their friends and intimates. Instead there is one chief authority at the head of the state, and all other citizens would do well to figure out their relationship to that authority. In such a situation, then, a theme like “paternity” becomes a natural place for labors directed towards this end. The question of madness, namely, “Has something happened to father?” embraces both the generation of the civil war and the new generation living under an emperor who is wont to advertise himself as being the father of his country or pater patriae. Even as the senate no longer speaks so freely, we find instead an emerging chorus of old elites, arrivistes, and up-and-comers all speaking in school, in public recitals, and in private salons about the nature of authority, of questioning authority, of negotiating one’s relationship to power. As the senate falls silent, the city buzzes with rhetorical fictions that still ask the old questions in new forms. I do not wish to imply that declamation is merely the frivolous nattering of the politically impotent and thereby to dismiss the genre all over again.91 Instead I wish to indicate that declamation had long offered a place where the big questions of Rome were rhetorically performed and reenacted, and that in the imperial period declamation not only still offered such 91
Syme 1983: 508 concludes his chapter entitled “The Doom of the Nobiles” with the sentiment that, “There could be no great men any more.” The corollary, of course, would be that there could be no more great oratory either. See Syme 1983: 515–18 and the discussion of Tacitus’ Dialogus.
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opportunities but could naturally take upon itself the energies and even the roles that were no longer available in traditional senatorial rhetoric. And while declamation might formerly have been a training-ground from which one ideally graduated into the real battles of the forum, now declamation trains its students to be declaimers. The distinction between the wooden practice-sword and the sharp edge of rhetorical steel is no longer so clear. Declamation becomes, then, ever more “real” and its follies so much the less foolish.
part ii
Let id be
c hapte r 5
An Cimbrice loquendum sit Speaking and unspeaking the language of homosexual desire Declamation offers a means for thinking through various problems of Roman social logic. Importantly, declamation is a specifically rhetorical means of carrying out such a labor. Tyrannicides, stern fathers, and raped maidens occasion wordy flights of imagination; by talking through these issues in a forensic fiction one comes to terms with problems of power, authority, violence and sex. The genre itself is implicated in questions of the production and reproduction of normative male identity even as that identity is revealed to be a much more difficult and decentered category than one might otherwise imagine. I would like to examine a specific case wherein Roman national and masculine identity are made to converge over a charge of attempted homosexual rape. By using “sexual” and “homosexual” throughout this chapter I am by implication diverging somewhat from those scholars who emphasize the category of sexuality as itself constructed, and, for that matter, as very recently constructed. But not only does the imbrication of identity and sexual practice to be found below in fact argue for something like the identitarian regime binding the person to his or her pleasure that is familiar from modernity, but the specific pattern of incitements and prohibitions is neither uncanny nor unfamiliar. Despite the many heuristic advantages of positing discontinuity, perhaps it is time to reinvestigate the common threads that can be found. Specifically, antiquity and modernity each grow very anxious over the question of desire expressed for autonomous adult males. Etymologically, of course, homosexual means same-sex, and for moderns the anxiety purportedly centers around sameness of gender. For Romans, however, the trouble was over identity of gender, age, and status.1 1
Thus my account throughout will routinely converge with and diverge from the arguments of someone like Halperin. See Halperin 1990: 15–40, which lays out a succinct version of the current constructivist line in scholarship on ancient sexuality. For a full-scale constructivist account of Roman sexuality, see Williams 1998b. See Habinek for a re-evaluation of the whole constructivist vs. essentialist debate as well as the concomitant narratives of “before and after” in studies of ancient
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One finds in the imagined threat of homosexual rape more than just a tawdry tale of illicit sexuality expressed in the despised idiom of declamation. Instead such a case offers a view into the social logic of masculine identity, a logic which takes as one of its basic principles that grown men should not have intercourse and that any such contact is in some means illicit.2 That is, a specific refusal marks a key moment of maleness. I do not, then, seek to speak about the much studied “yeses” of ancient sexuality, but rather to explore a particular “no.” In addition to meditating on sexuality, the third Major Declamation also negotiates questions of power and obedience, violence and authority. A soldier was the object of a homosexual assault by his superior officer. Any soldier is always in an ambiguous position: he is martial and aggressive, yet he passively takes orders. A soldier can even be beaten like a slave, but he is no slave. If one dramatizes the ironies of status by sexualizing them as this case does, then new questions emerge: who is an “impenetrable penetrator” and who will be the object of such men’s advances?3 How does one talk about sex between adult males? I hope to demonstrate below that it is only by producing a narrative of refusing sex between men that Rome can be free to be Rome. It is precisely by refusing to countenance sexual submission that a Roman man comes to invest in a desexualized cathexis to his fellow Roman. In this narrative of refusal social union and social submission become acceptable specifically on the grounds that they are no longer reminiscent of sexual union and sexual submission. Let us briefly spell out the ostensible rules of the game of male same-sex encounters at Rome: if two adult Roman males engage in sexual intercourse, then the man penetrated has been humiliated by the penetrator.4 Since the equation “man = active” is a vital one in Roman thought, the passive partner has “let something happen to him” that he should not have allowed. The label “unchaste” (impudicus) might readily be applied to such a man.5
2
3 4
5
sexuality. Habinek argues convincingly that other axes of evaluation – specifically the question of urbanization – might be more pertinent (Habinek 1997). Contrast, though, Clarke and his discussion of the scenes of male sexual contact on the Warren Cup, a classicizing piece of very expensive art that appears to portray unabashedly the very sort of contact decried in an endless parade of literary sources (Clarke 1998: 61–72). See Walters 1997b: 41 for this phrase. On the normative rules of homosexual desire in Rome see Walters 1997b and compare Parker 1997. Williams 1998a supplements Walters’ bibliography and offers useful critiques of both Walters and Parker. Williams 1998b offers his own detailed account. Compare Hallett 1997 on homosexual desire as an occasion for literary misrepresentation. Though Hallett is writing of female homosexual desire, one should imagine as well that certain illicit versions of male homosexual desire exert a similarly deforming influence upon our sources. See Williams 1998b: 172–74.
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Certainly he could expect nothing polite to be said about either himself or the encounter. By “submitting” to the passive sexual role a man has disqualified himself more broadly: his claims to being active in politics and social life have been seriously compromised. And while the active man’s desire to penetrate another man may not be “suspect” in ancient thought – what has to go where in order for its satisfaction is not held against him6 – nevertheless since this desire can only be satisfied at the expense of another man, it necessarily always also has an implicitly cruel and sadistic dimension as well. Such sexual encounters, then, are readily assimilable to violent acts of mastery and possession. A hypothetical and hypostatized “commandment” that men penetrate and be active inevitably meets up with the fact that the universe of potential insertive objects will include other men. However we cannot dismiss without comment desires that are fundamentally implicated with social scandal as being an unavoidable paradox of this priapic schema of normative male sexuality. On the contrary, one cannot appreciate the elaborate patterns emerging at the site of articulation between the psychic and the social without also understanding that prohibition by no means banishes desire. Indeed, such a realization lies everywhere beneath the surface of this declamation: one man sees another man qua man and desires him sexually. How does one enforce the distance between the pleasure experienced on beholding a man who possesses a number of socially desirable traits and specifically sexual desire? Can we have our beef-cake without the destructive scandal of wanting to enjoy it as well? This declamatory rape fantasy narrativizes Roman truths more often left latent. In speaking about unspeakable acts the Roman author simultaneously reveals how thoroughly speakable such possibilities in fact are. Believing that this case merely “reflects” ancient norms on the unviable nature of adult male-male contact is inadequate. Indeed undue belief in the normativity of the norm produces a situation where one “slide[s] from the model of reality to the reality of the model” and a finalism that proceeds “as if practices had as their principle conscious obedience to consciously devised and sanctioned roles.”7 As ever declamation is a much more active, subtle, and paradoxical player. This declamation offers us readers a venue where we can both see behind the veil and observe the weaving of its cloth. And as diligent readers we ought not to blush too much at the prospect of such 6 7
See Williams 1998b: 160–65. Throughout his study Williams advocates a “Priapic” model for Roman male sexuality where any man may be expected to wish to put his penis anywhere. See Bourdieu 1990: 39. Compare this observation to the frequent recourse to the notion of a “prime directive” of male sexuality in Williams 1998b.
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revelations lest we err by ourselves participating in the social logic of another time and another place. In other words, the declamation is arguing for a logic of desire, but we should not mistake its pleading for a closed case. The third major declamation of Pseudo-Quintilian provides the most lengthy and striking example of the theme of homosexual rape in declamation.8 During the Cimbrian war, the story goes, a soldier serving under Marius murdered his military tribune when the tribune attempted to sexually assault the soldier.9 The tribune was a kinsman of the general, and the soldier has the misfortune to be accused before Marius.10 This case of homosexual rape, while representative of the declamatory genre in a number of ways, offers a couple of comparatively uncommon variations upon the well-worn themes of declamation. First, it is among the handful of declamations to which a specific time and a place are attached. Next, the sex is homosexual rather than heterosexual. While neither of these traits is unique to this case, together they contribute to questions of broader significance: how and when does one speak of homosexual desire? Why should this assault be “historical”? Why should Marius need to be the judge? This speech, voluble in its denunciation of the assault, nevertheless bears the traces of a number of ideas that have been hushed up. First and paradoxically, the very specificity of the case ensures that, unlike so many other declamations, all of this takes place “back then.”11 This attack is not timeless and locked in an eternal present like the simple rape of a woman in so many other declamations. One speaks not as a man of today but instead as a figure from the past. This case, then, attempts to return to a fictionalized past in order to work through an insoluble problem of the present figuration of homosexual 8 9
10
11
See also Walters 1997a on this speech. For a translation of this case in its entirety, see Appendix 2. Walters enumerates other ancient passages where one can find this anecdote (Walters 1997b: 40 n.32). One should add to Walters’ list Calpurnius Flaccus, Declamationes 3, a case that is virtually identical to DM 3. See Sussman 1994: 100–02 on Calpurnius’ treatment. For a translation of Calpurnius, see the second appendix. Quintilian knows of this same controuersia. He mentions “the case where an Arruntine soldier killed his tribune Lusius who was attempting to do him violence” (in causa militis Arrunti, qui Lusium tribunum uim sibi inferentem interfecit . . .; Institutio Oratoria 3.11.14). Quintilian assumes that his readership is familiar with the example. He also avoids using any specifically sexual diction when pointing out this case that is all about sex. The musings on soldiers and masculinity in Alston 1998 are worth noting, but Alston remains perhaps too broad in historical sweep and far less precise about the logic of masculinity when compared with works like Walters 1997a or Williams 1998b. Notice that two more cases of homosexual assault, Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 292 and Seneca, Controversiae 3.8, are also historically specific. Each takes place after the sack of Olynthus in 348 bc. The rape is not just back then, but also “over there.” The case mentioned in Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 4.2.69 under the heading ingenuum stuprauit (“A man soiled a free-born [male] youth”) is generic and ahistorical. To the extent that there is a pattern amid the rare examples of homosexual rape cases, though, the generic appears to be less frequent than the specific.
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desire. Specifically, the solder who stands out before the camp on guard ( prostare) also stands out like a prostitute. In the paradox of the position, one desires him and this defender provokes an attack of lust. In response the soldier or miles strikes and saves Rome not by killing a Cimbrian, but by slaying a Roman. Homosexual desire must be silenced and countered with murder. Yet the murder does not promote silence, instead it occasions the declamation itself. There is always more speech trying to silence the stain of shameful words.12 The final irony, though, is that the words themselves stain him all over again. One learns that while homosexual desire is to be punished by death, it nevertheless will always be disinterred and the soldier qua soldier will ever be desired anew. This case of pleasure that begins as “historical” ends by making eternal and omnipresent the very desire that should have been gotten rid of long ago and far away. I hope, then, to offer a reading of the Miles Marianus case that will explain homosexual panic as a necessary component of Roman life. Violent homophobia is required by a certain manly relationship to the self: the normative Roman man refuses to imagine same-sex relations with other men as anything other than violent assaults in need of violent retaliation. Furthermore this self-relation is also a linguistic relation that extends from self-naming in the specific instance to the possibility of public and rhetorical speech in a general sense.13 We find a paradoxical rhetorical defence of a murderous deed that would somehow “unspeak” forbidden words. We are talking, then, of performative dis-utterances, of a speech act designed to silence anew the very words that the soldier’s sword sought to erase. Indeed, rather than silencing homosexual desire, the soldier’s deed has occasioned an endless proliferation of perverse discourse.14 r
Bello Cimbrico miles Mari tribunum stuprum sibi inferre conantem, propinquum Mari, occidit. reus est caedis apud imperatorem. During the Cimbrian war a military tribune attempted to sexually assault one of Marius’ soldiers. The soldier killed the tribune, a kinsman of Marius. He is accused of murder before the general.([Quintilian], DM 3)
This declamation imagines a variety of temporal and topographical relationships corresponding to its difficult linguistic posturings. Space becomes 12 13
14
indignis uero uocibus contaminatus; DM 3.9. Note, then, the gender play in the comments of Ritter on the style of the speech: “Es herrscht auch im Ganzen ein durchaus wahrer und m¨annlicher Ton, zwar auch pathetisch erregt, wie es der Sache angemassen ist, aber fern vom jenem entsetzlich hohlen Pathos.” (Ritter 1967: 23) This, then, is a “manly” speech in a number of dimensions. Compare Foucault 1990a: 3–13 for a similarly contradictory situation as it relates to modern sexuality.
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a metaphorical register in which the problem of desirable bodies is worked out in tandem with the linguistic question of the possibility of a spoken resolution. And the time of the event similarly shapes the status of both words and deeds. Marius fought the Cimbri for several years until engaging them in a decisive battle in 101 bce. Accordingly the author of this declamation is offering a scene from at least two centuries before his own time.15 Effectively, then, it is as if one were today to imagine a case where George Washington was leading an inquiry into the doings of some of his own troops during the American Revolutionary War. By this I mean to indicate that the past in this case is less likely to be an object of concrete history for the speaker and his audience than a quasi-mythical period where Romanness can be imagined in starker relief. Naturally one of the conditions of possibility enabling the very existence and language of both speaker and audience is the eventual success of Marius. That is, history has already answered the question of the necessity of military discipline that arises in this speech, and so too has history “proven” that such discipline was required in order for Rome to overcome the Cimbri. In its own way this truth of subsequent history shapes the way one looks at the problem of the case as a whole. Violent heterosexual panic in the face of the threat of homosexual rape is itself a long-standing historical winner. We are who we are because homosexual assault is a thing of the past. It has been duly punished and expunged from our society. But, if this is really so, why then are we speaking of it now? Our other sources tell us that the soldier won his case, and thus we are listening to a speech where the final judgement is not in the least uncertain. Cicero’s version of the story is unambiguously pleased with both soldier and Marius: “The good youth preferred a hazardous act to vile suffering. And this most exalted man (Marius) freed from danger a man already released from shame.”16 Plutarch even goes so far as to say that Marius crowned the soldier as if his were some grand military exploit and an example to all. Moreover, Plutarch declares that this judgement and this act were instrumental in winning for Marius his third consulship.17 The 15
16
17
See H˚akanson for a summary of the question of authorship and dating of the various Major Declamations (H˚akanson 1986: 2284–85). DM 3 is believed to belong to an earlier group that may even be contemporary with Quintilian even though only the boldest of critics would assign authorship to him. Facere enim probus adulescens periculose quam perpeti turpiter maluit. atque hunc ille summus uir scelere solutum periculo liberauit. Cicero, Pro Milone 9. The phrasing of this sentiment is a model of the sort of verbal effects towards which declamation constantly strives. qaumsav ¾ Mriov kaª ¡sqeªv kleuse t¼n ptrion pª ta±v riste©aiv stfanon komisq¦nai, kaª labÜn aÉt¼v stefnwse t¼n TrebÛnion, Þv klliston rgon n kairä paradeigmtwn deomnw
kalän podedeigmnon. toÓt e«v
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case of the raped soldier, then, is as significant for Marius as were the war against Jugurtha and the Cimbrian war, the prime justifications for his first two consulships. How could a single unsuccessful homosexual assault really be considered as significant a political event as grand military campaigns? Fantastic as the proposition may seem, we ought to take seriously the idea that saving Rome from a foreign enemy and saving Roman manhood from sexual assault are acts of comparable scale and import. While I may just have indicated that the defence of the soldier is in some manner an easy task, the speech itself immediately points out the profound difficulties of speaking about the rape. It will be useful, then, to go carefully through the opening of the declamation in order to see the author’s speech and stances. Ironically, but not coincidentally, the speaker is himself obsessed with the question of speaking and stances as regards his subject matter even as he notes that the soldier himself was subject to a crisis of words and positions. Significantly, one finds in the case of threatened homosexual rape an instance where performative utterances both felicitous and infelicitous are recognized and directly engaged, even as they are never capable of being silenced, closed, or deferred.18 And this is just the problem: how are we to silence desire by speaking of it? The speech has a rough opening. The Latin is tangled. While the exordium of any speech is wont to be rather more syntactically elaborate than regular prose, and while declamation itself is often rather florid in its touches, nevertheless such reflections do not exhaust the question of the arduousness of this passage. This declamation contains several telling interruptions in its opening moments, and from them we see that speaking itself is particularly difficult in this case. Satis dedecoris atque flagitii castra ceperunt, cum haec furenti tribuno mens subiecta est, ut in medio belli Cimbrici strepitu ante signa (tuis honos sit habitus sanctissimis auribus) iuberet prostare gladio cinctum et uim turpissimam ac nefariam temptaret inferre – ne quid aliud dicam – fortiori. The camps were sufficiently shamed and soiled when this idea overtook the mad tribune, thinking that in the middle of the din of the Cimbrian war in front of the standards – you will pardon me for what you are about to hear – he would bid a man girt with his sword to stand forth and then he would try to apply foul and criminal violence to – lest I say anything else – a man braver than himself. (DM 3.1.) 18
Compare Austin 1962 and the critique thereof in Derrida 1988: 1–23. See also Schmitz for the usefulness of such theories for thinking though declamatory culture (Schmitz 1999). To my eye Schmitz is perhaps too interested in felicitous performances and not attendant enough to the destabilizing effect upon the centrality of the center implicit in his material. Sticklers will note, then, that performance in Schmitz’ account is almost-but-not-quite Butler’s “performativity.” But these are quibbles given the refreshing and provocative quality of his piece.
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An English version of this initial passage can only be arrived at with some difficulty. The Latin word order is clearly important, but the interruptions of the syntax defy a smooth rendering in another language. Similarly the choice of words is itself ambiguous and leads one in a variety of contrasting directions. That is, though it begins clearly enough, foregrounding the idea that there was a disgusting transgression, the sentence ends in a stammering sort of rage rather than eloquent and fluent indignation. Not, of course, that losing or appearing to lose one’s composure cannot itself be a rhetorical trope.19 “It was bad enough when that idea came into his head . . .” Which idea? The one that led the mad tribune, in the middle of the war to do something. But what is that something? Where is ut pointing? The grammatical and bodily syntax immediately becomes far more complex. Places and positions proliferate. The sentiment that the assault takes place amid noise of warfare itself occupies the middle of a sentence that awaits a resolution: yes, what happened in the middle of it all? Then another word of location, “before the standards” (ante signa). Soon enough a third position is literally taken up. The tribune bids the soldier to stand forth (prostare). Only at the end of this tangle do we get to the key thought: “and he tried to attack . . .” This last clause is itself interrupted. The speaker is proceeding neither clearly nor directly. Stepping back in the sentence for a moment, though, both ante signa and prostare are ambiguous. Each makes sense enough in a casual first read: both signa and prostare seem perfectly reasonable words to find in a military context. In fact, perhaps ante signa is no more than a bland allusion to the noun antesignani, the troops who fight in the front ranks. Yet in this perverted case of military life we need also to look at the “wrong” meanings of these terms. In fact, by offering a quasi-etymology of antesignani the speaker also incites a more profound meditation on the philosophy of soldiering. In general, a signum is a sign, signal, or token. Signa here is used in a technical sense, and it signifies, a proper student will assert, “the standards.” These are the flags flying in the Roman camp. They act as signatories and indicate the camp’s possession by Roman military might. These flags are for the camp signs that the army is itself. That is, they signify that the men collected are soldiers and Roman soldiers at that. Furthermore, standing in front of the standards implies taking up a prominent, even heroic position: one rushes out in front of the standards in order to perform a conspicuous 19
Ritter praises the Latinity and the execution of this declamation, particularly relative to other pieces in the collection (Ritter 1967: 21–23).
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feat of valor.20 The action thus takes place in front of the very markers that will have been upset by the scandalous act the tribune is about to commit. The officer is ready to obliterate the moment of military signification.21 The declaimer, then, does well to dwell upon this detail. These spatial relationships contribute to the sense of outrage. Yet there is a second and more recherch´e reading that can be offered at this juncture. Ante itself has two meanings. Ante can signify “before” in both a spatial and a temporal sense. Thus, though we are in the middle – both spatially and temporally, I suppose – of the Cimbrian war, we are also both in front of and prior to the “signs.” By this I mean to indicate that the force of these signa can be read retroactively.22 The soldier is standing “before” the signs of soldiering. After he kills the tribune, he has become the brave soldier he might have failed to be. It is, then, only by way of appeal to the symbolic order constituted by the military standards that one knows the soldier as a soldier and not as something else. These are the only signs that mean anything when speaking of this soldier. The possibility that there are or could be other signa has been vanquished. Yet the assertion that the soldier is solely intelligible within the universe of meaning governed by these signa is itself a rhetorical claim that the declaimer requires in order to make his case: “He is always and only a soldier, and those signa are always and only the standards that themselves signify Roman military order and discipline.” The tribune, though, has asked the disturbing question, “What is the soldier before the sign?” The tribune’s version of “before” cannot be allowed by the soldier’s advocate; and this version of the preposition invites the imagining of another world of symbols and signification that not just the declamation itself but even the whole of normative Roman masculinity ostentatiously refuses to entertain even as its outlines are traced. Recall also that the Latin word for man, uir, has as one of its meanings “soldier.” Thus every man is also a soldier. Indeed every man is perhaps supposed to be this very soldier, a man who established who he is by refusing that he ever was or could have been something else. We find a further ambiguity in prostare. Taking the first and most obvious reading, we say that the tribune bade the soldier to stand forth (pro + stare) 20
21 22
See Livy 5.18.8 and 5.36.6 for the spectacular quality of the act. Compare 2.65.3 and 7.8.2 where getting ahead of the standards effectively means bringing the fight to the enemy rather than waiting for it to come. It is also, accordingly, a dangerous place to be. See 41.18.11 where the consul keeps his men from flight by advancing to the head of the army, but while he is going around in front of the standards he is struck and killed. Compare O’Gorman 2000: 23–45 on similar ironies of signa and soldiering in Tacitus. Compare Butler on the law staging the ideas of “before” and “after” as elements of its own fiction of sexuality (Butler 1990: 29).
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before the standards (ante signa). Despite the excessive and careful positioning of the soldier’s body in this phrase, has not the tribune already asked him to do something quite unseemly? It turns out that the etymological translation of prostare is an act of politeness supported more by decorum than by lexicography. Polite and proper as it may seem, my translation of prostare is actually quite bold. One reads of three possible translations for prostare: “1 To offer goods, etc., for sale in public, do business; 2 (of a prostitute) To expose herself [sic] for hire. b to be hired out for sordid or unworthy purposes. 3 To be prominent, project.”23 The third version is the safest for the soldier if somewhat difficult as a Latin phrase: the use is intransitive, and parallels are rare. In any case, on this reading the soldier will be prominent and take up a heroic position. But as soon as he takes up this position, of course, the scandalous scene that is about to occur will only be all the more visible to all the rest of his fellows. Accordingly even the “safe” reading of prostare swiftly devolves into an unsavory reading. The only thing prominent in this moment is its sordidness, and the tribune relishes turning a hero’s position into a whore’s. The soldier, then, is a prostitute. The tribune has, literally, prostituted him by giving this command to stand and deliver (iuberet prostare). There is trouble enough before the attack is launched, and the sex has already happened so soon as the soldier takes up his position in front of the signa. The tribune in his official capacity, then, bids a man to stand before the signs, and in so bidding, an ambiguity at once presents itself that the tribune takes one way and the soldier violently steers in another. That is, with the tribune’s blood on his hands the soldier ultimately does stand there in front of the standards as just a soldier in front of some Roman flags. But the soldier cannot take up this final position “before” he has stood before the signa otherwise. The normativity of refused homosexuality has only been retroactively guaranteed. This normativity is a product of violent disambiguation, of imposing a reading, of excising possible meanings. The soldier is thus a lexicographer, and with his sword he writes the proper entries in the dictionary of desire. But back to the scene “before” the scene of the crime. As yet nothing has happened, and a great many significances remain in play. When the tribune has positioned his man the stance assumed recalls standing in the market and standing for pleasure. That is, prostare here means “to offer goods for sale in public.” Accordingly the signa in this version become a “for sale” sign. And, more generally, a signum is a marker establishing position, ownership, 23
The Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. prosto.
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etc. If such are the signa, then these standards threaten to write the wrong name or to affix the wrong seal upon this soldier, disappropriating him from himself and rendering him a commodity to be bought and to be enjoyed. The signs and the times of the signs – if not the signs of the times as the declaimer will complain24 – offer no security. The soldier is both already a soldier standing before his standards, and also a male prostitute standing there before a sign offering him for sale.25 He stands doubly before in a temporal sense as well. He is on the one hand always already the soldier before even the symbolic markers of soldiering encompass him; and on the other he is ever before a final act of signification that would come to rescue him from the wrong sort of meaning. His murder of the tribune may have been an attempt at imposing such a fixity of meaning, but it has only provoked this declamation and the reopening of the question of the fluidity of signification. I am arguing that the logic of martial masculinity is here being shown to be concomitantly the logic of homophobic murder. We are watching the constitution of masculinity by way of a corresponding loss of a specific erotic possibility. Those who argue that “of course” we already know that adult Roman men did not have sex with one another without the humiliation of one party can only reiterate the native logic without offering an account of its production, reproduction, distribution, and paradoxes. This declamation would then become “representative” of Roman thought. But declamation is not about mere re-presentation any more than prostare is about mere standing forth. Instead declamation is about the exemplary and “exemplification.” Declamation involves the rhetorical forging of a consensus as to the validity of the evaluative schemata applied to the case. Masculinity emerges as something that has been put on trial both by the tribune and by Marius, something that has fought twice and won twice. Masculinity is the product of a process that is, as the French might say, a proc`es. Men are not so much born as they are made, and once again we see rhetorical fictions replaying the very logic of Roman identity. The logic positing the necessity of this specific libidinal loss seeks retroactively to read those other possible signs as impossible signifiers and as nonsense. In our declamatory idiom, then, a sort of madness is in the air: the proper trajectory is to say of such signa, “I don’t get it,” non intellego. And 24 25
See DM 3.11 on revolting and rampant homosexuality “these days,” i.e. in the imagined present of Marius’ Rome. A reader reminds me here that Marius’ age saw the transition to hired professional soldiering at Rome. That is, even Marius himself is interested in buying virility. Accordingly the moment of guaranteed “resolution” for this case is always also the beginning of the end.
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yet this madness actually represents sanity for virile authority. In this sense there is no genuine “before” for virility. Men are ever inaugurated into a specific modality of being.26 The sign labeled “man” is attached to a content that requires the loss of another possible signification. This project, though, is not an opus operatum. Instead the text and its genre reveal a durable literary task of negotiating the emergence of the category “man” at Rome. One is permanently in the middle of the Cimbrian war, a war, it will be learned, that is itself all about securing the proper sort of virility for Romans.27 The soldier and his advocate occupy a textual moment that can be fruitfully compared to Freud’s own allegory of the position and time of homosexual refusal. Much as Freud composed a tale rendering the loss of homosexuality legible and intelligible precisely as a narrative history, so too does the case of the outraged soldier narrativize a history and a path to normative sociality and sexuality. The Freudian account of infantile sexual history proceeds via a complex set of detours that ultimately deposit the normative heterosexual subject in the welcoming arms of society once he – for the text routinely assumes a little boy and only exceptionally pauses to imagine female sexuality – has set aside his narcissistic/homosexual libido.28 Much like the soldier’s fight, Freud’s text finishes with a post and imagines an elaborate tangle of medio and ante before one can get then/there. By this I mean to indicate that the space and the history of heterosexuality is written as if there had all along been little choice in the matter. Propriety requires a killing off of homosexual affect. Significantly, though, Freud says of the modern sexual soldier that the sense of affect one feels towards society in general is the remainder of the libido withdrawn from homosexuality as a concrete object choice and transformed into social instincts.29 One saves Rome, or Vienna, by fighting first against homosexual desire, by forging therewith a bond with the socius, and then by laboring against the enemy without. But neither the declamatory narrative nor the Freudian proceeds quite so simply. After all, the topography of the soldier’s stance and his very 26 27
28
29
Compare Butler 1990: 2–3: “Perhaps the subject, as well as the invocation of a temporal ‘before,’ is constituted by the law as the fictive foundation of its own claim to legitimacy.” Compare the impossible tropism of the inauguration of subjectivity in Butler 1997b: 4: “The paradox of subjection implies a paradox of referentiality: namely that we must refer to what does not yet exist.” One needs also to keep in mind that the detour itself becomes an important metaphor in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud 1961: 40–51). Notice as well the Derridean reading of the detour as a meta-metaphor covering the process of Freudian inscription (Derrida 1987: 338–86). Freud 1911: 61.
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posture is both compromised and suspect. One cannot trust the signs and standards before which the narrator now speaks his defence. For it is clear that homosexuality is never done away with so directly. In a footnote added to the Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud himself presents heterosexuality as a puzzling question given the subject’s “bisexual nature.”30 For Freud, all subjects have already made a homosexual object choice in their unconscious, and the exclusive object choice in one’s conscious life is a phenomenon of no small interest.31 If, then, the homosexual object choice in the unconscious is “typical” and not readily expungible in the name of social affect, should we not expect to see the return of this repressed homosexuality as a persistent phenomenon in an account of the refusal of homosexuality?32 Here one finds, among other things, that the Freudian corpus never successfully abolishes the homosexuality that “must” be prevented in the name of society. Nor for that matter can the soldier’s advocate fail to reprostitute his client all over again when making him stand forth as an example of homosexual refusal. In the negation we find nevertheless an affirmation of the forbidden possibility.33 As both narrative and meta-narrative, the declamation on the attempted rape dramatizes this moment of loss that cannot be acknowledged as such. Rather than lamenting the loss of a certain species of libido the murder of the tribune is instead greeted as the just response of outraged heterosexuality. Or, more properly, what is outraged is less heterosexuality as we understand it today than the notion that a man might be anything other than the active penetrative agent in his sexual encounters. Neither the soldier nor the soldier’s Rome can be what they must be in order to remain radically self-identical without refusing the lascivious tribune. The declamation qua declamation, though, preserves this moment of crisis as a crisis. It marks a moment where a turning away must be made. The declamation institutes this moment as the point of inception for the endless discourse of declamation. One will have to repeat this killing of the tribune time and again until the queered thinking of the tribune is set 30
31 33
Freud 1962: 10. As noted by the editor, this sentence was added in 1915 while the note at the end of this paragraph is a melange of material from 1910 and 1915. The first edition of the text had appeared in 1905. One will readily observe that these supplemental footnotes eventually come to overwhelm the original text of this passage. Objections that Romans were openly bisexual – and, in contemporary terms, they were – are beside the point. The key parallel between Roman sexuality and the Freudian account is the existence of a very specific refusal. For even if loving boys and women might be interpreted as “bisexual” today, there is a special Roman “no” surrounding adult males and a logic of this negation that we still need to examine. 32 On the return of the repressed, see Freud 1911: 68. Freud 1962: 10n1. See Freud 1963a. See also Butler 1997b: 132–50 on melancholic incorporation of lost homosexual affect.
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straight. Naturally, it never will be. The ever-voluble declaimers no sooner finish a speech than someone else takes it up all over again and argues it anew. Similarly the speech itself recognizes that the act of the soldier has somehow not finished abolishing the attempted act of the tribune. The speech then tries to finish a gesture that, though a murder might ordinarily seem quite final, remains incomplete before the threat of passive homosexuality. rr
Both soldier and sign are troubled by an inexpungible question of homosexuality that keeps restaging itself just as many times as it is hustled off the scene. I wish, then, to study this text in more detail and thereby to reveal not just how one refuses homosexuality as a Roman male but how becoming a Roman male entails this moment of refusal. Indeed it is in the turning away from the tribune that one simultaneously “decides” the question of masculine identity at Rome even as it is opened up anew in any account of this moment. One then discovers a compulsion to repeat the moment of murder as the pathological moment of inception for normative subjectivity. Without this soldier and without this very crisis, there can be no Rome. It might be noted that my commentary on the Latin of the text halted in the middle of the first sentence. A long account of homosexuality and the refusal thereof has intervened. If we resume reading, though, we will find numerous enticements and racy suggestions throughout this sentence and this speech. Even though we know that a decisive act was, in fact, taken and an assault was prevented, the sex doesn’t end with that murder. Instead the speech reveals at every moment the need for a chronic labor of refusal in the face of a world of signs that point towards other Romes and other men. The tribune staged the soldier, bidding him to prostitute himself. So also has the soldier’s advocate done the same thing. He repositions the soldier at the exact same spot, this time hoping to present this man to Marius for a different but related (propinquus) moment of viewing and appraisal. Marius will see the soldier for what he is and read the situation as strictly martial. Marius will see in his kinsman’s eyes a lust that has no part in his own army.34 Marius will even be solicited to see himself when the declaimer asserts that the soldier bore on his shield Marius’ own name. At the mention of the ambiguous signs, the speaker begged that honor might be paid the general’s ears. He asks as well, though, that these same ears honor the version of Roman identity through which this speech will 34
DM 3.12.
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be legible as a justification and as a defence. The speaker hopes to make the name Marius into the sign that stabilizes the meaning of all of those other signs. Still, the scene of the assault remains a confused one. The more we invoke the military that ought to save us from homosexual desire, the more we refind that desire as encoded in its symbols. The soldier does not just stand; he stands girt with his sword. The proper command would have been then, not that one man stand before another man as the object of his desire, but that a soldier stand before a tribune as the object of his military authority. The tribune’s otherwise legitimate order for a soldier to put on his sword was actually perverse. The sword is desired as an attribute of the man. “Wear it,” said the tribune, as if these armaments were not part of the dress of a soldier but instead pieces of some sexy soldier costume purchased from a mail-order catalogue.35 The tribune seems even madder for such a request: not only does he arm his would-be victim, but so also does he violate the normative protocols of ancient homosexuality that would prefer to see men of significantly dissimilar ages with the younger man ever passive, and the older always active.36 The sword, though, stages the object of desire as himself an active agent. Even though the soldier’s act decisively declares the danger of such a pleasure in Rome, the tribune’s look cannot thereby be forgotten. In this moment, one man desired another man who was himself an active agent. The murder, though, proves that Roman sexual logic allows for only one possible penetrator: either the tribune will be stabbed or the soldier will become a prostitute. In the soldier’s version of Rome the terms active and passive as well as those individuals designated male and female constitute mutually exclusive categories. Gender glosses the grammar of agency. The soldier’s advocate will eventually declare that he finds himself defending the man in an improper idiom. The praise of chastity is a genre whose object is properly a woman, not a man: “I blush even to praise chastity in a soldier. This is a woman’s virtue.”37 The advocate blushes like a woman as he declares that 35
36
37
For his part, says the advocate, the soldier wishes only that his girding be a readiness for death. But the death that was at hand was shameful rather than valorous. See DM 3.1: mortem in procinctu habendam and forti pectore. For more perverse costuming, see also Freudenburg on Crispinus’ Vestal-fetish in Juvenal (Freudenburg 2001: 259). The ancient active/passive norm has been much studied. See, for example, Williams 1998b, Walters 1997b, Parker 1997, Foucault 1990b: 215–25, Halperin 1990: 29–38, Veyne 1985, and Dover 1978. Dover 1978 is the point of origin for almost all of the other discussions. The institutional reproduction of this norm and the phantasmatic incitement to and possibilities of its transgression have remained little studied. See, though, Wohl 1999 for a reading of the transgressive possibilities of Alcibiades. See also the methodological remarks on rereading ancient sexuality in the introduction to Wohl 2002. pudicitiam in milite etiam laudare erubesco: feminarum est ista uirtus. DM 3.3.
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his client has himself been assimilated to the feminine position because of the masculine desire of which he was the object. The Roman discourse of rape is so strongly marked as heterosexual, then, that its idiom revolves solely around male desire and female acquiescence or refusal. Thus the exemplary figures from Roman lore whom one evokes all turn out to be female, and the presence of their company only goes to show all the more the plight of the soldier. The soldier escaped being used as a woman only to find himself discursively in a homologous position where he cannot but be compared to a woman even as he is distinguished from one. The advocate argues as if his client had indeed been somehow stained by the tribune despite remaining unfondled. Maybe the soldier suffered and suffers anew something decidedly unchaste merely by being the object of any sexual speculations or addresses. That is, there is something fundamentally and irrevocably unseemly going on inside the process of establishing one’s sexual and manly virtue even when the outcome is successful. At the heart of this question we find the slipperiness of the linguistic sign itself (signum) and the problem of setting any of this case in a Latin that unfortunately can speak all too well of such matters. The declaimer, though, does not linger on the matter of the name that stains even as one refuses, nor does he dwell upon the paradoxes implicit in his definition of male pudicitia. Yet, as he thunders away, the speaker produces new and related ambiguities. Much as he quickly moved from the easy case of women to the speculative and grammatically somewhat awkward case of this man, the speaker at once moves on to a further issue that is apparently related to these other considerations: “contemporary” homosexuality in the age of Marius. Non sit mihi forsitan querendum aduersis auribus saeculi in tantum uitia regnare, ut obscenis cupiditatibus natura cesserit, ut pollutis in femineam usque patientiam maribus incurrat iam libido in sexum suum. finem tamen aliquem sibi uitia ipsa exceperunt, ultimumque adhoc huius flagitii crimen fuit corrupisse futurum uirum. hoc uero cuius dementiae est? in concubinatum iuniores leguntur, et in muliebrem patientiam uocatur fortasse iam maritus. ego uero gratulor militari disciplinae, gratulor opinioni castrorum, si huius mentis tribunus in hunc primum incidit. Perhaps I would do well to avoid complaining to nobody’s pleasure that vices now hold such sway that nature has given way to obscene desires, that since men have been sullied to the point of sexual passivity lust now charges against its own sex. Nevertheless the very vices have imposed upon themselves a certain limitation, and hitherto the most extreme charge was that someone had corrupted one who was going to be a man. But what sort of madness is this: young men are chosen for sex, and perhaps a man already married is called to play the woman’s passive
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part. Indeed I congratulate military discipline, I congratulate the camp’s reputation since a tribune with this in mind came upon my client first. (DM 3.11.)
The advocate’s meaning is clear despite a persistent tendency to euphemise. Indeed, the translation is somewhat over-translated to the extent that translating femineam patientiam and muliebrem patientiam as something like “female endurance” would have seemed hopelessly bizarre, and so instead the strong implication of sexual passivity has been elicited from the phrase. Homosexuality requires euphemism and eschews a variety of speech that would match the direct and vigorous act of the murderous soldier. That is, the vices of homosexuality are more inenarrabilia than narranda. The age (saeculum) does not wish to hear of such things. To these adverse ears one addresses indirect words. Or, put differently, to the queered tastes of the depraved age one addresses oblique speech.38 The speaker refuses to address directly the unchaste ears of the age, but clearly he is preoccupied by the “corruption” (corrumpere) not just of a future man, but also of one who was already a man. Though the problem of homosexuality is contemporary, the temporal logic of its inception is as confused as the moment of the soldier’s quasi-prostitution. “Since men have been sullied to the point of sexual passivity lust now charges against its own sex.” But does not the former already imply the latter? Put coarsely – that is, to put things into an idiom refused by this proper speech written in proper Latin about what we can admit into our linguistic and social community and what we must defend against and kill – how did men get fucked if there was not first someone interested in fucking them? Is this outrageous homosexuality somehow contagious? Do perverts breed perverts as the “corruption” of homosexuality spreads inexorably?39 Where, exactly, in the advocate’s version does homosexuality come from? What are the rules of before and after for homosexuality, what is its pro and ante? According to this speech homosexuality is a recent “invention.” Moreover there were passive men “before” there were men interested in 38
39
Compare to the ears of the age (auribus saeculi) a phrase from the opening section: “Though the defendant’s virtue should go unpunished, I nevertheless declare that in this age (saeculum) hell-bent on ruin, there will be more who would imitate the tribune than the soldier.” (et licet impunita sit reo uirtus sua, tamen in hoc ruentis in deteriora saeculi cursu, adfirmo, plures erunt, qui tribunum imitentur, quam qui militem. DM 3.1) Compare Habinek 1997: 33–34. Not only is the sex going on in the scene with the Armenian ephebe from Juvenal 2.163–70 far more ambiguous than is usually pretended, but so too is sexuality there a contagion spread from Rome to the conquered and their elites as part and parcel of the “civilizing” effect of conquest. Habinek concludes, “[I]t must be emphasized, however, that the contagion [the satirist] imagines as spreading throughout the world is not passivity, but homosexuality – the preference of men for other men as both agents and objects of desire.” (Habinek 1997: 34)
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penetrating them. That is, the ablative absolute pollutis maribus tells us only “men having been polluted,” and not who did the polluting, when, or how. Here we need to pay close attention to a larger chunk of the sentence: “as men have been stained unto sexual passivity lust charges against its own sex.” These passive men are both temporally and logically anterior to their lovers. The supply of passive men produces a depraved demand. After/Because there is such a thing as the polluted man who lets himself be penetrated, other men lose sight of the fact that sexual patientia is fundamentally feminine, and they come to desire the infliction of sexual suffering on members of their own sex. If the tone of “inflict” and “suffering” seems too strong and an over-translation of the sense of the words used of sexual contact, think again of the fiction of the case as a whole. The case insists that the soldier would have had homosexuality inflicted upon him, and that he killed rather than suffer. That is, the case already embodies a specific reading of the grammar of Roman sexuality even as it then goes on to articulate its message within the terms of this grammar. The men who long to penetrate other men do not long only to penetrate boys or even to couple with those polluted males who taught them about such desires. As is clear from the further development of the speaker’s line of thought, vice’s advance consists precisely in the fact that men who wish to sleep with members of their sex are decidedly interested in anyone who fits the bill, and they will not be content with just that strange first crop of “pathics.” Can we believe this history and genealogy of homosexuality? As a history it serves only to produce the notions of before and after as fantasies in terms of which one lives as a subject. That is, the history of the sex at Rome also is asked to serve as a history of the Roman sexual subject. Each and every man is asked to live in a world where he is after and beyond homosexuality because by killing a tribune and/or acquitting this soldier he also takes up a heroic position (prostare) before and in advance of the logic of homosexual contagion. The normative man advances by seeking to go back to a time before the invention of the passive homosexual “invented” the active desire of man for man. The rhetoric of desire as articulated by our rhetorician employs further deformations in order to (un)speak homosexual desire in this passage. The demonstrative pronouns in this section demonstrate only with reluctance. We wish neither to speak of such things nor even to point at them. The ambiguity of the vague demonstrative “this” (hoc) in the last sentence from DM 3.11 requires a moment’s thought before one realizes that this “this” is itself a euphemistic gesture towards the attempted rape. The same can
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be said of the “this” in the phrase “a tribune of this mind” (huius mentis tribunus): the demonstrative points towards something that the speaker will avoid naming. So, the tribune wished to use a soldier as his concubine and perhaps to use a married man as his wife.40 Indeed “this” desire is terrible, mad even (hoc uero cuius dementiae est). This is not mere madness, it is also a madness about which one claims to remain in ignorance. “What sort of madness is this?” But the closer we get to the answer, the more we stain ourselves. It is best either not to know or at least to claim not to know such an answer. The speaker twice and emphatically (ego uero) congratulates military life on its good fortune. This soldier (hunc) was just the sort to dispatch the depraved tribune at once. Yet for all the emphatic syntax and congratulations liberally applied, that other “this” still hangs over Roman life. The camp may now be safe, but is Rome? The tribune came upon this soldier first and finally, but was this moment both the alpha and the omega of homosexual desire? Did “this” soldier get rid of “that” problem? No, the problem of the Romanness of homosexuality at Rome remains. There also persists a need to speak and perform all over again this difficult moment of unmentionable desire as an inevitable moment in the speech of defence that vindicates normative homosexual refusal. rrr
Before examining the details of the problem of language in general, we ought to look first at the question of Latin in particular. We have just seen a moment where the speaker’s Latin acts oddly when it comes time to describe homosexual desire, and next we will see his explicit deployment of the issue of Latinity. And in this scene as well homosexual desire disturbs the language that would express it. Thus in addition to the speaker’s proposition that Latin is not the vehicle for articulating a discourse of homosexual desire, we find a corresponding practice that actually performs linguistic incompetence. I do not, though, take this practical inability to be a canny ploy where a man who says he can’t speak of sex cleverly botches his speech about sex. Instead I take the claim that Latin can’t describe such matters to be an ostentatious bit of rhetoric that is actually less a moment of mere rhetoric than one might at first imagine. Much as Lucretia’s rape indirectly begat the Roman Republic when her noble example and sad fate inspired Brutus’ vengeance, so also does this assault itself yield a profound consequence for Rome. In the refusal of the attack one finds a moment disclosing the virtue of the Roman male 40
Hence the variation of femineam to muliebrem with patientiam.
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as martial, sovereign, and active, not mastered, feminine, and passive. Yet Roman male identity is as much unwritten as it is inscribed in this same moment. The declaimer himself routinely agonizes over the inexpungible stain of the homosexual threat. Indeed if he could only get over not being able to get over the assault, the advocate could proceed to write a much more tidy tale. Instead the relentless expression of the repression of homosexual desire reveals a scene too pregnant with meaning to be fully lost. The scene of the rape reveals the moment of grounding for an ungroundable subject and one returns to it by way of anxiously shoring up that which could never be consolidated since such a grounding requires the refusal and the loss of an element of libido. But libido is not destroyed. One only transforms it. The whole case labors to unspeak homosexual desire. The declaimer refuses to understand the possibility of direct adult-adult desire. The advocate even goes so far as to deform both the raw material of the case and the Latin language itself so as to avoid this prospect when he asserts, most surprisingly, that the soldier is in fact a “boy” (puer).41 This word renders the soldier young enough to be a legitimate sexual object yet in the same moment makes him unfit for service in the army. If he’s a boy, he can be desired, but he won’t be in the army. If he is a man, he is in the army, but he can’t be desired. Elsewhere, though, the speech talks of the soldier as a man, speaking of him as a uir and harping on his uirtus. Strangest of all, the semi-safe middle ground of a term like “youth” (iuuenis) never occurs in this speech.42 Instead one finds in the soldier both man and boy. As a boy the soldier might attract homosexual libido in the normative terms of the institution for men of that age. And even though the speaker himself dislikes the practice, he would not complain half so loudly as he does now. If the soldier is a man the appropriateness of such attentions vanishes entirely.43 Yet the soldier is desired precisely because he is a man in the fullest sense of the Roman use of uir. The declamation is unambiguous on this point. The tribune sees this manly man, and he thereupon can’t control his own lust. Sed neque te militaris aetas fefellit, cuius certissima mensura est posse fortiter facere, neque illa libido fuit saltem uitiis usitata, quae ad obscenos ueneris inpetus formae cupidine incenditur, sed quidam perditus contumeliae amor ac summa flagitiorum 41 42 43
DM 3.5. Note that even the text itself signals the problem of puer by declaring that others were shocked and jealous at Marius’ enlistment of such a young man against the Cimbrians. There is a generic reference to iuuentuti in DM 3.4, but it has nothing to do with our soldier. Adulescens is also missing. Compare Calpurnius Flaccus 3 on the soldier’s age: “Do you think him not yet a man, he who is already Marius’ soldier?” (tibi nondum uir est, qui Mario iam miles est?)
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uoluptas inquinare honesta; hoc ipsum, quod primus ante signa procurrit, quod ueteranos tiro praecedit, quod redit puluere et cruore concretus, istud, istud quod tam uir est. uulgaria inritamenta sunt cupiditatis forma, aetas; singularis res est fortis concubinus: illas cicatrices, illa uulnera, illa tot eximiae decora militiae – quid exequar ultra, imperator? pudet me quod intellegis. But neither were you unaware that he was old enough to serve – and the surest measure of this is the ability to fight valiantly – nor was that lust one of familiar vice, a lust that is inflamed to vile libidinous assaults by physical attraction. Rather it was a certain reckless love of outrage and a sense that the acme of pleasure lies in disgraceful conduct and in the staining of what is honorable. What attracted him? The way the soldier ran in the forefront before the standards (signa); the way a raw recruit outstripped veterans; the way he came back caked with dust and blood. It was this, the very fact that he was such a man (uir). Beauty and youth are vulgar enticements: there’s nothing like sleeping with a brave soldier ( fortis). Those scars, those wounds,44 those innumerable badges for exceptional service – why should I go on, general? I am ashamed at what you already understand. (DM 3.6)
The tribune’s lust is an uncommon one in that he is not enticed by familiar carnality. Instead he longs for his soldier precisely as a soldier. As a mere man perhaps the soldier would arouse no interest; but in his heroism ( fortiter, fortis) he provokes the tribune to lust. The tribune longs to sleep with a man with a sword, a man sword-girt, a man before the standards. The scene here recalls the signa of the opening sentence. The soldier who ran before the standards ( procurrere) will induce the tribune to make him stand before those same signs ( prostare). The marks of battle that the soldier bears upon his flesh and the ensigns he wears for valor are so many more signs and tokens that inflame the tribune. The more one marks the soldier as a man and as a soldier, the more he attracts this libido that seeks nothing other than to stain honor. The speaker breaks off and turns to Marius. He does not wish to finish the sentence he has begun. Instead the speaker declares that he feels a sense of shame ( pudor) that interrupts him. Marius, though, already knows what he is saying. One can commend this moment of chaste reserve, but it unfortunately performs the very sexual crisis that it seeks to avert. The speaker’s own maxim that a man’s chastity ( pudicitia) consists in not being corrupted does not bear comparison with this moment of universal recognition. Both speaker and audience are fully apprised of just what this perversity is. Both parties are already infected with the idea of this corruption, and even in their silence they reiterate the horror of such a desire. The problem with the 44
On the scars and wounds compare DM 3.9: “Will he put up with libidinous hands fondling his wounds?” (feret libidinosas manus uulnera sua tractantes?)
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tribune’s crime is not that it is perverse and unthinkable, but rather that one so readily understands (intellegis). It’s not just that, as Butler would argue, “the censor is compelled to repeat the speech that the censor would prohibit”;45 but the censor must also confess that this perversion is a part of the lexicon of desire even if it is never named. Most importantly, though, this speech as a whole reveals the necessity of repeatedly saying/not-saying the notion of the attractions inspired in other men by the active adult male. No sooner is this horrid category produced as horrid than it becomes a site thinkable and perhaps even livable if only under the sign of loathing.46 The soldier standing before or running before the signs keeps returning to camp as an actual object or at least as a potential object of desire. And though this is a period of war with a foreign enemy who would destroy Rome, the Rome to which one returns is itself already troubled within by the specter of homosexuality. The defence of reasonable Roman norms never advances within this confused topography wherein all roads lead back to the desire from which one would escape. Yet the specter of this desire and its murderous excision furnishes a point of departure for the speeches’ governing fantasy that Roman virtue might be on the verge of renewal now that this one man’s lust has been stopped. On the other hand, the advocate’s defence never approaches the soldier’s body without re-investing it with the attractions seen by the tribune. That is, the text repeatedly sees through those eyes as it attempts to argue for the murder and the blinding of such salacious looking. The difficulty of this project and its corresponding distortion of the text leads one less to the sanguine conclusion that all will be well in the end than to the suspicion that one ultimately is required to become both homophobe and self-denying homosexual in this world.47 Much as he checked himself before proceeding with the enumeration of the physical charms of the soldier as seen by the tribune, so also does the declaimer again break off his speech when he attempts to get closer to the actual moment of the assault and its broader significance. This disrupted passage thus also recalls the interruptions of the opening sentence of the declamation. One can see a sort of eloquence and verbosity in this protest of the inadequacy of language; and every Roman student of oratory understands as much: Non audeo dicere, imperator: ‘concipe animo temporis illius habitum, reforma cogitationes tuas.’ in aliis forsitan causis permittatur indignitatem rei in oratione exaggerare; de iniuria nostra Latine queri non possumus. parcendum uerbis est, inhibenda magna ex parte ueritas. praeuaricandum mihi est, si pudorem habeo. 45
Butler 1997a: 37.
46
Compare Butler 1997a: 77.
47
See Butler 1997a: 108.
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conlatis cum hoste grauissimo comminus castris, cum totum bellum quodam genere ad pedem uenisset et omnium mentes inminentis pugnae cogitatio inplesset, circumfremente undique barbaro ululatu, Romano militi pro uallo excubanti meretriciam obscenae libidinis patientiam aliquis inperat? suum quisque habeat fortasse iudicium; mea sententia non satis pudicus est miles, qui armatus tantum negat. General, I dare not say, “Picture the situation at that time; imagine for yourself what it was like.” Perhaps in other cases one is allowed to embellish rhetorically the shamefulness of the matter at hand: we are unable to complain of our injury in Latin. One’s language must be restrained; the truth must be largely suppressed. If I have any shame ( pudor), I ought to betray my client. Our camp was drawn up near a dreadful enemy. The whole war had devolved upon the infantry, and everybody’s thoughts were upon the coming battle. Barbarous howling sounded on all sides. And then someone commands a Roman soldier keeping watch before our rampart to endure a whorish, obscene lust? Perhaps each will have his own ideas on the matter: in my opinion (mea sententia) an armed soldier is insufficiently chaste ( pudicus) if he just says “no.”48 (DM 3.6)
The speaker rhetorically pretends for a moment that rhetoric fails here. He cites the kind of prolix tropes that might be used at such a juncture in a speech, and then he sets them aside.49 Latin cannot express the injustice at issue in this case. Of course, the speaker is speaking and even complaining, and in Latin to boot. Yet his hyperbole nevertheless is justified in that it points to the difficulty of specifying the full horror of heterosexual panic at this moment. Moreover it is not only difficult to express, but it is pointedly and rhetorically so. That is, this speech is part of the discursive apparatus that ensures that such issues will indeed remain outside of the Latin of public discourse. Imagine, then, not just genteel “linguistic discretion,”50 but also a broader restraining of language. One ostentatiously refuses to admit that the Latin language might be able to compass such thoughts within its orbit. Words must be checked, or, more literally, one has to “spare” ( parcendum) language the indignity of expressing such contents.51 The truth of this matter cannot come out, because one is obliged to hold it in check (inhibenda). One is enjoined to produce the tribune’s desire as ineffable. To his lack of sexual continence we counterpoise our own 48 49 50 51
Compare Calpurnius Flaccus 3: “A man who when asked merely says no is one step shy of saying yes to debauchery.” (non longe ab eo est miles, ut promittat stuprum, qui rogatus tantummodo negat.) Neither Cicero nor the remainder of the Latin declamations use a phrase of the form concipere animo, though. However this passage does resemble Cicero, Pro Rege Deiotaro 20. For the phrase, see Walters 1997a. The formulation “sparing language” itself leaves open the bold lexical proposal that one might imagine taking parcendum uerbis not just as “refrain from” words but also as “to be merciful” to them.
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linguistic chastity. Ears are spared the suffering of hearing about sex/sexual suffering ( patientia).52 For the speaker talking and doing are not separate categories, and linguistic signs (signa) are just as real as military standards (signa), and a word can cut like a sword. The problem for both speaker and soldier is the same: pudor. The advocate has to be shameless if he is to defend his client. If he had any sense of shame ( pudor), he would collude with the prosecution and leave the tribune’s outrage to lie in silence. Instead the speaker defends the chastity ( pudor) of the soldier by himself abrogating the chastity of his own speech. The soldier defended himself and his pudor, but this second defence participates in a second sort of assault upon him. Once again, the prostitution of the first sentence has to be restaged in order for the speech to excoriate the prostitution of a Roman soldier as wrong. Or, put differently, the tribune’s look and the tribune’s command subsist in a position homologous to the speaker’s own authoritative staging of the soldier for Marius. Whether as an object of a command or an object of language the soldier is prostituted before the sign of the signum. And in each case the production of the soldier as such an object makes him a symbol permanently embedded in an “after” of being-signified without any access to a “before” (ante). And so, despite his complaint that there is no Latin version of these injuries, and despite the refusal to tell Marius to imagine what happened, the speaker nevertheless does proceed to paint a picture of that occasion and to return to the scene of the crime. The soldier is about to become a whore (meretrix) and the object of obscene libido.53 This is what the tribune commands (imperat). The shameless declaimer thus demands of the imperator Marius that he remove the shame of the command of the tribune. Not only can Latin express what happened, but it keeps on expressing the terms of the original scene during a case that would defend the violent destruction of that same scene. Unlike the well-armed soldier, the orator and the protean language of which he is uneasy master can neither “just say no” nor can it effect the linguistic violence necessary to forever efface the tribune’s desire with an indelibly superimposed mark of negation. 52 53
Against this, see DM 3.16: “Whatever we suffer in battle, it is men’s suffering.” (quicquid in pugna patimur, uirorum est.) Walters emphasizes this thread of the case and offers a detailed analysis (Walters 1997a). See also his discussion of patientia as a word where the passivity of woman and slave converge. Walters likewise argues that the soldier who is subject to disciplinary beatings from superior officers is a paradoxical figure (Walters 1997b: 40). He is both the manly, active man and also the object of actions appropriate only to wildly divergent statuses. But where Walters emphasizes that the line is closely drawn – physical suffering is proper, sexual “suffering” improper – I would counter that the metaphoric associations can never be decided and that this case is precisely about the problem of trying to keep one version of patientia at a distance from another.
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The problem of language in this speech saturates scene after scene. The mark or stain of the name haunts all of the speaker’s own words. Our identities as Roman men are threatened. Beyond the rhetorical problems posed for Latin by homosexual desire, the Latin language may fail for a second and more practical reason. The Roman armies may be defeated and the Cimbrians may overwhelm Rome and impose their own language and culture upon it. If the Romans cannot establish a solid, hegemonic version of masculine virtue, then there will be no Latin left to defend against the shame of speaking of homosexual desire. Non de prolatando tibi imperio res est, nec transmarinas, ut nuper, prouincias petimus; de Italiae possessione certatur, pro aris focisque constitimus. an haec omnia igni ferroque uastentur, an nobis caput barbarus hostis excidat, an Cimbrice loquendum sit. uita omnium nostrorum et salus (namque aliud ne sub hoste quidem uiri timemus) in ultimum discrimen adducitur. This is not a question of your extending the empire; nor are we seeking provinces beyond the sea as we lately did. This is a contest for the mastery of Italy. We have come together to take a stand on behalf of our hearths and altars. Shall all of this be put to flame and sword? Shall a barbaric foe lop off our heads? Shall we be forced to speak Cimbrian? All of our lives and our well-being – for we men fear nothing else not even from the enemy – lie in the balance. (DM 3.13.)
As the advocate puts it, the Romans find themselves faced with an existential crisis in more than one sense. Most obviously, Rome may fall to the Cimbrians. Yet given the context of the speech as a whole, Rome also faces a threat of dissolution in the face of homosexual rape. The advocate has linked the two crises by insisting that the tribune’s act threatened the Roman army as an institution and so also endangered the Roman state that that army safeguards. Sexually passive soldiers will suffer the state itself to be raped by the hyper-virile Cimbri: Nam si uere aestimemus, imperium populi Romani ad hanc diem militari disciplina stetit. non enim nobis aut multitudo maior est quam ceteris gentibus aut uehementiora corpora quam uel his ecce Cimbris aut maiores opes quam locupletissimis regnis aut mortis contemptus facilior quam plerisque barbaris causam uitae non habentibus; principes nos facit seueritas institutorum, ordo militiae, amor quidam laboris et cotidiana exercitatione assidua belli meditatio. itaque plura paene moribus quam uiribus uicimus . . . Properly considered, one realizes that the dominion of the Roman people has endured up to the present because of military discipline. We are not more numerous than other nations; our bodies are not more powerful than these Cimbrians; our resources are not those of the richest kingdoms; scorn for death comes no easier to us than to most barbarians who’ve no reason for living. The severity of our
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institutions, our military discipline, a certain love of toil, and daily thought for the constant waging of war have made us supreme. And so usually our victories are more a question of character (mores) than of might. (DM 3.14.)
The tribune’s murder was hailed as a blow struck for military discipline.54 Similarly the example of Lucretia was adduced to explain how Roman mores had always been principally concerned with chastity (pudicitia).55 The chastity of the soldier, then, is an axial element of the salvation of the state. Character and culture come together in the soldier, and the soldier’s unstained life is part of his discipline and hence part of his ability to master other races. The tribune’s attempt upon the soldier was effectively a treasonous act, for it is from such liaisons that states fall. The declamation uses this scene from the war to reveal how Roman identity hangs on military discipline, how the Roman male thinks of nothing but war and mastery, and how homosexual pleasure undoes such sovereignty by unmanning men. The speaker first worried that he could not express his thoughts in Latin – though he did. And now he is concerned that this fallen Latin language may soon give way to Cimbrian. Whatever decadent Rome itself might desire, the camp must nevertheless remain pure. The camp must endure as a place for the practice of a manhood whose one thought is mastery and killing. As they fight the Cimbri, the Roman soldiers find an opportunity for their own self-definition. They prove here their mores, their character. They prove also the supremacy of Roman character over that of other nations. And, lastly, they prove that they possess that highest aspect of character, sexual restraint. If the camp should be stained, why not let it be overrun? The speaker himself commands Marius to imagine that the legions themselves cry out “Let the camps be captured, and let the Cimbrians interrupt the tribune’s violence. The Germans know nothing about such things, and one lives more purely near Oceanus.”56 Then the declaimer rounds out the passage: “What will come of things, general, if it’s in the interest of the soldier’s chastity that they be conquered?”57 54 56
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55 DM 3.11. DM 3.11. ‘. . . castra capiantur, et uim tribuni interpellet Cimber. nihil tale nouere Germani, et sanctius uiuitur ad Oceanum.’ DM 3.16. Here one sees a form of interpellare, the word that inspired Althusser. Its basic meaning is “to interrupt”, but it can also mean “to accost” or even “to proposition sexually” (The Oxford Latin Dictionary s.v. interpello, 5). In this rather more remote sense of the passage, then, one wishes to be raped by men who offer an unintelligible language and death. Let the scene at last be covered in the darkness it requires. Of course, the author directly argues here that the Cimbri know nothing of homosexuality. How noble, those savages. quid futurum est, imperator, si ad pudicitiam militum pertinet uinci? DM 3.17.
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The notion that the attack on the soldier took place “in the middle of the Cimbrian war” is therefore entirely appropriate. This war was all along a testing-ground for this very issue of sexual mastery. And sexual mastery here implies not just continence and resisting penetration. Sexual mastery also means remaining the active, hostile principle. One’s relations to other men are characterized as stabbing them before they stab you. One can therefore see in the tribune’s sexual assault an attempt at penetration entirely similar to the menace of an armed foreigner. The Roman man needs to resist both by striking first and more bravely. Roman excellence both endures by and consists of killing aliens and killing perverts. And then we enjoy speaking of the pleasure of this penetration that prevents penetration. rrrr
Let us begin to approach the end of this study by making an inquiry into the logic of naming. And by way of looking to the end, I wish to go back to the beginning. Let me resume my commentary on the opening sentence of the whole declamation. This sentence ends, “and he tried to bring violence most foul and nefarious upon – lest I say anything else – a man more brave than he ( fortiori).” uir fortis means “brave soldier” or even “war hero” in Latin. In fact the uir fortis is something of a staple of declamation as a genre. And we find in this case a defining moment for one of the fixed features of declamation as a whole. What the man was asked to be when fighting in the war against the Cimbrians he has proven himself to be when standing before the standards as he slew the tribune. The soldier’s advocate uses forms of “brave” 14 times in this speech; and though subsequent uses might seem to indicate the more familiar form of martial valor, all of them are in some way governed by this first version, “braver.” When one man is braver than another, he proves this by stabbing rather than allowing himself to be penetrated. My retroactive reading allows us to see in the opening of the case this rather unexpected conflation of valor and the refusal of homosexuality. So also can we better appreciate a phrase that the advocate seeks to set as a seal upon his defence of the soldier: “eternal praise for his most valorous chastity.” Nec si damnaueris, paenitebit: si fors ita tulerit, ibit ad poenam pleno gradu, tam paratus mori pro pudicitia quam occidere, laudemque perpetuam fortissimi pudoris secum feret. omnis licet delatorum uis ingruat, numquam tamen effici poterit, ut miles tuus magis doleat, quod accusatus quam quod appellatus est. He will have no regrets even if you punish him. If fortune so offers, he will head to his punishment in full stride, as ready to die for purity as to kill for it; and he will
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bear with him eternal praise for his most valorous chastity ( fortissimi pudoris). The accusers can attack with all their might, they will nevertheless never make your soldier regret more that he was accused than that he was hailed. (DM 3.2.)
This passage not only collapses valor and chastity, though; it also indicates an uneasiness with such a formulation even as it champions the bridging of these two virtues as the cornerstone of the soldier’s defence. For despite his act proving his status as a uir fortis, this act was not itself the usual or expected deed of a soldier, even if there is a latent homophobic impulse in the Roman concept of military achievement. “Stab or be stabbed” of course has more than one meaning. In killing the tribune, the soldier performs manly-valor-as-sexual-panic rather than leaving this conjunction of actions latent or abstract. Further, the murder of the tribune failed to erase the stain of the name and the sign that the tribune has imposed upon the soldier.58 Forms of the verb appellare, “to address, to name, to salute by a certain title,” are not particularly common in the Major Declamations. Outside of the third declamation, only the twelfth uses the word. And though the basic meaning of the word is simple enough, in the third declamation all of the uses seem to be related to the first occurrence in section 2. That is, the sense of “to make overtures to, to solicit” has come to the fore and it cannot be pushed back off the stage. Ulpian indicates that the word eventually approached the status of a “technical term”: “Appellare means making an attempt upon another’s chastity by means of coaxing speech (appellare est blanda oratione alterius pudicitiam adtemptare).”59 And, indeed, we might scandalously inquire as to the blandishments of the very speech offered to Marius. Aren’t we making homosocial overtures by offering narratives of homosexual refusal? In fact the next use of appellare is neither far off nor dissimilar. In section three the speaker is praising the qualities of the soldier’s mother and father, and he says of the mother “nobody would have hailed her with impunity.”60 Well, the same can be said of her son, although one has no need of speaking hypothetically in his case. The soldier was accosted, and the tribune was punished. This formula and this diction, though, make the soldier too much like a woman whose purity is in need of constant defence.61 If only, says the speaker, the soldier could be a humble veteran of the Jugurthine war like his father. Then the general was also Marius. And again Rome 58 59 61
“So, tainted by unworthy words will he do nothing more than refuse?” (indignis uero uocibus contaminatus nihil amplius aliud quam renuet? DM 3.9). 60 quam nemo appellasset inpune. DM 3.3. Ulpian, Digest 47.10.15.20. On the other hand, one notes that the mother herself is rather virile: she is stern (praedura), tanned and frostbitten (perusta). These praises tend to be attached to men, not to women.
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conquered a foreign foe. Instead the son is the sort of man who, like some fetching woman, attracts cat-calls and unwanted advances. Heeding the call would be a disaster. Sleeping with the tribune would have transformed the soldier into a whore: “And who would not take him for some prostitute, if he had acted such that he could be called upon again?”62 The declaimer fears that the appellation will stick, that the name given to the soldier in the moment of hailing will become the essence of the man. Had the soldier responded, “Yes, it’s me” when the tribune offered him a sexualized call, the soldier’s being would have been irrevocably subjected to this name. The soldier would no longer be a soldier, a uir fortis. He would hardly be a man. Instead he would become one of the tribune’s prostitutes (prostitutos, exoletos). But the case puts things even more forcefully. The speaker is not concerned about affirming a name. All of those horrors would come true if the soldier did not actually kill the tribune. Even a “No, it’s not me” is too close to a yes. This fertile moment of naming corresponds to the famous scene of interpellation in Althusser’s essay “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus.”63 For Althusser, ideology hails the subject into social existence. When one hears one’s name called, turns, and responds to the appellation, this produces the individual as a social subject. Althusser’s account stages a fictional inaugural scene even as this scene is merely an illustrative fiction. That is, the naming and turning have always already happened and are happening everywhere and all of the time. Thus the fiction of a moment of turning and naming is itself more like a declamatory fiction than a history of the truth of the self. This is a thought experiment. Its drama is “true,” but that truth is less a representation of an actual history of the self than a demonstration of how that self came to have a history at all.64 The Althusserian staging of the moment of interpellation involves two examples: the police officer and God. Clearly my own reading of the tribune’s call to the soldier has a parallel with the call of the gendarme. If the soldier answers the call of the tribune, he confesses a sort of sexual crime. He becomes not just a subject but a guilty subject. He will never be his virtuous self again, never hearty and frost-bitten, instead forever soft and passive. By way of a solution to that crisis of naming we make an appeal to Marius and 62 63 64
et quis non illum inter prostitutos habeat, si commiserit, ut possit iterum appellari? DM 3.9. Compare DM 3.12. Althusser 1971. Althusser’s essay has influenced a variety of readings of the problem of ideology and of the subject. More recently, though, Judith Butler has made the trope of the subject’s turn in response to the hail the focus of her own investigations of the internalization of power. See Butler 1997b which opens with a discussion of Althusser.
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ask him to rename the soldier and to relabel him a “man.” The declamation then recognizes and actively seeks to counter Butler’s proposition that the subject suffers from a “vulnerability to being named” that forms the “constant condition of the speaking subject.”65 This declamation tries to erase the traumatic possibilities of one scene of naming by going before a higher authority who will resanction the name soldier as one impervious to the name prostitute. The subject, though, is not only exposed to the possibility of the name, but more broadly he or she exists within a universe of possible names.66 Thus the declamation will not be content with merely relabeling the soldier. Instead it has to engage the universe of speakable discourse itself. The name that is refused therefore has to be removed from speech. Yet this declamatory speech must necessarily name the very name it wishes to render unthinkable. Hereby we discover not only that the repressed will ever return, but also that that is the function of the repressed. In other words, this is an emblematic scene of the assumption of normative masculine identity because it contains both a turning to and a turning from. It refuses as it accepts. But so too does it forever retain the thing refused by producing a disavowed moment of heterosexual melancholia, a moment where the lost affect is mourned even as it is refused. Thus this declamation may offer a drama wherein a moment of crisis arrives, a choice is made, and a deed done, but this same drama also reveals that such an account of assuming or refusing names is mere fiction. The names are already out there, they have already been assumed and refused even before we get to a moment that would appear to allow for an act of will. The psychic life of the Roman subject is not so much exemplified by the soldier as it is by the speaker. The speaker has to compose a coherent account of normativity out of a fictional drama that cannot be made into a once and for all affair. First, he is required to repeat the prostitution in order to prevent it, and next, the soldier was always already prostituted. Thus the speaker deploys the logic of naming in the course of his own rhetorical elaboration of the possibilities of this case, but he is never master of the process of naming. Even if the soldier’s act failed to erase the problem of homosexual desire, the soldier nevertheless stands closer to the possibility of refusal than does the speaker who can only respeak the very names he would silence. The declamation names the soldier all over again and finds in this naming an improper overture. The speech cannot avoid the ambiguity of appellare. 65
Butler 1997a: 30.
66
Butler 1997a: 133.
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Am I naming him or am I chatting him up? The speech as a whole cannot help but restage the soldier and rename him with a double name. The virility, the chastity, and the bravery that once stood forth and enticed the tribune reappear before our eyes as the speaker names the soldier all over again. And, significantly, the declaimer gestures to the same set of terms that resonated in the scene with the tribune: soldier, scars, sword, standing forth. Yet we must not ourselves look at those same attributes as did the tribune. We must see them as the advocate directs. We can ourselves only read Roman sex “correctly” if we acquiesce to the speaker’s own hailing of us. We as readers have to refuse to see this soldier’s body as had the tribune. Or, rather, we have to forget that we have seen him otherwise and that this very speech helped us to do so. Therefore if Seneca’s recollections gave us a process for the (re)production of the good man and his sexual economy, this declamation informs us that our art of memory is likewise an art of forgetting. Arriving too late to prevent the hailing, the speakers nevertheless hope to rename and resignify. In so doing, though, they only recapitulate the dialectic of homosexual overcoming. The straight world of Roman virility needs this imagined moment of “before” (ante) in order to constitute itself as itself. The name is exposed as a site of vulnerability, a wound is received from the tribune, and a mortal one is dealt him in return. The speakers lavish their energies on rehearsing this moment, in naming it, in exploring its contours. In the end they hope to have submitted the soldier to our approval, to have given him back to us as a uir fortis. And, as the author of this text asserts, even if you should condemn the soldier, at least sentence him to go out and fight and die against the Cimbrians.67 That is, let the punishment prove that the name of uir fortis was always his. Punish the soldier by restoring his lost name. Yet the name is forever lost in its purity and simplicity, and the cleaning up of Latin can never take place. rrrrr
I would like to conclude by way of exploring the addressees of this speech: what are their names? to whom does this text call out? to what name are we readers being asked to respond? The text of this speech calls repeatedly upon Marius, and rightly so, as he is given as the audience in the declamation’s premise. The text, then, repeatedly says “you” to its reader, and when it does so it speaks first to “Marius” and next to a reader who has been positioned so as to hear what the general would hear. But who is Marius for the declaimer? 67
DM 3.19.
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Marius is a key point of orientation for the entire set of transvaluations of vocabulary necessary to cleanse the soldier of the stain of the tribune’s address. Marius resolves the ambiguous vocabulary of the original scene and sin into more palatable and restricted versions of the same notions. Marius, then, is the necessary addressee of this speech in a variety of senses. The imperator is solicited to see in this moment an opportunity for setting a example and for revealing the truth of the declaimer’s own arguments about these virtues. Moreover the imperator is himself an exemplary figure: all eyes look to him. His model is the one set for society. And here we have another opportunity for him to cast a verdict that will have a broad social import: “Certainly the gods attend to your greatness, imperator, and they guide it. They have offered you beyond your other plaudits an opportunity for so noble a verdict. That the soldier acted bravely is your example (exemplum) if you let him go.”68 That is, the soldier’s act and the meaning thereof are a function of the general’s verdict. After his verdict, the example thereupon becomes Marius’ in a variety of senses: Marius “owns” the exemplum of the soldier by being the source of the moment’s meaning, and Marius accordingly disappropriates the meaning of the deed from the soldier and makes it his own. So also does the imperator once again reveal that all eyes have always been looking to him as a source of value. Marius occupies a position both at the top of the society and at the focal point of the rhetorical address. Marius is a point to which one looks. The social climber Marius himself occupied a variety of positions – excluding, of course, that of passive homosexual partner. Marius can then be hypostatized as the ideal subject. He is the superlative Roman, seeing and seen, master of all, penetrated by none. Marius’ stance, then, is the standing we would wish for our soldier even as we know he can no longer take up such a posture. Furthermore since both we and Marius are the “you” of this speech, we are constantly encouraged to identify with Marius’ autonomous mastery. And the speaker makes sure to construct this “you” as both autonomous and masterful. Furthermore we know how Marius will decide this case. We know, then, how we too ought to decide it for ourselves. The advocate hopes that his client can finally stand more like a man and like a hero in court than he did before the tribune. 68
di profecto magnitudinem tuam curant, imperator, ac dirigunt, qui tibi super ceteras laudes obtulerunt tam honestae sententiae occasionem: quod miles fortiter fecit, si absoluis, tuum exemplum est. DM 3.15. On this as a case from which an exemplum shall be minted, see also sections 1 and 10. Recall the female exempla of section 11 as well. On Marius himself as an exemplum, see sections 3, 5, 13, and 15. One could also think through the allegorical possibilities of Marius as imperator and of the Roman emperor as imperator.
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Etsi nil minus conuenire uidetur partibus aduocati, summe imperator, quam reo capite periclitanti subsidium miserationis auferri, memor tamen pro quo et apud quem loquar, audacter atque, ut spero, tuto profiteor militem tuum, quicquid adferat casus hodie, sub ipso fortunae minantis ictu stare securum: aut enim absolues tamquam innocentem, aut punies tamquam uirum. No matter how ill it seems to suit an advocate’s role, my great general, to do away with the aid of pity when my client’s life is on the line, nevertheless I recognize on whose behalf I speak and before whom. Boldly, and, I hope, safely do I declare that your soldier – whatever chance should bring today – your soldier stands untroubled beneath the very blow of a menacing fortune. For either you will absolve him as innocent, or you will punish him as a man. (DM 3.1.)
When it is standing before Marius, standing forth is no longer a problem, come what may. The soldier can expect the treatment he deserves. He will get either liberty or death. He shall suffer at the hands of Marius something far preferable to the “suffering” that awaited him in the embraces of the tribune. That is, in a version of Rome saturated with meaning by this imperator and his many positions, one can be assured of getting death rather than passive male homosexuality. The alternatives in the Marian revision of Rome obliterate the possibilities of the tribune’s Rome. For the alternatives “soldier or whore” we now substitute “soldier or corpse.” As with standing, so with the other gestures. The embraces of the tribune are effaced by embraces found over on the side of Marius. One notes that the soldier had to use his sword to sunder the obscene embraces (amplexus) of a mad corruptor.69 On the other hand, parents embrace (complexi) the opportunity to send their children to Marius: “By god, parents rush to enlist their children no matter how harsh the war as if embracing the opportunity to have their child complete his military training under you, to see you daily as a example (exemplum) of divine virtue, to have you urging them on in their labors, to have you as their witness.”70 Sending your child to Marius makes him part of a world of labor and virtue; it inserts him into an optical scheme where Marius sees and is seen, where the general gives bearings to the world. One embraces, then, the opportunity to live in a world without mutual male embraces. In many ways the sword itself is a sign of this world. The sword is the tool with which one prevents the tribune’s embraces. Yet the sword is 69 70
cum obscenos furiosi corruptoris amplexus gladio diuelleret. DM 3.2. Compare DM 3.7 where madness and embraces also occur though they are only part of a hypothetical version of the rape scene. et, mehercules, festinarunt parentes ad nomen liberos mittere quamuis asperrimo bello uelut occasionem complexi, ut sub te ponere rudimenta militiae contingeret, cernere cotidie diuinae uirtutis exemplum, te hortatorem operum habere, te testem. DM 3.5.
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also Marius’: “No sooner did he hear talk of filthy desire than, just as if the signal for battle against the enemy had sounded, the soldier drove his sword through the chest of the detestable corruptor, that sword he received from you for the sake of our wives’ chastity.”71 The sword has always been a sign of refused illicit sexuality: it is given that it might defend wives. But this time the fight was of a man on his own behalf. The call to embraces trumpets in the ears like a call to arms. These are the moments for which a sword is made. And who better than Marius, the exemplary moral figure, to have given the sword that ever fights for chastity? The sword, though, forms only an element of a whole martial ensemble to which the general gives meaning. Marius is not merely the commander of the army, he also is the signator of all of the details of the soldier’s apparatus. He gave the sword to the soldier, but so also do we find his name literally written upon the man’s equipment. In an indignant address to the dead tribune, the declaimer says, “Do you see his side armed with a sword, the harsh metal breastplate, the face closed in a helmet, the plumes threatening the horrors of war, the name of Marius written on his shield, in a word, a man wholly bristling with martial bearing? Do you think this is what a prostitute wears?”72 The portrait finishes with Marius’ name on the shield. The man can be summarized by his dress, and the focal point of this is the signed shield. Marius and Mars virtually coincide, and they do so in a spectacle that ought to repel sexual advances. Yet it was this very sight that had incited the “mad” tribune in the first place. Now we see the same items again paraded before our eyes as if they were an obvious “turn-off.” The speaker’s defence of the soldier hinges on making Marius see his own name on this verbal shield. And to the extent that we readers are in the position of Marius as addressee, we are ourselves invited to find our own names as the signatories of the valor of refusing homosexuality. When the visual/verbal field has been saturated with meaning by the authorative signum “Marius,” no surplus meaning or illicit desire will be able to obtrude into the scene. Thus it is the ideological function of this speech to produce the obviousness of the horror of the tribune’s illicit gaze.73 71
72
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ad primum statim obscenae libidinis sermonem, non aliter quam si in hostem classicum cecinisset, gladium illum, quem a te pro pudicitia nostrarum coniugum acceperat, per pectus infandi corruptoris exegit. DM 3.7. uides munitum gladio latus, loricam ferro asperam, clausam galea faciem et ad terrorem belli cristas minantis, inscriptum in scuto C. Mari nomen, totum denique uirum Martio habitu horrentem: hic tibi cultus prostituti uidetur? DM 3.12. See Althusser 1971 on the obvious as an artifact of ideology. The gaze as guarantor of meaning is a Lacanian notion that has been much developed by feminist film theory. See, for example Silverman 1996 and Mulvey 1991. Here, then, we have the rhetorical (re)production of Marius’ gaze as the only
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The presentation of the soldier to Marius is hence a recuperative replaying of Lacan’s “mirror stage.”74 The speech offers an opportunity for the martial male body to be coordinated out of the fragments of scarred limbs and military harness into a specific morphology. Laura Mulvey’s gloss on the Lacanian scene indicates the extent to which the psyche is grounded on this self-recognition at a distance: [Children’s] recognition of themselves is joyous in that they imagine their mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than they experience in their own body. Recognition is thus overlaid with misrecognition: the image recognized is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject which, reintrojected as an ego ideal, prepares the way for identification with others in the future.75
This rhetorical image of an ideal manly body becomes the brave soldier (uir fortis) who justifiably murders his attacker. Once these pieces of the body were desired by the tribune, now they come together as an image of the male subject who kills the tribune. But the image of the soldier can itself be understood as a reflection of an ideal image offered by Marius. Thus the rhetorical soldier is in a sense the reflection of a reflection. He is not just a miles, he is a miles Marianus. The optics of the scene are coordinated by the look of Marius, a look that both we and Marius are invited to mistake for the gaze.76 That is, the optical apparatus of the declamation would constitute a world given to be seen only within the terms of Marius as viewer and as spectacle. Psychic order returns when the soldier can see in himself a Marius and can also offer up this self-image to a Marius who will look in again at the scene of the attack and cast a wholesome and chaste verdict upon the soldier’s act. Even if we let the speaker get away with the sleight of hand where he rhetorically substitutes for the kinsman the man in Marius, the ambiguous nature of the sign and the backdrop of a not necessarily chaste Rome both militate against this monolithic martial virtue. Nevertheless the declamation is determined to put the genie back in the bottle. When the declaimer claims to quote his client, we hear the following proud exclamation, which, despite its boldness ( fortitudo), nevertheless betrays tokens of difficulty:
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gaze that we will allow to be meaningful even as one acknowledges the possibilities of other visions than those offered by what Silverman 1992 would call the dominant fiction. 75 Mulvey 1991: 435. Lacan 1977c. See Lacan 1981: 67–122. Compare Silverman 1996: 125–62 which is heavily indebted to Lacan. Silverman 1996: 9–37 offers a richly expanded version of the scene before the mirror.
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Ipse nihil excusat: “percussi”, inquit, “– gratia Marti signisque! – occidi, hausi noxium ultrice dextera sanguinem, siue licuit, siue non licuit.” He himself makes no apology: he says, “I stabbed him; – my thanks to Mars and the signa – I killed him; I drained his guilty blood with an avenging right hand, whether it was permitted or not.” (DM 3.8.)
One might first note that our simple soldier has a smattering of the stylist in him: the word order of hausi noxium ultrice dextera sanguinem is rather artful for a common foot-soldier. So also does hausi provide a vivid and almost poetic finale to his three-branched verbal crescendo.77 The interruption gratia Marti signisque! ought to be simple to translate. Indeed one might have expected gratia in the ablative and accompanied by two genitives: “for the sake of.”78 Instead thanks are being paid to Mars and the standards/signs. The gratitude of the moment, though, comes as something of a hysteron proteron: it is only because the tribune was killed that Mars and the signs are assigned the values for which one thanks them. Before the murder, meaning was in a state of flux. Indeed, despite the grammar, the murder was done for the sake of the signa. The conclusion, “whether it was allowed or no” is rather more honest. The moment of the murder was one where the law that would say licet was in doubt. By striking down the tribune the soldier set himself on the side of a Rome that knows the tribune’s desire to have been illicit.79 The solving of the sign of the signa, then, forms the basis of the premise, the motive for the murder, and, finally, the site of reiterated resolution for the declamation as a whole. In its final recuperative return to the scene of the crime, the declaimer’s speech asks of Marius that he resignify the signa. Even if he decides to punish the soldier rather than to acquit him, the advocate says, Marius ought to send the soldier out into battle as his penalty: Pone in prima acie, pone ante signa, fortiter dixerim, non inter tirones, ubi plus periculi, quo maximus hostium globus ingruet; specta pugnantem. adfirmo: tunc minus ignosces tribuno. liceat ire in aciem, congredi cum hostibus. si perire debet, rogat te, imperator, miles tuus, opera mortis suae utaris. Put him in the front line, put him before the standards (signa) – my words may be bold ( fortiter dixerim), but don’t put him amid the raw recruits, put him where 77 78 79
Haurio with blood is a familiar enough image in Latin literature, but it tends to occur in poetic or stylized passages. The copyist of manuscript V wrote gratia Martis ignisque: “for the sake of Mars and fire.” Manuscript O offers the grammatically mixed message Martis signisque. Compare Calpurnius Flaccus 3 for the fundamental permissibility of violent resistance: “Smite boldly, young man, you have avenged Marius as well. Wherever chastity is at risk, it has its own law.” (macte uirtute, adulescens, et Marium uindicasti. ubicumque periclitatur pudicitia, suam legem habet.)
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there is the most danger, where the enemy throngs make their fiercest attack. Watch him fighting. I declare, then you will have fewer excuses for the tribune. Let him go into the battle-lines, let him draw near the enemy. If he ought to die, general, your soldier asks you that you make use of his death. (DM 3.19.)
Fortitude now moves from the side of the soldier to that of his advocate: language itself takes on the characteristics of the uir fortis. Speaking properly of the soldier is itself an act that has time and again revealed an advocate striving to be as brave as his client. The boldness of the first blow struck against the tribune now attaches itself to the advocate boldly unwriting the meaning of the tribune’s own scene of male desire with a fiction of his own. This final scene itself resolves the incident with the tribune by restaging it. The soldier is again placed ante signa. This time, though, the signa are Marius’ standards. The name orchestrating the deployment of the signa is that of Marius, not the tribune. One returns to the ambiguous moment and finds it super-saturated with the right kind of meaning. That neighboring and kindred (propinquus) moment is eclipsed by the authoritative substitution of Marius throughout. It is no longer appropriate that this young soldier fight as a novice. Already proven a man and a soldier, he will demonstrate the same all over again in this final fight. The guilty verdict thus contains the same message as an acquittal: “yes, you are a soldier, not a whore.” Marius is to be the spectator (specta). The soldier will be deployed as a soldier for his eye. Gone is the libidinous look of the tribune. Now when sword and scars are seen, they are read as murderous, not erotic. Though the word licet was in doubt a moment ago, the advocate now wishes that Marius declare what is permitted (liceat), and that this declaration should name the soldier as a soldier and should send him to the proper kind of fighting. Marius is also asked that he sign the soldier as his (miles tuus) and that he “use” the man’s service. Rather than being “used like a woman” at the hands of the tribune, the soldier will be used like a man. And the primary use of manhood in this world is death, not desire. In the tale of Marius’ soldier, the Miles Marianus as the manuscripts entitle the declamation, the speech in defence of the soldier rehearses a narrative that offers a genealogy of Roman manhood. The speaker presents an almost mythical scene of origins for virility. Manhood emerges not accidentally out of the refusal of the tribune, but rather necessarily so. A possible Rome and a potential version of the Roman are glimpsed and then refused. The terms organizing the meanings of manhood that will be allowed are written over the traces of this refused desire. The libido that
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the tribune offered is instead cathected to this destructive project. And the project is destructive in a variety of senses. First, the blood-stained soldier replaces the homosexual object of desire. And since the former was identical to the latter, it is also necessary to replace the desiring subject with the authoritative spectator Marius. By restaging the meaning of manhood as a spectacle of bloodshed and refusal, the time of male meaning, the post of the ante signa, is resolved into a martial vision of Rome. We are taken on a forced march from homosexuality to esprit de corps:80 never mind the lifeless bodies one must tread over along the way. Nevertheless the tribune never ultimately disappears. As a kinsman of Marius, he is never too distantly removed from the heart of Roman male identity. Instead the protean quality of signification that the tribune revealed remains the only means within which to attempt to resignify that same illicit meaning. The declamation, a specific variation upon an infinitely iterable premise, reveals the necessity of producing masculinity as a historical fact, of making a narrative of the Roman man out of a raw material that allows for other possible meanings. Latin wishes that it could not speak the language of these meanings, but it is forever consigned to do so even as it refuses to heed and to love the meanings that lie beneath its own words. Must we speak Cimbrian to be free of the tribune? Perhaps, but the brave men who emerge from the fight against the tribune would never willingly suffer such a defeat. 80
Compare Freud 1963c: 31 and Freud 1963b: 81–82.
c h a pt e r 6
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As a rhetorical agency, the Hegelian subject always knows more than it thinks it knows, and by reading itself rhetorically, i.e., reading the meanings it unwittingly enacts against those it explicitly intends, it recovers ever greater dimensions of its own identity. Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire1
The two final Major Declamations of pseudo-Quintilian make for a fitting close to the Latin declamatory corpus as it has been transmitted to us. The chosen theme, “A son suspected of incest with his mother (infamis in matrem),” marks them as two of the most horrible and fantastic specimens of an already outlandish genre.2 Yet these speeches provide appropriate if fortuitous end-points to the study of declamation for another reason as well. The problem of speech and silence obsesses each. We are therefore going to follow up on the themes of the prior chapter. Declamation as a genre is fond of the paradoxical, and this time we have arrived at a paradox that goes to the heart of declamation: how does one speak of the unspeakable? In not speaking the unspeakable, what gets said by implication? We will find in these speeches a portrait of the mechanism by which the domain of the speakable is constituted. Moreover the realm of possible discourse is fundamentally related to the set of exclusions, erasures and denials that surround this territory. This unhappy family romance emplots and encodes the rules for normativity. And out of the ruins of this house we see emerging a portrait of good psychic health. Thus these cases 1 2
Butler 1999: 31 [original emphasis] Quintilian, Insitutio Oratoria 9.2.79–80 discusses the proper treatment of a declamatory scenario with this same premise. On incest, or the threat thereof, one can also compare Declamationes Minores 289. A father entrusts a daughter whom he desires to a friend in order that the latter safeguard the girl from his lusts. When the father tries to get the girl back, the friend refuses to give her up, and then the father hangs himself: the friend is accused of having caused his death. See also the quasi-incest of Declamationes Minores 335: infamis in nouercam. In this case the mother is not quite a mother, but the sex is definitely sex. Similarly see Seneca, Controversiae 8.3, infamis in nurum. Seneca, Controversiae 6.7 is likewise quasi-incestuous.
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will offer us our last and most disturbing version of paternal authority as advocated and inculcated by declamation. For this time we will be able to see at what cost one purchases for the father both his sanctity and his sanity. The process of reading these cases will be an arduous one. In them we will see the production, reproduction, and extirpation of desire all conjoined. Moreover this complex process acts in both the past and the present. And, finally, the speeches themselves are principally designed to conceal even as they reveal. Not only does this game of hide and seek work at the intentional level of self-conscious rhetorical artistry, but we will find odd telling slips. In the eighteenth and nineteenth Major Declamations a mother and a father are at loggerheads.3 A court case has arisen over a report of incest, a torture, and a murder. DM 18 gives the speech of the mother’s lawyer on her behalf, DM 19 the father’s on his own.4 Let us examine for a moment the premise of the two speeches and then the often unexpected development of the two sides of the case. Malae tractationis sit actio. Speciosum filium, infamem, tamquam incestum cum matre committeret, pater in secreta parte domus torsit et occidit in tormentis. interrogat illum mater, quid ex filio compererit; nolentem dicere malae tractationis accusat. One may bring a charge of ill-treatment.5 There was an attractive son marked with the scandalous reputation of having committed incest with his mother. His father removed him to a secluded part of the house, tortured him, and killed him in the process. The mother asks the father what he learned from the son. When the father refuses to say, she brings a charge of ill-treatment.
The raw material of the matter is relatively clear: the young man was a looker (speciosus).6 It was said that he and his mother were having an affair. 3
4
5
6
While the authorship of the two speeches is uncertain, they are nevertheless believed to be by the same person. That is, though the nineteen Major Declamations have perhaps four different authors, 18 and 19 are believed to be by the same author. For a summary of the scholarship on authenticity, see H˚akanson 1986: 2284–94. A close reading of 19 also reveals so many ties to the specific text of 18 that one can at least be assured that we do not have two unrelated speeches thrown together because of the identity of their premise. Ritter argues from a close, technical reading of all of the declamations that the same author composed Major Declamations 8, 11, and 14–19 (Ritter 1967: 69–73 and Ritter 118–20). Connolly mentions these cases, but her account is brief, and it makes both the rhetorical situation and the gender relationships subsisting within this situation seem far less difficult that they actually are (Connolly 1998: 146–48). Nevertheless her general portrait of declamation remains valuable. See Bonner for cases based on this law (Bonner 1949: 94–95). The declamation itself argues that the law is inadequate to the present circumstances since “ill-treatment” is the only charge a wife is allowed to make (DM 18.5). Compare DM 18.9 where the significance of this attractiveness is vigorously disputed by the mother’s advocate.
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The father seeks to confirm the rumor, but what he discovered remains a mystery. The speech on behalf of the mother presents itself as a defence of her reputation against the scandal of the father’s silence. It seeks to force the father to speak publicly rather than to allow him to feed more rumors with his silence. The father’s speech, on the other hand, concentrates on the son, on the son’s torture, and on the father’s own pain. The two parties have strikingly not addressed one another in their speeches, and so again we find another irony: communication that fails to communicate. Words do not necessarily communicate, nor need communication be a matter of words. More specifically, though, we need to explore the reasons for the gap between the two speeches. Each is, in its own terms, perhaps adequate, but the gulf between them needs to be explored. The father’s speech is, then, particularly the problem. It is clearly a sequel to the mother’s, but it also fails to address directly the crises she evoked. Indeed it raises more issues than it actually solves. I would like to propose that despite this fissure between them, the two speeches form a unit, a unit that in fact includes the fissure itself. The whole of the case, being a question of incest, oedipal desire, the paternal function, and the problem of speech, accommodates two such ill-accommodated units. Each speech, then, not only explores its own particular issues by way of a forensic exercise, but also offers a commentary on the psychic life of desire and the possibility of publicly narrativizing such desire. And since tongues have already been wagging, this problem of speaking the unspeakable is actually phrased as a matter of having to speak a specific truth in a world where aimless talk has long been circulating. On dit needs to be converted into il a dit, the shamelessly impersonal into the, perhaps, horrifyingly specific. r
repetition compelled The mother’s advocate opens by laying out a number of themes that will dominate the course of the whole of the declamation. In each instance, the vocabulary of the case proper overlaps with the issues that led to the day in court. Much as happened with the rape story in the preceding chapter, we find in the case as a whole a tendency to replay and to relive the events prior to the case. The declamation thus restages the event about which it claims to make a report. And the silence that surrounds both the reputed crime and the potential confession is hereby replaced by the prolixity of the declaimer/advocate.
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The mother’s advocate claims that the father has cleverly schemed to make his wife seem culpable whether or not she mourns her son.7 Either forbearance or sorrow on her part will look suspect.8 The advocate specifically describes the father as wishing to bring infamy upon the mother (infamaturus). This “infamy,” though, echoes the diction of the premise to the declamation. There the son was infamis. He was reputed to have slept with his mother. That first reputation does not have a clear source, but this time the father is the agent and the mother the target. The original trauma has by no means ended with the son’s murder. The father perpetuates the crisis with his silence, and the cloud of incest still hangs over the family. The mother, on the other hand, seeks to escape the popular report the father’s silence produces by herself producing a public speech. Against fama she stages a causa. She is nevertheless still in a treacherous position. She risks being stained with infamy as she pursues this course. But in translating the crisis into the formal world of public discourse, she may perhaps escape the husband’s gambit. This is neither sorrow nor silence, and as a prosecution, it is a defence.9 Moreover one must also note that the mother is neither silent nor vocal in this declamation: she is spoken for by another man. The requirement that a woman be given an advocate is, naturally, doubly patronizing. But in this case this scheme serves the mother’s interests. By translating her voice into that of the advocate, the mother’s position gains some leverage relative to the problem of silence and speech that her husband has imposed upon her.10 This translation, though, exceeds mere displacement of the mother’s voice into the advocate’s. Indeed the mother has translated the domestic crisis into a public crisis, and in so doing she has reconfigured a dynamic within which she was the inevitable victim into one where she has some control. The mother will question her husband, not at home, but before all.11 The secret of the incest, true or false, has to come out into the open. It needs witnesses. In fact, this passage in particular and this text in general both contain a striking number of occurrences of the preposition “before” (coram).12 This witnessed interrogation of the father in court, though, reproduces and replaces that former investigation the father himself made of the 7 8 9 10 11 12
ut uobis matrem faceret inuisam, siue dissimularet misera mortem filii sui, siue quereretur. DM 18.1. ut sibi uideatur infamaturus iterum uel patientiam nostram uel dolorem. DM 18.1. ream se incesti, ream parricidii putat. DM 18.1. On the other hand, the advocate concludes his speech by ventriloquizing the mother: the last section has him speaking in her voice. laudo, iudices, laudo miseram, quod interrogare noluit domi, quod nihil fecit et ipsa secreto. DM 18.1. Coram appears eleven times in this declamation. It is used twice in the next speech.
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son.13 The present judicial interrogation also replicates the questioning with which the mother herself informally confronted the father after the son’s death. The mother is turning the tables. The father has replaced the son as the one investigated now that he possesses the son’s knowledge. The father owns it like some tainted legacy. The secret has been transmitted, and we are at another scene of tortuous inquiry. This time, though, there are witnesses. According to the advocate, the witnesses for this case are specifically those very parties whose interests were not served in that prior investigation. The mother wants to question the father in the presence of the state, of parents and children, and even in the face of rumor itself. She asks what did he learn when he questioned his son under torture.14 In this manner she herself provides an opportunity for asking her about her own doings. The investigation of the father about his investigation also serves as an investigation of the mother: “She displays to the people her clean conscience and she offers her husband and rumor the opportunity to ask her about any talk, any secret.”15 The son was interrogated by the father, and the father is interrogated by the mother. But, it turns out, she is nevertheless providing him with the opportunity to ask her the very same questions that were asked of the youth. This case will be her torture. The remainder of this paragraph immediately makes this same point by shifting into the idiom of torment: “She would prove her innocence with her own guts, she would cast her wretched pietas onto the rack, into the flames.”16 Yet pietas or “dutiful behavior” is in many ways precisely the question here. By putting her propriety on the rack the mother ensures that one will get an unambiguous answer that would have been doubtful were she herself the object of torture. Pietas is necessarily innocent. It will never be guilty of incest. By the end of the advocate’s introduction the mother’s interrogation of the father has turned into its own opposite. Rather than tormenting the father with her questions, the mother now doubles for the son. One should not forget the potential identification of father and son as victims 13
14 15 16
My thinking parallels DuBois 1991. DuBois also sees profundity in torture. Her emphasis, though, is on philosophy and torture, while mine is on the production of a strategic unreason in this case of torture. hic coram ciuitate, coram liberis ac parentibus et, licet dissimulare parricida uideatur, coram rumore mater inquirit, quid tormentis unici quaesierit, quid morte compererit. DM 18.1. exhibet populo conscientiam suam et aduersus quemcumque sermonem, quodcumque secretum marito famaeque praestat interrogandi potestatem. DM 18.1. uellet innocentiam suis probare uisceribus, uellet in eculeos, in ignes hanc miseram praecipitare pietatem. DM 18.1.
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of interrogation when reading the rest of the declamation, but the advocate finishes this section with the notion that the mother is ready to suffer in order to get the truth out. Hence the ironic imperative addressed to the judges, “Forgive her impatience” (ignoscite, iudices, inpatientiae. DM 18.2). Unable to suffer (pati) any longer the implications of her husband’s silence, she seeks to suffer in court. She wants to make him talk, and simultaneously she wants herself to be tortured into a confession of the truth of the allegations of incest.17 The father’s silence, then, has produced more than a simple collection of ironies on the theme of speech versus reticence. Instead as these unfold one finds that subject and object and past and present also begin to oscillate indeterminately. Furthermore each party keeps on sliding into a position formerly occupied by another member of the family. Thus one sees here that the world of signs does not so much secure the radical self-identity of any individual as it guarantees that the subject will occupy a series of fluid positions.18 This case asks in which of these positions we can find certitude. The case marks a return to the moment of crisis, and, hence, it marks a sort of return of the repressed. We find anew a moment of speaking that which had been silent and of silencing “infamous” speech. The former encompasses the son’s confession, the latter the father’s occlusion of that confession. Yet even in that “original” scene of inquisition we find that there is something of a return or recurrence. The moment of torture was itself derivative. It required a still earlier silence and speech, namely the rumor of incest and the tight-lipped son whom one would interrogate. The court case is then doubly derivative. But should it be scorned for that? This declamation ultimately underscores the problem of originary speech in general. It asks where does silence end and speech begin. In this world speech always begets silence, and silence speech. There is no first speech nor is there an ur-silence. And lying at the bottom of this morass of paradoxes we find incest and oedipality. The law of the father is mobilized so as to bring out and then extirpate such a desire, but it never succeeds in this project. Instead the incest retreats from sight all over again. Let us suspect for the moment and then explore in detail later the possibility that the incest prohibition is required to keep this whole circuit of speech and silence moving even if it ultimately does not “go” anywhere. The speech cannot go anywhere, though, because of the problem of incest itself. Incestuous desire, a horrible sin and something nefas, has 17 18
As with “suffering”, so also are references to “sparing” (parcere) made ironic throughout this case. One may compare the repetition compulsions of the case, the insistence of the signifier, and the endless games of identification with Lacan’s reading of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” (Lacan 1972).
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made it difficult to speak and to invoke fas as grounding the right to speak. Incest is a label that turns love and forms of amare into unspeakable words. Or, in the idiom of this case, incest is the unspoken/spoken term in which the father’s silence and rumor unite.19 While the father checks his speech, the mother declares that it is fas for her to cry out before all, “I loved my son!” (‘amaui filium meum!’ ).20 This proclamation, a statement otherwise banal and unworthy of being punctuated with an exclamation point, can no longer be taken for granted. A mother’s love can no longer be read as a simple version of amare. In crying out to recover this lost meaning, then, the advocate only makes the mother recall the contents of the rumors and the silence: “Yes, you did love him, didn’t you?”21 Suddenly the ordinary is in need of a defence. The mother has to assure us that she had always been chaste. That is, we are not just talking about the son’s desires here. The father acknowledged that the son was his, so there has never before been a problem of a paramour. Yet in the father’s eyes the mother’s nurturing of the child is no mere nurturing. The mother’s advocate pretends that the father’s case will include the conceit that the mother was too fond of the child from infancy: “Do you really, killer, stain with infamy (infamas) those years? Do you really stain even the poor boy’s childhood?”22 The father thus becomes the font of the very infamy he would check. The son who is “infamous” is not necessarily infamous because of any innate incestuous desire on his part. Instead the father has perhaps concocted a fantasy of an inappropriate maternal embrace that might participate in the son’s infamy. There is a strange proliferation of desires once we start rereading the family with the father’s jealous eyes. Mother and son love one another, but now this love may have already been incestuous in the cradle. The mother’s advocate claims that the whole institution of the family is done for if such suspicions enter into child rearing.23 Himself a miser with his embraces, the father drives his wife into the arms of her child. This last sentence, though, exposes a vital slippage of thought. What does it mean to replace a conjugal embrace with a maternal 19 20 21 22
23
coniungat, quantum uolet, nocentissimus senex cum rumore populi silentium suum. DM 18.3. DM 18.3. Compare Gunderson 1997 for a reading of the ambiguities of amare when negotiating the relations between adult males. numquid et hos annos, parricida, numquid et pueritiam miseri iuuenis infamas? DM 18.3. Notice as well that this same paragraph insists that the mother herself when younger avoided besmirching herself with infamia. To the father’s morbid fantasy that the relationship between mother and child was sexy from the beginning the mother’s advocate counterpoises an equally perverted notion that the father had constantly been on the lookout for an opportunity to kill his son (qui unicum aspiceret animo, quo quandoque posset occidere; DM 18.3).
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one? It will be worth while to linger for a moment on what is happening in the Latin, for it is not clear that the declaimer has made the point he might have been expected to make. While he has not necessarily suffered from a slip of the tongue or a slip of the pen, he has doubled the sense in which we are to take things. And, as has happened before and as we shall see below, the ambiguity hinges around the senses of pati. This section of the speech is filled with embraces. First, the mother’s embrace of her infant is described as “fervent” (impatiens).24 The mother is extra passionate from the beginning. Her fervor leads her to do all of the child rearing herself. The boy is not entrusted to nurses or servants. This child knows only his mother’s nurturing embrace (suo fouit amplexu), and the somewhat unexpected word order emphasizes this amplexu. But the mother’s fervent “impatience” is both always there and is imposed upon her by the father: “A hard father and a stern husband, he inflamed this fine mother’s fervor towards her only son.”25 The father has disrupted the economy of love felt between the members of this family. He is slow to kiss. He’s hard to embrace (rarus ad oscula; difficilis amplexibus; DM 18.3). A new problem arises in this passage. If it was hard for the father to tell the mother’s embraces of her son from those a wife offers a husband, so too do we now see that it is hard to decipher the husband’s embraces. Who is he slow to kiss? Who finds him unapproachable?26 Since this man is disagreeable both as a husband and as a father, one assumes that mother and son are each slighted. The Latin perhaps implies that these are kisses denied the son, but it certainly also allows us to see here the very sort of double touching that has made the mother’s love ambiguous. The love between husband and wife is of a different order than that shared between mother and son, isn’t it? Well, that’s precisely the problem here. Love keeps getting confused, and not just in popular talk. Nor, for that matter, is the father wholly to blame. The mother’s advocate, that is our declamatory author, has himself re-confused things for us in his defence of mother and son. Embraces bracket this passage and within them we see the mother holding a son “insufferably” and a wife not suffering the company of her hard husband. Ultimately we learn that all of the 24 25 26
natum . . . impatientius complexa quam reliqui parentes. DM 18.3. accendebat hanc erga unicum optimae matris inpatientiam rigidus pater, asper maritus. DM 18.3. Sussman translates: “[R]arely did he kiss his son, and he was reluctant to embrace him.” (Sussman 1987: 218) A translator often has to commit himself to one meaning, but we need to keep open as many possibilities as we can. Note as well my passive rendering of difficilis amplexibus as opposed to Sussman’s active version.
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wife’s talk and public appearances are shared with the son and not the father. The husband is hard to embrace: but, he will say, this is only because she is already embracing another, their son. All of this touching and “suffering,” then, keeps on sliding around. First we find the good touches of a parent’s hugs and the warm fervor of parent for child and next we see sexual touches and allusions to patientia muliebris, that is, the female sexual experience. Which was the first embrace that transgressed? When it happened, was the mother to blame? “Forgive her impatience,” indeed. That is, recall again DM 18.2 (ignoscite, iudices, inpatientiae . . .) and compare the impatientia of 18.3. Who “suffered” or could not suffer? And, most importantly, why is love in this house always a question of suffering? The day in court is not so much recounting this past as reliving and reinvoking its structure. These ambiguous embraces become ambiguous all over again. They are rekindled as chaste yet suspect passions for our eyes even by the mother’s own advocate. The incest keeps on (not) speaking of itself no matter from which angle one hears or does not hear of it. The advocate claims that the father was imagining things from the start. And, if he was not, then these embraces transferred to the son were properly the father’s after all, but he had forfeited them because he was so harsh. Such a seemingly contradictory mode of argument is quite familiar from traditional forensic speeches. There they usually serve to cover all possible gradations between absolute innocence and unexceptional culpability for thoroughly practical reasons. But in a case of incest, one needs to be extremely careful when formulating the mother’s accusatory self-defence: this is an issue that needs to be read as black or white. The mother’s life with her son, though, immediately takes on the appearance of being a repository for a number of other elements of the mother’s transferred love. All of her talk is with her son; she accompanies him in all of her public outings. The son takes pleasure in his reputation for being more loved by his mother.27 In many ways, she is the ideal wife, but only with her son. A Roman woman was expected to be careful about her public appearances, and she would be praised for never being seen abroad without her man. In this case, though, her man is her son. Indeed, pursuing such a line of thought is less a sign of an overly clever and prurient hermeneutics on my part than it is an indulgence in paternal suspicion: 27
omnis igitur miserae sermo cum filio, omnis in publicum pariter egressus. gaudebat etiam, quod laudandus occursibus, quod omni frequentia coetuque conspicuus populo iam ipse fateretur, quod plus amaretur a matre. DM 18.3.
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Miseremini, iudices, ne nefandas suspiciones maritum ex ullius traxisse credatis indiciis; suum rigorem, suum tantum secutus est animum. filium si non ames, uideatur tibi mater adamasse. Judges, please don’t believe that the husband derived his abominable suspicions from any evidence. He just followed his own severity, his own character. If you don’t love your son (ames), you think his mother lusts after him (adamasse). (DM 18.4)
The advocate tells us that the father had no tokens of guilt, yet the speaker himself has shown how the father’s role relative to his wife had been usurped by the son. In making such a reading of the situation, the father returns to his original sin: he is too hard, his unembraceable rigor means that he will mistake others’ embraces. That’s how his soul (animus) works. His mind deforms vocabulary. First it scorns the mother’s love, then it mistakes it. It imagines for itself two improper statements: “I do not love you; you love him.” The son thereupon becomes the site at which the problem of marital passion or lack thereof is reworked. Admittedly Roman marriages need have no love in them, but uxoriousness was well recognized as a possibility, and the jealous thinking of the whole of this declamation requires that we feel that there has been an amatory disappointment in this instance. All of the combinations and permutations of the erotic vocabulary and positions have been elaborated by this family. First note the play between the ambiguous amare and the unambiguous adamare. The former can cover proper affect, but it might not. The second is necessarily more passionate. The forced distinction between the two is an artifact designed to clean up amare even though amare can never be radically detached from adamare which, after all, is just the same word with a prefix. Death fixes the determining boundary of affect even as the father mistakes one word for another, amare for adamare. That is, the murder is an act of definition, not a matter of hermeneutics gone awry. Much as did the miles Marianus, the father writes his meanings in blood. The father, though, seems to have guaranteed immortality to these illicit thoughts rather than to have saved Rome from them. There is no need to complain about popular talk; the real problem has long been the father’s silent refusal of amare whereby he does not love and can see only lust.28 The father’s reaction to his sexual suspicions is itself sexualized. His torture and murder of the son is expressed in the language of rape. While 28
Throughout the declamation the speaker insists that the father is the ultimate source of all of the popular talk. That is, the fama of infamis is wholly derivative upon the father’s silent suspicions.
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the mother does everything simply and publicly,29 the father’s crimes are secret and unspeakable. He whisks the son away and tortures him (rapuit, abduxit). But this action and its movement are ambiguously sexual. First, abducere is an appropriate word for a sexual abduction in a declamatory rape,30 even if the word is not itself strongly marked as sexual. When combined with rapere, though, the erotic resonances come more to the fore given that rapere is the technical term in declamations for rape. That is, the father’s own conduct in investigating the alleged sexual transgressions of his son is itself expressed in the diction of sexual transgression. Naturally, this is subtext, not text. The quasi-sexual jealousy of this family that has been present from the son’s infancy finds itself perpetuated all the way into the last moments of the family triangle as such. As is typical of this case, though, nothing is certain: one suspects a latent sexuality in the father’s suspicion of latent sexuality. We will never find an answer to such an inquiry in this case, though. Silence again covers the scene: “He tortured his son to prove his incest; he killed him that it would be believed.”31 The father’s uncertainty has become our own. rr
simplicit y This uncertainty stands in direct contrast to the simplicity that the advocate seeks to attach to the mother’s cause. The mother’s advocate trumpets the directness of the mother in bringing the case and the innocent nature of the son who failed to suspect his father’s murderous designs (simpliciter, simplicitas). In the latter instance the son’s failure to fear is even defined as being characteristic of “integrity” (integritas), which is itself a semi-sexual notion. Sexual simplicity is the cornerstone of the mother’s defence and her advocate invokes various versions of simplicitas in championing her. Indeed for his finale the advocate speaks in the mother’s voice and commands us to hear her “simple sorrow.”32 Without a simple view of human relations, the world dissolves into suspicions of incest that, in the harm they produce, are nearly as bad as actual incestuous acts. One longs for simplicity.33 Moreover, 29 30 31 32 33
Note the triple adverbs and the doubled coram in DM 18.4: Haec sunt, iudices, quae mater fecit secure, simpliciter, palam, coram marito, coram ciuitate. Compare Seneca Controversiae 7.14. torsit filium, ut probaretur incestum; occidit, ut crederetur. DM 18.4. audi, quid misera simplicissimo dolore proclamet. DM 18.17. Note the superlative simplicity of this moment. prope est ab incesto timere, ne fiat. malo simplicitatem quae non uereatur infamiam . . . DM 18.10.
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simplicity provides its own defence. If the mother and son had had a tryst, they would have hidden their affection rather than flaunting it: nefas is not so simple.34 The love felt within the family must be simple. It also is public and open. Therefore this ideal definition of family relations proffered by the mother’s advocate can be readily used to translate the court and spectators into a new quasi-family. “Occidi; contenta esse debet incerto.” interrogari nunc te, marite, credis a matre sola? causas mortis illius reposcit sollicitudo generis humani: stant circa liberos attoniti parentes, horret inuicem se caritas fraterna complecti, rupta est illa osculorum inter soceros generosque simplicitas. quousque nos cum silentii tui interpretatione committis? “I killed him; she should be satisfied in her uncertainty.” Husband, do you think that you are now questioned by a mother alone? Concerned, the human race demands to know the reason for the killing. Parents stand stunned around their children; brotherly affection dreads mutual embrace; simple kisses between in-laws are a thing of the past. How far do you make us go in interpreting your silence? (DM 18.15.)
The translation is idiomatic, but a closer analysis of the implications and ambiguities of this passage will provide a variety of complicated observations about this “simple” situation. All of mankind, the genus humanum, seeks to have the silence removed and the mystery revealed. Humanity, though, consists not of a mere collection of human beings. Humanity is broken up into familial subdivisions, parents and children, brothers, and in-laws.35 For all the talk of the “simplicity” of mother and son, every sign that greets the reader is doubled and duplicitous. In this declamation statements of the stamp “this is simple” need to be read much like the famous paradox “I am lying.”36 Nothing can be simple any longer. Simplicity demands that amare have only one translation; and in so demanding simplicity demands as well that amare be divided against itself into amare and adamare. The one is the love within the family, the other is the love that destroys family. Yet one cannot save simple love by doubling it. Nor can one read this declamation by simply asking the question of how the mother felt about the son or the 34 35
36
See DM 18.7: non est nefandorum ista simplicitas. da, ut sit haec inter matrem ac filium conscientia; parcent osculis palam, abstinebunt coram patre complexibus. . . . For the sollicitudo part of sollicitudo generis humani, compare DM 18.10: “Reputation is not so dear that a mother should love her son anxious about her reputation for chastity” (tanti fama non est, ut amet filium mater sollicitudine pudicae). On lying as a point where one can see the distinction between the subject and his unconscious, see Lacan 1988a: 194.
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son about the mother. Rather the father is always a necessary third party. His silent presence both before and after the torture structures the scenes of suspected incest in each instance. Silent, he drives a mother into her son’s arms. Silent after the murder, he forces her to again be satisfied with an uncertain (incerto) relationship to her son. The torture and the interrogation produced words bracketed – embraced, even – by two profound silences. In repeating both torture and interrogation this declamation is condemned to repeat the same gesture: a silence has preceded the day in court and a silence will no doubt succeed it. No matter what the father says now, if even he says anything, duplicitous suspicions of incest will invariably arise.37 The speech of the mother’s advocate hopes to bring about a condition where the light of speech and inquiry will have washed over the whole of the matter. One will finally know all: the audience of parents and children will directly apprehend (coram) the truth of this family’s love. Speech’s task is to make the world simple all over again. But the words that speech would employ to achieve its aim cannot be simple. They are inherently double, and they are doubled by the structuring structure of paternal silence that subtends the realm of words. This phrase may sound somewhat grand, but it is a point well worth establishing for we are seeking the nature of the father’s silent law. Consider for a moment the protest from the mother’s side that the “sanctity of the name father has been destroyed” (consumpta est paterni nominis religio).38 First one notes the underlying thesis: a father is holy. If the religio has indeed been used up, the father abolishes his own title as soon as he imagines the disruption of the erotic economy of the house over which he is head. A father is a sacred thing, and he cannot both torture and be silent.39 Yet within the thematics of the declamation as a whole, the distinction between silence and speech has long since been eroded. For that matter, the idea of torture is itself confused. Silence is cruel, torture elicits speech. But in either version, can one trust in either the speech or the silence? The father is not even properly silent. Instead the father’s silence is ever accompanied by a second level of speech, namely rumor. Against the public and avowed speech of the courtroom or even against the “simple” public outings of mother and son one opposes a second order of discourse that speaks without being nameable and is eloquently silent in the person of the 37
38
The father’s speech notes that one can no longer simply believe what he says. See DM 19.11 and DM 19.14–15. Highlights include “I can no longer be believed at all” (ablata est mihi omnium uerborum fides; DM 19.11) and “Aren’t you afraid that, forced to speak, I will come up with a pack of fictions and lies?” (ita non times, ne coactus loqui multa fingam, multa componam? DM 19.14). 39 eligas utrum uoles: aut tormenta damnes necesse est aut silentium. DM 18.14. DM 18.14.
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father.40 In this house the two orders of speech can never again be aligned for there has been a split within amare and everything else has fallen into two after this first break. The symbol for love, then, is a broken token whose two halves may no longer be united. In the wake of this split, other signs begin to flow far too swiftly and uncontrollably. The wreckage produced by this confusion can still be found in the mother’s own defence. For no sooner does her advocate draw the distinction between maternal amare and illicit adamare, than the gulf between the two closes up again. This is another instance where the advocate’s advocacy reveals more than it necessarily intends. Or, rather, it exposes the extent to which the father’s paranoid idiom is the one in which the case must be spoken no matter how hard one tries to evade his language and dialect. Me quidem, marite, si quis interroget, omnes matres liberos suos, tamquam adamauerint, amant. uidebis oculos numquam a facie uultuque deflectere, comere caput habitumque componere; suspirare cum recesserit, exultare, cum uenerit, conserere manus, pendere ceruicibus, non o<s>culis, non conloquiis, non praesentiae uoluptate satiari. hoc est ergo tam nefanda suspicione saeuissimum: incestum non potest fingi, nisi de optima matre. execrarer mehercules, iudices, si crimen istud clarius obiecisset filio pater, si usque ad uerborum processisset amentiam. If someone asked my opinion, husband, all mothers love their children (amant) as if they had fallen passionately in love with them (adamuerint). You will note that they never turn their eyes from their faces. They arrange their hair and their clothes. They sigh when their children leave; they rejoice when they arrive. They lock their hands together and hang from their necks. They are not satisfied with kisses, colloquies, or the delight of the child’s presence. So this is the summit of savagery in such a horrible suspicion: you can only imagine the incest of a superlative mother. I would, by god, curse the man, judges, if the father had been clearer in his accusation, if he had gone all the way to the madness of speaking those words. (DM 18.10.)
The father’s suspicions are repeated like a mantra: “He was a looker (speciosus fuit).”41 The mother’s defence consists in showing how all sons are beautiful and how all mothers are madly in love with them. For the first half of the proposition, see DM 18.9: “Children, husband, no children are not loved with one’s eyes; a mother is not held by a mouth or a face. But a mother sees some beauty beyond the human.”42 The second notion, that all mothers 40 41 42
The father himself cleverly starts from this very point as he simultaneously violates his silence and begins to give it its words: “My silence can’t keep quiet.” (tacere non potest silentium meum; DM 19.1) DM 18.9. liberi, marite, liberi non amantur oculis, non complectitur mater ore, non uultu, sed est in filio matri nescio quid homine formosius.
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passionately love their sons, is demonstrated by the longer citation above. It is brought out, though, by the figure of an interrogation: “If someone asked me.” But this is the very question the father was asking: “What goes on between mother and son?” The scene of torture interrogated the son, and the case has metaphorically interrogated both father and mother. Now the advocate too enters the lists of those from whom a confession of incestuous desire both will and will not be extracted. Yes, it’s true, there is no real distinction between amare and adamare. But then again, there is. The better a mother is, the more she loves, the worse she might be, the more vile she can seem. The advocate’s description of maternal affect is drawn straight from the diction of erotic verse. We see sighs, grasping, glances. It’s clear to a fool that mothers and sons are in love, but only a madman utters the word (uerborum amentia). In effect, the father has seen that the emperor had no clothes, but it is his own empire that stands to be lost should he speak the truth. And, ironically, he extracts a confession from the advocate by torturing and interrogating the mother’s counsel with his own silence. By not speaking the madness of incest the father forces others to proclaim incestuous desire. One would curse the man if he came out and said what he means. But in not saying incest, he says it just the same. And so the present contrafactual of the advocate’s construction hangs in the same limbo as the father’s silence. It is an address to that silence: “I am not speaking the reply to your failure to speak.” In whose name should we take the curse that is not uttered? Why not join it to the sanctity of the paternal name (paterni nominis religio)? “I would curse you in your own name if you said what it would be mad for your name to speak.” Yet a mad speech is emerging from the paternal silence, and this nothing has come to signify something so horrible that it threatens to ruin everything. The non-utterance of incestuous desire has already destroyed a child and broken the family. Now the two are husband and wife only, not also mother and father. This helps to sharpen the erotic idiom. The father has reduced the terms of discourse into his own chosen fundamental units, that is, the erotic ones. The crisis began when either the father imagined or the son enacted oedipality. The price for this sin ought to be castration and death. In the end, this is the coin in which the symbolic debt is paid, for the son has died. But the unthinkable has been thought and the unspeakable spoken. The father has had to perform an act that he ought properly to have merely silently threatened. The torture makes eloquent a speech nobody ever wanted to hear. Seen from this angle, it is a statement, not an inquiry. The torture
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declares, “You desire your mother, and I will destroy you for it.” In this torture we find a bitter parody of a so-called performative utterance for here the performance of the torture speaks a message that should have remained silent, and it enacts a punishment that is best left merely a threat. The homology between the torture and the case, though, means that the declamation itself replays for us that prior moment of failure and reparation. The most hidden moment is simultaneously the most manifest, and the case recapitulates the logic that led us into court. Yet this logic remains a lopsided way of thinking. There are not two sides to the issue in this case. The father has eliminated the other half. The advocate himself says this: “But you, you horrid, cruel man, you eliminate the other side (pars altera) of the question. You have made it so that the tortured son can no longer seem innocent.”43 One notes that the technical term pars altera is used. The mother’s advocate complains that the father has forged a broken declamation that always and only works according to the rules he instituted. The case then cannot but recapitulate the torture and the intractable problem of speech and silence. With the murder of his son the father has also made permanent his ambiguous and double mode of thought. Paradoxically, then, the father has rhetorically simplified things in eliminating the other side, but he does so only by forever banishing the simplicity of love. Everything resides within the paternal discourse, but this discourse is not itself a simple one. rrr
negation The moment that gets this paternal discourse started, though, is a seemingly simple question. The advocate says that the father, seeing mother and son together, asks himself: “I wonder, can she be in love (rogo, numquid adamauit)?”44 With its numquid the question “expects” a negative answer; but, tellingly, the father cannot answer the question for himself in the negative. One even comes to wonder if this particular question can ever “simply” be answered in the negative as its very expression immediately doubles love and then life. The father’s answer to the question to which one must say “no” is “yes.” He has affirmed the unaffirmable. He has made positive a primary act of negation. 43 44
at tu, nefande, crudelis, tollis quaestionis alteram partem: efficis, ne possit amplius innocens esse, qui tortus est. DM 18.13. DM 18.7.
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The case itself tells us that we cannot be satisfied with any statement like “I killed; you ought to be content with the uncertainty” (occidi; contenta esse debet incerto; 18.15). The problem with this killing is precisely its permanent inscription of uncertainty. But this uncertainty has its uses and advantages for the text proper. We find that the inability to negate the fantasy of the incest provides the force that ultimately drives the highly mobile secondary fantasies of this declamation as a whole. The prospect of incest has been permanently affirmed by the father’s act. Now there will be no negating the possibility of the crime. First there is his silence; then one wonders if even his declarations might be believed. To resume the long suspended analogy between the declamation and the dream, we can compare Freud’s remark that “‘No’ seems not to exist so far as dreams are concerned.”45 This observation corresponds to the remark in the essay on negation to the effect that “in analysis we never discover a ‘No’ in the unconscious.”46 The father’s intervention into the dreamy workings of the declamatory scene secures for the text as a whole the inability to formulate a negative.47 This father’s violent declaration that, “No, a son may not desire his mother” is indeed a negation, but it contains within it the seeds for the permanent affirmation of a logic of desire that will constantly cycle around that first negative declaration. The father has ensured that all parties shall henceforth have an “uncertain” relationship to language. The protean quality of amare is just the beginning. In its train there follows an endless series of confusions about who is torturing, who is investigating, who watches, and who knows. This father as he sliced into his son produced two other fundamental cuts. First he has reinstalled the symbol as such. The father has broken the relationship between the word and the thing, between signifier and signified. The father has guaranteed the endless circulation of more rumor and fama; he has even produced the causa as well. But none of these acts of speaking can ever come to an end or establish the truth of the thing or fix a true word to an actual fact. And the mother can never control the mobile universe of paternal symbols. With his fertile silence this particular father has laid out a clever trap for all who would attack him and his symbols. On the other hand, his gambit appears all too familiar and commonplace when one compares it with the remarks of Lacan: 45 46 47
Freud 1955: 318. Freud 1963a: 217. Both this essay and this passage will be discussed in more detail shortly. See Lacan on the specifically rhetorical quality of the elaboration and interpretation of the dream in Freud (Lacan 1977a: 58). Compare Lacan 1998: 12 on the profound links between psychoanalysis and the analysis of language itself.
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[I] argue, as necessary to any articulation of analytic phenomena, for the notion of the signifier, in the sense in which it is opposed to that of the signified in modern linguistic analysis . . . Conversely, it is Freud’s discovery that gives the opposition of signifier to signified the full weight which it should imply: namely, that the signifier has an active function in determining the effects in which the signifiable appears as submitting to its mark, becoming through that passion the signified. This passion of the signifier then becomes a new dimension of the human condition, in that it is not only man who speaks, but in man and through man that it [c¸a] speaks.48
Lacan claims that Freud complements linguistic theory by adding to it his chief discovery, namely the unconscious. The unconscious is, for Lacan, structured like a language; and, in this passage, the “it” that speaks is the ¸ca more familiar to students of Freud as the id of the unconscious. The signifier, then, and the dimension of the human condition in which it travels can only be fully understood by way of appeal to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, though, disappropriates man from himself by arguing that his unconscious is not his own, that it obeys the trans-individual logic of the sign.49 This is all well and good: with Lacan we can see the stakes of this sort of reading of the declamation. We can see how the contents of the text offer us more than an opportunity to observe the workings of an authorial ego churning out some unseemly Latin prose. However, we can go even further: this specific declamation engages directly with the sort of issues that preoccupy Lacan’s own project. This declamation argues for a relationship to language that requires that something other than the ego should always also be speaking. One hears not just from the ego, but from also the id. The oedipal crisis and the father’s role in it have produced the universe of signs in these declamations as Lacanian signs, as trans-individual and unappropriable. And, it’s all the father’s fault. Or, to put this idea in Lacanian idiom, one needs to look at the meaning of the paternal phallus. Signification is a product of the phallus, of its presence and absence: For it is to this signified [the phallus] that it is given to designate as a whole the effect of there being a signified, inasmuch as it conditions any such effect by its presence as signifier.50 48 49
50
Lacan 1983: 78. Lacan 1977a: 47: “The unconscious is that part of the concrete discourse, in so far as it is transindividual, that is not at the disposal of the subject in re-establishing the continuity of his conscious discourse.” Lacan 1983: 80.
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And, as Lacan argues shortly thereafter: All of these propositions merely veil over the fact that the phallus can only play its role as veiled, that is, as in itself the sign of the latency with which everything signifiable is struck as soon as it is raised (aufgehoben) to the function of signifier. The phallus is the signifier of the Aufhebung itself which it inaugurates (initiates) by its own disappearance.51
The Lacanian phallus is both present as the guarantor of signification and absent in that same moment of signification. It is the latent notion that enables all of the others. It disappears as it enables the appearance of everything else. In the idiom of the incest declamations, though, we can translate this fecund latency into the paternal silence that begets all of the other variety of speech. The father has absolute authority, but his motives and reasoning remain permanently veiled. The father in killing his son has installed himself as the site from which meaning and knowledge emerges. Not only does he “really” know what the son said, but even without disclosing this knowledge, the failure to know what the father knows mobilizes the rest of the world around him. In fact, as the father will argue, he has killed so that he can remain silent. That is, the murder’s prime motive is to fabricate a veil of obscurity. Accordingly the father also puts a unique spin on the relationship between torture and truth. The truth is that something needs to go unknown and to remain hidden.52 Thus there is indeed a holy mystery surrounding the paterni nominis religio. The father is the unmoved mover whose invisible hand is everywhere to be seen beneath the world of phenomena. The very negativity of the paternal silence marks the rest of discourse with its constitutive disappearance. That is, the other speeches rise into being out of this negative function by which they are indelibly marked. This raising up (Aufgehebung) transcends, cancels, and annuls as well, but the products of this negation of a negation53 remain fundamentally bound to the dialectical movement of their own emergence. A father’s name lies at the bottom of it all. We have moved from the father’s affirmation and his strange “yes” (Bejahung) spoken to the idea of incest into a consideration of negation 51 52
53
Lacan 1983: 82. Contrast DuBois 1991: 123–40 who resumes Heidegger’s commentary on the relationship between the l»gov of philosophy and the uncovering of the hidden in lqeia, “truth” (Heidegger 1962: 262–69; compare 1962: 56–57). The father insists that the reasonable relationship to incest and/or the suspicion of incest is hiding the very truth that demands disclosure according to the dictates of l»gov both as reason and as forensic discourse. Compare Hyppolite 1988: 293.
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(Verneinung). This analytical movement, though, mirrors the shifts in logical register within the text itself. The father’s affirmation arises at the level of the unconscious or the ¸ca where one does not find negation. Yet this first positive moment meets with a thoroughgoing negative reaction. Everything stamped by the symbolic machine that this “yes” drives comes out with the word “no” emblazoned upon it. Indeed even the first “positive” suspicion was itself expressed at the level of conscious discourse by a false negative: numquid . . . However there can be no authoritative “no” here since torture turns every answer into a positive confession.54 Again, the father’s question is the question: “I wonder, was she in love?” (rogo, numquid adamauit?). This tortuous question addressed to himself forms the nucleus of all of the subsequent questionings addressed from one party to another. Each question “expects” the negative and is phrased negatively, but all are logically and grammatically subordinated to a paternal, “Yes, I am asking . . .” Each subsequent question has to traverse the same trajectory wherein the idea of Oedipal desire is entertained, but then negated. All mothers love as if they are madly in love; but they aren’t. She embraced her son; but she didn’t love him like a husband. Or, at another level, “Yes, I am asking you, the son didn’t confess to anything did he?” For this is the condition of the case itself, the Latin version being: interrogo, ‘numquid confessus est?’ There is an expansion of the first rogare where the father questions himself into a second version that involves another party: rogare becomes interrogare, the questioning of one person by another. And indeed this interrogare ultimately will itself get repeated until it eventually involves a whole civic audience of parents and children. Briefly, I am arguing that this entire family unit is characterized by a desire that has been repressed (verdr¨angt). This repressed thought returns, inevitably, by way of a negated expression of the same thought.55 Freud’s own definition of repression offers two fundamental points to be borne in mind, first that repression withholds something from consciousness, and, secondly but more basically, that repression is in fact the marker of the emergence of the distinction between the two orders: Psychoanalytic experience . . . forces us to the conclusion that repression is not a defence-mechanism present from the very beginning, and that it cannot occur until a sharp distinction has been established between what is conscious and what is unconscious: that the essence of repression lies simply in the function of rejecting and keeping something out of consciousness.56 54 55 56
The advocate pursues this particular line of thought at DM 18.11. For repression and symptom-formation, see Freud 1963d: 111 and compare Freud 1911: 68. On the repressed eternally returning, see Lacan 1988a: 191–92. Freud 1963d: 105 (original emphasis).
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In other words, consciousness, and, for our purposes, public discourse, is a field whose structure is itself determined by a set of rejections. We acknowledge as true, real, and intended everything that has not been cast out of consciousness. And the first thing to get negated for both Freud and these declamations is the question of love. The notion of the necessity of repression and of return, however, is best brought out by Lacan. Here one sees that the opposition between conscious and the unconscious is not so simple, and that they are in a constant state of non-communication. But this negativity or non-communicating is the precondition for communication in general: No doubt something which isn’t expressed doesn’t exist. But the repressed is always there, insisting, demanding to be. The fundamental relation of man to this symbolic order is very precisely what founds the symbolic order itself – the relation of non-being to being. What insists on being satisfied can only be satisfied in recognition. The end of the symbolic process is that non-being came to be, because it has spoken.57
The father’s suspicions of incest and his silence ground the rest of the symbols of this world by way of forcing into being something that does not exist. His silence makes spoken the unspeakable. The repressed thought “amare is adamare” insists on coming into being. Indeed the father must ensure that others hear this message from his silent position. Negation is the means by which this movement between the orders is effected. The primordial “yes” of the unconscious has as its conscious counterpart a statement of the form “yes, it cannot be that . . .” (numquid ): Negation is a way of talking of what is repressed; indeed, it is actually a removal of the repression, though not, of course, an acceptance of what is repressed. . . . The result is a kind of intellectual acceptance of what is repressed, though in all essentials the repression persists.58
The declamations thus keep volubly not saying the same thought over and over again. And this thought, the unspeakable love, keeps on forcing its way to the fore in order to get not-spoken all over again. The father is speechless; and the speaker does all of his un-speaking for him. The process of negation raises up the repressed thought into a signifier of rejection, but this provisional acceptance of the notion of incest is by no means a conscious affirmation. Instead incest remains an object of purely intellectual sport entertained outside of the realm of affect. Indeed, this is the point: incest is made into a “thought” rather than an element of psychic life. As a thought it is then argued into a “mere thought,” an impossible fiction. Declamation 57
Lacan 1988b: 308.
58
Freud 1963a: 214.
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thus affords the ideal vehicle for expressing repressed ideas in general as it is such a pointedly “meaningless” genre. Though the advocate says it of rumor, one might argue the same for his own discourse: “The more people talk of incest, the more incredible it is.”59 Here it will be useful to recall that we need to think carefully about how not to read a declamation in its capacity of not-speaking. One might imagine, as the Latin itself says, that the father “knows” and that he in fact knows that the mother is innocent. His silence is really quite simple, then. This silence is actually an accusation made by a man who has no evidence and thereby needs to resort to slander. But why not just lie? The father could easily have said that the son said yes. If his proof rested only on the grounds of a confession his insinuations would be no weaker than they are now. In fact, they might even be stronger. No, the genius of the case lies in its premise. The father has been consigned to silence from the outset. The elaboration of this point expounds an entire archaeology of cognition that far exceeds the relatively humble premise of a husband and wife who have wound up in court. Even the “truth” of the charge is not particularly important. The most vital action of the case is the exploration of speech and silence in general, of silence as the precondition and possibility for speech. rrrr
foreclosure Well, such is a portion of the whole story. That is, here we have a portrait of the incest declamations as drawn from both the logic of the case’s own premise and its subsequent elaboration from the side of the mother who is confronted with the paternal silence. A major question remains to be answered, however. Namely, what can the father say for himself? Naturally the very idea of the father’s speech is itself a violation of the premise of the case. However a speech has been written for the father, and it is even performed in his own voice. In order to traverse the text of the nineteenth Major Declamation we will need not just to recall the intricacies of the preceding case, but also to ask still further questions of the function of the father. Despite the obvious and often clever connections with the mother’s speech, the father’s speech also evinces numerous unexpected divergences from the premise of the case and hence strange silences amidst the father’s 59
incestum tanto incredibilius est, quanto et de illo plures locuntur. DM 18.7.
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prolixity. The father opens his own speech with the notion that we all ought to be silent now.60 He blames the need for speech on a woman whose “passion was ever immoderate.”61 He blames the murder on an outburst (ardor) that has since passed.62 And he repeats the sentiment that “I am not silent because I killed my son; I killed him so that I could be silent.”63 With this idea the father expresses a notion for which I have myself been arguing, namely that the murder was not about discovering a truth but rather about making a certain state of affairs true in the world. The father reworks a variety of the themes from the prior declamation into the material of his own defence. Thus this declamation can consistently be found rewriting the one that precedes it. Ideas like “suffering” and the various forms of pati return. Naturally all of the play with speech and silence is still with us as well. Optics and spectatorship as found in coram are resumed and modified. Even simplicitas, rigor and rogo receive their fair share of attention. And after surveying the father’s redeployment of these themes I would like to focus on two key additions to the lexicon of this case, madness and felicity, furor and felicitas. The father asserts that his relationship to suffering in particular and to experience in general is more complicated than the mother’s. The father says time and again, “whatever this woman bewails, I both suffer and did.”64 The father sums up his own position by saying “People will say that you interrogate me because you know that I prefer to suffer everything (pati) rather than to speak.”65 His performance is not to speak. It is a performative silence, not a performative utterance. Here the father prides himself on his famous endurance (patientia),66 and it is implicitly contrasted with the failure (impatientia) of the mother who questions him.67 He says explicitly, “I loved my son not with kisses, not with weakness, not with tears, but with 60 61 62 63
64 65 66 67
debebatur quidem tristissimae orbitatis misero pudori, ut iam taceremus omnes; DM 19.1. mulier inmodici semper adfectus; DM 19.1. Notice again that ardor has too many meanings: its primary meaning will be “passion” in general, but the specific case of the passion of erotic love is included in the valence of the word. non quia occidi filium, taceo, sed occisus est, ut tacerem. Compare the more convoluted version of the same sentiment that ends the opening paragraph: “In my son’s case the two things are mutually exclusive, that I kill him and that I say why I did it (utrumque de filio fieri non potest, ut et occiderim et fatear, cur meruerit occidi).” quicquid, iudices, ista conplorat, et patior et feci. DM 19.2. 19.13 is virtually identical: ego tunc cuncta et passus sum pariter et feci. diceris ideo me interrogare, quia scias omnia me potius pati malle quam loqui. DM 19.8. quis ignorat, qua cuncta soleam ferre patientia? DM 19.8. On her impatientia see DM 19.2. Compare the ironic play of incontinence and speech in DM 19.10: quid ais, mater inpatiens? On the other hand, he praises her patientia for not interrupting the torture and murder of the son: laudo, iudices, patientiam matris. DM 19.4.
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vigor, sorrow, and endurance (patientia).”68 So both parents are lovers, only one loves cruelly. The contrast between patientia and impatientia is not a simple question of the gender of the quality’s possessor. The father himself is marked with impatientia. This is a man who brought suffering upon himself and his family because he could suffer no more. That there should be a thematic ambiguity surrounding patientia should come as no surprise, for it is a word whose own meanings confound any simple deployment in a text such as this. While patientia may mean “ability or willingness to endure,” it can also mean “submission to sexual intercourse.” Impatientia on the other hand is similarly doubled against itself. It may mean “inability or unwillingness to endure,” or it may signify “freedom from emotion, impassivity.” Thus, let us turn things around somewhat and focus on the secondary meanings. The prospect of illicit muliebria pati is countered by the husband effectively championing uirilia pati. The father accuses his wife of sexual patientia, and the mother accuses the father of emotional impatientia. The father also can be said to have an inability to endure sexual submission, an impatientia patientiae, that motivates the torture and killing of his son. Beyond this inferential account of the father’s odd relationship to “impatience,” what of the actual citations of the words in this text? Taking the second occurrence first, we find both lexical ambiguity and contradiction. The father claims that he did not suffer from impatientia: he did everything deliberately. Quanta tamen mihi fuit et in quaestione moderatio! non enim praecipiti raptus inpulsu exsilui repente, subito, nec captus dolore caeco inpatientiae meae uelox uulnus inflixi. non potest non ratione occidi filius, cum ante torquetur. dedi moras, spatium, tempus indulsi. How restrained I was when I questioned him! For I was not swept up by some headlong impulse; I didn’t spring at him unexpectedly, suddenly. Nor did I strike a swift wound seized by the blind sorrow of my impatientia. It’s impossible not to use reason when killing a son after torturing him. I delayed. I paused. I took my time. (DM 19.10.)
If we take this passage at its word, we could say that the father is not impatiens but patiens: he endures and he does, just like he said before. He is deliberate, not passionate. On the other hand, he is seemingly possessed of a profound impassivity (impatientia) if he can so methodically torture and 68
amaui filium meum, non osculis, non infirmitate, non lacrimis, sed uiribus, dolore, patientia. DM 19.4. Notice the non-engagement with the meaning of the phrase amaui filium meum from DM 18.3.
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kill his son.69 And yet we cannot take this passage at its word: the father may here talk about cold calculation, but this contradicts his statements elsewhere. The father himself earlier declared that reason (ratio) did not lead him to this murder, rather it was passion (ardor). The father has said this twice before and will repeat it again later. He claims that he suddenly attacked his son in a fit of rage. “That passion that once drove me against my son was consumed by its own savagery.”70 “Anyone who thinks that I did anything by design (consilio) is mistaken. Things unfolded according to an impulse and some unknown passion of the moment.”71 At a conscious level, then, the father argues that even he does not know (nescio). The real motivation of the deed has been lost. And if we look at the setting for this sudden fit of inexplicable rage, we can say of it that it is less the portrait of a real part of the house than it represents a psychic interior. That is, the scene is set in a space worthy of the House of Usher, and we are not looking inside your average Roman villa: “There is in my unfortunate house a secluded portion, separate and sunk in shadow. It is a sad place to approach and suited for every sort of outrage, a place in which even a father would dare to commit a crime.”72 The father next argues, in effect, that the unhappy spirit of the place led him to the assault on his son when the two “accidentally” met up there (inprouisus adueni). Something was rotten in the house: the house itself. Something was rotten in the house: the son’s relationship to the mother. Nothing was rotten in the father, though. He did not plan his crime/torture. Rumor, accident, the house, the son himself made him do it. The person who is most clearly mistaken in all of this is the father. This father cannot give a consistent version of his own state of mind at that moment. The father has in a sense gone mad, and his madness lies not in the answer he extracts from his son, but in the question itself. The father does not want to know the answer to his own question, and, if we trust his word – but this is impossible now for a variety of reasons – he really does not know the answer to the question “Was it love, or was it love?” (utrum amauisti an adamauisti?). Strikingly, the father claims that no question was 69 70 71 72
In this section of the text we learn that the father even throws out the notion of quaestio altogether. He is not asking, he is torturing with an eye to murder. ardor ille, qui me modo inpegit in filium, ipsa sui immanitate consumptus est. DM 19.1. fallitur, quisquis me putat quicquam fecisse consilio: impetus ac temporis ipsius nescio quis ardor explicuit. DM 19.3. Compare to these two passages the furor of DM 19.15. est in miseris penatibus pars remota, seposita, profunda tenebris, tristis accessu, omnibus apta flagitiis, et in qua audeat facere facinus et pater. DM 19.3. Notice as well that the “house” here is represented metonymously by the penates or household gods. This again points back to the “sanctity of the paternal name” as itself a would-be surrogate for fatherhood.
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asked, and all answers were refused. “Listen, wife, to a brief account of my real reason that the young man was killed in the inquiry. I was torturing him, not interrogating him.”73 The torture becomes purely punitive, no knowledge is either produced or disclosed here: Quaeris, cur nihil dixerit? quia non habuit, quod scire uellem, quod audire deberem. nihil aliud quaestio illa captauit quam silentium, quod praestare uita non poterat. Do you ask why he said nothing? Because he had nothing I wanted to know, nothing I ought to hear. That inquiry sought nothing but the silence which his life could not provide. (DM 19.12.)
The father has put another turn on the theme of torture and truth. The case itself tortures, but it does not produce true words. And the father tortures in order to produce silence. When one first hears of the torture in the premise of the case, though, one suspects just what the wife did, namely that the torture was modeled on the practice of torture in a judicial inquiry, that it was designed for “factfinding.” The father’s present silence in the face of the torturous inquiry that he is put to in court makes good a defect the son’s life itself had produced: there is nothing to be learned from the father. The father has nothing we want to know, nothing we ought to hear. Moreover, when the father staged his own torture/inquiry, he himself enforced silence upon his son. The scene with the son in the father’s declamation properly reveals nothing other than nothingness. The father has long since forced the son to not speak his non-message about incest. But the father knows a lot about this unknowable message the son was prevented from uttering. Though he repeatedly insists that the son said nothing nor was the son allowed to say anything, he nevertheless characterizes his son’s sins as unlike those of a son: “It was an unspeakable monstrosity.”74 Of course the secret was unspeakable for other reasons than its innate horror. The secret was forcibly produced as a thing not spoken; it was silenced. The son’s is a message to which conscious discourse has no access; it has been removed from the world of speech. And when this silenced message makes its non-return, even this is done in the negative: “He did not speak; and what he did not say was unspeakable.” The father 73 74
accipe, mulier, breuem ueramque rationem, cur in quaestione iuuenis occisus est: torquebam nec interrogabam. DM 19.12. nihil ille delinquebat, quomodo liberi solent. monstrum erat inenarrabile, quod nollem deprehendere, quod ferre non possem. DM 19.13.
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endures (pati) killing his son because he cannot endure (impatiens) hearing this unspeakable message. The father’s impatientia in this case, though, has already been prefigured by an earlier impatientia that both compliments this scene of torture and offers another clue. After the phrase, “I both did it and I suffered it” (et patior et feci), the father continues with the following exclamation: “O the mother’s conscience, happy in its ignorance, capable of questioning! A greater impatience, a greater passion burns me. I can’t tell why I killed my son, nor am I sorry I did it.”75 Almost every word here is either paradoxical on its face or else contradictory of some other portion of the father’s case. First conscientia is packed with ambiguity. Conscientia means knowledge, joint knowledge, or good or bad conscience as we understand it. In itself the word covers virtually every possibility for the mother’s own appreciation of the “truth” of the case without predisposing us to decide in any one direction. Check the box marked “All of the above.” But this knowledge is “happy in its ignorance” (felicem ignoratione). The virtue of the mother’s knowledge is its status as non-knowledge. But one can go even further with felicem than “happy.” If we entertain for a moment another aspect of “felicity” in Latin, namely the notion of fertility, we see here a knowledge pregnant in its ignorance. It is a knowledge rich in non-knowing as its ignorance produces more occasions for the circulation of the originary moment of silent symbolization. Furthermore, this ejaculatory address is not just made to the mother, it can also be said to be true of the father’s own condition. He too is happy in his ignorance, his knowledge is fertile in its non-knowing. He silenced the son and begat thereby a whole universe of symbols based on the refusal of the word amare. This Eros refused is pregnant with meaning, it is felix even as it weeps over the dead son. The father’s next sentence makes little sense at first glance, or, rather, it makes only a superficial sense. “A greater impatience, a greater passion burns me.” In themselves the words offer little difficulty, but how did we jump to this notion, and what are its full implications? From conscientia we suddenly move to impatientia and adfectus. The use of the comparative degree invites us to compare not just the father’s feelings to the mother’s but also the first noun to the second two as if they were all somehow commensurate. The mother’s ambiguous conscience, then, is translatable into impatience and passion. Well, in the idiom that has been used of the 75
felicem ignoratione conscientiam matris, quae sufficit interrogare! maior me inpatientia, maior urit adfectus. cur filium occiderim, indicare non possum, nec paenitet, quod occidi. DM 19.2.
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mother, this makes perfect sense. She is conscious, of course, of the passion of her love for her son. Perhaps she is merely aware of it; perhaps it is a knowledge shared with her son; perhaps she feels guilty about it. She is also conscious that she can no longer endure the silence of the husband and its slanderous implications. And maybe she is conscious that she shares a sexual experience (patientia) with her son. The father’s sentiment, then, makes sense only if one compares him to the mother: “I too am impatient, I too feel passion, only more so than you do.” The word missing here is again amare. “I am conscious of love. I am impatient of love.” And both of these refused statements have double meanings. There is no simplicitas here. Later the father says that he loves with uiribus, dolore, patientia.76 And, frankly, it is easy to see his point. Each of these harsh terms replaces love as kindness with love as punishment. In the present passage, though, the father continues: “I can’t tell why I killed my son, nor am I sorry I did it.” Putting all of the pieces together, we see that the father has said, “I love him more than you; I killed him; I am pleased; let this be left in silence.” The father’s love is ultimately too impatient of its own impatientia. His love returns to the orbit of control and self-control when violence, sorrow, and suffering are applied to it. And these three terms have themselves become ciphers for silence. Love must be silenced. The father not only silences his son by torturing him into not saying amo, but he also in so doing prevents amo from emerging from his own lips. As his passion burns himself beyond all others, he cures it by literally burning his own son. The father can’t speak, but he enforced silence first upon his son. He is not sorry that he killed his son: he has what he wanted, the confession was not heard. “Before he could lie, I killed him.”77 Or perhaps he is saying instead, “Before he could tell the truth, before he could say the word I myself could neither say nor hear, I killed him.” From the same scene of murder, notice what the father cries out to his son: “Madman, lunatic, silence!” (‘furiose, demens, tace!’ ).78 Again, who is mad, and who silent? To whom does the father address his command? Who felt the ardor and who the adfectus?79 76 77
78 79
DM 19.4. antequam mentiretur, occidi. DM 19.15. Note also the father’s description of the son’s silence as he killed him: “By god, his stubbornness and his patientia were amazing. Though he was tortured at home by his father, he did not call upon his mother (dii inmortales, quae contumacia, quae fuit illa patientia, cum domi torqueretur a patre, non inuocare matrem! DM 19.4).” DM 19.15. The father, despite his ardor and the arguments pertaining to it above, has already denied the implications of these questions in DM 19.5: filium pater non demens, non insanus occidi.
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Before detailing the problem of truth and fiction relative to the whole of the father’s speech, before, that is, asking if it is not the father who tells now a deadly lie about love or the lack thereof with both his speech and his silence, let us first look into what the father says about this sinful son. For hitherto I have failed to mention a rather striking point about the father’s case: he never directly accuses his son of incest. Perhaps once or twice he alludes to it, but when he actually spells out why he killed the son, the premise of the case, the rumor of incest, has disappeared. Early on in his speech,80 the father claims that the house was happy so long as the city said of it only that they had a beautiful boy. But then the boy grew up, and he became haughty and arrogant (superbus atque adrogans). He turned into a sensualist who refused to pursue public honors in favor of his private pleasures. Rumors flourished about him. He seldom went out. He avoided his father. The father sums up the situation thus: “I dared not question him (interrogare); but I couldn’t feign ignorance.”81 Here he will not even properly formulate the precursor to the final interrogation. There are rumors; the son looks good; sexual suspicions are in the air. But the father makes no mention of the incest. The father covers this ground again in the middle of his speech yet still refuses to address the premise of the speech, “A son suspected of incest with his mother”, infamis in matrem. In a “confessional” outburst the father reveals his motives. We shall soon ask ourselves about the truth of any such confessions from a variety of standpoints. But for now we will try once again to take the father at his word: Si tamen utique, mater, uis scire causas, breuiter audi. prospiciebam miser in grande quandoque facinus prorupturum, quod otio uitam, quod desidem domi perdebat aetatem. non peregrinationibus excolere mentem, non experiri militiam, non temptare maria, non rura colere, non administrare rem publicam, non ducere uolebat uxorem. praeterea traxerat ex frequentibus castigationibus taedium patris, et in execrationem mei conscientia, quia non emendabatur, exarserat. timebat occursus, non audebat adire conloquia; oscula conuictusque fugiebat. breuiter perditissimae mentis definienda mensura est: oderat me filius et timebat. Mother, if you really must know why I did it, hear my reasons in brief. I saw to my sorrow that he was bound to break out into some great crime. He wasted his life in leisure. He squandered his time idle at home. He didn’t cultivate his mind with foreign travel; he missed out on soldiering; he avoided the sea; he wouldn’t farm; he wouldn’t touch politics; he refused to take a wife. Also he had come to dislike 80 81
See DM 19.2–3. interrogare non audebam, dissimulare non poteram. DM 19.3. The surrounding passage paints a vivid portrait of a man driven into a blind fury by the rumors.
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his father because of my constant reproaches. He was provoked to actual curses of me because of his bad conscience since he never righted his ways. He feared to meet up with me; he dared not come and talk to me; he fled my kisses and my company. One may quickly take the measure of his totally depraved mind: my son hated and feared me. (DM 19.9.)
After this summary of his son’s vices, the father, in effect, concludes, “And so I killed him.” But what has the son done to deserve death? Of course a father technically has the right to kill his son at any time and for any reason. And, even though few Roman fathers ever really were so capricious, in declamation one perhaps is allowed to imagine a father of such an extreme stamp. Yet even for a declamation, this father seems particularly harsh and monstrous. The son was an idler: see Cicero’s Pro Caelio on how to excuse this. Or look to Terence’s Adelphoe for models both of severity and of indulgence. The punishment for youthful sloth at Rome is not death. Even in declamation the proper course is to disown (abdicare) such a youth.82 Furthermore, the father has cooked up his fantasies of crime without any real evidence: “I could see a criminal outbreak coming . . .” Why? “Because (quod . . . quod . . .) he was lazy.” The explanation is no explanation. The transgressions are all failures to act, not actions. The son is allegedly destined to commit a crime because he has never done anything: he doesn’t travel, he is unmarried, etc. Much as the father is obsessed with a word that was about to be said, so also is he fixated on a deed that was about to happen but never actually took place.83 Of course later on the father does occasionally intimate that the subject of the case is, after all, incest. For example, he says, “She asks me what he said when I tortured him, as if she didn’t know! She doesn’t believe that I didn’t learn anything, as if she knows what he would have said!”84 Such moments, though, are more like slips of the tongue for the father. His long and deliberate passages expounding the crime write incest out of the case. And even in a remark like this one, the sin is alluded to quite obliquely. That is, what specific sin does the mother already know about? If we hadn’t read the title of the work, we would not be likely to guess incest. Get rid 82
83
84
See, for example, Seneca, Controversiae 3.3; Calpurnius Flaccus, Declamationes 30; and Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 290. Compare Bonner 1949: 101–03 on what “disinheritance” signifies relative to actual Roman practices. See DM 19.15 where the son in his agonies is about to gasp out something and the father strikes him down before anything can be said: ille, quo redditur anima, singultus fuit similis exclamaturo nescio quid, quod et tu fortassis audires. occupaui, fateor, et aduocatis, quas iam consumpseram, uiribus, manibus, telis totoque corpore pariter adnisus, antequam mentiretur, occidi. quid iuuenis in tormentis dixerit, tamquam ignoret, interrogat; nihil comperisse non credit, tamquam sciat, quid dixerit! DM 19.10.
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of DM 18 and the strip off the title from DM 19, and one would be hard pressed to say what exactly the son was supposed to have done. In this long passage about why the son had to die, though, one notices two markers of familial affection, one negative and one positive. First, the son has no wife. So far as an incest charge goes, we can translate this into a tactless “because he already had one.” Next, he refused his father’s kisses. We have, then, two negative propositions: “My son doesn’t kiss his wife” and “My son doesn’t kiss me.” The missing affirmative statement is, of course, “My son kisses my wife.” Perhaps also one should entertain, “I wish my son kissed me.” Such a hole in the father’s thinking leads him to the psychotic proposition that he was not even abusing his son when he tortured him; rather, he was assailing rumor. “Do you think I am torturing my son? I’m making the people look bad. I feel that with those blows I mangle fama, with those flames I rail against rumor.”85 He punishes rumor by abusing his son, but he cannot bring himself to express the contents of the rumor. Yet the rumor had said things about mother and son, about the whole family, father included. The father labors to stun the city into blushing,86 but he is the one who can’t even blush, for he refuses to hear the son’s words. The mother said amaui and then tried to negotiate its defiles. The father cannot say this word, and he cannot bear to hear it. When he does speak of his own love, this happens only in the context of murderousness; and he concludes that “killing a son is a sign of greater attachment than is championing him.”87 The father does not repress and then negate. Instead the father refuses. The father’s refusal of the case proper should not be taken lightly. We have two speeches here, one that follows the rules of the declamatory game and that addresses itself to defending a mother against a silent father. The second speech, though, cannot bring itself to engage with its own founding moment. Where the mother struggled, the father fails. Not only is he silent as a matter of principle, but he is also silent because he truly cannot speak the contents of this case. The father has said, and rightly, “my silence cannot keep quiet” (non potest tacere silentium meum).88 He also ought to add, “my words cannot speak” (non possunt dicere uerba mea). And whatever he says is itself designed to produce silence and not to 85 86 87
88
torquere me filium putas? inuidiam facio populo: uideor mihi illis uerberibus lacerare famam, illis ignibus increpare rumorem. DM 19.9. ut ciuitas stupeat, ut erubescat. DM 19.8. illud est in patribus usque ad parricidium terribile, quod amant, quod succurrunt, quod sibi uidentur aliter non posse misereri. non est, quod uos ab aestimatione malorum meorum mollior sexus abducat; maioris adfectus est filium occidere quam uindicare. DM 19.5. DM 19.2.
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reveal truth. Throughout the whole the father reveals that the reasons for his silence (silentii causas) are the reasons for the murder,89 that they are the reasons for the case as a whole (causae causas). rrrrr
p sychotic The father will never be able to “solve” the problem of the declamation. Indeed the point of these two pieces seems to be to render incest an insoluble problem. Much as the mother could not segregate amare from adamare because of the father, the father cannot get beyond the question of love in general and incest in particular because of his impossible relationship to language. All truth becomes marked as fictive. And, on the other side, silence is an artifact designed to prevent the true word from emerging. The same word causes the two declamations to founder: love. “What is it to be a father?”90 First, it means the incest taboo; it means a son may not sleep with his mother. This father, though, cannot even formulate the question correctly. The father does not speak the taboo, he instead commits an act that guarantees that his son will not sleep with his wife. Nevertheless, in so doing he also erases his own paternity, for he is, properly speaking, no longer a father. The father himself, though, says just the opposite of this: “After my only son’s death I became a father again” (post exitum unici reuertor in patrem).91 Such a warped statement comes to make a half-sense when compared to the charge that the youth “preferred to play the beauty among us rather than the son.”92 The father gets his son back by destroying the erotic aspect of the young man. Of course he also loses his son in the same moment. The boy has become a wastrel. Murder and silence for that? Of course not. The father is killing desire; or, rather, he attempts to kill it. The father’s difficulties exceed the complexities of the mother’s troubles. She is trapped in a world where the repressed constantly returns. The silence of the father traps her own words in his logic of language where there is a fundamental ambiguity that has attached itself to every sign. For the father the torture, the questions, and the silence of the prelude also return in the case as well. But the father’s speech remains frozen at a prior moment. For the mother denials of love only affirmed love. For the father there is no love to deny. 89 90 91
Think again of DM 19.9: si tamen utique, mater, uis scire causas, breuiter audi. Lacan says of this question: “Observez que si c’est l`a un probl`eme pour chaque n´evros´e, c’est aussi un probl`eme pour chaque non-n´evros´e dans le cours de son exp´erience infantile” (Lacan 1994: 205). 92 inter nos formosum malebat agere quam filium; DM 19.9. DM 19.11.
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This refusal of the word love lies much closer to the psychoanalytic problem of foreclosure (Verwerfung) than it is to repression or negation.93 This foreclosure rejects something in such a manner as to bar access to it. What is refused does not become a symbol, and the subject literally knows nothing about what has been lost even at an unconscious level. If the repressed is an idea gone underground, the foreclosed is an idea that is just plain gone. The refusal does have consequences. In the analytic version Verwerfung produces psychotic hallucinations; and what is rejected returns from without. One can thus in a sense compare the return of the repressed to foreclosure in as much as the former is internal to the subject while foreclosure involves an externalized experience.94 A neurotic feels an inexplicable dread; a psychotic is persecuted by disembodied voices. The father’s own experiences in this case can, I believe, be best compared to psychotic delusions. This is a bold proposition, and it is not designed to explain every detail of the speech. Such an analogy allows us to begin to confront squarely and then subsequently to labor to work through the most incoherent aspects of the father’s argument. Psychosis also offers a rubric within which to understand the father’s morbid fantasy of lashing rumor when he is actually beating his son.95 The father is persecuted by voices whose words he cannot hear or name, and he reacts to this constant barrage of speech with a violent interrogation designed to silence the son, the son’s beauty, and then the father himself. But the words only return: people keep on talking about the motive for his silence and, worse still, the mother brings the case to court. Himself girt by Furies (senex furiis monstrosae feritatis accinctus),96 he cries out to his son, “Madman (furiose), lunatic, silence!” Yet the madness is the father’s, and he vainly attempts to bring silence to the scene. He beats his son, but he sees himself striking rumor. The hole in his own world of symbols, though, leaves him blind to the fact that he is beating his own symptom, that both the word that comes back from without and the word that he still cannot hear is a word he has lost, not one his son has enacted. While one must be careful not to diagnose the father as suffering from actual psychosis – for he remains, after all, a literary fiction – it is nevertheless useful to see the psychotic structure of his speech. As soon as the declaimer buys into the premise of the speech, he immediately loses his facility with 93 94
95
On foreclosure, see Lacan 1977b: 200–01 and Lacan 1993: 12–13 and 321. The technical Lacanian formulation involves the assertion that “whatever is refused in the symbolic order, in the sense of Verwerfung, reappears in the real” (Lacan 1993: 13). Compare Freud 1911: 71: “[W]hat was abolished internally returns from without.” 96 DM 19.15. See again DM 19.9.
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words. The declamation itself is in many ways quite eloquent and shows innumerable signs of rhetorical polish, yet despite these tropes and a rather clever emplotment, the speech nevertheless labors to say what, at a bare minimum, it must say: “A son was accused of incest . . .”97 Happy the consciousness that remains ignorant (felicem ignoratione conscientiam). This is the mother’s condition, though, not the father’s. The father knows, but he cannot know. He refuses to know. The ironies of speech and silence that he inflicts upon the world make the symbol mobile, but it also makes his own position qua father untenable. When he asks himself as a father, “Am I my own name?” the answer that comes back to him is spoken in the language of madness.98 He tells his wife that she can only understand if she were to stand in his place, torturing their son.99 Perhaps he is right: the position of father is a site fertile in meaning, but written as silent, ignorant, and unknowable. And just as this paternal position is unknowable when looked at from outside, so too is meaning meaningless from the inside. One can imagine what it is like to speak from the site of the absolute authority of the paternal position within the symbolic structure of the world, but one can never actually live within this position.100 Thus one can at best play the father but never finally be the father. This is an important message for reading declamation in general. The father concludes with the proposal that he and the mother retreat together back into the house and into that room of torture and murder. He would put a close to the public inquiry that the mother had so carefully orchestrated for the son’s cause. Instead the father offers her a strange solace that parodically duplicates her own statements of her affection for her son. For while she once said that she delighted in grooming her child and arranging his hair,101 the father repeats this vocabulary and says, “let someone offer an image (imaginem) of our slain son; let him put in the mother’s lap those clothes with which the poor woman herself dressed him.”102 Then husband and wife will share silence and mutual confessions.103 This can only happen, though, when the son has become an image of himself. In a 97 98
99 100 101 102 103
Compare Miller 1996: 245 on the dead-end of foreclosed psychotic speech as opposed to the possibilities of ultimate affirmation via neurotic repression. The father has also enacted the inverse of the murder of the father performed by the “primal horde” from Freud’s Totem and Taboo. As Lacan punningly glosses the scene, the murderers conclude, “ce n’est pas – tu es celui que tu es, mais tu es celui qui tuais” (Lacan 1994: 211). DM 19.15. In Lacanian terms, the absolute Other is a site fit only for God and/or Death, and it is a position to which one only has access indirectly and through the so-called imaginary. DM 18.10. porrigat aliquis imaginem iuuenis occisi, ponat in sinu matris illas uestes, quibus ipsa iuuenem misera comebat. DM 19.16. ibi aut tacebimus pariter aut inuicem confitebimur. DM 19.16.
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final irony, the son is replaced with a lifeless token gesturing to a signified that is forever lost in both fact and name. This son is not just dead; perhaps he was never exactly what a son should be. Only the likeness of the son can function as a serviceable son for the father. Communication is restored, the mother’s gestures are rendered innocuous. The name of the son supplants the son himself, and the father is restored to his paternal function. With the advent of the son as image, the father’s imaginary relationship to himself and to the other egos of the world is restored. So long as the real son and the threat of desire are removed, this family can begin to live again the fantasy of family life. Thus fictions of the self are the only selves with which we can really live. Declamation itself lives with the very problems that the last two Major Declamations present. Declamation can never “solve” any of its own crises because there is too much meaning in the world. The mother cannot fix the meaning of love, but no declaimer will ever be able to secure a final victory for his side of a case either. Declamation itself is thus predicated on a cruel sort of paternal silence that enables it. The silence declamation faces arises from the impossible dictates of the law. In the law’s case, though, one might just as well say that it speaks, yet it is deaf to the accounts that it requires be rendered unto it. The law defines guilt and innocence. The law also interrogates. The law kills. But one can never be anything but an advocate pleading before the law or an orator asking of the law that it confess an absolute and fixed truth that will never be given to the mobile world of human meaning. The law that lies beneath the premise of a declamation, much like the murderous father himself, provokes a crisis in its own name, and then withdraws, leaving everyone else to talk and talk and talk. One cannot simply identify with the position of the paternal origin of the law. Though the sacred name of the father mobilizes meaning, one cannot in the end stand in his shoes and know what he knows, even if the father himself insists that only from here may one truly know. The declaimer who tries to think his way through the silent underpinnings of the phenomenal world winds up exposing even more fundamental contradictions than the simple duplicity of language. Speculations emerging from this position become overwhelmed by the play of signifiers circulating between the site of death, silence, and paternity and the endless babble of the id/c¸a. One cannot find oneself at the site of this absolute Other. It is a split position that may offer to the world the double and doubling gift of the word amare, but it cannot itself hear that word.104 One may not speak in the name of 104
Compare Lacan 1983: 80.
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this law because the law itself cannot acknowledge the desire to which the law gives rise. Seneca began by talking of lost men and a lost sexual economy. He spoke as a father seeking again both his own paternal authority and the authority of virile rhetoric in general. Seneca, the Master, and the various declamatory performers speak as if they would represent the interests of the law, and each in his own way strives to reach a putative stable center where the law resides. But each of them is likewise only a performer. These men derive the authority of their speech as if they were delegates of this law, yet one would look in vain for any speech that was in fact itself the very speech of the law instead of a speech deriving its authority from a claim of a legitimate filial relationship to the law. All of those seeming fathers are themselves so many sons. They claim to be the sons of the law. Each of these parties, then, reveals to us that playing with and inside the fiction of the law as it relates to oneself as a rhetorical persona is no mere play. Instead this process mimes the actual rhetoric of authority and authenticity.
By way of conclusion
After my delineating the unspeakable as spoken by declamation, an artful conclusion might be to myself fall pregnantly silent. But much like declamation, the academic study is itself a very predictable genre with a number of rules that, though arbitrary, are held as indispensable by the practitioners of the art. One of these rules is the need to offer some words by way of a conclusion. The desire for a conclusion unfortunately cuts against the spirit of declamation itself even as it does partially abet the purposes of Seneca the father or of the Master to get in the last and authoritative word. I would myself prefer that the whole of this study serve only as one speech among many, and, specifically, that it likewise prompt another to take up the pars altera. My peroration will accordingly resemble an exordium. The many critical declamations leveled against the odious tyranny of declamation exercised at the expense of good, sound Latinity have themselves frequently offered less of an insight into the workings of declamation than a demonstration of certain principles inhering within it. For declamation loves to redeem the father and the voice of authority, and the slaying of declamation is seldom done in the name of any but such fathers of high style as Cicero and Virgil. Let me, though, plead one last time the son’s side of the case even as I recognize that a son’s destiny ever lies with his father no matter the outcome of the trial. Moreover the declamatory son seems seldom to wish for anything else than to out-father his own father. My discussion of declamation is not intended to reinvoke the distinction between literature and society. I have quite the opposite desire. I do not wish to say of declamation that it involved imagining the violation or the disruption of society’s bonds and hence it should be valorized by the critic as a site of liberation from social regulation. Such an advocacy of the genre would find much material to support its case. Yet it would overlook the extent to which the violation of the social order implied in the original crime is itself only a pretext for making reparations. A good speaker is expected ultimately to arrive at a point where he doubly represents an authority that 227
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will set back in order a world disrupted: he is both the legal and the literary representative of the law.1 If in the course of this progress the unassimilable and the irreconcilable appear amidst the speaker’s pleadings, and if they appear in a manner revelatory of the impossibility of true resolution, this is indeed interesting and noteworthy. But at a larger level the genre functions so as to habituate people to submission to the law specifically within the context of a recognition that the law frequently produces impossible and contradictory situations.2 Declamation asks that one come to the aid of a failing law, that one assume the name of its authority in order to shore up a possible gap in the field covered by the law’s sovereignty. Even as the subject matter itself seems wild and even as a certain rhetorical licence is on display, we have found time and again that it is with difficulty that one escapes from the orbit of paternal authority. Not only does paternal authority vouch for the authority of the law in general, but the authority of the law guarantees the father’s own authority. Thus the whole question of declamation and the law swiftly becomes one of declamation and the father. And here the number of fathers proliferates. There is a Foucauldian fecundity of power here. The fertility of power has in declamation a special case where fathers appear and reappear endlessly as representatives of that power. As representatives, though, they appear as bearers of an authority that is both uniquely their own in the sense that paternal authority is the model for all authority and also as representatives of the authority of law where this authority is pointedly confused with paternal authority. The situation is thus over-determined. If one wishes to defend the law, then, it becomes necessary not just to adopt the stance of a champion of law, but to assume the role and function of a father. Declamation thereby acts as a place where one rehearses the transition into fatherhood. The jibe that declamation is mere child’s play is not entirely misguided. Declamation is indeed well suited for children, for it teaches them specifically how to turn into their own fathers. It is likewise well suited to gauche new-comers: it allows them to practice the grammar and syntax of Romanness.3 To dismiss declamation by way of its potential clientele misunderstands the manner in which the relationship to authority within declamation is something that never can and never will come to 1 2
3
See Spivak on the literary politics of vertreten and darstellen (Spivak 1988). For this line of thought, compare Miller on the relationship of the novel to authority (Miller 1988: xii–xiii). See also Miller 1988: 3: “Yet when the law falls short in the novel, the world is never reduced to anarchy as a result.” Compare Edwards on Romanness as a matter of the mastery of Roman knowledge (Edwards 1996: 17). Hence it is something that a Roman might not himself have, and Roman knowledge is also something that the diligent newcomer might acquire.
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an end. That is, the impossibility of ever truly becoming that authority means that the case never closes, and the speaking always begins anew. Even the established elite and full-grown men are never themselves fully and completely authoritative. One approaches authority asymptotically without ever finally reaching any stable center. Notice in particular that declamation offers two opposite sides to its cases each of which invites claims that it is the most “authoritative.” Declamation is about becoming, not about being. Declamation is about pleading one’s just claims to authority and then pleading them all over again. All of our guides to the genre themselves adopt this same paternalistic role. Seneca speaks as a father to his sons. He superadds his own authority as author, editor, and critic so as always to get in the last word. He not only represents authority to his sons qua father, but he re-presents literary authority to them. This act of doubled representation works as well for his readers: Seneca is always Seneca the Father for them, and this father is making present narratives of paternal authority. And when reading Seneca, even if we decide that in the end declamation was so much child’s play, in so deciding we can only have been brought to this mature and sound realization under the watchful eye of a declamatory father. It is well worth remembering that the distance between Seneca’s editorial voice and the contents of the declamations is ambiguous at best. The author of the Minor Declamations is another figure whom we might easily take for granted. But taking a father or even a foster-father for granted is by no means incompatible with turning out like him in the end. The Master of those declamations speaks to younger pleaders. He teaches, he trains, he comments. He again shepherds us through cases about paternity while adding in an interpretive apparatus that is itself suffused with paternalism. Once again it is precisely our getting beyond and over the material of the Minor Declamations that signals our own maturation into the very rhetorical subject whom educators like Quintilian had so striven to rear. But if power is productive and not repressive, then all of this talk of being under the eye of authority should not mislead. “What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse.”4 Declamation allows for the indulging of power’s productivity, for delighting in its possibilities, for further articulating its more curious details, and for producing ever more discourse. And the pleasures of this discourse lived within the terrain carved 4
Foucault 1980: 119.
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out by declamation are by no means limited to the expected products of a dutiful homage made to power. That is, once the field is constituted, it allows for more and freer play within its terrain than a mechanical application of the rules governing the constitution of the field itself might be expected to produce. Clearly one could have fun, and one suspects that many would not care if they saw Seneca scowl. The genre filled with tales of youths who got out of hand is filled as well with pleaders who themselves get carried away. Not all of them would be as quick to repent as a stern father might hope. But even those from whom we expect licence were not necessarily as free and easy as one might pretend: Ovid the declaimer avoided the liberties of Ovid the poet.5 Meanwhile Ovid only chooses those cases that suit his taste: why bother to speak unless one is going to have fun? But all of the sport must be conducted both within the context of the law and before a community of peers who when put to the test can be expected to defend their own gravity and authority. If the emperor shows up, indulging in anything that might smack of political lampoon could very well be most unwise. And before other crowds it is easy to imagine that undue licence would earn murmurs of disapproval. Declamation was not serious oratory. This statement has a number of dimensions, and most of them are traditionally read negatively. First, declamation is sportive where gravity demands moral seriousness. But nobody thinks that the Romans themselves were always and everywhere serious. Should the existence of Roman tragedy tell against Roman comedy any more than forensic oratory should be used to upbraid declamation? Moreover why not take the contents of declamation seriously? The lines of argumentation are not dissimilar from those that would be used in judicial oratory. And some of the less spectacular cases seem all too legalistic.6 And even if we see speakers who are not being entirely serious in a silly case, dismissing a joke as a mere joke is no way to get to the bottom of anything. Next, declamation is not serious oratory because declamation produces speeches that are merely ephemeral. Declamation is not serious enough to manufacture its own “classics.” This is a doubly misleading criticism. First, we should recall that Latro complains that some people had stopped 5 6
Seneca, Controversiae 2.2.12. See, for example, Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 264: “Violation of the Voconian Law. ‘It is forbidden to leave more than half of one’s estate to a woman.’ A certain man left his estate to two women in two halves. His relatives dispute the will” (Fraus legis Voconiae. Ne liceat mulieri nisi dimidiam partem bonorum dare. Quidam duas mulieres dimidiis partibus instituit heredes. Testamentum cognati arguunt). See also the case of the two wills (Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 308).
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reading the speeches of Cicero for which Cestius had not written responses, and, were they not afraid of outraging the dominant literary taste, they would have openly declared Cestius to be Cicero’s better.7 What could be a more serious literary claim than to challenge Cicero himself? Similarly, even though they lack a context, the many Major Declamations written by several hands clearly attest to a desire to produce a literary artifact that would be significant and lasting. Similarly the Greek declamations of Libanius have had their own admirers.8 But even if every declamation was not built to last, this does not relegate the genre as a whole to meaninglessness. We know that Romans engaged in a variety of literary exercises in other genres that were disposable, and yet we do not thereby dismiss the genres to which these ephemera belonged. Does the existence of casual hexameters tell against Virgil? Finally, perhaps by serious what we really mean is socially serious. That is, the only real oratory is that spoken in the senate, on state occasions, or at trials. All other oratory is at best training for the real thing, and at worst a parody of it. Such a view would require us then to believe that the ranks of people to whom we ought to give ear at Rome are exclusively those to whom the state decided to grant a platform. It is of course hugely fanciful to imagine a provincial showing up at Rome a nobody and later speaking as a senator in the senate. It is best to entertain such dreams on behalf of one’s own children. If this new arrival is nevertheless an accomplished orator where else can he be expected to exercise his art than as a declaimer? If Seneca’s pages seem to be filled with newcomers – and the author himself immigrated to Rome from Spain – this should hardly surprise us. But declaring that their oratory was necessarily worse than what we might have heard in the senate in that age is not a justified conclusion. The opportunity to speak in public should not be confused with the superlative ability to do so in a society that guarded access to the inner sanctum of aristocratic politics as jealously as Rome did. If we grant that most of these men didn’t have all of the social advantages yet, can’t we still berate them for talking about such garbage? Even if the preceding chapters have not produced any conviction as to the substantial stakes of declamation, let us not expect that the declaimers actually could have gathered to discuss the proper policy with respect to Germany: a meeting of non-magistrates to discuss issues of state is seen as protorevolutionary in Rome.9 And indeed the role of the common man in the 7 9
Seneca, Controversiae 3.pr.15–16. See, for example Livy 2.28.
8
See the remarks of Russel 1996: 14–15.
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Roman constitution is restricted to expressing opinions on questions formulated and then put to him by magistrates. The authorized authorities have arrogated to themselves a monopoly on “serious” political discourse, and they are keen to retain this monopoly. Nevertheless, as was argued above, declamations do in fact speak on weighty political issues, even if indirectly. Or perhaps it is only the lowliness of the genre that we wish to reproach. And yet the stuff with which the declamations concern themselves is by no means as lowly as has been pretended. Rape, tyrannicide, incest: these would make for a good Attic tragedy. Indeed declamation routinely chooses to dramatize profound psychic and social crisis without really offering training for the specific and perhaps prosaic tasks of oratory such as defending before the senate a man accused of corruption. Thus declamation picks up on the notion that oratorical performance is not dissimilar to a theatrical performance and runs with it.10 The orator/actor/author now gets to star in a variety of cases. Here it becomes necessary to pay close attention to the choices made. For even if the premise that we are going to leave behind the likely stuff of standard oratory seems an unbounded one, the actual results of this liberation are not at all anarchic. Declamation may land the speaker in the middle of a depraved world, but the case he pleads there is one routinely designed to put the cat back in the bag. How does the good, authoritative orator come in and plead for the reparation of the torn social fabric? This is the task to which we find the speakers applying themselves. Thus if the cases themselves sound like something from shock TV, the speakers are more like the host or the anchor who wears a suit and tie. And this fellow will never let himself be confused with a gap-toothed, trash-talking guest on a show whose theme is “My son the rapist.” Pointing out that the person playing King Lear is really just a middleaged man living in a dingy apartment, that there never was any such king, and lastly that the author was no blue-blood himself is an entirely useless approach to the appreciation and criticism of the play. Declamation offers meditations on kingliness composed and performed by men who were seldom themselves born to wear a crown. And while the development of these pieces may be more or less artful depending on the speaker, we must not adopt in advance the position that that kind of person could never have anything interesting to say. In fact the theme that seems to be numerically the most popular among the cases preserved for us is one that is highly unsexy. Cases involving 10
Compare Gunderson 2000: 111– 48.
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a rich man and a poor man who are having a dispute outnumber any other general theme.11 If one asks, then, “What did the Romans most enjoy speaking about?” the answer will be “Social inequality and how to negotiate it.” And while I have myself left this theme somewhat to one side in my own discussion of declamation, the other highly popular issue of father disputing with son has, I hope, received its due. Asymmetrical power therefore forms the basis for two of the most prominent classes of speech. In a Rome that believed in inequality as staunchly as contemporary citizens of Western societies claim they love equality, such meditations are hardly irrelevant exercises. And it is precisely the fact that few of the speakers will ever really rise to the top of the social heap that makes this sort of meditation one of the best practical exercises that can be imagined. For almost every Roman man had to concern himself with how to deal with a superior who might be in the wrong while at the same time being able to imagine being himself superior to yet another man. r
If I have everywhere argued that declamation involves thinking through what it means to be a Roman, I hope to have extended the scope of this process beyond mere social practice and into the space where society and psyche intersect. Thus this playing at being a Roman also becomes believing in the contents of one’s own dramas. Romans are asked to think through the logic of Roman identity, to accuse and to defend, to decide how to weigh incompatible demands against one another, and then to decide the same issues all over again. Declamation thus encourages the objectification of the social logic of Rome on the part of the participants within that logic. This mode of reflection is not, though, mobilized in the name of a critical break with the rules of the game, but instead it proceeds in the name of a fuller reinvestment in the game itself. If Magritte’s pipe was not a pipe, then a declamatory speech is also clearly not a speech. In other words, as a double, as a parody, and as a too perfect copy, declamation does not so much fail to be another kind of speech as it reveals important and paradoxical features of oratory itself. In the space of this paradox the Doppelg¨anger starts leading a life that no longer seems as silly as it once did. Declamation as oratory’s uncanny double here allows for the saying of what could not otherwise be said, for speech-making where official rhetoric would fall silent. Cicero and other Republican politicians turn to declamation to think through and to prepare themselves for words and deeds that they may or may not wish actually to pursue. Latro’s gaffe 11
See Tabacco 1978 and Tabacco 1979 for studies on this issue.
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concerning Augustus’ potential adoptions indicates an audience more than willing to believe that declamations were filled with allusions to worldly matters. If nothing else, declamations could have allusions forced upon them, much in the way that Roman comedies from the past would receive unexpected laughs and applause because the audience was so thirsty for innuendo concerning the scandals of the day.12 Declamation plays with this “almost, but not quite” quality. Rather than despairing of its own unreal quality, declamation exploits it. As a discourse that encourages such speculation, then, declamation incites the ever more detailed elaboration of the dyad knowledge/power without simultaneously inviting a situation where knowledge will produce a radical epistemological break that pits it against the social logic of Rome. Certainly all results cannot be anticipated in advance, and “scary” ideas may periodically emerge, but here the critical community of the speaker’s peers can intervene to head off serious trouble. In fact, this is how I would like to read the scene of Haterius’ blunder regarding officium. Seneca relates that Haterius actually made this mistake during a real trial, but the context of the anecdote and the stamp of the phrase allow us to see here the uneasy distance between the salon and the courthouse. So what happened? “I remember that [Haterius] was once advocate for a freedman defendant who was reproached for sleeping with his patron (i.e. his former master). He said, ‘Unchastity in a well-born person is a crime, in a slave a necessity, in a freedman a duty (officium).’ The thing became a standing joke: ‘You’re not doing your duty by me’ and ‘He’s very dutiful towards him.’ And accordingly perverts were for a long time called ‘dutiful.’ ”13 Haterius makes all too literal the metaphorical relationship between social unequals: it’s a lot like getting buggered. Everyone thinks that this is very funny indeed. But the laughter and the subsequent witticisms by no means dispel the unfortunate analogy contained within the original insight. Freud offers the following functional definition of wit: “[Wit is] an activity whose purpose is to derive pleasure – be it intellectual or otherwise – from the psychic processes.”14 If we accept that the psychic and the social 12 13
14
Compare Bartsch 1994: 67–71. Memini illum, cum libertinum reum defenderet, cui obiciebatur quod patroni concubinus fuisset, dixisse: inpudicitia in ingenuo crimen est, in seruo necessitas, in liberto officium. Res in iocos abiit: ‘non facis mihi officium’ et ‘multum ille huic in officiis uersatur.’ Ex eo inpudici et obsceni aliquamdiu officiosi uocitati sunt. Seneca, Controversiae 4.pr.10. uersatur is hard to capture in translation: it means “to be engaged in,” but there is likely a pun on the meaning of “to turn” in the word, and hence with turning to receive the active partner’s member in his anus. Freud 1993: 137.
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are profoundly interrelated, then what we notice in the humorous case of the freedman’s duties is a pleasure derived in lingering over the moment where the Roman psyche makes a connection relating social functions and hierarchies to sexual ones. Even as people are repulsed by Haterius’ argument and seem to delight in mocking it by redeploying it in an ever more inappropriate manner, they nevertheless extend and generalize the premise of the original insight in the course of minting new witticisms. That is, the new jokes no longer are attached to the notion of being a freedman, instead any man who is the passive partner is now “dutiful.” And here it is worth recalling that such a role was generally figured as a humiliating submission. Accordingly the jokes simultaneously serve both to censor Haterius by deriding him and to reexpress the same prohibited idea over and over again. At the risk of belaboring the Roman joke even further, we will find that “getting the joke” in the sense of decoding the message that provoked the laughter and “understanding the joke” are not one and the same activity. The same can be said of the distinction between decoding declamation and appreciating why it mattered. Let us return, then, to the idea of the ambiguous example of the expression and repression of Haterius’ meaning by way of witticisms. Freud argues of wit’s ability to circumvent censorship that “Strictly speaking, we do not know what we are laughing about.”15 In other words, the joke about officium may seem to be a hostile barb made at the expense of the passive male, but the energy subtending the laughter is not to be found in the simple desire to mock another. Rather it is precisely the idea that sexual relations between two adult males are a censored category of libidinal activity that produces the frustration that then fuels the hostility. Accordingly that which remains unacknowledged amidst the laughter is the existence of a libido that in fact would like to entertain the possibility of such unions in an uncensored manner. There is the further consideration in this case as well that one’s own duties have implicitly themselves been opened up to a sexual reading. Thus there subsists at the base of the joke the notion that “I am constantly being penetrated.” The Romans then trot out a series of proper rejoinders to such a reflection: “No, I don’t like it”; “No, it’s not really happening”; “No, Haterius, I’ll bugger you so good that you’ll be too ashamed to ever speak like that again.” I hope that by now we are suspicious of such negations. The persistence of the joke about duties 15
Freud 1993: 148. (original emphasis). Compare Zizek on the distinction between the dream-work and the content of the dream (Zizek 1989: 12–14). It is the former qua process to which one ought to attend rather than becoming distracted by reading a hidden secret in the “message” of the contents of the dream itself.
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attests less to a steadfast condemnation of male sexual passivity than it does to a desire to keep on reinvoking the moment of frisson where sex, duty, domination and submission converge and are then forced apart again. Even though it occurs in a forensic context, Haterius’ slip fits the situation of declamation very well. For declamation obsesses over mutually incompatible demands. The contradiction between the dictates of duty and the shame of sex in that sententia is emblematic of the very sort of social and psychic catachresis that declamation is designed to indulge. That is, even if we ourselves do not laugh today, declamation served antiquity as a veritable factory of wit in the Freudian sense. It is not entirely surprising that later generations have seldom found themselves amused. For “every witticism . . . demands its own public.”16 More properly, it demands its own psychic community, a set of people who are disposed to take pleasure in precisely these substitutions and this mixture of ideas. Perhaps one should say of much of the declamatory wit that its timeliness abandoned it. Declamation was vital to the fabric of Roman thought, but with the passing of much of the apparatus of that thought, so too has the sense of its cleverness and vitality faded. From the preceding it will be clear that I believe that an important portion of the significance of declamation lies in a zone where we cannot expect the declaimers themselves to offer us help. Thus reading declamation will involve more than understanding the confusing Latin and more than getting the joke that is the manifest content of any given passage. Beyond these two frequently difficult projects we find a third. We need to understand the logic according to which ideas are articulated within declamation. And some of these ideas are not going to be ones that fall under the heading of willed contents. Thus my goal in the preceding two chapters was to attempt to approach the question of reading beyond the letter of the text in order to find those places where declamation reveals aspects of the Roman psychic landscape that cannot be articulated within the manifest discourse. And here manifest discourse covers not only reputable Roman letters but even a disreputable genre such as declamation. Myths, dreams, jokes, and the empty speech of declamations: if you would fully know the Romans, you must find a way to listen to what even they do not know they are telling you. Literature, society, and psyche have been my three chief interests in this study. It is easy enough to imagine other readings: there are so many cases, and so few case studies. This is not meant to be the last word on 16
Freud 1993: 233.
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declamation; and declamation itself abhors the last word. This text will have been a success even if it only convinces people that there is something to declamation after all. In addition to giving an account of what there is to find, though, I hope as well to have revealed the variety of forces that have gone to produce the situation wherein one was inclined to believe that there was nothing to find. And to you who would believe that your author has chosen to rave with the insane, I can answer only that I would prefer my talking cure to the unbroken calm of forgetfulness entailed in the judicious excision of declamation from the grey matter of Roman studies. A lobotomized Latinity might be more docile, but the patient leaves the clinic of criticism less a Roman than when he arrived.
a ppe n d ix 1
Further reading
I hope that the curious who wish to follow up with further reading of declamatory literature will find what follows useful. A word of warning, though: even basic tools are relatively scarce. Seneca the Elder has remained the most available of the authors but his collection is in many ways the least typical of the genre. Accordingly Seneca’s favored snippets have long been standing in as representatives of the whole of declamation. Reliable Latin editions of all of the authors have been available for less than twenty-five years. Indeed, many decent-sized libraries do not even have a complete set of these editions. There are no commentaries on most of the texts: Winterbottom’s commentary on the Minor Declamations is as welcome as its very existence is unexpected. Sussman’s translation of the Major Declamations in 1987 was the first translation of them into English in 300 years. The Minor Declamations have yet to be translated. The obscurity of declamation, then, has been able to endure at least partially because it has remained fiercely inaccessible to any but the most determined.
LATIN TEXTS AND COMMENTARIES H˚akanson, L. (1978) Calpurnii Flacci Declamationum Excerpta. Stuttgart, Teubner. (1982) Declamationes XIX Maiores Quintiliano Falso Ascriptae. Stuttgart, Teubner. (1989) L. Annaeus Seneca Maior. Oratorum et Rhetorum Sententiae, Diuisiones, Colores. Leipzig, Teubner. Shackleton Bailey, D. (1989) Quintilianus. Declamationes Minores. Stuttgart, Teubner. Sussman, L. (1994) The Declamations of Calpurnius Flaccus: Text, Translation, and Commentary. Leiden, E. J. Brill. Winterbottom, M. (1980) Roman Declamation. Extracts Edited with a Commentary. Bristol, Bristol Classical Press. (1984) The Minor Declamations Ascribed to Quintilian. Berlin, de Gruyter.
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ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS Sussman, L. (1987) The Major Declamations Ascribed to Quintilian. A Translation. Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang. (1994) The Declamations of Calpurnius Flaccus: Text, Translation, and Commentary. Leiden, E. J. Brill. Winterbottom, M. (1974) The Elder Seneca. Declamations. 2 vols. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY Beard, M. (1993) “Looking (Harder) for Roman Myth: Dum´ezil, Declamation and the Problems of Definition” in Mythos in mythenloser Gesellschaft: Das Paradigma Roms, ed. F. Graf. Stuttgart, Teubner, 44–64. Bloomer, M. (1997) “Schooling in Persona: Imagination and Subordination in Roman Education.” Classical Antiquity 16, 57–78. Bonner, S. (1949) Roman Declamation in the Late Republic and Early Empire. Berkeley, University of California Press. Fairweather, J. (1981) The Elder Seneca. Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press. (1984) “The Elder Seneca and Declamation Since 1900: A Bibliography.” Aufstieg und Niedergang der r¨omischen Welt. Berlin, De Gruyter. ii, 32.1, 514–56. H˚akanson, L. (1986) “Die quintilianischen Deklamationen in der neueren Forschung.” Aufstieg und Niedergang der r¨omischen Welt. Berlin, De Gruyter. ii, 32.4, 2272–2306. Kaster, R. (1998) “Becoming ‘CICERO’” in Style and Tradition: Studies in Honor of Wendell Clausen. Eds. P. Knox and C. Foss. Stuttgart, Teubner. 248–63. Ritter, C. (1967) Die Quintilianischen Declamationen. Hildesheim, Olms. Sussman, L. (1978) The Elder Seneca. Mnemosyne Supplementum 51. Leiden, Brill. (1995) “Sons and Fathers in the Major Declamations Ascribed to Quintilian.” Rhetorica 13.2, 179–92.
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Sample declamations
What follows are samples from each of the four declamatory authors discussed in the preceding text. I offer full versions of four cases so that the reader can appreciate the difference between the different authors. It is also useful to see these cases whole and in their original order given that the commentaries in the main text of this book present them in a fragmentary and scattered fashion. As was noted in the first appendix, it can be difficult if not outright impossible to find some of these texts in English. A certain number of “stage directions” have been added into some of the translations in order to make the material more accessible. These additions are marked by parentheses. It will be noted that the declamatory texts as they come down to us can jump swiftly from idea to idea. This phenomenon can be attributed both to the genre itself and to the editorial process guiding the composition of the various texts. Words and phrases have also been inserted to complete the sense of especially elliptical moments in the Latin original. These are usually marked with square brackets.
I. THE MAJOR DECLAMATIONS
Date Unknown. Quintilian lived perhaps from 30 to 100 ce. But these speeches are not by him. They are not even the product of a single author. There are accordingly various dates for various speeches. All of these are inferential, but the earliest speeches may be roughly contemporaneous with Quintilian. The latest may well have been written as many as two or three centuries later. Introduced Page 158 above. 240
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The corpus There are 19 cases surviving. These are the only representatives of full Latin declamations. Our other authors offer only excerpts or adumbrations. The Major Declamations are showpieces and are designed as displays of wit and skill. Though flashy, these speeches nevertheless generally adhere to familiar rules of forensic oratory in both structure and diction once one makes allowance for issues like the subject matter and the keen love of paradox, irony, and epigram. The length of the declamations varies, but the example below is typical. These cases, then, are roughly on the scale of the shorter speeches of Cicero. m a j o r d e c l a m at i o n 3 : m arius ’ s o ldie r
First discussed Pages 153–190 above. The translation can be loose at times. Readers may wish to consult Sussman’s version as well.1 As in other declamations, many of the speaker’s statements have double meanings. One is encouraged to read things into this speech, and plenty of the sexual content is offered via insinuation. The logical flow of the ideas can be surprising. It is worth considering the full implications of the often unusual connections made by the speaker. A more particular problem is the constant extension of the term corruptor. This word has been hard to capture without making the speaker’s case for him. At its core, the term indicates one who spoils, taints, or renders unsound. This can be sexually extended to mean seducer or even ravisher. But here the term almost always means something like rapist, especially in the last half of the speech. It is constantly associated with violent imposition. Similarly difficult are the numerous instances of sanctitas and its cognates. This is religious purity, moral purity, or just plain uprightness. Throughout the case the word is usually used in the milder sense of mere propriety, but the speech constantly gestures towards the religious dimension as well. In fact, these two notions of corruption and sanctity are in constant conflict in the speech at a variety of levels. Scenario During the Cimbrian war a military tribune attempted to sexually assault one of Marius’ soldiers. The soldier killed the tribune, a kinsman of Marius. He is accused of murder before the general. 1
See Sussman 1987.
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Defence [1] (In the character of an advocate for the soldier who is himself a soldier) The camps were sufficiently shamed and soiled when this idea overtook the mad tribune: he thought that in the middle of the din of the Cimbrian war in front of the standards – you will pardon me for what you are about to hear – he would bid a man girt with his sword to stand forth, and then he would try to apply foul and criminal violence to – lest I say anything else – a man braver than himself. An eternal stain besmirches him, and news of this novel crime has made the rounds until it has become an exemplary case after which vice sets off in ready and eager pursuit. Even granting that the defendant’s valor should go unpunished, nevertheless I declare that in this decadent and decaying age there will be more who will imitate the tribune than the soldier. No matter how ill it seems to suit an advocate’s role, my great general, to do away with the aid of pity when my client’s life is on the line, nevertheless I recognize on whose behalf I speak and before whom. Boldly, and, I hope, safely do I declare that your soldier – whatever chance should bring today – stands untroubled beneath the very blow of a menacing fortune. For either you will absolve him as innocent, or you will punish him as a man. It is right and proper for a man to risk his life when he remembers that he is born within death’s jurisdiction. Nor did he enlist in the military during a harsh and bitter war without realizing that he must stand girt with death itself at the ready. Nor is he so unwarlike as to refuse to endure adversities courageously so long as they are not dishonorable. [2] In all honesty, Marius, he would not have fought back so vigorously if the tribune had wanted to kill him. He was in no doubt as to the dangers that awaited him once he rent those perverted embraces of his insane corrupter (corruptor) with his sword. Nor do I praise a soldier – especially one of your soldiers – if he is chaste merely because it is expedient. And he cannot regret his act, no matter how dear he may hold his life. Perhaps you might hesitate in the case of the killer of a seducer (corruptor), but I am quite sure that you would not have thought twice about the case of an unchaste soldier. But this man, Marius – and let your soldier be defended as courageously as he avenged himself – this man, even if you convict him, will not feel any regret. If this is what fortune brings him, then he will go to his punishment in full stride, as ready to die as to kill in the name of chastity. And he will bear with him eternal praise for his most valorous chastity. The accusers can attack with all their might, they will nevertheless never make your soldier regret more that he was accused than that he was hailed.
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But I pray that neither Father Mars nor the military standards and victorious eagles nor your godlike virtue, great general, might allow you too to believe that any man who is both a Roman and a soldier might be excessively chaste. [3] Look at what we are really dealing with here: will one be allowed according to your own decree to pick out whores from among the ranks of the Roman legions and to haul off to illicit sexual encounters men who have been sworn into military service? The prosecution’s tactics are brazen: in front of Marius, a man who seems to be sent to us from heaven above as model of the power and possibilities of human excellence (uirtus), and in the presence of the assembled legates and prefects and these military tribunes who are utterly unlike that monster, in the presence of this whole court of armed men, then, he abuses the soldier for being a man! His complaint stops just short of calling him rough and rustic and too little enticed by slatternly wiles. But for my part – and please believe me – I blush even to praise chastity in a soldier: this virtue (uirtus) is an attribute of women. I should praise a hero otherwise, calling him “fit for combat,” “ready for danger,” “exceptionally courageous,” and – to speak in all candor – “more deservedly a tribune.” Marius, you would not blush if he were your kinsman. His father did his own military service when we smashed Jugurtha, who was backed by all of Numidia. After his discharge he turned veteran hands to farming. His mother is a tough nut of the old school. Her skin is hardened by long exposure to sun and snow. She often shares in her husband’s labor on the farm. I assure you, nobody would have solicited her and gotten away with it. Sprung from such stock the young man had withdrawn himself from contact with any moral contagion by keeping himself constantly occupied with work. At first he followed the herds. He kept wild animals away from the flocks. He was forever daring something beyond his years. [4] He thought it a game to send stones flying. Even then he would brandish stakes. The mountain pastures would resound as he hunted. Eventually as his shoulders grew broad and strong he would cleave the earth and uproot a tenacious wood to make room for crops. And so, just as some think [that this is a soldier’s natural training], it indeed came to pass that he was soon ready for military service. Meanwhile from the utmost shore of the ocean and an inaccessible frozen waste there comes a race who live in virtual exile from the rest of the universe. They poured into Italy with their stupid brawn, indomitable savagery, arrogance in success, and a monstrosity of body and soul that reveals them to be more beasts than men. Their confidence sprang not so
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much from their own might as from the luxurious tastes and folly of our generals: while we continue in war to pursue the vices of peace and pamper ourselves even in our time of trials, they have brought devastation upon our fields, privation and loss to our youth, and a nearly catastrophic danger to our empire. And they have made it clear that the Roman people never stood in greater need of real men in order to stave off ruin. And so given that military discipline seems to have fallen apart and that our fight is no less with morals than it is with the enemy, we have fled, Marius, to our only refuge: your excellence, your integrity, your severity. [5] And look how parents rush to submit the names of their children for service no matter how arduous the war might be, and they all but embrace the opportunity to ensure that their children get their initial military training under you, that they daily behold a model of godlike excellence, that they have you urging them on, that you be the witness to their successes. And though having Marius as general was the common good fortune of the army as a whole, nevertheless – oh, what a sorry state of affairs – those who had the backing of your kinsman the tribune seemed to fare better than the rest. The care you showed, commander, when you selected strong soldiers so that you could raise a suitable levy to match against an enemy whose strength is nearly superhuman is clear even from this: since you knew that excellence is not a question of wealth, you set aside consideration of resources and just looked at men’s hearts and at their vigor. What good did this do? Look at the ill will your selections provoked! They claim that you approved that a boy go against the Cimbrians. But neither were you unaware that he was old enough to serve – and the surest measure of this is the ability to fight valiantly – [6] nor was that lust one of familiar vice, a lust that is inflamed to vile libidinous assaults by physical attraction.2 Rather it was a certain reckless love of outrage and a sense that the acme of pleasure lies in disgraceful conduct and in the staining of what is honorable. What attracted him? The way the soldier ran in the forefront before the standards; the way a raw recruit outstripped veterans; the way he came back caked with dust and blood. It was this, the very fact that he was such a man. Beauty and youth are vulgar enticements: there’s nothing like sleeping with a brave soldier (fortis concubinus). Those scars, those wounds, those innumerable badges for exceptional service – why should I go on, general? I am ashamed at what you already understand. I omit the offers of exemption from work assignments made against 2
It will be noted that the two branches of the “Neither . . . nor . . .” here do not fit together unless and until one makes a striking variety of additional assumptions and associations.
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the soldier’s will. I omit the tribune’s excessive praise for the soldier that exceeded the bounds of military discipline and the orders to undertake the most difficult missions just so that the soldier could be excused from them amidst boasts about the tribune’s rank and his relationship to you. Here is my confession, Marius: the perverted seducer owed his continued existence to the soldier’s ignorance of these gestures. General, I dare not say, “Picture the situation at that time; imagine for yourself what it was like.” Perhaps in other cases one is allowed to embellish rhetorically the shamefulness of the matter at hand: we are unable to complain of our injury in Latin. One’s language must be restrained; the truth must be largely suppressed. If I have any shame (pudor), I ought to betray my client. Our camp was drawn up near a dreadful enemy. The whole war had devolved upon the infantry, and everybody’s thoughts were upon the coming battle. Barbarous howling sounded on all sides. And then someone commands a Roman soldier keeping watch before our rampart to endure a whorish, obscene lust? Perhaps each will have his own ideas on the matter: in my opinion an armed soldier is insufficiently chaste (pudicus) if he just says “no.” [7] At this particular moment in my exegesis, commander, I would have you believe the accusers. They relate the story of an act worthy of a man, a Roman, and your soldier. At the very first mention of perverted lust it was just as if the trumpet had sounded the charge against the enemy: he drove that sword which he had received from you for protecting the chastity of our wives straight through the breast of that unspeakable seducer (corruptor). Their oration set before your eyes the battle willingly joined, and they all but told of his burning eyes, his hair standing on end, and his shouts of rage. If all of the soldiers we have are like this, Marius, we have already won the war. In fact my only fear is that he would have drawn his sword for the sake of avoiding the seducer (corruptor) and, as sometimes happens – one thinks that the other is going to retreat; the other is sure that he won’t strike – so noble a deed would then have been an accident. And it was much too much to ask as well that the soldier should withdraw the blade even as the assailant (corruptor) rushed forward onto his wound in a fit of blind madness still seeking to catch him in his embrace. Truly I think that he would have showed himself too little a man in his rage if he was able to forgive the tribune in his agony. [8] He himself makes no apology: he says, “I stabbed him; – my thanks to Mars and the standards – I killed him; I drained his guilty blood with an avenging right hand, whether it was permitted or not.” Indeed if only he had been able to die again and again so that a vengeance born ever anew could torment his sick spirit! We do a
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slack job of maintaining military discipline if we use mild punishments – unless, of course, one believes that the tribune had it good because he was killed. And so I will not defend my client by denying the deed: it is the part of a man, particularly a brave and an innocent one, to do nothing that needs repudiating. I don’t deny the charge: no, even if the accusers sat there in silence, I would have recounted the story myself. So reproach him, but do it as befits informers (delatores): tell the whole story. It’s less shameful for a perfectly chaste soldier to make a confession than to lodge a complaint in earshot of our most saintly general. How is our shame incomplete? We are not looking into the honors to be shown a singularly brave man. And – to let my fancy really run wild – will the soldier evade punishment for the doing of so noble a deed? Should he actually be convicted? Should he actually be executed for his chastity? Come and gather, you legions; pay close attention, ye allies summoned from every corner: a law is being laid down for the camp, nor is there a small number who want this to be illicit, but that to be sanctioned.3 [9] So help me, I can’t restrain myself: my sorrow has to assail the accuser. What are you saying? You, if you were the tribune, would you have done this? If you were the soldier, would you have put up with it? Instruct us. You supervise military discipline. The soldier was battered by this affront. So, tainted by unworthy words will he do nothing more than refuse? And who won’t take him for just another prostitute if he permitted the possibility of a second solicitation? “Still, he should say no, and he should put off avenging the affront done him.” And so I suppose he should wait until dawn in order to lodge a complaint with the proper authority: his tribune! He feels a hand laid upon him. The soldier is led from his designated post so as to endure an illicit sex act (ut stuprum patiatur). I put this question to you, accusers: what will he do? Will he put up with lewd pawing and hands fondling his wounds? Will he lay down his arms or will he interpose them? This is a man we’re talking about. “But he’s under orders. A man of superior rank commands him. It is right that a soldier yield to his tribune.” And so, to take things a step further, one can even hope that he will perhaps get a promotion for this good service of his, he will lead companies, and others will serve under him. If this is how the case stands, if self-defence is not permitted, just give the word, declare as much from the start. If the stabbing of a seducer (corruptor) is not allowed, he will accept as much. For there is no way that he can be fought off bare-handed. Remember: the assailant is an armed seducer (corruptor armatus est). Still, think about it: 3
“This”: defending chastity; “that”: abusing chastity.
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what was he going to do to help himself when he was entangled in that unspeakable embrace? Was he to [gap and/or corruption in the text]? No, if this is the way you see it, then let him endure the assault so that he can improve the justice of his complaint! However, let that disgusting act perish in the attempt: for if lust had gone so far as that perverted seducer wished, today we would have two men who needed killing. [10] And so if I might speak freely, Marius: whatever verdict you pass concerning this utterly heroic soldier you are really looking more to your own interests. Certainly nothing more could be added to his glory than if he should die for the sake of such an honorable cause. The distant future, that lone uncorrupted witness of the virtues, will marvel at this man. Fathers will teach their sons about this deed even if he is punished. Think about what men should believe were your feelings in the matter. There is no way to keep this exemplary act quiet one way or the other. As a rule when making a judgement each is minded to approve that which he himself would have done in similar circumstances. Of course the road to manly vigor lies open to all traveling through their youth. And now it is no good to have reached maturity while maintaining an opposition to lust. Think back on your own gradual progress, and recall your original humble condition that pays honor to your current distinction. There is no doubt but that your godlike excellence raised you to so many consulships and the numerous triumphs you have already celebrated and those to come. Still, remember that you too served under a tribune. And you could not have reached such an exalted rank in so short a time if you had gotten a late start. [11] What next? Am I going to tell you how chastity was ever the chief concern of Roman morality? Will I recount the story of Lucretia, she who plunged the dagger into her own breast and exacted punishment on herself for an act forced upon her, Lucretia who sought to sunder her chaste spirit from her soiled body as swiftly as she could, and so stabbed herself because she could not kill her ravisher (corruptor)? If you approve of the soldier, why should I narrate the tale of Virginius who defended the virginity of his daughter in the only way he could when he snatched a knife from a bystander and buried the blade into the girl with her consent? He sent Appius off unharmed, but the Roman people nevertheless made their suit by abandoning the city to the aristocrats and they nearly started a civil war. In the end they forced the general into chains, and nothing provoked the outrage of the common people more at that time than the fact that he had tried to rob the daughter of a soldier of her chastity. These are noble deeds; they are exemplary acts concerning women; they deserve retelling: yet what is male chastity if not avoiding violation in the first place (non corrumpere)?
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Perhaps I would do well to avoid complaining to nobody’s pleasure that vices now hold such sway that nature has given way to obscene desires, that since men have been sullied to the point of sexual passivity lust now charges against its own sex. Nevertheless the very vices have imposed upon themselves a certain limitation, and hitherto the most extreme charge was that someone had corrupted (corrupuisse) one who was going to be a man. But what sort of madness is this: young men are chosen for sex, and perhaps a man already married is called to play the woman’s passive part. Indeed I congratulate military discipline, I congratulate the camp’s reputation since a tribune with this in mind came upon my client first. [12] Now are you really proposing – there is some value in abusing his madness as if he were here – that your whores draw pay as soldiers and that you draw up beneath the standards a host of old fairies (exoletos)? Is this why prostitutes are kept away from the army and it is forbidden for women to enter the camp? I guess that there is no need for them. A soldier – a man who is more than just a man – is just about to take up his place in the battle line. The country has entrusted its safety to him as his manly duty. And you proposition him?! Perhaps this is the reason you make your rounds of the sentries and the watch while the trumpet blares. Think about the kind of tribune you would have made when boys used to serve! Isn’t this extravagant madness and flagrant insanity? You look upon a torso armed with a sword, a hard and steely breastplate, a face closed within a helmet from which rise crests that evoke the horrors of war, the name Marius inscribed on the shield – in short, you see a man everywhere bristling with a martial bearing. Do you think that this is the outfit of a prostitute? You plan to proposition him for indecent sex? Will you violently compel him? What do you suppose is going to happen: is he to think you are a tribune when you don’t think he is a soldier? Does idleness have time for our every moral failing and does our ease run riot while fortune caters to our least desire? Or has the state in fact come to that pass where if it is to be restored it were better that its soldiers not be perverts? [13] This is not a question of your extending the empire; nor are we seeking provinces beyond the sea as we lately did. This is a contest for the mastery of Italy. We have come together to take a stand on behalf of our hearths and altars. Shall all of this be put to flame and sword? Shall a barbaric foe lop off our heads? Shall we be forced to speak Cimbrian? All of our lives and our well-being – for we men fear nothing else, even from the enemy – lay in the balance. An unheard-of mass of humanity has poured into Italy, a mass that not even the land that spawned it could sustain. The bulk of their bodies is unparalleled. Their customs are savage even
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for Germans. The fields lie concealed beneath the slaughtered corpses of our people. The campaigns of Carbo and Silanus whose men took to their heels seem blessed by comparison.4 Scaurus languishes, his army gone. We have lost the two camps of Servius and Banlius and all of those legions with them. A race that has victoriously wandered the greater part of the globe came to a stop only when it met up with Marius. I ask you candidly, commander, in circumstances like these would you rather have such soldiers or such tribunes? Amidst the chaos of such a massive war as this I would not even condone permitted sexual acts: for the higher the grade of honors a man rises to, the more he is liable to be seen as an exemplar by those around him. While some keep watch under arms, others guard the closed gates, and still others lean upon their shields and form a ring girding the ramparts. They take their very meals standing. Meanwhile will the tribune loll about among whores? And will this be the only kind of vigil he keeps? And will he not bother to make even a brief show of restraint so as to keep the soldiers from knowing that this is what he is up to? [14] Now imagine this: if the tribune lived, commander, and if we were reporting this act to you, the whole army would encircle us, they would understand this as an outrage not against a soldier but against soldiering itself. What would you do? What resolution would you pass? You have been done a favor, Marius, yes, a favor: you are not obligated to kill your own kinsman. Properly considered, one realizes that the dominion of the Roman people has endured up to the present because of military discipline. We are not more numerous than other nations; our bodies are not more powerful than these Cimbrians; our resources are not those of the richest kingdoms; scorn for death comes no easier to us than to most barbarians who have no reason for living. The severity of our institutions, our military discipline, a certain love of toil, and daily thought for the constant waging of war have made us supreme. And so usually our victories are more a question of character than of might. For example when women were captured they received scrupulous treatment and no outrage was done even to a foe. All of these things were suspended because of the unbroken luxurious living of an arrogant aristocracy, but your character has restored them to us. [15] The gods certainly do keep an eye out for your greatness, commander, and they steer it in the right direction: in addition to your other praises they are offering you an opportunity to pass such a noble verdict, because if you forgive the soldier, the lesson that the soldier acted heroically is a precedent set by you (tuum exemplum est). 4
These are two “earlier” Cimbrian victories over Roman armies.
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I don’t suppose you think I am upset because he was a tribune. Heavens, that makes him all the worse, all the more worthy of every species of death. This is what it means to be a superior: whatever one does seems like a lesson. The danger presented by an advocate of vice increases with his status. Who will restrain the soldiers? Who will teach about the stern conduct of camp discipline? When you, commander, are preoccupied with more important affairs, who will check the trespasses of the soldiers? The tribune? And who will correct the transgressions of the tribune?5 To whom will I flee for help? With whom will I lodge my complaints? And so it comes to pass that we have to champion our own cause ourselves. [16] “He was a tribune.” And this man was a soldier. When you use the word “tribune” you mean a man whom a common soldier is legally obligated to obey, a man who is put in charge of not just soldiers, but centurions as well, a man who shares some measure of the general’s own power. And so, I suppose, the soldier disobeyed military authority, even if he had just said no. Come on: if someone had reported to you, Marius, the case of an unchaste soldier, would you let him get away with saying, “The tribune ordered me”? Now if both sides are equally in the wrong, nevertheless this charge at least befits a soldier. “He was a tribune.” Heavens, I think I am losing sight of my own humble station if even though I am hardly up to the task of defending a single man I am nevertheless about to make statements on behalf of the entire army. Imagine that all of these legions who stand around us, the flower of Italy, the pick of the citizenry and our allies cry out with a single voice before the court: “We can’t obey the tribunes to our disgrace. None of us refuses the toil of marching or carrying an over-heavy pack in addition to our arms, of enduring the heat of the summer sun, of passing a winter huddled under pelts. Wearied we are compelled to dig a trench. We have to keep watch in front of the ramparts and the gates. We will bravely enter uncertain battles. We will buy glory with our wounds. We will put death before dishonor. Whatever we suffer in battle, it’s men’s suffering. Let the tribune send us off on harsh missions: maybe the enemy needs to be dislodged from some mountain peak; maybe passes filled with the armed foe need exploring. Finally let the tribune rage and heap blows on our backs. Let him demand that we endure beatings, that servile brand of suffering. But even a pimp is kept clear of the slaves. Perhaps this is the law under which you will be selling the captives. If the command is that prostitution is required, if against the foul injury of a seducer (corruptor) we have weapons merely 5
There is a mild problem with the text in this passage. H˚akanson prints: tribuni † corpus et peccata corriget?
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to our own insult, let the camp be captured instead, and let a Cimbrian interrupt the tribune’s assault. The Germans don’t know about such things and along the banks of Oceanus one leads a more blameless life.” [17] What does the future hold in store, commander, if being defeated is conducive to the chastity of the soldiers? Aren’t we all well aware, commander, of the magnitude of the revolt that once was kindled among the Roman people when a debt-bondsman once burst forth from the house of his creditor and showed to the public a back that had been shredded by beatings? He complained that he bore those marks from being punished because he was unwilling to put up with a sexual assault (uim corruptoris pati noluisset). And that assailant at least showed himself somewhat mindful of Roman sanctity even if he attempted this outrage against a debt-bondsman and a man who could only barely be called free: he had not tried to use his utterly depraved violence until he first made sure that his victim’s hands were tied. Still, the Roman people so proved itself the champion of the man that nobody would answer when a draft was called as war raged on Rome’s borders until reparations were made by punishing the assailant (corruptor) and by the repeal of the law of debt-bondage. They were unwilling to serve even though it was no soldier to whom this injury was done. Need I mention Fabius Eburnus, the man who killed his unchaste son after trying him at home? Now, though, my fellow soldier, whatever fortune awaits you, even if the commander is going to convict you, you have this to console you: it’s better than being killed by your father. [18] “But he was Marius’ kinsman.” You are tainting the judge (corrumpitis iudicem), and you try to tip the scales by employing favoritism in a case where the damages would otherwise be light.6 He was your kinsman: oh how people will talk this up when you decide to acquit! Even granting that the role of a judge allows you to do certain things in your own personal interest, certainly you realize how much ill will this will provoke among your rivals who are already irked at your excellent qualities: you will seem either to have decided that the soldier’s assailant (corruptor militis) was innocent or to have championed the cause of your kinsman in spite of his guilt. For some time now, commander, envy has sought out a soft spot among your resplendent virtues. And though the aristocracy is naturally hostile to all advances made by new blood, it has nevertheless been checked and overwhelmed by people’s praise for you. They are looking hard for an opportunity to make accusations against you. But I am well acquainted with jealousy. This too will be held against you: that in any event your kinsman 6
The text of this second clause still seems to have a problem even after H˚akanson’s emendation.
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sinned. And so you must disown him. You must solemnly renounce your blood connection. Certainly nothing is more to be avoided than failing to avenge this outrage, especially in a case where your detractors can imagine that he acted with your consent. Provided he ever reflected at all that he was your kinsman, shouldn’t this man have chosen to drink deeply from the font of your virtues – and the least of these is your good fortune – since he was allowed to contemplate them close at hand? Shouldn’t he have thanked his own good luck at being your relative? The soldier does a better job at imitating you. Now if the tribune lived on, perhaps it would have been necessary for him to feel oppressed by the ill will that would arise because a kinsman of Marius had done such things, because a criminal offshoot had reared itself up from the very stock of the virtues. Since it’s a good thing to free one’s family from reproach, what’s the point of constantly reproaching Marius with this incident? The best thing would be never to have had such a relative. Second best is to be glad to have lost him. [19] I have finished my peroration, commander, as best as my humble wit allowed. I realize that in my remaining speech I am supposed to entrust my client to your protection. But your probity (sanctitas) renders this task superfluous. How could I be afraid that humble station could harm my client in your eyes when you can be even more pleased by naked virtue (nuda uirtus),7 when you are most impressed by self-made men? Am I to entrust to your care the ranks of common soldiers when you cheerfully look down upon them from on high as if upon the birthplace of your own ascension? It may be that aristocratic birth has predominated up until now, but you have improved the lot of the virtues.8 A man still of his age was not yet able to go any further than he has. And yet since I have shown him to be a hero, worthy of your camp and worthy of serving under your auspices, I entrust to your care whatever more a soldier is able to become. I am positive that you are not waiting for a conclusion to my speech where with wretched tears and humble supplication the soldier begs for his life on bended knee. You don’t demand entreaty from an innocent man; nor does a hero have need of a forgiveness that he had to beg for. He asks only one thing, that if you have the least doubt about his case, that you put things off until the next battle. Put him in the front line, put him before the standards. My words may be bold, but don’t put him amid the raw recruits, put him where there is the most danger, where the enemy throngs make their fiercest attack. Watch him fighting. I declare that then you will have fewer excuses for the tribune. Let him go into the battle-lines, let him 7 8
Not a naked man (nudus uir)! This sentence is corrupt in the manuscripts. I have dropped the seven obelized words, but the sense of what remains might still be off.
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draw near the enemy. If he ought to die, general, your soldier asks you that you make use of his death.
II. CALPURNIUS FLACCUS
Date Unknown. On stylistic grounds he ought to be placed later than roughly 100 ce. Introduced Page 156 above. The corpus There are 53 cases surviving. Most are of approximately this length or shorter. These cases are clearly not representative of whole declamations as they would have been delivered. They are excerpts.
d e c l a m at i o n 3 : m ariu s’ s o ld ie r
First discussed Page 156 above. Scenario A youthful (adulescens) soldier of Marius killed a tribune who was Marius’ kinsman when the tribune attempted to do him violence. The soldier is brought up on a charge of murder. He defends himself. Defence [The prosecution] says, “The general’s kinsman has been slain.” Well done, young man: you have avenged Marius too. Wherever chastity is in danger, it has its own law. (As if addressing the dead tribune) What are you doing, tribune? Do you think him not yet a man when Marius thinks him a soldier? The soldier who when asked just says “no” is not far from assenting to illicit sex. Believe me, general, your soldier would have judged ill of you if he had spared the tribune. This brand of violence Verginius evaded by killing his child; this was the reason Lucretia pierced her own breast with steel. Shame overcomes me, general: I defend a soldier with female precedents (exemplis). [The tribune] threatened your soldier with illicit sex: the Cimbrians threaten us with less.
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The prosecution: General, your soldier is already somewhat unchaste because he attracts unchaste desire. You stained your sword with the blood of a fellow soldier when it was sufficient just to threaten him. III. THE MINOR DECLAMATIONS
Date Unknown. As mentioned above, Quintilian lived perhaps from 30–100 ce. This collection, though, is very closely tied to his teaching if it is not actually composed by him. Introduced Page 60 above. The corpus There are 145 cases surviving. The original number of cases was 388, and we have, then, the last 40% of the original collection. Most are of roughly the length of the sample below. These are not representative of whole declamations as they would have been delivered: they are teaching texts. They present the premise of a case, offer some commentary on how the case might be treated and an outline of how a speech might be formed from it. The ratio of commentary to modeling varies greatly between cases. There is only one sentence of such commentary in the middle of the case below. Sometimes there is no commentary and only a model speech. Conversely sometimes there is only commentary and no speech. The whole text of the Minor Declamations is disorganized, and Winterbottom plausibly suggests we are looking at a collection derived from a teacher’s notes that have been assembled posthumously.9 m i n o r d e c l a m at i o n 3 72: th e aban doned bat t e re r o f his foster- fath er
First discussed Pages 60–67 above. The laws governing the case [A] The man who strikes his father will lose his hands. [B] One may sue for punishment in kind. 9
See Winterbottom 1984: xiii.
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Scenario A man took in an abandoned child. He reared him as his son. He was struck by him. As if he were his father, he cut off the son’s hands. The youth is acknowledged by his real father. With the help of his father he sues the man who raised him for punishment in kind. [1] Declamation (In the character of the foster-father) He is the most criminal youth, judges. He is thankless as he owes to my kindness either his life or his father. He is doubly a parricide, once at home, now again in the forum. If anyone will still doubt how he deserved to lose his blood-stained hands, let him look at him: he beats me again before your very eyes; and now, weak and mutilated, whole only in his savagery, he attacks a poor old man. What if he had his hands? [2] And lest anyone think him checked by his punishment, he has been made even bolder: he lusts to cripple me, and his anger is most directed at that part of my body to which he owes his life. I confess, judges, I confess that these hands of mine should have been cut off – back then when they took up this scoundrel! [3] I am not ashamed – and this is the least of his offences – to hear myself reproached and also to become a defendant on a charge of cruelty. Of course he calls me cruel as he makes a spectacle of himself [in his mutilated state]. I have no fear that this charge against me should seem plausible given that my opponent is himself a monument to my compassion. [4] Now I’m not at all surprised that the father of this parricide is here too. He is not afraid of his crippled son, though he was markedly more cruel when he exposed the lad.10 I am sure that he was driven to it by a number of dreams and prodigies – since clearly it was fated that this fellow become a parricide11 – and he cast the boy out to free himself from fear. [5] And so I am a cruel monster, judges, I whom this one alone labels an “executioner.” I approached him with kindness in my face. I took pity on him. In short, I, a stranger, took up a boy whose father had cast him out. Not content with this first gesture, I even took him as my own son. [6] Do you want to know what I gained by this kindness (indulgentia)? I saw to it that there would surely be someone to beat me as an old man: he whom I took up to be my protection, he whom I had hoped to see as my champion against strangers, he had beaten me so manifestly that he 10 11
Shackleton Bailey 1989b suggests that second clause might need to be deleted. It may also be misplaced. Winterbottom 1984 declares that this clause is hopeless. I have followed the text of Shackleton Bailey 1989b. But it is difficult to be wholly pleased with the phrase parricidio defungi.
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couldn’t even deny it. Fool that I was I even then persisted in that same kind indulgence (indulgentia). And when my friends would ask me who beat me I used to lie. [7] They said to me, “What, are you waiting for him to kill you?” They snatched me off to the forum. They pointed out the marks on my battered face. This fellow confessed. The judge convicted him. The executioner removed his hands. My tears were the only part I had in the proceedings. When the whole city was abuzz with the talk of his parricidal act, impiety discovered its own origin.12 Look: as you can well see he is beating me all over again. He says, “I seek punishment in kind.” [8] What’s the charge? Are you accusing me of cruelty? Who then did I strike? I am wont to take pity even on outsiders. I crippled you even though you were my own. Did drunkenness drive me to it? Did madness? Rage? No. Punishment in kind avenges unjust acts. The law is written to ensure that nobody who acts wantonly will go unpunished. [9] And so are you claiming that I acted unjustly when I took his hands?13 I cut them off legally. Nor did I do it: it was the executioner. Whatever is done according to the law is not wont to be punished by the law. And what does the law say? “He who has beaten his father.” “But,” says [the opposing counsel], “you were not the father.” Think it over: it is nevertheless impossible to abrogate one verdict by means of another. [10] Comments from the Master Here one talks about the sanctity of verdicts. [11] Declamation After a conviction it’s too late to make a defence of one’s innocence. That which you lately said you should have said before. But you could not say it: I was your father according to the legal situation then prevailing. Accordingly I had the power to disown you. I could have killed you. I was empowered to exercise every privilege as if you were my son. Are you surprised? [12] Not even your father could argue against this. He says, “You were not the biological father.” Then I deserved so much the more: I took up a stranger even though there were those who could bring themselves to cast out their 12 13
That is, the publicity of the case allowed the son to discover his biological father in whose name and with whose assistance the present suit is brought. The speaker is seldom if ever explicit about where he is addressing the son and where the biological father who is bringing suit against him and is thus the opposing counsel. This is a useful confusion from the speaker’s standpoint, but English idiom usually requires me to make certain commitments. Here “his hands” might also be translated “your hands” depending on how one wants to take things. The text, following normal Latin idiom, only says “hands.” This problem recurs throughout the case.
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own. But granting that I was not your father, you at least thought that I was. The law punishes intent (mentem). You can learn the truth of what I say from this: I won my case.14 “But,” says [the opposing counsel], “you knew that he was not your son.” [At the first trial] I certainly could have said, “But my worthy acts made me your father. But you struck me as if I were your father.” But, so help me, I did not want to say [that I was not the biological father].15 I also gathered him up when he was exposed. [13] What will you do now?16 Will you cut off the hands that took you up? I V. S E N E C A T H E E L D E R
Date c. 55 bce – c. 40 ce Introduced Page 27 above. The corpus The manuscripts preserve five intact books of controuersiae (1, 2, 7, 9, and 10) each containing from six to eight cases. The remaining books have been excerpted. From the cases that survive in both full and excerpted form one can see that the excerpter drops the names of the speakers, omits large numbers of passages, and even edits down already terse phrases into raw epigrams. We also have one book containing seven suasoriae. Most of the controuersiae are of a length and format comparable to the one translated below. These are collections of memorable passages or phrases from a variety of speakers who spoke on a given topic though they did not necessarily all speak on the same occasion. There is a tendency to have the first and longest set of phrases come from a “favorite” speaker. What Seneca offers are clearly not samples of whole declamations as they would have been delivered. He 14 15
16
Shackleton Bailey 1989b brackets this sentence as genuine but misplaced. I am content to keep it even though I see that the flow of the argument is improved by its removal. See Shackleton Bailey 1989a: 403 on what is implied in nolui: “W[interbottom] explains nolui: ‘I did not wish to, in order not to prejudice your chances’ (Son was on trial for beating Putative Father). But would the revelation that the Putative Father was not the real father have done that? He did not want to reveal the secret because of his continuing affection for the young man whose life he had saved.” I have accepted the deletion suggested by Shackleton Bailey 1989b. Two sentences preceding this question have been dropped: “My friends were furious. He himself (i.e. the son) confessed.” These fit with that earlier scene in the text where the friends force the foster-father into a suit against his son when they see his bruises.
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seldom even provides what appears to be a single extended passage from an individual speaker. These are “sound bites.” c o n t r o v e r s i a e 1 .4: th e h ero wi t ho ut hand s
First discussed Pages 75–79 above. This case comes from the intact first book and is representative of Seneca’s general practice. It will be noted that the text has many gaps, especially when it reaches the phrases of the Greek speakers. The copyists of the manuscripts of Seneca did not know Greek. Therefore Greek was frequently omitted. Sometimes the copyists attempted to transcribe what they saw even though they did not understand the Greek alphabet.17 All of the Greek has been lost in this particular controuersia. The laws governing the case [A] He who catches an adulterer and adulteress in flagrante may kill with impunity so long as he kills them both. [B] A son is allowed to avenge a mother’s adultery. Scenario A hero lost his hands in war. He caught an adulterer with his wife, the mother of his son. He commanded the son to kill. The son didn’t do it. The adulterer fled. The man disowns his son. On the father’s side [1] Porcius Latro: “All I did was rouse my deceivers. Woe is me: how long they lay there after I caught them. (Turning to the son) I shouldn’t disown you?! I would have preferred to be able to kill you! O how bitter the recollection of my valor! O how sad the memory of my victory! Though a true warrior who was but lately laden with enemy spoils all I did was heap abuse on my deceivers. I alone of all the husbands neither dismissed nor killed his deceivers. ‘Why are you laughing,’ I said, ‘I have hands!’ I called my son. (Turning again to the son) Are you the son of a war hero? You can’t draw a sword. Not even mutilated could I be taken, except in my home. Nevertheless, as best 17
See H˚akanson 1989: xv. Some substitutions are: N for H, n for p, TI for . L can be L, , or A. H˚akanson and others have time and again done a heroic job reassembling terse and ironic Greek from these ruins.
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as I was able I put up a fight and set my mutilated body in their way. The adulterers departed bloodied, but the only blood was mine.” Cornelius Hispanus: (Imagining a third party’s thinking) “ ‘He’s a fine fellow who has either a chaste wife or even an unchaste one so long as he is armed.’ I call upon you, Republic, you who have my hands. Who wouldn’t think either that I was without a son or that my son was without hands?” [2] Cestius Pius: (Speaking indignantly of the son) “This fellow was born of . . . Well, we’ll know when I catch the adulterers. I never thought it would happen while the state yet stood that a war hero would feel that he had lost his hands.” Marullus: “I followed my deceivers all the way to the threshold of the house. I ran, poor fool, to get my sword, as if I actually had hands.” Triarius: “My weapons fell along with my hands. Then for the first time I felt that I had lost my hands.” Then Triarius offered a description of the fighting war hero: “Good gods, someone laughed at these hands?” P. Asprenas: “Summoned to kill the adulterers my son came so that he could send them on their way. And so did I lose my hands even on behalf of adulterers? I stood there captured by my adulterers. (He turns to the audience.) Deserter of his father, pimp to his mother, one whom, I believe, you no longer think to be the son of a war hero, he stood there in the bedroom, a third who mocked me.” [3] Fulvius Sparsus: (Assuming the role of an advocate for the father) “In war he lost his own hands, at home even those of his son. This man alone went off to war as the substitute for a son who was of military age. In the battle line he conquered; at home he is taken. The father points out the adulterers lolling among the spoils of the hero and says, ‘Young man, the time for your military service has arrived.’ Scandalous: he is deceived. He ran to fetch his son as vainly as he had to fetch his sword. The adulterers were laughing at the mutilated hands of the hero fumbling all around his own weapons.”
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Argentarius: (Assuming the role of an advocate for the father) “He first refused his hands to the fatherland, and then to his father. I gladly took up his case: who wouldn’t champion him? What is more unhappy than this? Then they laughed at him when they ought to have died. In our state does a mutilated hero look on at intact adulterers?” [4] Iulius Bassus: “There is no reason you should think the son is punished: he is sent off to his own. Sent off, I say, to his own mother and perhaps even to his own father. He has earned his place as that man’s heir whose murder he thought of as parricide. You never owed a debt to any man greater than what you owed the hero: he fought so hard on your behalf that he couldn’t on his own. Young man, go follow those you sent off.” [5] On the son’s side: Vibius Gallus: “[My father] says, ‘You did not kill your mother.’ On this charge whom did I deserve to lose less than my father? My father ordered me to kill; the law said no. I would not have matched the law against my father were the law not on her side. I thought it a second parricide to kill my mother in front of my father.” Arellius Fuscus Senior (pater): “Alas poor piety, lo the parental wishes you stood between! Crimes are not always in our power, and natural pity weakens fierce hearts as well.” [6] Logical analysis: Latro analyzed the case thus: was the son then allowed to avenge his father? Should he have? If he could and should, was he to be forgiven if he was unable owing to compassion’s opposition? The question of permissibility he subdivided as follows: is a son allowed to avenge adultery in the absence of the husband? Can he in the presence of a husband who is as good as not there? The question of propriety has various treatments and varies as each chooses. Latro, though, arranged it as follows: it was appropriate for the son to kill the adulterous wife of a hero even if the father were not asking him to do it. It was appropriate when the father did command it, even if the father himself could do it. It was appropriate when he both commanded and could not himself kill.
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The younger generation of declaimers made a trial of a line of inquiry that emerged from the wording of the law, namely that “He who catches an adulteress with an adulterer, so long as he kills both, can do it with impunity.” Was nobody able to kill other than the one who actually caught them? They even tried another line: was it not possible for a son to be disowned for something that he was allowed to do within his own legal competency? [7] Everybody who spoke on behalf of the young man introduced one and the same bit of spin: “I was unable to kill.” This was derived from a snippet of Cicero, which he delivered in a similar controuersia when someone was being disowned who had had an adulterous mother handed over to him for killing and had let her go: “Thrice . . . not . . .” [break in the text] Latro depicted the numbness of the son’s whole body as he looked upon such an unexpected and outrageous spectacle and he said, “Father, you lacked hands, I everything.” And after Latro had depicted the dark cloud that passed over his vision, his faintness, and the dead weight of all his limbs he added, “They left before I came to.” Gorgias, with a piece of gauche but charming spin, [said] . . . [break in the text]. Pammenes, one of the new declaimers, said, . . . [break in the text]. Gorgias had a fantastic one: . . . [break in the text]. Pammenes said, . . . [break in the text]. [8] Aurelius Fuscus said, “What you were commanding was a greater crime than the one you had caught.” Albucius did not offer a proper narration, but he pursued this angle from start to finish: “Should I even be defending myself? If I am reproached with anything I will either deny or excuse it. If you ask for anything that outstrips my capacities, I will say, ‘Forgive me, I can’t. A father forgives a son who refuses to sail if he cannot endure the sea. He forgives a son who does not go off to war if he can’t, even if the father himself is a military man. I can’t kill. Come now, recite the actual law: ‘This is allowed to a husband, a father, and a son.’ Why does it name so many people unless it believes that there are some who would be unable?” In his description Albucius said: “When my father called me I told myself, ‘He thinks the punishment is going to be worse than death if he exhibits the adulteress to
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her son.’ ” And Albucius said this: “The adulterers departed making their way between a feeble father and a stunned son.” Silo took this approach to his narration: “I did not think I was allowed to do it.” [9] Blandus used this spin: “I hear the name son from two sides. My father’s request is more just, my mother’s more easy.” And after his description Silo added: “I will confess it to you: I could not commit parricide in front of my father.”18 Cestius pursued this approach: “My mother at once sprang forward and entangled my hands in her embrace. I thank my confused state of mind: I saw nothing in that bedroom other than my father and mother. My father was asking that I kill; my mother that she live. My father asked that the guilty woman not go unpunished; my mother that I should be guiltless. My father was reciting the law on adultery; my mother the law on parricide.” Cestius’ final epigram was: “If there is some scandal in not having wanted to kill my mother, then I was unable.” Argentarius said, “You should not form an opinion of me by looking at me now and seeing that I have hands. Then I did not have them.” And he said this: “She is paying you for her crime: she lost her husband; she lost her son. When she is sick I will not be at her side. When she is needy I will not take care of her. I am totally free now: I no longer owe her a life.” [10] On the other side there were many phrases of exceptional beauty. And I wonder if our Roman speakers might not take second place to the Greeks. In this controuersia Damas said, . . . [break in the text]. There is something degenerate about this epigram. Latro said, “How I reproached my fortune then that I had not lost my eyes as well!” Silo said, “Son, either tear out my eyes or lend me your hands.” Everybody said something elegant in that section where the adulterers are caught and released. Latro said, “All I did was rouse my deceivers.” 18
Though parricide usually means “killing a father”, it can in English reproduce the meaning of the Latin original: “killing a parent or close kin.” That is the sense here: “I could not kill my mother in front of my father (because, nobody wants to be seen as a kin-/father-killer by his father).”
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Aurelius Fuscus inverted this epigram to poor effect: “With my arrival I did not even rouse the adulterers.” Vibius Rufus said, “The adulterers did not rise to meet the husband.” Pompeius said, “Young man, rouse at last the adulterers. After your arrival they lie there even more carefree.” Latro said, “ ‘You are wrong to think that I have no hands.’ I called my son. When he entered he was greeted by the adulterer.” [11] Fuscus said, “Son, be true! Show that while you are unharmed I have not lost my hands. The adulterer makes of you a controuersia for me. Come, show whose son you are.” P. Vicinius offered an attractive and novel turn on a sentiment expressed agreeably by all: “I broke into the bedroom of the adulterers – poor me, why am I lying? The adulterers were waiting for me with the doors wide open.” Cestius said, “I called my son. The adulterer laughed as if to say, ‘He’s mine.’ ” Vibius Rufus said, “My deceiver left, and at his pleasure.” Hybreas did the best job expressing this sentiment: [break in the text] Dionysius, the son of that Dionysius who was the teacher of Cicero’s son, was a more polished declaimer than he was a vigorous one. Still he expressed this idea both passionately and elegantly: [break in the text] [12] Vibius Rufus said, “How carefree, how undisturbed the adulterers passed before my eyes, before my son’s hands.” Latro added the following after he had depicted the adulterers exiting: “Young man, follow your parents.” Nicetes offered that incredibly beautiful epigram whereby he perhaps outstripped our Roman speakers: [break in the text] Albucius at least overtook the Greeks with his expression. Once he had depicted himself 19 fighting in battle, he said: “Poor me, what hands the adulterer fled!” This too is an example from Albucius: “ ‘I could not kill 19
This is a striking detail: the Latin reads se, not eum or fortem. Thus Albucius depicted “himself ” and not “him” or “the soldier”. The boundaries between the authentic self and the fictive self blur momentarily.
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my mother,’ he says. If you want an even better excuse, add this: ‘Or my father.’ ” Albucius’ narration was governed by the conceit that the adultery was committed with the son’s knowledge. He cast suspicion on the son as if he were his mother’s confidant. P. Asprenas said, (assuming the role of an advocate for the father) “Finally the husband departed and made way for his deceivers.” Asprenas also said: “You can’t kill your mother? At least kill the adulterer. Or is he your father?” Nicetes had said, [break in the text]. Murredius wanted to imitate this epigram, but he instead offered an incredibly stupid one: “I left on the field my fighting hands.”
References
Alston, R. (1998) “Arms and the Man: Soldiers, Masculinity and Power in Republican and Imperial Rome” in When Men Were Men: Masculinity, Power and Identity in Classical Antiquity. Eds. L. Foxhall and J. Almon. New York, Routledge, 205–223. Althusser, L. (1971) “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus (Notes towards an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy. New York, Monthly Review Press, 127–186. Anderson, G. (1995) “Ut ornatius et uberius dici posset: Morals into Epigram in the Elder Seneca” in Ethics and Rhetoric: Classical Essays for Donald Russell on his Seventy-Fifth Birthday. Eds. D. Innes, H. Hine and C. Pelling. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 75–92. Austin, J. (1962) How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Barton, C. (1993) The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Bartsch, S. (1994) Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Beard, M. (1993) “Looking (Harder) for Roman Myth: Dum´ezil, Declamation and the Problems of Definition” in Mythos in mythenloser Gesellschaft: Das Paradigma Roms. Ed. F. Graf. Stuttgart, Teubner, 44–64. Bloomer, M. (1992) Valerius Maximus and the Rhetoric of the New Nobility. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press. (1997a) “A Preface to the History of Declamation: Whose Speech? Whose History?” in The Roman Cultural Revolution. Eds. T. Habinek and A. Schiesaro. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 199–215. (1997b) “Schooling in Persona: Imagination and Subordination in Roman Education.” Classical Antiquity 16, 57–78. Bonner, S. (1949) Roman Declamation in the Late Republic and Early Empire. Berkeley, University of California Press. (1966) “Lucan and the Declamation Schools.” American Journal of Philology 87, 257–89. (1977) Education in Ancient Rome. Berkeley, University of California Press. Bornecque, H. (1902) Les D´eclamations et les D´eclamateurs d’apr`es S´en`eque le P`ere. Lille, Au si`ege de l’Universit´e. 265
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Index locorum
Achilles Tatius Leucippe and Clitophon Aeschylus Prometheus Vinctus 7 Antiphon Tetralogies Apuleius Metamorphoses 4.24 Aristophanes Clouds Aulus Gellius Noctes Atticae 6.5.1–8 Calpurnius Flaccus Declamationes 2 3 30 38 Cato Maior De Agri Cultura pref. 1.2 Celsus De Medicina 1.pr.9 Chariton Chaereas and Callirhoe [Cicero] Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.51 Cicero De Finibus 3.60–61 De Natura Deorum 1.10
De Oratore 1.149 Epistulae ad Atticum 1.14.4 9.4.1 9.4.2 9.4.3 14.12.2 14.22.1 14.22.2 Epistulae ad Familiares 7.33.1 9.16.7 16.21.5 Epistulae ad Quintum fratrem 3.3.4 In Catilinam 4.3 In Verrem Orator 46 Philippicae 2.77 2.199 Pro Caelio Pro Milone 9 Pro Rege Deiotaro 20 Pro Roscio Amerino 72 Tusculanae Disputationes 1.4 Columella De Re Rustica 1.pr.31 Q. Curtius Rufus Historiae Alexandri Magni 4.15.17
12 95 2 122 65 97
1 156, 172, 175, 188, 253–254 220 116 40 67 12 36 36 29
273
2 106 104 106 107 107 108–109 109 107 107 107 107 69 81 81 105 82 84 81 17, 220 6 158 175 81 92 92 67
274
Index locorum
Demosthenes Leptines
2
Fronto De Eloquentia 1.1
92 Quintilian Institutio Oratoria
Horace Carmina 4.8.6
92
Juvenal Saturae 2.163–70 8.102
169 92
Libanius Apology of Socrates Livy Ab Urbe Condita 2.28 2.65.3 5.18.8 5.36.6 7.8.2 41.18.11
231 161 161 161 161 161
Ovid Ars Amatoria 3.15–22
134
Papyri Berl. Pap. P. 9781 PHibeh 15 POxy 2400 Paul Sententiae 1.B.1 3.4A.7 Petronius Satyricon 3 3.1 3.1–2 3.4 Pliny Naturalis Historia 35.64 Plutarch Marius 14.8–9 44
Moralia 202B Polybius Historiae 6.123
2
2 2
1.1.21 1.pr.24 2.10 2.10.5 2.10.8 2.11.3 2.11.7 2.20.4 2.4.41 2.4.42 2.9.1–2 3.11.14 3.5.5–11 3.5.8 3.8.46 4.2.42 4.2.69 5.12.17–21 5.13.36 7.4.11 9.2.79–80 9.2.81 9.2.90–91 9.2.91 12.10.4 Quintilian(?) Declamationes Minores
2 116 116 11 147 10 10 11 92 158 136
264 270 270.2 287 289 290 292 295 295.4 308 316 316.1 316.2 316.3 316.4 316.7
158 83 4, 67, 68, 71 63 71 17 12, 124 10 34 34 4 2 2 63 156 105 105 82 63 156 10 93 116 191 63 118 119 92 3, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 144, 145, 229 230 70, 94 70 61 191 220 156 118 117 230 121 121 121 124 121 124
Index locorum 316.12 330.5 335 346 349 349.1 349.2 349.4 358 358.1 362 372 372.1 372.5 372.6 372.9 372.11 372.12 375 372.1–3 [Quintilian] Declamationes Maiores 3 3.pr 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11
3.12 3.13 3.14 3.15 3.16 3.17 3.19 18 18.pr 18.1
122 36 191 116 118, 119, 120 119 120 60, 119 11, 60, 61, 65 65 11, 60, 61 11, 60, 61, 62, 65, 254–257 66 65 65 65 66 66 61 64 3, 24 153–190, 241–253 157 159, 167, 169, 184, 185 179–180, 185 167, 180, 184 172 172, 184, 185 172–173, 174–175 185, 186 188 157, 173, 180, 181 184 163, 168–169, 170, 178, 184 166, 181, 186 177, 184 177–178 184 176, 178 178 183, 188–189 3, 191–226 192 194, 195
18.2 18.3 18.4 18.5 18.7 18.9 18.10 18.11 18.13 18.14 18.15 18.17 19 19.1 19.2 19.2–3 19.3 19.4 19.5 19.8 19.9 19.10 19.11 19.12 19.13 19.14 19.14–15 19.15 19.16 Seneca Maior Controversiae 1.pr 1.pr.1 1.pr.2 1.pr.3 1.pr.4 1.pr.5 1.pr.6 1.pr.7 1.pr.8 1.pr.8–9 1.pr.9 1.pr.9–10 1.pr.10 1.pr.10–11
275 196, 199 197, 198, 199, 214 200, 201 116, 192 202, 206, 212 192, 204 201, 202, 204, 224 210 206 203 202, 207 201 3, 191–226 204, 213, 215 213, 217, 221 219 215, 219 213, 214, 218 218, 221 213, 221 219–220, 221, 222, 223 213, 214, 220 203, 222 216 213, 216 203 203 215, 218, 220, 223, 224 224
3, 72 99 37 32, 33 33 33 34 34–35, 56 129 129 36 31 39–40 42 42–43
276
Index locorum
Seneca Maior (cont.) 1.pr.12 1.pr.13 1.pr.14 1.pr.17 1.pr.18 1.pr.19 1.pr.21 1.pr.22 1.pr.24 1.3.8 1.4 1.4.pr 1.4.1 1.4.1–4 1.4.2 1.4.3 1.4.5 1.4.7 1.4.8 1.4.9 1.4.10 1.4.11 1.4.12 1.7.17 2.pr.3 2.2.1 2.2.12 2.3 2.3.13 2.3.19 2.4 2.4.1 2.4.2 2.4.5 2.4.7 2.4.10 2.4.12–13 2.4.13 2.5.8 2.5.20 2.6 2.6.1 2.6.1–2 2.6.2 2.6.3 2.6.4 2.6.5 2.6.7–8 2.6.9 2.6.10 2.6.12 2.6.13
2 44, 45, 48 46 46 46 47, 48, 70 49, 70 125 53 137 258–264 75 77, 78 76 78 77, 78, 88 76, 78 76 76, 78 76 77 77 77 137 99 134 117, 230 118 117 119 101, 130 131 131 131 131 131 101–102, 132 102, 103 134 103 121 125 12–15 126 126, 127 126 127 126–127 128 127 127–128 129
3.pr.12 3.pr.12 3.pr.12–15 3.pr.15 3.pr.15–16 3.pr.16 3.pr.17 3.3 3.8 4.pr.2–4 4.pr.4 4.pr.5 4.pr.6 4.pr.6 4.pr.7 4.pr.8 4.pr.10 4.pr.11 4.1 5.6 6.7 6.8 7.pr 7.pr.1 7.2 7.2.2 7.2.3 7.2.4 7.2.8 7.2.14 7.6 7.6.2 7.6.7 7.6.8 7.6.10 7.6.13 7.6.16 7.6.17 7.6.18 7.6.19 7.6.20 7.6.22 7.6.24 7.14 8.3 9.pr.1 9.4 9.4.16 10.pr.14 10.3 10.3.1 10.3.2 10.3.3 10.3.5
36 147 10 84 231 6 85 220 156 98 96 96 97 96 103 98 234 98 98, 102 38 130, 191 103 99–100 137 80 81 81 81 80 80 136 34, 138 138 138 139 136, 139 117, 139 136 136, 137 136 137 138 139, 140 201 191 99 11, 60, 73 74 103 132 134 134 134 134, 135
Index locorum 10.3.7 10.5 10.5.2 10.5.12 10.5.13–15 10.5.17 10.5.19 10.5.20 10.5.22 10.5.23 10.5.27 10.5.28 Historiae fr. 4 Suasoriae 6 6.7 6.8 6.12 6.14 6.21 6.22 7 7.1 7.2 7.10 7.11 7.13 7.14 Seneca Minor De Beneficiis 1.1.11 Epistulae Morales 114.9–11
133 91 92, 93 93 93 93 94 94 95 93 92 94 34 72 1, 81 84 82 81, 82 82 83 83 81, 82 83, 84 83 83 87 86 86 36 37
Sophocles Oedipus Rex 981–83 Stobaeus 2.68.19–18 Suetonius De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus 25.3 25.5 Augustus 53 68 99 Julius 84 Nero 10.2 46 Tiberius 45 Tacitus Dialogus de Oratoribus 35 Terence Adelphoe
277
23 116 4 91 101 101 101 101 4 101 101
12 220
Ulpianus Digesta 47.10.15.20
180
Virgil Aeneid 7.312
18 x
General index
Note: Pointers to further information about the more obscure historical figures can often be found in the index to H˚akanson 1989. adoption 101–103, 130, 132, 234 see also father, surrogate for Aeneas x Aeschylus 95 age of speakers 2–3, 73, 228 Agrippa 101–102, 103 Agroitas 127–129 Albucius Silus 81, 99, 131, 134, 136, 137 Alcibiades 2, 167 Alston, R. 156 Althusser, L. 141, 178, 181, 186 amare, adamare see love Anderson, G. 7, 9 Antiphon 2 Antonius 1, 80, 81–83 Apuleius 122 Arellius Fuscus 134, 138 Argentarius 77, 84, 92, 137 Aristophanes 65–67 Aristotle 105 Asinius Pollio 82, 96–97, 98–99, 100, 103, 117 Asprenas, P. Nonius 83 Atticus, T. Pomponius 104, 105, 106, 108 Aufhebung (sublation) 100, 209 Augustus Caesar x, 96, 98–99, 101, 103–104, 234 Aulus Gellius 97–99 Austin, J. 159 authenticity x, 21, 90, 97, 110, 111, 226, 263 author-function, the ix, 20–21, 22, 23, 32, 36, 45–52, 208, 229, 237 authority 6, 141, 182, 230 and authorship 21, 103, 129, 145, 146, 227, 229 and the body 60, 69–74, 75 and the body (manus) 60 and the imaginary 56 and the law 75, 228 and mental health 118
and the symbolic 224 as citational 29, 40, 41, 57, 112–113, 226 as positional or structural 14, 65, 66, 69, 75, 126 assumption of 15, 29, 74, 134, 147, 227, 229 critiques of or attacks upon 65, 117, 123, 138 defending or championing 59, 73, 87, 135, 227 the eye of 189, 190, 229 identification with 66 masculine 29–30, 38, 46, 164 military 167 paternal 18, 75, 112, 117, 118, 128, 134, 143, 145–147, 192, 226, 228 paternal ( patria potestas) 116, 133, 209, 220 performance of 119, 124, 132, 226 political 96, 148, 232 violence and see also father see also masculinity see also Quintilian(?) and authority see also Seneca the Elder as a father (metaphorically) see also tyranny and authority Barton, C. 12, 18 Bartsch, S. 234 Beard, M. 1, 9, 19, 22, 134 Bloomer, M. 3, 7, 9, 13, 14, 17, 19, 43, 59, 105, 140 Bonner, S. 2, 7, 8, 11, 38, 60, 91, 104–105, 107, 116, 192, 220 Bornecque, H. 7 Bourdieu, P. 13, 14, 52, 140, 155 Braund, S. 8, 9, 11 Bruttedius Niger 82 Brutus (assassin of Julius Caesar) 108 Brutus (first consul of Rome) 171
278
General index Buteo 117 Butler, J. 21, 41, 57, 112, 141–142, 144, 159, 161, 164, 165, 174, 181, 182, 191 Calpurnius Flaccus 3, 116, 118, 156, 172, 175, 188, 220 Carthage x Cassius Severus 10, 16, 35, 94, 147 Cato the Elder 22, 31, 39–40, 105, 129, 136 Cato the Younger 134 causa see hypothesis Celsus 67 Cestius Pius 5, 6, 84–87, 91, 126–127, 131, 137, 138, 231 chasitity/unchastity see pudicitia/impudicitia Cicero 80, 83, 92, 154, 158, 175 as an orator or rhetorical theorist 6, 7, 11, 17, 34, 44, 69, 102, 105, 148, 158, 220, 227 as a declaimer 2, 6, 76, 104–109, 112, 233 as a father-figure 80, 84, 195 as read by declaimers 2, 81, 84, 134, 231 death of within declamation 1, 8, 24, 79–88, 135 Cicero, M. (son of the orator) 86–87, 107 Cimbria, the Cimbri 156, 157–158, 159, 172, 177–178, 183, 190 Cineas 47, 48 civil war 104, 132, 134–135, 148 Clark, D. 7, 17 Clarke, J. 154 Clarke, M. 2, 7 classics, classical philology 3, 13, 15, 123, 230 Clodius Pulcher 134 color (“supplemental spin”) 16, 61, 74, 76, 128, 133, 136 Columella 92 community 13, 53, 79, 102, 115, 125, 139, 146, 164, 227 as idea or fantasy 51, 52, 57 boundaries of 128, 137, 140, 169, 234 constructing 5, 8, 30, 43, 50, 51 psychic 236 reconstructing 36, 46, 52 of speakers 1, 21, 38, 43, 50, 55, 145, 230 Connolly, J. 7, 192 Conte, G. 11, 12 controuersia, as a technical term 1, 12, 53, 70, 97, 101, 102, 105, 108, 119, 121, 128, 131, 139 Corax 65 Cornelius Severus 82 Craton 94 Cremutius Cordus 82 Crispinus 167
279
Crook, J. 60, 116 Cucheval 7 da Vinci, L. 29, 53 daughters 60, 132, 133, 134, 136–138, 140, 191 de Decker, J. 8 de Man, P. 49–51 deconstruction 49, 51, 52 Demetrius of Phaleron 2 Deratani, N. 8 Derrida, J. 30, 41, 46, 49–52, 159, 164 Desbordes, E. 8 Dido x Dingel, J. 7, 61, 62, 90, 118, 119 disinheritance of a son, abdicatio 9, 12, 61, 66, 75, 101, 130, 220 diuisio (logical analysis of a case) 73, 74, 81, 121, 132, 136 as bodily 70–72 Dover, K. 167 dreams x, 22, 23, 31, 53, 54, 111, 207, 235, 236 DuBois, P. 195, 209 Dugan, J. 8, 81 Dupont, F. 7 education 7, 10, 14, 23, 33, 63, 65, 112 and educatio 33, 62–63, 72 and imitation 66, 124, 126 declamation within 1, 2, 3, 8, 10, 12, 70, 229 harmfulness of declamation to 10–11, 107 usefulness of declamation within 17, 20 Edwards, C. 228 effeminacy 10, 36, 37, 38, 42–46, 47, 129 see also luxury ego, ich, moi 21, 24, 111, 123, 143–144, 147, 187, 208 Electra 97 emperor, princeps 13, 84, 96, 100, 101, 103, 148–149, 184 as a declaimer 4 listening to declamation 16, 94–96, 110, 132, 230 see also Augustus empty speech ix, x, 5, 36, 54–55, 103, 236 Encolpius 10–12, 24 Epicurus 125, 126 exemplum 126, 133, 134, 184, 185 Fabianus, Papirius 97–99, 117, 120, 125 Fairweather, J. 7, 11, 29, 34, 90 fairy tales 54 Fantham, E. 5 father as guarantor of meaning 8, 134, 145, 192, 203, 206, 207, 209, 217 see also father, name of the
280
General index
father (cont.) blindness of 215, 217, 221 critiquing a 55, 57, 74–75, 78, 101, 115–116, 117, 125, 129, 197 defending a 86, 88, 227 law and, see law, and the father name of the (psychoanalytic) 142, 146, 147, 203, 205, 209, 224, 225 powerlessness of, see impotence, paternal son displacing and replacing 59, 76, 82, 131, 227 sorrow of a 96, 97, 99–100, 213 surrogate for a 60–64, 72, 75, 80, 85, 124, 215, 229 teacher as a 63–85 violence done to a 11, 21, 60, 61, 65, 66, 73–74, 163, 205 see also mutilation, of a father violence originating from 66, 70, 134, 192, 218 see also authority, paternal (patria potestas) see also torture of a son see also authority, paternal see also hands see also luxury in a father see also persona of a father see also Quintilian(?) as a father-figure see also Seneca as father see also silence, paternal fatherhood 29, 33, 59, 180, 222 and the psyche 18, 22, 123, 208 as a position of function 13, 15, 21, 32, 64, 112–113, 122–123, 127, 169, 224 see also authority, paternal father-son relationship 18, 32, 40, 59–89, 116, 227 Felman, S. 21, 23, 143 Fitzgerald, W. 60, 86, 137 Flavus, Alfius 126–127 Ford, H. 5 foreclosure 212–225 foster-father see father, surrogate for Foucault, M. 20, 21, 110–112, 113, 141, 157, 167, 228, 229 freedmen 98, 140, 234 Freud, S. x, 22, 29, 37, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 78, 79, 123, 143, 164–165, 190, 207, 208, 210–211, 223, 224, 234–236 Freudenburg, K. 167 Fronto 92 Fugmann, J. 67 funeral oration (laudatio funebris) 83 Gallio 93, 120 Gavius Sabinus 136 gaze, the (with psychoanalytic force) 186, 187
Geminius, Varius 82, 136 Glycon Spyridion 92, 94 Goethe 53 Goldberg, S. 1, 8, 9, 10 “good man” (uir bonus) 56, 60, 100, 128, 140 and the definition of the orator 31, 39–40, 68 as an object of nostalgia 35, 55, 81, 129, 183 non-rhetorical uses 40 Gorgias (a declaimer, not the sophist) 107 grammaticus, “grammarian” 3, 63–65, 110 grammatistes 3 Greece 2, 91, 107, 136, 156 Greeks 2, 47, 91, 94–96, 107, 127–129, 148, 231 Greer, W. 7 Griffith, M. 95 Grimal, P. 11 Habinek, T. 30, 40, 83, 153, 169 H˚akanson, L. 7, 36, 80–81, 82, 92, 95, 101, 158, 192, 250, 251, 258 Hallett, J. 154 Halperin, D. 153, 167 hands 73, 75, 84, 88 and amorousness 173, 204 and paternity 64, 72 and rhetorical performance 67, 78 loss of 60–69 loss of (for a father) 20, 54, 73–74, 75–76, 79, 142 loss of (for a son) 60–61, 64, 69–74 supplement for 77–78 violence done by 188 see also authority and the body (manus) see also Cicero, death of Q. Haterius 5, 97–101, 102, 234–236 Heath, M. 1, 4 Hegel, G. ix, xi, 1, 51–52, 191 Heidegger, M. 209 Hermagoras 105, 129 hero 32, 142, 160, 162, 170, 173, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184, 189 Seneca as 44 without hands 54, 55, 68, 75–79, 81 see also hands, loss of (for a father) Hershkowitz, D. 116, 135, 141 heterosexuality 158, 165, 175, 182 see also identity Hispo, Romanius 131 history 1, 2–5, 8, 34, 37, 47, 79, 83, 95, 108, 134, 156–157, 158, 163, 164, 168, 170, 190 homosexuality 38, 156–157, 163, 169, 178, 235 and the grounding of the heterosexual norm 157, 158, 162, 164–165, 166, 171, 174, 180, 183, 186 and homosociality 180, 190
General index and normative social protocols 154–155, 167, 170, 172 and the psyche 24, 153–170, 190 as a contagion 228 as unspeakable 169, 170, 171, 177 disgust at passive role in 37, 38, 39, 57, 166, 184, 185 see also identity see also rape (specifically homosexual) Horace 92 Hortensius 47 hypothesis (Ëp»qesiv) x, 6, 57, 105, 106, 107, 108–109, 112, 113 Hyppolite, J. 209 id (es, ¸ca) 21, 23, 123, 208, 210, 225 identity 148, 153, 172, 211, 233 and desire 24, 148, 153, 166 and the law 22 and military discipline 178 assumption of 182 masculine 31, 153, 154, 163, 172, 190 rhetoric of 5, 6, 18, 23, 88, 90, 112, 113, 143, 145, 163, 191 see also psyche ideology 181, 186 “ill-treatment” 116, 192 imaginary, the (with psychoanalytic emphasis) 18, 19, 56, 144, 146, 187, 224–225 imitation and pedagogy 34, 125–126 and reproduction 35, 36, 56 of forensic oratory, declamation as 2, 8, 35 of vice 169 see also exemplum see also persona impotence 16, 44, 63–85, 126, 228 of the law 142 paternal 54, 60–63, 66–70, 75–76, 77, 78, 81, 88, 229 see also hero without hands political 63–65, 110, 148 see also passivity incest 23, 24, 25, 191–226, 232 see also insanity insanity 24 actual madness 115, 117–118, 135, 218 and dissimulated paternal wisdom 117, 118–129 and filial critique 101, 116, 148, 237 and incest 204, 205, 215, 218, 223, 224 and intellectus 116, 117, 120, 122, 124, 131, 141 as damage done to the family 129–140, 222 civil war as 134–135 declamatory practice itself as 10, 139–140, 147, 148, 237
281
homosexual desire as 168, 171 legal definition of 116 intentionality xi, 5, 20, 32, 110, 113, 144, 191, 192, 211, 257 see also the author-function je (the “I” of discourse) 143–144 Jenkinson, E. 2, 7 Johnson, W. R. 6, 8, 34 jokes 9, 85, 230 and the psyche 22, 234–236 Jones, W. 67 Jugurtha 159, 180 Julius Caesar 83, 104, 107, 108, 134 Juno x Jupiter 92, 93, 95, 114 Juvenal 9, 11, 92, 167, 169 Kaster, R. 8, 14, 32, 80, 84, 87 Kennedy, D. 19 Kennedy, G. 7 Kenney, E. 8, 14, 17 Kraus, C. 4 Kroll, W. 11, 31 T. Labienus 134 Lacan, J. 21, 22, 54, 55, 56, 57, 89, 143, 144–145, 146, 186, 187, 196, 202, 207–209, 210, 211, 222, 223, 224, 225 lack (with psychoanalytic force) 56 Latro, Porcius 46, 88, 99, 101 as a critic 84–85, 230 as a declaimer 5, 53, 77, 78, 93, 117, 129, 130, 131 as object of Seneca’s recollections 44–51 as Seneca’s aˆ me 50 diuisiones of 74, 76, 82, 120, 136 gaffe in Augustus’ presence 101–104, 113, 233 prosecution of Cestius 84–85, 86–87, 91 law 20, 57, 61, 62, 65, 70, 76, 79, 85, 116, 121, 126, 147, 188, 228–229, 230 and the father 13, 75, 89, 116, 134, 146, 147, 196, 203, 225, 228 and subjectivity x, 22, 38, 79, 113, 141–143, 145–146, 149, 161, 164, 225, 226 Greek or Roman 7, 60, 80–81, 85, 90, 91, 116–117, 188, 230 specifically declamatory 22, 38, 60, 85, 90, 91, 116, 192 Leach, E. 44 Leeman, A. 2, 4, 5, 7 Lewis, N. 2 Libanius 2, 231 Licinius Nepos 139, 140 Q. Ligarius 134 literary criticism and declamation 5, 7–8, 18
282
General index
literature, declamation as 8, 15, 23, 227 Livy 4, 16, 82, 83, 161, 231 look, the (with psychoanalytic force) 167, 176, 187, 189 love amare contrasted with adamare 200, 202, 204–205, 215, 222 as ardor 213 as repressed or foreclosed 211, 218, 222 as a signifier 200–205, 206, 207, 217–219, 225 courtly love 57 incestuous 197, 206, 210 of a father for a son 200–206, 213, 218, 221 of husband and wife 198, 210 of kin for kin 202 of man for man 121 of a mother for a son 199, 202, 210, 218, 221 of a pupil for a teacher 63 of a son for a stepmother 130 see also heterosexuality see also homosexuality Lucan 6, 8, 135 Lucretia 171, 178 luxury and effeminacy 42, 47 as decadence 35, 98 deleterious effects of 34, 129, 131–132 in a father 125–126 in a son 59, 120–123, 124, 125, 127 when allowed 124
Mela 99 melancholia 165, 182 Migliario 17, 90 Miller, D. 228 Miller, J.-A. 224 Milo xi Montanus, Votienus 99 Morales, H. 8, 9, 19, 91, 92, 93 Moschus 134 Moses 112 motherhood, mothers 23, 56, 75, 76, 77, 78, 131, 180, 191–206, 207, 210, 212, 213, 214, 217, 219, 221, 224–225 Mulvey, L. 186, 187 Musa 134 mutilation 23–24, 59, 66, 127 of Cicero 81, 82 of a father 32, 75–76, 77–78, 81, 142 of memory 59, 88 of rhetoric 60, 68, 69 of a son 61, 64 mythology 1, 22, 95–96, 134, 158, 189, 191, 236 see also Prometheus
madness, see insanity Maecenas 101–102, 113 Magritte, R. 110–112, 113, 233 mala tractio see ill-treatment Mamilius Nepos 139–140 manliness, virility 37, 39, 40–41, 49, 148, 156, 157, 161, 172, 185, 190 see also authority see also effeminacy see also good man see also identity C. Marius and exempla 158, 184, 185 as a general (imperator) 156, 157–158, 163, 172, 176, 180 as a judge 156, 158–159, 163, 166–167, 173, 176, 178, 180, 181, 183–190 as signatory 186–189 as a tyrant 136 see also naming Mars 186, 188 Master, the see Quintilian(?)
O’Gorman, E. 161 object, the (in psychoanalysis) 56 oedipality 23, 25, 64, 205, 210, 222 Ovid 16, 103, 134, 230
negation 140, 165, 176, 206–210, 211, 221, 223, 235 Nero 4 Nicetes 77 Nietzsche, F. 142 Norden, E. 7 nostalgia 37, 55
Parker, H. 39, 154, 167 Parks, P. 7 Parrhasius 91–94, 95 parricida, parricide 64, 80–81, 194, 195, 197, 221, 262 pars altera (“the other side”) 62, 82, 93, 100, 103, 132, 206, 222, 227 passivity 37, 42, 76, 154–155, 167, 169–170, 172, 176, 181, 235–236 see also homosexuality patientia, pati 168–169, 170, 171, 175, 176, 194, 196, 198, 199, 213–215, 217, 218 performance and identity 41, 87, 108, 111, 112, 143 of authority 120 rhetorical 30, 67–69, 78, 232 specifically declamatory 3, 36, 66, 68, 72, 78, 90, 97, 106 textual 51, 57, 90
General index performative utterances 69, 157, 159, 206, 213 persona 23, 121, 126 and subjectivity 21, 142, 147, 226 of a father 62, 66, 78, 124, 125, 126, 146 Petronius 9–12, 147 phallus, the 41, 56, 57, 64, 208–209 see also authority Philip of Macedon 91, 92 philosophy 99, 105, 116, 137, 195, 209 pietas 63, 86, 195 Plato 2 play, declamation as 2, 6–10, 12, 18, 19, 25, 33, 88–89, 90, 91, 100–112, 128, 147, 226, 230, 234 pleasure 6–10, 126, 128, 217–219 and the psychic mechanism 234, 236 and sexual identity 153, 167 as effeminate 37 deleterious effects of 36–37, 178 of oratory 37, 124, 179 of the paternal position 76, 127, 229 of recollection 32, 34, 37, 45 perverse 79, 162, 172–173 salutary effects of 45 Pliny the Elder 92 Plutarch 136, 158 Poe, E. 21, 196 Polybius 83 Pompey 134 Popillius 80–81 Postumius Accaus 137 Prometheus 91, 92–94, 95–96 prostitution, prostitutes 101, 102, 128, 130–131, 157, 162, 167, 176, 181, 182, 186, 189 psyche, the 18, 22, 55, 56, 57, 79, 88, 141–147, 148, 149, 182, 193, 211, 215, 232, 236 connection to the social 18, 89, 115, 155, 233, 234, 235 pudicitia/impudicitia 36, 38, 154, 167, 168, 173, 176, 178, 179–180, 183, 186, 188, 202, 234 quaestio, see thesis Quintilian (author of the Insitutio Oratoria) 92 as an educator 4, 63, 229 as a rhetorical theorist 7, 63, 67, 68, 71, 78 examples of declamation within 82, 93, 105, 118, 156, 191 on the benefits of declamation 10, 17, 63 on declamatory vs. real oratory 10, 116 on the excesses of declamation 4, 12, 33, 124 on the “good man” 40 on the history of declamation 2 Quintilian(?) (author of the Declamationes Minores) 21, 78 and authority 72, 144, 145, 147, 226, 227
283
as a father-figure 62, 63, 65, 66, 69, 72, 73, 78, 87, 123, 124, 125, 129, 229 as a teacher 54, 60–63, 66–70, 81, 229 the declamationes of 62, 68, 119, 122, 124, 144 relationship to Quintilian 61, 67–68 the sermones of 61–62, 65, 66, 70, 71, 73, 78, 94, 118, 119, 120, 121, 124, 144 pseudo-Quintilian (authors of the Declamationes Maiores) 21, 24, 191, 192 authorship and dating 158 rape 12, 19, 31, 37, 60, 70, 118, 168, 232 committed by a slave 136, 138 metaphorical 39, 42, 201 specifically homosexual 24, 38, 39, 91, 153–190 see also violence Rayment, C. 90 reason 1, 117–118, 123, 209, 215 repetition 21, 23, 45–52, 54, 144, 166, 193, 196 repression 22, 65, 79, 123, 172, 218, 235, 236 distinguished from foreclosure 221, 223, 224 return of the repressed 23, 165, 172, 182, 196, 210–212, 222–223 retroactivity 144, 161, 162, 163, 164, 169–170, 179, 188 rhetor 3 rhetoric, death or decay of 11–12, 13, 25, 34 Richlin, A. 8, 79, 135 Riggsby, A. 69 Ritter, C. 7, 61, 90, 157, 160, 192 Rochefoucauld 115 role-playing xi, 76, 87, 109, 111, 142 see also play Roller, M. 8, 19, 79, 80 Romulus 34 Rufus, Q. Curtius 65–67 Russell, D. 2, 231 Saturnius, Furius 138 Schmitz, T. 2, 7, 8, 159 schools see education Seneca the Elder 11, 21, 23, 29–58, 59, 72–79, 117, 183, 226 and the scholarly reception of declamation 4–5, 12, 14, 49 and the sociology of declamation 13, 31, 33, 35–36, 42–43, 44, 46, 55, 128, 140, 231 as an analyst 144–145 as a censor 22, 34, 36, 39–41, 128 as an editor 20, 34, 43, 48, 49–52, 73, 80, 81, 131, 229 as a father (literally) 13, 31–32, 33, 34, 40, 57, 87, 125, 146, 229
284
General index
Seneca the Elder (cont.) as a father (metaphorically) 13, 15, 23, 32, 37, 49–52, 75, 127, 128, 227 as a literary critic 92, 93, 94, 97, 100, 103, 229 as a literary critic (approving) 96, 98, 138 as a literary critic (disapproving) 10, 82, 93, 127, 133, 137, 139, 140 as an orator/declaimer 29, 32, 33, 80, 94, 96, 100, 101, 127, 139, 140, 229 as a son (metaphorically) 80 as a wastrel 34, 37, 44, 138 on the history of declamation 2, 44 on the occasions for declamation 3 see also sententiae, Seneca’s production of Seneca the Younger, son of Seneca the Elder 36, 37 sententiae (“sound bites”) 19, 42, 47, 92, 136, 140, 236 aesthetics of 77, 87, 125, 128, 129 blur between the two meanings “opinion” and “epigram” 175 Seneca’s production of 80, 96, 102 sermo (“theoretical advice”) see Quintilian(?), the sermones of Servius 137 Shackelton Bailey, D. R. 70, 122, 255, 257 silence 191, 193, 194, 203, 204–207, 213, 218, 225 and propriety 176, 182, 227 as quasi-speech 159–173, 196, 197, 201, 203, 212, 213, 221 fertility of 204–207, 209, 211, 217 imposed xi, 25, 66, 72, 104, 157, 159–173, 212–216, 217, 218, 223 paternal 193, 194, 203, 205, 209, 212–216, 222, 225 Silo, Pompeius 120, 136 Silver Latin 4–5 Silverman, K. 89, 186, 187 Sinclair, P. 2, 7, 9, 13, 16, 19, 80, 97, 140 sisters 136–140 slaves 60, 86, 93, 98, 123, 137, 154, 176 marriage to 136–140 sex with 94, 234 uernulae 122–123 violence done to 81, 91, 92, 94, 229 Sochatoff, A. 7 society see community sociology 7, 12, 14, 17, 21, 49, 52, 131, 155, 233 of rhetoric 7–8, 13, 19, 30–31, 140 see also homosexuality and normative social protocols see also Seneca the Elder and the sociology of declamation sophists ix, xi, 95
Sophocles 23 Sparsus, Fulvius 77 Spivak, G. 228 Spyridion, see Glycon stepmother 22, 130, 191 Stobaeus 116 Stoicism 68, 116 study, studium 16, 37, 42, 45, 121 suasoria 1, 8, 12, 81–82, 105, 108, 135 see also Cicero, death of within declamation subjectivity 18, 19, 25, 196 and naming 113, 157, 177, 179, 180–183 and normativity 166 and the process of subjectivation 20, 141–149, 164 see also psychic life sublimation 154 subtlety 25, 49, 51, 52, 95, 122, 123, 129, 132 Suetonius 91, 105 suicide 131–132 Sullivan, J. 11 superego x, 21, 146 Sussman, L. 1, 3, 7, 8, 17, 18, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 59, 78, 90, 115, 116, 156, 198, 241 symbolic order, the 11, 32, 145, 146, 161, 163, 207, 224 and foreclosure 217, 223 and the object 57, 115 founding of 55, 61, 78, 205, 211 Syme, R. 148 Tabacco, R. 8, 233 Tacitus 12, 148, 161 teachers, teaching, see also education 10, 16, 17, 44, 63–65, 77, 79, 85, 110, 126, 228 Terence 220 textuality 35, 70 thesis (qsiv) 3, 104–105, 106, 107, 108, 112 Thucydides 83 Timagenes 94–96 Tiro 107 Tisias 65 torture 8, 79, 203, 214 and truth 195, 205, 209–210, 216, 218, 224 metaphorical 195, 196, 203, 205 of a slave 91–94 of a son 192, 200–201, 213, 214, 215, 216, 221, 224 Triarius 94, 119, 134 tyranny 12, 31, 91, 95, 112, 136, 138, 140 and authority 74, 75 and the superego 146 and tyrannicide 73, 109, 232 metaphorical or allegorical 95, 104, 106–107, 109, 138, 227
General index uir fortis, see heroism Ulpian 180 Umweg, detour x, 164 unconscious xi, 18, 22, 115, 202, 215, 236 and language 144, 208 and negation 207, 210, 211 and repression 210, 223 and sexuality 165 see also id (es, ¸ca) Varius Geminus 103–104 Virgil x, 5, 6, 227, 231 Veyne, P. 167 Vicinius 77 violence, uis (see also rape and torture) 22, 38, 39, 44, 60, 79, 86, 88, 154, 156, 157, 158, 159, 162, 178, 179, 218, 223 Wacquant, L. 13 Walker, J. 5, 11, 25 Walters, J. 39, 154, 156, 167, 175, 176
285
Washington, G. 158 Webb, R. 5, 8 Whitehorne, J. 7, 8 Williams, C. 34, 153, 154, 155, 156, 167 Winterbottom, M. 2, 4, 6, 7, 11, 17, 36, 38, 61, 62, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 81, 85, 117, 120, 122, 123, 254, 255, 257 wives 63, 132–134, 186, 219, 221 and conjugal love 198 and dedication to a husband 133, 134, 199 and divorce 130 and infidelity 75, 77, 78, 194, 197–200, 214 and marriage to a slave 138 and passive homosexuality 171 and prostitutes 130 see also “ill-treatment” see also motherhood, mothers Wohl, V. 167 Zeuxis 92 ˇ zek, S. 235 Ziˇ
